I can´t even come up with a title

I had to re-edit my calendar pieces in high
resolution for an exhibition. I scanned them with
a whooping 800 dpi, and colouring such huge images simply isn´t
fun, even with 1500mb RAM. Every step took maybe 5 seconds
to react, and when filling big patches of colour I could take small
bathroom breaks till it properly appeared on screen.
It was a soul-crushing chore.

So I put the Wacom back in the drawer
and took out the colour pencils again. Again, the
colours come out like crap in the scan. I messed around
with some colour adjustment dialogues, but it
stayed very grainy. Ah well. Maybe I try out watercolour
tomorrow. The last two days were full of teeth-grinding,
especially working with pictures I don´t really like
anymore, so making some relaxed biro sketching and
colouring by hand was a joyous ride again.

EDIT: I noticed the bad-ass scanners in our
school today, and my drawing out with those
in my Photoshop/QuarkXPress class on wednesday.
Judging on that, I´ll see if I need a new scanner...

Donkey Kong, Monkey Dong. (Okay, that was weak.)

What´s up?

A ingridible update

Look at this! I moved around a couple of things
in my room today, and found some childhood drawings
in a dusty box. Isn´t this ingridible? REX- KING OF DINOSAURS.
Must have made them when I was about eight or ten or something.
Take note how everything is written in English. English was
the COOL language back then. But back then nobody
screamed "We must secure our wonderful german
language!" Just for the record, I love using both.

I even distinctively remember where I learned
the word that´s supposed to mean "incredible" from:
"The incredible Spiderman" Gameboy cartridge.
Back then games were so hard that they made
us cry. One time my Gameboy even ran so hot that
it crashed all the time. That was another game,
though.



"His Hair is Blue and his Schort is
Yellow! Who it is? FJ!"
Priceless.

That must have been back in the early
nineties, when manga and anime were
almost unknown. He still does look like
Dragonball or something. Maybe the exposure
to Nintendo games made me do this. And
he´s wearing "Sonic The Hedgehog" sneakers.
Sonic was THE BOMB back then.

Heitschi Bumbeitschi

Bubblegum chewing fish with legs.

If you have any questions regarding this
picture or about my sanity in general,
contact me via the comments section.

Threesome! (Sorry.)

Oh boy, drawing with my newly aquired
pen sure IS fun. It´s a uni-ball, and the model is
named VISION ELITE.
I can actually feel the raw megapower running
through my arm when I pick it up, making it shake
and causing sparks to run all over me.
VISION! ELITE!

This pen has refill cartridges, but ironically,
the cartridge is mostly the pen itself, just without
the cap and the shaft. But they come in cute nifty
plastic wrapping, which made me buy three of them
in one go.

As you see, I´ve been as busy as a beaver today.
Mostly because I sit at the desk for more than 5 minutes
of uninterrupted work. I am learning.
Fred slacking on couch = doubleplus ungood.

This linework really has got a lot of punch,
innit? (I always wanted to write "innit", because man,
that word is just wicked).

Also, check out two new entries on my
link list. Jörn Kaspuhl, a fellow student, with
bucketloads of talent and a very nice website, and
The Gross Uncle, who deserves a lot more comments
than he´s getting at the moment. Go change that!

King of the bongo/conga/djembe

You should all know by now that
you can CLICK on every image here
to ENLARGE it, you noobs!

This drawing is pretty small even
for my standard, and I do rarely go over
DIN A4 (magazine or letter-size). This one is about
the size of my hand. But lately I discovered that my drawings
do not benefit from drawing on large formats.
Drawing on tiny space has a magic of its
own. Too bad it´s ruining my back. I need a proper
drawing surface and not just my plain old IKEA desk.

Plus, smaller paper is much cheaper
and oh so much easier to handle. I recently
threw away buckets of useless "sketches" (pieces of
paper with a few half-assed lines on them), and decided
that all this sketching got me nowhere; it´s the
concentrated, detailed pieces that make me
progress.

Also, I presented my Pinocchio submission
a few days ago, and the colors, while still looking
OK, are pretty different in print compared to how they appear on
my screen. So I went through a couple of settings in my
monitor, and man, I had no idea what to choose.
So I took "sRGB" since in that mode I don´t
have to mess around with contrast and brightness
settings. (Whatever...)

Headfirst into a world of pain

Skateboarding - know any other sport
that is so common and widespread, yet so
incredibly painful and masochistic? I guess
everyone in the western world has seen
some footage of a skater boy falling off a rail
and getting his crotch mashed to a pulp.
Yesterday we saw some "funny homevideo" show
(Aaw, those cute dogs and cats doing off-the-wall random
stuff really get me each time!), and in one clip a guy
fell of his board and got his leg stuck between the handrail
and the concrete wall.

The only wheels he´s going to ride from now
on is the wheelchair! (Well, not really, he
seemed to have gotten away with that).
Sliding one some steel pipe with
a wood board doesn´t justify this kind of risk for
me. I may be overly cautious in every day life
(I barely even jump down a couple of steps to save time,
let alone do stuff that could hurt my hand - or my eyes - I need
both for playing Nintendo, and some occasional drawing), but
I really appreciate a healthy, complete and unbroken
body.

Oh and yeah, that´s a skyscraper in the
picture. Now that´s yet another long story...

Oh, and my fuel cell illustration got
accepted! Whew! Even though I missed the
printing appointment and had to reach in some
very sub-standard and way too tiny printouts.
I really trusted my luck on that one, but it worked!

Du de bop da bo bop

A belltower giraffe.
´cept for the bushy tail, of course.

And a new version of Pinocchio.

That´s all, folks!

Pinocchio

That´s right, a new illustration assignment.
This time around, we only have time till April 16th,
and it´s a welcome change of pace. Makes me forget
my mediocre calendar submissions. We are supposed to
read the book, select a chapter and illustrate it. Here
is the English part (quotes from WikiSource - you can
actually read the whole book in Wikipedia!):

"He returned home as wet as a rag, and tired out from weariness and hunger.
As he no longer had any strength left with which to stand,
he sat down on a little stool and put his two feet on the stove to dry them.
There he fell asleep, and while he slept, his wooden feet began to burn.
Slowly, very slowly, they blackened and turned to ashes.
Pinocchio snored away happily as if his feet were not his own."

I decided to wake him up before his feet completely
burn away. It´s a pretty heavy part of the story, but
that´s what made it interesting to me.

Oh, and by the way, the german version doesn´t
mention a stool. Seems to be "lost in translation"
(I love that movie). Also, Blogger likes to mess around
with my letters again, I don´t know why this has to look
so ugly, but...meeh. "Stool" sounds very similar
in german, "Stuhl". It also means "poop" (in more
academic terms). Ah! Enough of that.

Ghosts...everywhere!

IF: "Snap"

click to enlarge

Something inside the car just snapped.

---

Had this lying around and thought it would be fitting
for this weeks IF. Semester has just begun and it´s already
a tight schedule (but sounds like fun this time!).

The story behind this is that I bought some cheapo
handheld game system while being on vacation in Texel,
Netherlands. It had all kinds of very barebone games on it
(I bought it just because I have a soft side for strange videogame
related things), and one of those games was called
"Fast Race". The imagination of this title instantly stunned
me, but I found out that is was more like "Slow Race (with
constant annoying humming sound and endlessly repeating
levels)".

So there!
FAST RACE! ENGINE START!
GET THE POWER UP AND WIN THE GAME.
FOR GREAT JUSTICE.

(If you don´t get these hints, be happy that
you can´t consider yourself a nerd.)

Alle Vögel sind schon da...

...alle Vögel, alle!

That´s an old german song meaning
"All the birds are here already, all of them!",
which, obviously, is praising the arrival of spring.

And man, praising it I am. The last couple of
days were an absolute joy, I went to my school by
foot (both ways sum up to maybe an hour of walking),
along the beautiful Eilbek-canal, with flowers blooming
and green-yellowish trees. It was a physical feeling of leaving
the bleak winter days behind.

Today it´s a bit colder again, but I am enjoying
getting outside more often. I don´t like to be
a shut-in couch potato by any means.

I also fixed my totally ruined sleeping
patterns - during the last weeks, I went to bed
at 5am more often than not. I think that this really
affected my health, so I am going to bed between 10 and 11pm
and setting my alarm clock to 8am strictly. The first days were
heavy, but now I feel that much better. Makes me feel like
a normal member of society again!