2006/11/30

I want to see you sue-ÄÄ! ...ehm, what?

Hyper! Hyper!


This drawing reminds me of this.
Ravers, the weirdest dressed people ever.
I was really surprised that those folks exist
outside of Germany.

And Liz, you´re lucky. I cannot afford
my horse anymore. But don´t feed him
peppers and hamburgers, it might get
diarrhea.


2006/11/28

Blablabla this is the title, okay?

German horses look like that. Really.


You know what´s great about Illustration
blogs? You don´t need to read useless
descriptive drivel. So there!

Messing around


I think I´ll make another post for today,
so for now here´s a bit of an experiment again.
As I said, my knowledge in GIMP is still
pretty rudimentary, so I´ll try something new
once in a while. Nothing groundbreaking,
but turning black lines into coloured ones
is a nice change.

Uuuh, pretty coloured lines.

Monday Shmonday

This picture has very ugly compression issues.


That´s pretty much it. Besides...

___

...I hate clips on pens. What´s the point? Does anybody
really puts pens on their body with a clip? In the small
pocket on your shirt? On your pants? Stupid. They are just
in the way when I draw, pressing against my hand.
So mostly I decide to take the necessary step:
Snap them off.


The green mechanical pencil turned out best - it´s cheap plastic,
and the sharp pointy edges disappeared after a treatment
with sand paper. The biro pen in the middle has sharp edges
too, so I covered it up with tape - looks pretty crappy.
The white pencil has the remains still showing, and
unfortunately it still has this dumb plastic part that
keeps it from being comfortable.

Clips - made for being snapped off!

2006/11/26

Another demon


Boooh! Demon time!
This one was fun.

That´s me


I can´t leave this photo in my profile without commenting
on it. First of all, I have the slight feeling that I caught a
cold from my girlfriend ( so I´ll get that
chainsaw-in-your-throat-time soon too),
and making pictures of yourself while retaining a
natural look is HARD. This is still a rather mediocre
representation of how I look, but believe me, I made
maybe 30 pics (and most of them are blurry, and if
not, I look very ...mentally challenged on them).

Oh, and I have glasses too, and I wear them nearly
all the time - why I thought it would be a good idea
to take them off for a self-portrait is beyond me. Just
print it out, and draw some rectangles around my eyes
with a poster marker; there you go. That´s me.

(Please take note of the bonus dancing feet in the
upper right corner. What a great background.)

2006/11/25

IF: Invention



I admit being a bit lazy with my recent
Illustration Friday submission; yesterday wasn´t
a good day for creative vibes somehow, so here is my
revision. I still like the idea and I don´t want to
make Ariel sad since he likes jetpacks as much
as I do (as well as soap detergents ;P ).

Below is the original post.


______

It´s as small as a backpack, but
instead of putting water bottles, books
and toilet paper in it, you get blasted into
the sky. Enough said.





Newsflash



I had my Illo class today which
is made by two professors, one that I know since years
and the other one a very close colleague who is in the same
vein - talking lenghty about this and that, making me feel
really comfortable (I like people that talk much, because I
like talking much too - I can´t handle awkward silence; and as
you can tell, I like to write much as well) and I learned A LOT
today.

He introduced us to a program that basically is a
calculator for freelance designers to calculate what price
to take for you work to make a living (or get richer). I have
no idea if it´s avaiable in English, in this case I´ll post that -
this is a really valuable tool.

Anyway, thanks to Sergey from designcontest.net
for featuring me. I feel very honoured!
Here´s the link:

Click

So long, good night.

2006/11/24

New layouts for my Illo class

In a previous post I told you about my Illo
class project "Medicine-Therapy-Caretaking", and
here are some more layouts (that are due tomorrow).
The topic is dealing with optimizing the workflow
in hospitals.





Those sketches SHOULD be self-explainatory,
if not, I failed. By the way, I enjoyed making up
ideas and concepts for this one, because I did it
while staying in bed the whole morning. That´s great-
laying in bed and still doing work. The sweet side
of being an illustrator.

2006/11/22

Revision


Here is a revision of the Illo I did yesterday.
Usually I don´t touch my pictures once they are
finished, but the added stuff annoyed me after
a while so here is a cleaner version with new colours.
My initial thought was to delete the post from yesterday
and pretend that I didn´t use all those useless
lines and shades, but for the sake of documentation
I´ll leave it the way it is. I realized that I am no friend
of ornaments and disfunctional decoration, and I
want my drawings to stay as pure as possible
while colouring it.

Beating the drum


It´s good to know I can make a picture
like this above without much trouble on
one day (with much sleeping and enough
breaks to keep my lazy side satisfied).
I am experimenting with some (hopefully)
subtle digital additions besides the colour,
and, well, you can see the results.

That´s all for now. Comments
appreciated, as always.

2006/11/20

More sketches


Better than no post at all!



Two bird-people with large tummies.



More demons. Demons all the time.



Scaring innocent pedestrians.


Biro pen on cheapo paper (as always).

2006/11/19

Caffeine - Illustrators best friend



I was just skribbling around a bit today, late
in the evening again, and after scanning my
results in I found it to be
rather unexciting, so I
slapped some additional
layers on it and messed
around a bit (I still have to learn what all those
layer options in GIMP are, so the result is
mostly random).


I am quite pleased with the outcome, I am not
used to using much colours, but it fits the rather
dry drawing quite well. That´s why I love digital
editing so much; you can experiment all you want
without being able to ruin everything. Maybe I´ll
explore into that direction some more.


2006/11/17

IF: Thanksgiving

The problem is that I don´t live in the US and
have therefore a very rudimentary and generic idea
of what thanksgiving actually is, and no emotional
connection to this subject - and looking it
up in Wikipedia isn´t something I want to do.
We do have a similar occasion in German by
the name "Erntedank", but it is not a big
celebration like Thanksgiving.

Instead, a take on the turkey/turkey wordplay:



Keep in mind that this is not a political caricature
or something, to avoid misunderstandings. It´s just
a weird thing that a bird and a country share
the same name in English.
And making jokes about that is indeed corny.

I hope that in the future we keep getting
topics that anyone can relate to, worldwide.
(Too bad someone already had my initial
idea of someone who is giving a "Thanks"...)

And please, no christmas topics in
december. Please, no. That only invites
stereotypical ideas.

Double Update!


I have no idea what is going on in this picture.
This is the result of drawing straight away,
from left to right, without concept, without
penciling, with a good amount of
randomness in it. I like working that way,
though it doesn´t make sense when illustrating
specific subjects. But it´s good excercise nevertheless.
Man, I had a tough fight when colouring this one -
I used a lot of shades but finally reduced it to only
a few, contrasting colours again. It just works best
right now, and colouring is always my least
favourite part.

The second one remains monochrome -
I don´t think colour is necessary in this one.



What are those grey lines between the text?
Too late, I am hitting the pillows now. Oh, time
to check out this weeks IF topic.

2006/11/14

Angry demon REDUX


First of all,
thanks for the truckload of comments

(though its beyond my imaginative powers how
comments could ever fill any truck, but let´s move on),
and especially John Reddinger
for pointing out that a certain Johnny
from drawn.ca found me via my IF submissions
(and of course, thanks to Johnny too!) and linked
me on their site.

I wasn`t expecting being picked

for such a sweet site so early, and have been
found among all the other fantastic submissions
on IF. So here is a variation of the demon
that Johnny took for his post.


This is how I eat breakfast each morning;
mixing sugar and oatmeal with lots of milk
and gulping them down like a hungry
coyote. It´s nutricious and stuffs me
for at least 3 hours.



While I drew and coloured this, I listened
to this all the time. I simply love those guys.

And I love you, people.
So long!

Kudos to the biro pen



Nothing new or revolutionary today. I´ve tried my luck
with some different materials and it didn´t work out
so well. So instead I flipped through a couple of
sketchbooks from earlier this year (those are really
great small books with 144 pages for 3 euro, stitch bound
and linen cover - from the netherlands HEMA store), and
share some sketches.



I used to draw nearly exclusively with biro pen
during the last semesters, and will start using them
again - if done right, biro pen drawings have
a lot of expression, detail and rough power in them.



I remembered writing a Wikipedia entry on that
subject, seeing that biro pens are usually not
considered "art tools" but cheap everyday
supplies (and on a sidenote, the best biros
are usually the cheapest ones, including the french Bic
or the german Schneider pens). And upon
looking it up again, I saw that someone
added pictures going with my article!




So a like-minded individual improved my entry,
and here it is in german:

Kugelschreiber

And, for the non-german readers
(with added auto-translate awkwardness, but
still understandable):

Autotranslated

To sum it up, biro-pens are durable, nearly
indestructible, varied, uncomplicated,
cheap and avaiable nearly everywhere. To if
you think you´re too sophisticated to use a
mass-market cheapo product, think again!


2006/11/13

Life in the streets


Sk8ter boy? Indeed.
I wanted to colour this one too, but it
turned out ugly, so instead of letting this one
rot away in my desk, I´ll share it with you.

Illo Friday - "Clear"



Oh boy, Illo Friday again. With "Clear" we
have a nice, loose term, which surely will
lead to many different results.
So here is mine. This time
around I didn`t interfere with colour so
much and kept it simple.

In case you are new to my blog,
feel welcome and check out my
other illos if you want.

Enjoy!

2006/11/10

Medicine - Therapy - Caretaking


I should be in bed now. Why do I always have to work
late in the evening? Oh well. Here is a first idea of
how the aforementioned illo could look
like. See the gap between the upper arm
and the head? I never pencil first but draw
straight away, so I often correct by cutting
and glueing instead. Its just
a pain to correct it digitally afterwards.

So long, good night.

(Random topic stuff)

Another sketch I coloured today. Looks a bit dirty and it
lacks a proper background, but, well...
I am currently busy working on a calendar page

we do for our university; the topic is "management
of therapy, medicine and caretaking in hospitals"
and I noticed how hard conceptual
thinking still is for me.

These are pictures without concept, so don`t
ask what they mean - they just randomly
fall out my head. Not when it comes to
class assignments, though. I need
some drill - badly.

In my early semesters I was completely
consumed by stylistics - sharp and symbolic
thinking is something I wasn`t bothered with.
Studying gets a lot more serious for me during
the last weeks but I like that a lot.
Dedication!


2006/11/08

Clouds

My newest creation - don´t worry, this isn`t my
own mood pictured here. The fountain-pen / brush technique
is growing on me, its much less countour-driven
and very satisfiying to use. After I made this
one, I picked up an old catalogue with poster art
from Poland (50ies till 80ies) which is easily
the most impressive collection of art I have.
Fascinating because they are mostly
commercial posters, advertisments and festival
announcements, but with a very distinctive
feeling of shape, style and colour,
and very sharp concepts. A large number
of them will serve as inspiration for
future ideas and approaches.

So here is a link to let you know what I am talking about:

Polish posters

There are a couple of other drawings waiting
to be coloured, so I will be able to serve you
with frequent updates in the next few days.
Thanks for taking time to comment!

2006/11/05

A weird sheep


Yeah, that`s about it.
See you later!

It`s "Smoke" again


Yesterday I complained about not having enough time for
making an original
Illo Friday contribution, but instead
I downed a load of tea an
d started going at it.
I thought about shamefully erasing the last post,
but since you people
already commented on it,
I choose to make a new post. This picture

has some issues, since the paper went wavy and
so there are
blurry spots in the scan. I simply need to
use thicker paper when working
with water... oh, and
besides, I drew this with water-soluble ink and then

went over it with water - I think this makes my drawings
meatier.
Just tell me what you think.

(FREE bonus sketch for your delight)

And I can`t stop telling you how much I appreciate your
comments.
I will not get tired of saying this, it`s like saying
"I love you" over
and over again, because you just
want to make it clear again and again.

It`s really surprising me how motivating this
whole messageboard - blogging -

art community via internet-thing is.
I guess we all should be thankful for this.
Well, I know I am!



2006/11/04

Illustration Friday - "Smoke"

[EDIT: There is a new original contribution to "Smoke"
above this post. Yeah, I got myself together at last!]


Ah, what do we have here? I know I posted this picture
for the last Illo Friday already, but at the moment I am a bit
sick of digital colouring, so I will simply sketch and doodle
for a few days. And since this picture fits BOTH wind and
smoke (a lucky coincidence!) I might as well present it again; maybe
some new people will see it who missed it last week.

But to show at least something new, here is a random
sketch I did today. It`s self-explainatory. So anyways,
thanks for your visit! Next time there`s gonna be more stuff to
see. Maybe I´ll get something new for "Smoke" together, with or
without colour. Until then!


2006/11/01

Draw Man


This boy has a very special super
power. I doubt that this will get him to save the world,
but at least he`s having fun. He already has got
a super heroes cape and mask!

And thanks again for the many comments on
my last picture!