Tanks...OF LOVE!

You can´t tell from the outside, though.
Also: Trees!

Welcome back, Internet!

Alright, I am back! And already having itching
fingers again. Drawing during my vacation didn´t work out
that well, I thoughtlessly left most of my stuff at
home (music, books, Nintendo, and, well, the internet)
and I realized that I need all my belongings around me to
function as an artist ("artist"). I am also terribly impatient.
When you´re so used to produce drawings on a daily
basis like I do (or attempt to do), having a week off is pretty
brutal, because after a certain time it becomes a roaring
demand. I am also very dependent on my home;
tramping around the world would pretty much kill
me. I am used to my media, to the internet, to my
own bed, my habitat. I am the counterpart
of a nomad.

What I came to think about too:
Do you feel the internet is a luxury or a
new, basic form of cultural device, a necessity?
I liked to think that despite me using technology
each day, every day, I could drop all that and become
a buddhist monk or whatever anytime. But that isn´t
true. I will also never lose my interest in Nintendo
games, no matter how much I think that it´s
a waste of time sometimes (hint: It´s not, because
it serves as an excellent stress relief for me).

Ah, well. More to come, I am heavily sucking
in my conveniences right now, with the stereo blasting,
all light on but, sadly, no potato chips in arms reach.

Later!

Vacation break

Just wanted to let you know that I am on
vacation with my family in Bergen, Netherlands
for a week, so don´t expect any posts during this time.
I´ll take my sketchbook with me, so there will hopefully
be a lot to post after that.

Till later!

PS. This also means internet cold turkey.
That´s really necessary once in a while.
(I wonder if somebody wrote me a mail since
I checked ten minutes ago?)

Cerberus

Also on Illustration Friday Night.

Up in the trees!

Intelligence test: Are you smart enough
to figure out to CLICK TO ENLARGE yourself?
Because many blogs don´t feature this, and I would
hate to make my new readers miss out on that.

I noticed that I seem to be extremely
efficent in my drawing rountines when I am under
deadline pressure, but lose this work habit whenever
I am just drawing for fun. Instead of doing proper,
full-blown pictures, I do pages and pages of little
head, trees, and general random stuff.

Now this isn´t bad in itself and it does make
sense to practice, for instance, faces with more
concentration; but it´s not that I need a lot of
studies and sketches before starting a new piece.
Instead I just go at it and see where it goes, and
by filling it with a lot more details, it usually becomes
more varied and interesting than just sketches.

Sketches are to drawing what training is to
sports; it´s good for a while, but what you really
want is to do the proper thing. I more or less
wasted a good year and a half at my school just
sketching and sketching without ever going into
more effort and detail.

I also believe that I learn more from
doing whole pieces instead of doodling around,
because the thought of ruining a good piece
with bad elements demands much more attention
then when I am just filling pages with skribbles.
My sketches and my proper drawings aren´t that
far apart to be honest, the only thing that separates
them is that I start a proper piece with the intention
of scanning it and colouring it afterwards as a new
portfolio piece. And I always draw everything into
one sketchbook, so this sketch/piece difference
is a pure question of attitude.

BLAH BLAH
WORDS WORDS WORDS

IF: Discovery

Click to enlarge

Annual expo GO! GO! GO!

Just made this. Eh, it was
kinda fun. Not much to say about it.

---

Anyways - Photo time!

This picture shows what Germany looks like in most
places. But kidding aside, this is the DVD presentation
we made at the Martin tom Dieck class, and to make
people really sit down and watch it we set up some
kind of kitschy living room atmosphere.





It worked. And so did the beer.
Gave me some proper headaches, combined with
some selfmade wine tom Dieck got from his
neighbour. (That my head down there. My god,
my hair looks weird.)

We sat there pretty much the whole evening.
And whatever you think is happening in this picture,
I didn´t do anything (which is pretty rare for me).

My professor Bernd Mölck-Tassel and lots
of food. They even had some sushi there.

The photos are pretty low-res, I had to nick them from
StudiVZ (the german rip-off of Facebook). I hope nobody
in these pictures is offended by being exposed to the internet.

Bild und Text

So here is the first batch of photos
from our annual exhibition.

(CLICK TO ENLARGE, YOU NOOBS!)

This is a poster I made last-minute.
Thankfully, Nicole helped me with the layout,
since we only had InDesign CS, which is
TOTALLY different from CS2. Well, at least
different enough that you can´t open CS2 documents
in CS. What´s that about, eh, Adobe?



My second poster. It´s a bit wavy, but I won´t complain,
since I got exposed a lot this year. You can also see
this poster in the first image, to the very right. My stuff
was all on one floor, and it was crammed with lots
and lots of great illustrations.

Reflective glass, urgh. Again, no real complaint, as
we almost DIDN´T show our column illos this year.
I can´t believe how much we did this semester, and
I am really looking forward to the next round.

I´ve been officially dead (in the Blogosphere)

WEB 2.0!!!
If you don´t post for a week you´re claimed
dead in the data hyperspace version two point zero!
At least, if you post as much as I did in the past.

It´s the year exhibition of our school and I´ve been
there almost every day since monday, and today too
and also tomorrow, showing the stuff to all kinds
of family and friends, drinking beer with some fellow
students and doing supervision (or whatever the act of
sitting there on a stool to prevent people from ripping
paintings off the walls is called).

After I used to slack to much and generally
spend most of my days at home for the last, uhm,
three years of studying (!), I finally got a grip and
now I am doing stuff there like crazy. I also have a surprisingly
big number of pictures hanging this year, and today I´ll
FINALLY make some pictures with my own camera (which
I´ve been avoiding so far since it´s pretty unreliable,
I guess I´ll have to jump into the cold water and buy
a new model from a better brand.)

I am also making lots of new friends, and I am
also setting up a group of people to go drawing every
week during the semester break (which is two and a half
MONTHS long). It´s a bit creepy at times. I also started
drinking my coffee with sugar and milk instead of black
and using strange words like "her work is beautiful" and
something.

So I am in a hurry right now again, but expect another
HUGE update on all this in the near future!

----

And also, I don´t know if I already linked her here,
but you have to check out Kokokalinka,
she does very excellent stuff with beautifully awkward
characters and uses a certain hypnotic
shade of blue A LOT.

Oh, and it´s been raining every day
without exception for weeks here, and now today
the sun is shining and a warm breeze is running
through the windows. I wish I could close this
post with some sort of ironic comment, but not
today, as everything is just AWESOME and
AMAZING, except the exhibition of our
neighbour art school, which was mostly
stupid shit. (If you´re reading this and studying
at the HfbK: I LOVED your work, really! Great concept,
with the rusty nails and the neon colours
on nylon stockings!)

How are you gentlemen!

Finally I get the chance to catch up with my
posting. Not posting stuff on blogs somehow looks
like I am not doing anything, which in most cases
is true, but recently I did SO MUCH that I couldn´t
be bothered spending some attention on my litte
"post picture and talk nonsense" site.

The watch you´re seeing is for a text that
deals with advertising gifts that are cheap and
useless. The company the author mentions is the
ADAC (the german car club), and the watch I drew
is both "timeless" (It doesn´t show the time! LOL!)
and advertising the company. This is the best concept
I ever came up with, as opposed to just draw stuff
that randomly fits the text in a way.



This is for text about
a hypochondriac who is daydreaming
about a one-stop cure for all this suffering.
My teachers said he would look too much
like a drug addict, and that he is
pretty muscular for someone who
is supposed whiny and weak.

So here is the second version. This one
actually looks sick and worried, and the color scheme
is less happy and funky and more doom and gloom.

That´s it for today. I am off playing
some videogames, I guess this time I actually
deserve it. Next week is packed with our
yearly exhibition, and I´ll take some photos
for your delight!

MY CAPS LOCK KEY IS BROken - oh wait, it´s not.

I illustrated another column today, in which
the author burns some crappy books in his chimney,
with the saying in his head "Where books are burned, people will
be burned, soon, too" (yeah, that was a shoddy translation).

Red-Handed tagged me (it´s this time of the year
again), and I´ll react to that in the next few days.
You should check out his stuff or I`LL BREAK
YOUR LEGS!, yes, his work is that good, especially
the line-art stuff.

I also bought Wasabi-covered peas today.
EXXXTREME LIFESTYLE!

Brizidan

I´ve been pretty busy lately, to explain my
slow posting. I got a deadline wrong and churned out
FIVE illustrations on two and a half days, which is some
sort of record for myself. To be honest, it wasn´t THAT
brutal, I just didn´t get as lazy as usual like I do over the
weekend (oh, and no partying or something like that,
either, of course). Turned out I still have another week,
but six illos are a good number for showing this work
at your yearly school exhibition. It´s comforting to know
that my recent style is something I can
produce extremely quick.

This image is for a column about mishearing words,
"Brizidan" being one of those words. It deals with
an old story about a black man catching monkeys
and roasting them, "briet sie dann". This is the illo I am
most satisfied with, so there you go! Posting more
of those within this week (if I am lucky).