Sketchblog

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.

The comic that I’m working on involves a magical forest with many strange characters and creatures. One of which is the Wendigo, who is waiting for our protagonist to cross his way.

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

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.

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.

Thanks to the amazing people behind Magnolia and Cafe Bar El Camino I get to have my first exhibition ever. The event series called Magnoli-Art is a place for local artists to show their work, each one at a time. On Monday, July 20th you can visit the El Camino in Thun where I get to hang my mediocre stuff all over the place. The thing is supposed to start at 18:00-ish

If you’re around, come by and have a beer. Check out the event on facebook.