Dienstag, 10. Januar 2012

Fashion Illustraion


First of all: I love fashion. You can see that in many of my illustrations. There is a beauty in good tailoring and it's so much fun combining fabrics, textures, pattern, colors.A part of my sketchbooks is filled with stuff like this. I just never get bored with it.

Samstag, 7. Januar 2012

Das Spiel ( The game)

In the last post I mentioned the association with gambling. In a follow up project for the Promethiade poster I made a short comic without words. This is the first page. Zeus is a bearded rocker now and Prom-Boy is struggling as usual. A femme fatale Pandora is also there but it doesn't really matter who is who.


"Just a deck of cards and a jug of wine... "(Hank Wiliams- Lost Highway)

Freitag, 6. Januar 2012

Promethiade poster

This is a poster I made for the theatre festival "Promethiade" which took place 2010 on the Zollverein Area in Essen, germany. Prometheus was a greek mythological figure. As a titan, the son of Iapetus and Themis, he was only a half god. He stole fire from the gods and gave it to mortals. The fire is a symbol for the civilisation and technology. Later Prometheus was punished with being bound to a rock and his liver was eaten by an eagle every day. He was immortal so his liver would recover and be eaten again the next day. The humans were also punished because Zeus didn't want them to have the fire (and the power of technology developed from that) so he send Pandora. Her gift was a trap and it released all the evils in the world. (hunger, diseases and so on...) but they also get something to make it bearable: hope.

I imagined him as a trickster, daredevil and gambler who tried to play with the gods and failed. It is told that he could see the future but did it anyway. He did want to give the power to the humans even when it would also bring them grief and evil too.

I designed playing cards with Zeus, Prometheus and Pandora. Each can be identified by their attribute. Zeus, the god of thunder and king of the gods. Prometheus with the fire and the eagle and Pandora with her box.

You can find more information on the theatre event here:
http://www.zollverein.de/index.php?f_articleId=5175

The pictures didn't come out of the production though. I went by my first association and an line in a Hank Willams song that reminded me of a guy who wents into misery with his eyes wide open.

Donnerstag, 5. Januar 2012

Roald Dahl

 
Roald Dahl is one of my favourite authors. He is known for his childrens books but made some rather adult novels too.(nudge nudge)  The main thing about his work is a sense of humor that makes him quite unique to me. It's almost black humor but innocent at the same time. Also he really knowns how to tell a story from the perspective of a child but without getting naive or cute. The world is full of dangers even for children too. At the age of  eight he was caned by the headmaster of his school for putting a frog into one of the Jars of the local sweet shop. If you read his books the stories often are about a threat like this but in the end the children can outwit the cruel tormentors.
Later he was a pilot for the RAF in Africa during the Second World War.

I tried to make both sides of him visible in my portait. He looks like a midcentury gentlemen with his suit, whiskey and cigarette but also has a boyish look (maybe because of the big head?)

Now take one of his books and enjoy!

Dienstag, 3. Januar 2012

Evil Clown

Sketch for the villain in "Die Groszstadt" ...an evil ice cream selling clown. Maybe it is a clichée since John Wayne Gayce but I am sure the fear for clowns was known long before him. Archetypes work better for fairytales because they don't need long explainations. It's the same with horrormovies. Once they try to explain they are getting dull and boring.

Die Groszstadt - Part II


Maybe you can see it is also a tribute to George Grosz (1893-1959) hence the spelling in the original title. It doesn't translate too well into english because we have this funny "ß". George Grosz changed the spelling from Groß into Grosz because he wanted to let it appear less german and more international. Same with John Heartfield who was born as Helmut Herzfeld. I did just read that a possible translation for Kremers could be Chandler....but then again: What would Raymond do?

Montag, 2. Januar 2012

Die Groszstadt

 Hänsel und Gretel in der Groszstadt
 (Hansel and Gretel in the big city)

Excerpt from illustration project at the university, 2010, during the lectureship of Lars Henkel. We had to come up with a new setting for the Brothers Grimm fairy tale Hansel and Gretel. So in the story we don't have bread crumbs, a wood or a witch. Not even a oven I did choose an early 1930s city and an evil icecream selling clown as the witch.




Sonntag, 1. Januar 2012

Sonntage

 
Sonntage (sundays)
Illustration for a personal project inspired by Sybille Berg