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I love drawing characters, and I love drawing animals. So it’s not surprising that this Illustration was a lot of fun to do! It’s for a snowboardtest in March in Adelboden, where you get to test snowboards from all the big (and small) brands for free.

The process: Pencil sketch, Inks, Color sketch and finished work

This saturday, the 16th of January, I will be having a small exhibition of my art at the Bus Stop Bar in Grindelwald. The Bar is inside an actual Bus from the 1960’s, placed at the bottom of the valley run that leads from the ski resort to the village of Grindelwald.

There will be music and visuals by my friend Matt and his Buddy Ernst, and you’ll get epic apres-ski drinks like a «hot mojito» or «café motor oil» at the bar.

Grindelwald. One of the most beautiful places in switzerland. (Photo © Bus Stop)

Probably one of the dopest venues to have an exhibition. Photo © Bus Stop

Here you’ll find the facebook event.

Happy new year everybody! Time to mix up things a little in the new year: I found a process for expressive lines that I really like. Here’s how it works: Try drawing with a really soft pencil (3B – 6B) on tracing paper. And if you want to loosen it up some more, hold the pencil with your index finger and thumb, while letting it come out between your ring finger and pinky. It feels a bit weird at first, but the pencil is at a very flat angle, thus producing very wide lines. You also can’t control it as much as you could with a normal grip, but that’s the fun part of it.

Tree trolls are very territorial creatures inhabiting the Magical forest near Castle Rübenhorst. They are intelligent and hunt in packs. If you should ever get close to one of these, be very careful unless you have a Wendigo with you.

In the Projects section, I have a new entry with a look behind the scenes of the Rocket Air 2015 Illustration.

This is Eddie. He is the main protagonist of my story project I’m working on. I’m super motivated to have a project like this, and it’s fun to develop the story and all the characters in it.

I’ve been scribbling scenes and characters in my sketchbook on my commute to work this week, so here are some more rough sketches for you:

More Character Heads

I’m currently taking a course on personal and story projects called Oatley Academy Live by the Oatley Academy of Concept Art & Illustration. It’s the best course ever if you’re an artist want to do a childrens book, comic or whatever on your own or with a collaborator. It teaches you the basics of storytelling, how to create your own story with a theme, what to look for when designing characters and environments for the story. It’s awesome and you should check it out. Seriously.

The course helps me develop my own story project, which will either be a Children’s Book or a Comic. It’s about grumpy wizards, a kitchen and monsters. It’s really fun to write, and when designing a character it helps a ton if you have a backstory figured out for the character.

An environment sketch with some shading studies to explore the tools of Mischief

A couple of weeks ago, I got to do my first exhibition ever, as a part of the Magnoli-Art Series in the bar El Camino in my hometown Thun. It was a unusually hot night for a swiss summer and a lot of people showed up. Thanks to the El Camino there were was free beer and white whine along with some delicious snacks for those who appeared early.

Since I work mostly digital, I mostly had prints exhibited. But there were also some watercolor originals, some of which I even got to sell. Next to the originals there were also a couple of prints and postcards sold.

There was a water leak of the building next to it the week before, so the back part of the bar was turned into a construction site in the days where the exhibition was. This meant that the space for the exhibition was one third smaller than expected. But we managed to improvise something and in the end it turned out pretty well.

Since I also have a ton of sketches, we wanted to find a way to showcase them as well. So we turned the part on op of the stairs into a smaller version of my sketching desk at home. We pasted some copied sketchbook pages on the wall and put a couple of open sketchbooks along with pens and other utensils on the desk. With the wooden panels on the wall from the construction and the half disassembled lamp in the corner it worked out really well.

The man who made it all possible: Fabian Scheidegger who organises the Magnoli-Art events. Thank you so much bro.

All in all it was a great experience for myself, and working on my art for the exhibition was super fun. The most important thing I learned:

It’s so much easier for me to practice and work on something if I have a goal to work towards than when I just work on stuff at random.

Thanks  to Fabian Scheidegger, to the El Camino Team to everyone who showed up and of course to everyone who bought something, I’m really grateful for the support.

Last year I started getting into sketchnotes. Sketchnoting is basically visual notetaking or «a visual summary of all the interesting stuff in a talk». You use drawings instead of words where possible. Doing them is simple: If a sentence or concept makes you go „aha!“, you draw it. They’re not about looking beautiful, but about summarising important information in a way that is quick to draw and quick to read.

And while being practical, they’re also great fun and a good excuse to scribble in your sketchbook during boring meetings or school. If you want to pick up sketchnoting (as you should since it’s really fun), I can recommend the Sketchnote Handbook by the Sketchnote Master Mike Rohde.

Back in May, I attended the Beyond Tellerrand Conference in Düsseldorf, Germany together with my coworker and fellow Designer Matthias Feusi for Edorex. There were a lot of interesting talks about design, development and the web in general.

So for the talks at Beyond Tellerrand, I had my sketchbook with me and just practised doing sketchnotes. It was pretty hard at times, but great fun overall, and it even sparked some interest on my twitter account during the conference.