Dog Café

A whimsical café. A dog who can smell which people are meant for each other. An honest mistake and its consequences. This is Dog Café!

Here you can find the process of the creation of this graphic novel, bit by bit.

Falling in love
with an idea

How did the idea of dog café come to life?

Let's say, it started with a visit to a cute Café with a friend, the shared love of comics, and the dread of unnecessarily dragged out stories/seasons.

I will bring out a video about it soon. Stay tuned!

Kill your darlings

Sometimes you think you have the best idea. Until you don't. Until someone tells you, that you need to scrap this. And this someone can be you.

This happened to my first design drafts of dog café. I had a full art style figured out, already three and a half full character designs, an (every so often changing) colour palette and a tightly wrapped script. Then I got writer's feedback (very fair feedback!) and more crucially - I did not want to look at my drawings any more. I did not want to paint the dog café and dog and cat any more. I thought it was writer's block. Now I know: It was style block. Change needed to happen.

Kawaii!

I love cute stuff! Dogs! Cats! Ferrets! Squishy things! But how dare you if you call me out on being cute. I am more deep and complex than anything cute would ever be! This brings me into a dilemma - I have an idea for a really cute story. The writing has even started. And the drawing. It will be a graphic novel. Basically, it is already decided. And I love it! Other people I have asked, too.

And still there is this voice in the back of my head that says "no cute!"

Are you also sometimes doubting your ideas by weird standards?

And would you also love a story about a café that is dedicated to finding love and discovers that it is about more than matching profiles? Cute animals included.

She can write

There are a lot of things I maybe have insane confidence in being able to do - building wood structures, that I can rearrange a whole room in an afternoon, learning dance choreography, being able to read in an animal's eye how comfortable they are. But writing was never one of these things. Writing makes me anxious. I feel like I am not really good with words. If there was something I really sucked at in elementary school, it was reading out loud. Complicated three to five syllable words make me shiver. I usually say too little or too much, so people don't fully get what I mean.

And now I dare to write. A graphic novel (so not just writing, pew). We'll see how it goes.