Sketchblog

For a friend of mine, I did this simple Illustration to go on the cover of her bachelor thesis. The thesis is about raising awareness on young drivers in traffic.

Back in april, I’ve finished this challenge called #21days. The last images didn’t make their way into the blog until now.

Study after Albert Bierstadt. As it turned out these are the swiss Alps, and Bierstadt spent quite some time in the area where I live. Of course I didn’t know that at the time I picked the image.

In the middle of april we went camping and snowboarding in Laax for the spring session. Of course I didn’t take my Cintiq-Setup with me, so I practised with some more traditional sketches of stuff off the internet.

Back home, I tried my luck on this iconic masterpiece by the legendary Frank Frazetta.

Some digital gesture drawing studies

For the final piece, I picked this amazing painting by Albert Bierstadt. At this point I felt I’ve learned quite a bit since the first piece of the 21days. Sketching the Landscape quickly, eyeballing the local colors and generally „rendering“ it worked out so much better than before.

It was a great challenge to do, and I recommend it to anyone who wants to get better at art, no matter the current skill level.

For some color practice, I did this study off a random grizzly picture on pinterest.

In my desk drawer I’ve found a set of pastel chalks waiting to be used. I’ve finally got to use them on this portrait of a buddy of mine. Sorry for the long neck, buddy =)

It’s fun to work on colored paper like this one where the paper defines your midtone, you can then work in it with white chalk / pencil or one of those white correction pens. And since you cant make lines really well with these chalks, it was a good practice like that where I had to work more with shapes and values instead of lines, as I tend to do usually.

Been busy the last few weeks with the last bunch of lessons of the awesome Painting Drama course in the Oatley Academy. The course is just plain awesome and definitely something I would recommend to anybody who wants to really get into the guts of visual story telling.

Here’s a bunch of random stuff for you to see, mostly rough thumbnails that might become full illustrations when they grow up.

This week, I got together with some friends to have a sketching session in a public place in Thun. Because most people are on holiday now, and the weather was rather bad that evening, we were only 4 people. Still it was fun to sit together, check out new Art Books, talk about art and draw.

Say hello to Jim. Just in case you can’t tell from the sketch, Jim’s a rat. He’s still living with his parents. He’s a bit „special“, but he likes to draw a lot. He’s heavily influenced by Van Gogh and Splinter, the Rat Guy that trained the Ninja Turtles. Jim is pretty much into cheese, rat ladies and drawings of ugly cats.