School 's out!

A few posts ago I showed a hospital entrance I did for a Get Well-card. And I had the idea to do a school entrance for a Graduation-card. Here it is.

IF: Spider-monster.

A few month ago my girlfriends father had a scary party. I did some decorations for the walls. Is this a monster or not? Maybe he lives under your bed. Sleep well.

Spring is in the air.

No spring in Holland yet. Cloudy, rainy, dark wether. No children playing outside, no cats stuck in trees. Saw a few small flowers in the garden this morning. Turning the heads in one direction, hoping for the sun.
Still playing around in Painter. This one is inspired by the superkalifragalisticexpéelladocious Fiep Westendorp. Click the title of this post to go to her website.

Art?

In 1992 I was in New York for ten days. Of course I visited every museum I could find. I spend a day at the Metropolitan, a day at the MOMA and a day at the Guggenheim. So much inspiration. One evening, lying tired on my hotelbed I did this picture in my sketchbook. Dancing couple. Soft pencil and eraser.

Count Count.

I did a lot of Sesame Street work. Count Count always gave me a bit of trouble. I had problems getting him "in character". This one worked out nice I think. How many bats are smiling? How many are crying?

Illustration Friday: Feet.

This Painter IX book (see my post below) realy helps. Hear me shout it out ?"PAINTER!!PAINTER!!PAINTER!!PAINTER!!PAINTER!!PAINTER!!"
(Click the image for a closer view.)

WOW!!!!!

No better way to discover your software than the WOW-books.
I received these two this morning. Gonna be a playfull weekend.
:-)

Hospital.

I'm working on a Get Well-card. For page three I needed a hospital entrance. So I took some photographs of the real thing and styled it to this in illustrator. My art-director likes the style and we're gona do more. For other categories as well. A graduation-card with the front door of a school maybe? Hey! That's a good idea.

How to draw.

As a child I drew all the famous characters from magazines. Mickey, Donald, Dombo, Luky Luke, the Dutch Tom Poes, Nijntje, Jip en Janneke, you name it.
I was always very happy when the Donald Duck magazine had a "How to draw" page. They showed you how a Disney character is build with cirkels.
Years and years later when I was doing a comic for the magazine of the National football association they wanted to give the comic some special attention. I proposed to do a drawing competition amongst the readers. And there was my chance to do a "How to draw" page with my own character.



We had 42 entrys from children with ages from 8 to 15. It's funny to have such a collection of drawings of my own character done by children I don't even know.

Illustration Friday: Tattoo

I have ideas for new comic-characters all the time. But where do I find the time to make them all come alive? John Lennons words are so true. "Live is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans". I'm not complaining. I love my work and I'm realy happy to make a living as an illustrator.

The drawing is an oldie. I put an extra effort in the background to give you some value for your visit.



Don't know what Illustration Friday is about? Click the link on the right.

Presentation for Brazil.

A client of mine was working on a big project in Brazil. A health-fitness and beauty complex for the rich and famous. He asked me to do some pictures to give his presentation a bit of a style. Like many big projects this one never came true. That's a pitty. He promised me a trip to Rio if everything worked out. And the whole styling of picto's, signs for directions and other grafic work that had to be done for the complex and it's publicity..
(:-(

40 years of fieldhockey.

I've played fieldhockey all my live. Being the only drawer in the club I always did the special t-shirts for tournaments, the illustrations for the club-magazine and posters for promotion. When we had the 40 years jubilee I was asked to do an illustration/logo for promotional purposes. It's clear what I wanted to show I think. We did play hockey for 40 years but there was always an important roll for what we call "the third half". Guess you understand what we mean.
;-)



All sorts of memorabilia were produced. A t-shirt with the logo on the back.



And we even had our own wine.

Great publicity for Prins and Ploes

Today in Het Algemeen Dagblad (one of the big national newspapers) a story about Prins and Ploes The Musical. Very positive and with a nice photograph. Not to mention the special attention for my name. Glow, glow. If you read Dutch click the image for a bigger version.

More Corel Painter IX.

This software is fantastic. Here's another try-out. Just started with some sketchlines to discover how the rotation of the canvas works. This came out.

Illustration Friday: Insects 2.

The insect (and the fact that I have a full version of painter now :-) inspired me. No story behind it. Just some quickies to get to know the tools a bit.







If you came here via Illustration Friday and you like to see more of my work click the title of this post and scroll down.
If you came here otherwise and you want to know what I.F. is about. Do the same and click the link in the list that comes up on the right.

Illustration Friday: Insect

What a wonderfull occasion to show you this work.



And tell you the story behind it.

In the part of Holland we call Limburg there is a long tradition of street-theater. In the summertime we have a wonderfull festival where theater-acts from all over the world come to do a show. It was somewhere in the nineties. A French group called Les Mallabar came to the festival. In those days I worked behind the bar of a theater and Les Mallabars used the dressing rooms and the stage of this theater to put on their costumes and make-up.



It took more than two hours and while they were busy a friend had the time to take some pictures. All I have are some bad prints. I tried to clean them a bit in photoshop.







The show was in the evening hours and involved a lot of light and fireworks. The audience was taken on a tour through it's own city. The guides where giant insects that were sometimes frightning, sometimes funny, sometimes sweet.
I even got a spiders-kiss on my forehead. A black one.
It was all very spectacular and the images stayed in my head. The next day I had to do a picture. More than ten years later it's my entry for Illustration Friday.
Hope you like it.

The Prins and Ploes campagne.

The start of a new job but already a funny picture. In the Prins and Ploes campagne (see previous posts) we're giving the oppportunty to collect 11 different handdolls. To show the dolls in the shops a hanging display will be used. 6 dolls on one side 5 on the other. Lots of white space to fill. :-)

More animation

I did these animated gifs for a website called DrShift.com. A website about finding jobs in the technological fields. It was a few years ago during the internet-hype. Big investors behind it and a lot of ambition. It does not exist anymore.

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.
;-)