„Vă aÈ™teptăm de o mie de ani!” / "We have been waiting for you for one thousand years!"
In 2018, Romania celebrated the centenary of its Great Unification. I had the joy and honour of bringing my modest contribution to all the cultural events organised that year by creating this short comic-strip and exhibiting it together with other artists at the Comic Strip Salon in Brașov (Salonul de Bandă Desenată).
I chose to depict this beautiful moment because I felt that the speech given by the prime-minister, who welcomed the Transylvanian delegation so warmly and exclaimed ”We have been waiting for you for one thousand years!”, really captures the emotion and genuine feelings across our country at that time. Transylvania had been under foreign occupation for nearly 1000 years, socially and politically oppressed, and now finally they were uniting with the rest of the country, being no longer second-hand citizens in their own land.
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Technique and Process
Before creating this comic-strip I spent about a month researching documents, articles and photographs, as well as visiting the palace and the room where the event took place. I wanted the moment to be as true to reality as possible - from the warm welcome that the people of Bucharest gave the Transylvanian delegation, to the words spoken and the actual look of the characters and places. My intention for the style and look of the pages was also to convey the action as vividly as possible, reading almost like a film.
My first step was to write down the prime-minister's speech, upon which I based my concept, and then brainstormed many sketches depicting the action. The next step was to draw everything in pencil. I then scanned and coloured the pages in Photoshop.
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