Congratulations Charles Darwin

This year '09 is among other things the Darwin-year
and today his birthday.

I 'll like to work with a personal view on his themes
until november, when the public celebrates
the anniversary of his first book
"ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES".

-Claudia

A Second Day At The Museum

click to enlarge

Today was my second drawing-studies-date (together with my students) at the Ethnological Museum, Berlin-Dahlem. There I found these weird figures at the proved South-Sea-Collection.

Currently I‘m very interested in such „ethnological issues“. This passion was caused by writing a new article (for Jitter-Magazine) about first nation artist Brian Jungen and his „Prototypes for New Understandings“, a series of aboriginal masks which were assembled from parts of Nike Air Jordan shoes.

Greetings Dieter

Matchbone

I really like to draw these skulls lately,
maybe because they have this kind of
stupid look on their face
(if they HAD a face).

Station B

Here comes a new strip of our dogville-project (I‘m still very busy with it). This small story (words by Verena Postweiler) is dedicated to my favourite and now abandoned recordstore Station B.

The Station was based at the notorious Kastanienallee, in former East-Berlin. And was also a place to discover a lot of remarkable things - rare und beautiful music, strange people and obscure tea-blends. RIP.

Dieter

Illustration Friday: "Time"

"Your time will come."

I´ve been having loads of
fun drawing these skeleton in the
past few days. I just noticed
that working digitally allows me
to work in a way that resembles
painting more than drawing -
it´s like I move away from
outline/contour-based progress
to a more spacial approach.

Does this make sense?

Anyway, click each one to enlarge
them and enjoy ;)

Varanasi

Two years ago, I've drawn a graphic report of the Indian 

pilgrimage town Varanasi.

I'm now making a silkscreen edition of the book. 

It's a big edition, as the Belgian government (fortunatly)

ordered a larger amount of copies. This is why they're

printed on a semi-automatic machine:

The last thing to do will be the binding,

which might take some little hours, as it's handmade...

Ghostwriter

Hello!

This Illustration I did for the monthly inlay of spiegel,
the kulturspiegel. It was for a funny ironic article
about Uwe Tellkamp, who was a doctor
("like every writer") before he discovered his talent
to write books. He authored the no1 top-seller
Der Turm which is about his past life in the GDR

and the reunion (snore!). The article tells us,
that he bought himself a zebra-hat, to show everyone,
that he is an artist now ...

Greets IB

Ilustration Friday: "Flawed"

click to enlarge

This girl has a pretty flawed haircut!

Fun fact:
This is one of the very few times
I gave a character pupils. I think I´ll do
this more often as it gives her face a lot
more expression than without.

And here´s a litte bonus piece.
Hope you enjoy it. Have a great day
and comments are welcome ;)

-Frederik

Continuing the Berlin-Stories

The Captain is on his way, now it‘s time to go on with our „Dogville-Berlin“ project. As I‘ve posted here, the announced release-date for this book shall be during March. Yeesss. Verena wrote a lot of new stories and I started to illustrate them last week. Here is an example of my work in progress, a new story with working-title „Crazy-Man-Michael“ (words by Verena Postweiler).

So far I can see, it‘s indeed al lot of work to do until March...

Greetings, Dieter

Airing out

click to enlarge

I´m currently working on illustrating
a haiku, which is part of our illustration
class this semester. The format
we´re supposed to use is quite
tall (or wide, we could choose the
orientation) so I´m giving you some
additional detail shots.


"Airing out
the bedding
and the cat"
-Kobayashi Issa

I think this is the most interesting
butt I´ve drawn so far.

I´m still experimenting with
digital drawing some more, and
I like the painterly, soft feeling this piece
has. My older digital work looked
way too flat for my liking, but now
I start to produce images I´m pretty
satisfied with.



It was quite some work but I enjoyed
every second of it. I hope you can see
the love in it, too!

-Frederik

Illustration Friday: "Pale"

click to enlarge

"Pale blue skies - perfect weather
for flying!"

Beefheart - again

click to enlarge

Last days I‘ve completed the “example-pages“ of the mentioned graphic novel „The Adventures of Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band“, some conceptional work was also done. Now our book will be chaptered into three main parts:
1) The youth of Don and Frank (Zappa) - the originstory of Captain Beefheart 2) Trout Mask Replica (Recording sessions a.s.o.) and 3) the legendary concert at the Jahrhunderthalle Höchst, Frankfurt, Germany 1972.

It‘s really cool for me to work with author Carl-Ludwig Reichert. When I was 18 years old I discoverd his previous band, the bavarian „Sparifankal“ (which means something like „ naughty little devil“). Sparifankal was the only german beefheart-influenced music-group, they played a strange kind of „folkish garage rock“ - very unique at their time and today. C.L. also got a fine reputation as writer about popcultural issues. He published biographies of Frank Zappa, the Ducks, did some books about blues, folk and rock and translated lyrics of Jim Morrison and Bob Marley.

Now its time for us to contact various publishing houses - international publishers are welcome!

Dieter

Illustration Friday: "Contained"

click to enlarge

"Back then when kids used to play around
outside, fun also contained the
occasional pain."

This is what my stuff looks like when I
do some experiments digitally. I did some
scribbles on my new Wacom Bamboo Fun
(nice hardware!) yesterday but it all ended
up looking waaay too artificial, but this here
is something I´m pretty satisfied with.
I roughed up the smooth edges to give it
a more ripped paper look, and now that
I look at it it reminds me of the polish
posters I adore so much.

I used to be pretty anti-digital some
years ago, but I realized it´s not that
those two worlds are separate from each
other. By the way, I did this in GIMP,
the best alternative to Photoshop you
can get, and being Open Source software
it´s free of charge. Sorry, I had to
write a little advertisement here,
but I just love it ;)

In any case, this was a lot of fun
to do and I drew this pretty much non-stop.
Hope you enjoy it too!

-Frederik

I just finished a poster for www.knowmore.org which hopefully will be spread all over the US. Just have a look on this page. You will find some interesting stuff.

max

Jitter 04 - Ian Miller

click to enlarge

One of my heros in illustration is the extraordinary british artist Ian Miller. His illustrations range from loose figure sketches in pencil and charcoal to pen and ink drawings of complex artefacts, twisted trees or strange mechanical animals. In many of his pictures there`s a sense of grotesque... I appreciate his work since his early books for Dragon Dream and his excellent drawings for „A Tolkien Bestiary“. His graphic-novel „The Luck in the Head“ is one of my all time favourites ever. I compiled a longer text about his work, techniques and career which will be printed (together with fine artwork) in the newest issue of „Jitter - Magazin für Bildgestaltung“.

The picture above is a kind of hommage to Ian Millers work. I‘ve made this image years ago, original used for an exhibition-poster of my comic-work.

Dieter

Hi everyone,

...another ape, also without the finishing touch. I will let this one aside for a while and maybe paint something nice after all.

Farewell,
Peter

Ghosts, everywhere!

click to enlarge

Just a couple of days ago I realized
I haven´t done anything proper for
A WHOLE MONTH. Real life issues
and the christmas season caused my work routine
to take a nosedive - my girlfriend got a mechanical
heart valve (when I sit next to her without any other
sound sources I can hear it ticking like a loud
pocket watch), which was a preventive operation
since she´s got a heart defect since birth.
She´s very fine now and she´s going to be
much fitter after she gets back in shape,
but nevertheless it was quite a stressful
time and I´m either not the type or not
consistent enough in my work habits to
be able to get creative stuff done under
such stress.

Anyways, the second picture is a drawing
that´s a couple of years old, and I still
really enjoy it, so I´m planning on turning
this idea into a series of drawings and
maybe turn it into a little production run
of pocket-size booklets. I´m in the mood
of doing something lighthearted and I already
have some plans with these little ghosts here.
Hope you enjoy it!

-Frederik