Animationtest

I found the way to show animation on this weblogpage. I am not an animator but in the development of a character it's always good to do some steps. Again I am NOT an animator. Just playing.

Some more tea?

I'm thinking about buying Painter IX for a while so I picked up a 30-day trial. Tea is a great subject to play with. Can't stop myself. It's fun. I'm gonna buy this magic toolbox. Watercolors, oils, pastels, pencils, different papers, you name it. Everything is there. And you keep your hands clean.
;-)



If you came to this blog via Illustration friday and you like to sea more. Just klik "home" to visit the rest.

Tea.

Playing around a bit digitaly.
Nothing better than a good cup of tea for breakfast. Pick your taste.

A Sesame Song.

Like most drawers I have done my share of license-work. Sesame Street in my case. Once I did an entire year in 3 weeks. 12 illustrations with old Dutch childrensongs. My favorit character was Oscar. The song is "Jan Huigen in de ton". No idea how to translate it. It's about a man breaking out of a barrel.

Prins and Ploes The Musical.

I some of my earlier posts I told you about Prins and Ploes. A blue dog a pink cat and a group of farm-animals I designed for a petfood-company. All sorts of things are happening in this project. In the past months a group of talented people has worked on a real musical with the characters. And last saturday we had the premiere in the city-theater in Veenendaal. What a surprise to find an article about it in this weeks WEEKEND. A national show and gossip magazine. One of the actors is the brothr of a famous Dutch opera singer and the famous brother came to see the show. That was the main reason for WEEKEND to do the article I think. But who cares. It's great publicity.

If you read Dutch click the image to enlarge.



And this is the image we are using for the affiche and the cd-cover. The affiche is 84/118,8 cm. It was a nice feeling to see my work printed that big.

THAIPHOON.

THAIPHOON is the name of a fashionable Azia oriented restaurant in Roermond. They asked me to do something special for the younger guests. A placemat and a menucard. The first thing they came up with was this: :We're called Thaiphoon so lets do a whirlwind with arms and legs." A boring idea of course and I proposed to give it a bit more thought. "That's why we come to you." was the answer. I started googeling for Thailand and the first presentationsketches I came up with were these.



They liked the boy and the idea to make him a little kickboxer. He even has his own special move. It's called THE THAIPHOON. He turns around so fast that he looks like a little whirlwind with arms and legs. Great idea. ;-)
The gold did not fit the atmosphere of the restaurant so we lost that.



The idea of the placemat was to put little riddles on it. How many bricks in this stack? How many birds in the leaves? Find the ten differences. Riddles for kids.



Here's the final version. The open spaces are kept free to put the texts in.
Do click the picture to enlarge. It's worth it.
;-)



And the illustrations I did for the menucard. I tried to give the whole thing a bit of a story here. Thaiphoon jr lives in the jungle with his elephant K.O. He is training to be a kickboxing champion.







Wanna get to know the restaurant? Click the title of this post.

Backgrounds part 2. The bedroom.

In my earlier post (Backgrounds part 1) you saw a preview of this picture. It's the second one of six. Here's my sketch to start with. Notice the Prins and Ploes characters in the window as dolls. The drawings are part of that campagne.



As I told you my girlfriend is working with me on this. She did the big shapes in Adobe Illustrator. On her blog (My love in the linklist.) she shows 3 exampels of her work. Not in color but in vectorlines so you can see the complexity of the construction.

And this is the finished bedroom. With these new brushes in photoshop you can realy achieve some wonderfull textures I think. Do click the picture to enlarge.



Can't wait to see the six printed together on postersize. What a wonderfull job we illustrators have.

Newspaper-illustrations part 2. Simple

A misunderstanding about icons:" They are simple". In fact they are very difficult. They look simple. Here's a series of 9 I did for a newspaper-special. Different categories of books. I'll give one away. Down-left.
Detectives.
;-)

Backgrounds part 1.

I'm working on a big project. A fun project too. A chance to try out working with Adobe Illustrator. Six different backgrounds. School, park, bedroom. That sort of thing. Here's the first one that's finished. The marketplace. The sketch to start with. My goal was to keep them simpel in lay-out but rich in detail and with a strong design-quality.



The final version I did in Illustrator. In the end I used good old photoshop to put a little texture in. Please do click the picture to enlarge.



Studio at work here. For the other ones my girlfriend is doing the Adobe Illustrator files following my sketches. Here's a preview of her work. See her blog (My love) in the linklist.

A chair to share.

My contribution to illustration fridays topic: Chair.


Without words.

The otterman.

This is a funny story. Every Dutch drawer that ever was on a comic convention to sign his new book knows him. Is he a teacher? Is he a stalker? No. It's Otterman. The guy is in between 50 and 60 years old and has a beard. If I remember correct. Not so long ago it was my turn. I did'nt know all this yet. He comes to your table and tells you the following story. He is a teacher and as a school-project he is working on a collection of otter-pictures. By the end of the year a book will come out and all the profits will go to projects that protect the otter. Kind as I am I said I could not draw an otter without at least a little documentation and I promised him I would do one at home. He gave me an adres and I kept my promis. Here's the illustration. I send it to him as a digital document. Never heard from him since. Later on when I told this story to other comic artists many of them had met him. The guy probably has a big collection by now. I wish him joy of it. He must be a big otterfan.
Nothing is done for nothing. I put the drawing in my portfolio and some new jobs came up because of it.
Thank you otterman.