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.

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.

I try to do some more watercolor stuff lately, and it’s great fun, especially because you can paint anywhere with it if you have the right setup.

Well it’s not exactly Cthulhu. It started out pretty random and now it looks like a mix of Cthulhu and Zoidberg.

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.

On twitter I discovered this awesome idea of the great Noah Bradley, called #21days. Basically it’s about taking 1 hour everyday for three weeks and investing that time into developing your art skills. It’s about forming a habit, and as a small reward for yourself you can post the result of each day’s work onto your social media thing.

I’ve started my 21 days this monday, so the last 4 days I did three master studies (where you basically try to deconstruct and copy a painting of an old master painter, to understand the way he worked) and one portrait.

Day 1: Master study after Norman Rockwell (original obviously on the left)

Day 2: Portrait of Dino after a photograph taken by my talented brother, which you can check out on ramonwenger.com

Day 4: Masterstudy after the great Thomas Moran

The challenge is super fun so far. Personally, when I start out with a thing, I tend to want to go all in and do the best thing ever with it, and sometimes my expectations are so high that I struggle to finish it at all and it ends as an unfinished idea on my hard drive.

With this challenge, I’ve found it way easier to do because you start and finish a single thing every day. And with the timebox of 1 hour it’s easy to start, because instead of sitting down trying to finish one thing which could go late into the night, you sit down for one hour and do whatever you can in this hour. And eventually, it’s probably more productive this way because you’re not wasting time.I could imagine doing this approach for personal projects as well.

I’m sure there are a couple of personal projects that I could finish way faster when having a fixed schedule of one hour each day for three weeks than the approach of doing a lot and then nothing again for some time.

Do you plan to get into the #21days-challenge yourself or did you do it already? Do you have other „hacks“ for personal projects or learning on your own? Or does this approach not work for you at all? Leave a comment below. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this kind of thing.