Baked Beanz

I made another illo for our little exhibition in
the last minute (or well, the last hours) because some
texts still didn´t have an according illustration, so that´s
a star of courage I´ll give myself. I cheated a bit and
used orange instead of red, because I developed a certain
love for this colour recently for no particular reason.
I just choose it whenever I have the chance of picking
colours. I would never, ever wear an orange
t-shirt, though, so if you thought of sending me your
old ones...

The text is basically about a chainsaw being
dropped on a workbench, with a lot of minute detail
description, so I went for the easiest way and drew,
well, a chainsaw. I think the constrast is a bit better than
in the last one I did. And drawing powertools is fun, if you
don´t care too much for realism.

In mixed news, a new afro supermarket opened
up right down our street (next to the awesome surpremo
24h-DVD rental shop), and I saw "Heinz Baked Beanz"
there for sale. Yes, not beans, but BEANZZZZ. I kinda like
those, but they are a little expensive in our regular supermarket,
so maybe the Beanz are a bit cheaper since they seem to be
imported. THE MIRACLE OF LIFE!

Work in progress

I also posted this on IFN.

This is an almost finished illustration for a
text from our creative writing class, about a women
who is having a business-related dinner with her
boss, and he ordered his favourite meal for both of them,
but unfortunately, she is vegetarian. So she is struggling
with her meat while he continues talking and eating.

We are restricted to black and red (and their shades),
but that´s actually a welcome change.

Whoa! A page full of txt!

A page from my nice orange sketchbook,
messing around with fonts a bit. I never really
cared for letters, but it´s nice making them up.

I have a class this semester where we work
with QuarkXpress, and it´s a proper nightmare
getting even the most basic things to work. I am
glad I chose Illustration and not Graphic Design
as my studying focus. And since everybody and their
mom can compose text on the PC these days,
nice handlettering will become more important
again. Take my word for it.

Red Hood

Clocks!!!!!!! YEAH!!!!!1

This is so hot and barely legal!

Upsie Daisy!

Messing around with my pencils
again. My scanner is acceptable with
ink pen, but it picks up the greyscales from
pencil really bad. Here is a nasty close-up
in the original 300 dpi:

Nasty, grainy white dots.

I could start talking about how bad
it gets when I scan in something coloured,
but I guess frequent readers of my blog already
now that (Hint: Very bad).

Refill 0.8mm balls (FUNNY!)

That postcard under the sketchbook is by
an austrian guy called Mahler, to avoid
misunderstandings. He makes pretty funny cartoons.

Yesterday, the sketchbook guy was at our school, a man that
is visiting us once in a while selling his self-made
sketchbooks in all kinds of sizes and colours at
pretty good prices. He must make a pretty
good cut, since the other artshops in that area
sell that kind of sketchbooks that you never
dare to touch and that catch dust staying unused
because having an expensive sketchbook with bad
drawings in it is worse than an expensive
sketchbook that is not used at all.
(That was sarcasm, by the way.)

I got four nice orange sketchbooks
(though they are not real books, more like booklets),
two portrait and two landscape orientation for 1.50 euro
each. AWESOMELY AMAZING!

Throw your hands in the ayy-aah

I already ditched my brush pen experimentation
phase and instead try some more of my "twitchy, shaky
lines"-style instead. The pen bleeds through the pages
pretty heavily, but since I am aiming at a rougher
drawing method again, it doesn´t bother me that much.

This is a so-called "mood shot", because it´s in
black and white and that´s a very "art" thing to do.
It also is a good way to cover up that my camera sucks
at colour.

If you come across any of those pens above, pick
them up - they are the best rollerball ink pen thingies
I ever had. Actually, the uniball eye is the better one, but
I had to pick up the VISION ELITE for ELITE DRAWING,
and also because I really loved those replacement
cartridges, which almost cost as much as the pen itself -
mostly because they ARE the pen itself more or less,
without the replacement cap and the shaft.

Trees and bushes of some sort

New Kids On The Blog

Tried out my PITT brush pens today,
and it´s always a exciting step away
from all other pens. Makes me use a lot
more black, and the nearly weightless way of
drawing is very liberating. One of the few
good things my local art supply shop in our
shopping centre has those Pentel brush pens, that
have proper brushes instead of soft felt tip ones -
maybe I´ll check those out tomorrow.

Thief

This one is a bit inspired by Martin tom Dieck,
whose class I am visiting this semester. We went to the
museum recently, and he looked through our sketchbooks
at the end and showed us his. I´ve never seen the sketchbook
of an art teacher before, and it was interesting. What
I found funny is that he too uses the Uniball eye ballpen,
combined with an ink brush.

And yeah, I am using ballpen
again despite what I said yesterday... I can draw
expressively with all pens if I want to, or do boring
sterile crap with all of them too.

I also put this up on Illustration Friday NIGHT,
a pretty cool blog that is some sort of mutant twin
of Illustration Friday, with pretty cool people on it.
Check out the link to the left.

...the link to the RIGHT. Sorry.

Let the music kill your soul (err, I mean "heal")

These are two sketches I did for a painting
(or several smaller paintings, that´s not set in stone
yet) for a friend of mine. They are done in biro
pen, but I am thinking about switching to pencil
again - the lines are just too scratchy most of the
time, and getting the contrast right is pretty painful.
I mean, it looks okay, but pencil somehow has more
warmth and is smoother. And it has a nice, punchy
blackness when I edit the contrast right.

And anyways, I just noticed that the three images in
the Hu Bei China book (which are still my favourites)
are all done in pencil. So it must be the best option
for me.

Dear readers!

I´ve fallen off the face of this planet for some days,
printing large shitty images in darkened, muggy rooms
full with rows of computers and king-sized printers kinda
knocked me out for some days. Luckily, work breaks
don´t last THAT long for me, which kind of makes
up for my loose working habits.

So I browsed my own blog for some minutes,
and I noticed a weird decline in my style. I am too lazy
to cross-link around my own site now, but I wonder why I
didn´t follow the road I took with my early demon
drawings, or the "Mask" submission... Damn it, some of
those even have proper BACKGROUNDS! Instead,
I abadoned my Bic biro pens and drew bland stuff
with boring fineliners. Gah. Why?

See, that´s one of the benefits of having a blog -
you can dig around in it like in a sketch diary,
but it´s much more tidier and with a whole lot more
words and random nonsense, and it also has
loading times and crashes occasionally.

Correct me if you have a wildly different
view on my work, but looking back, it seems
that my best work is always the looser,
more expressive work, with some sort
of special "handwriting" in the lines - not
the slick, tidy, tame stuff. Nothing against
slick illustration, it has it´s own appeal,
but it´s not my strength. And I am going
to get back to that from now on. So see above:
I bought some nice new Bics. They are
lovingly cheap, and I love smearing around
with them.

Oh! And look at that. It´s the second half of
my pages in a book which is sort of a compendium
of our school. Can you guess where it is going
to be published? China.
Kazaam! My first time being published in
print, and it´s in CHINA! I haven´t seen
the pages of my colleagues yet, but I am looking
forward to seeing the final book. Geez, I hope I get
a copy of that.

I almost forgot about this project,
and it excites me quite a bit. Especially since three of my
all-time favourite pieces are in it (the other page has
german text and my "Demon with knifes" on it). Our
professors just keep on doing great projects lately.
(Or, more likely, they did that all the time and I didn´t
notice because I sat at home surfing the web all day.)