Sketches from NYC

I am back from NYC, and I am glad to report I managed to do some doodeling in the city. It always takes me a bit to relax and find a nice place to draw. I need to have nothing to do that day, no appointment, and I need a save corner where nobody can look over my shoulder. I found a lot of those places, specifically the locations the city put up those tables and chairs unrelated to a cafe or restaurant - like Madison Square Park, Bryant Park and around 34th street. Here are some of the results. 

Dude trying to take a nap at Bryant Park, completely sunken into himself. 

People chilling on a sunny day at Bryant Park.

Peeps playing chess at Bryant Park.

Hungry peaople waiting in the long line for Shake Shack at Madison Square Park.

People who already got their food from Shake Shack. They seem satisfied.

The lady hat two furry things on her lap. First I only saw one dog, until the other started to move. Such cute, fluffy fur balls.

My favortie place to draw at Metropolitan Museum of Art is the African/South Pacific Mask section. Unbelievable great cartoon characters.

That statuette at MET cracked me up. She seems so pissed.

More chilling people at Bryant Park.

Going to NYC!!!! YAY!

Weeeee, guys, I will be going to New York for 10 days this week, so be prepared with little updates. I will be eating tons of food, go to museums, see old friends, say hi to artists at MOCCA, go life drawing - hopefully I'll be able to relax and not think of all the work I'll be missing.In the meantime, check out this old lady I drew as my homework for Stephen Silver's class (memory sketch from lady I saw at the market).

Character Design Class #2

I am in my 6th week of the Character Design Workshop with artist Stephen Silver (watch the trailer for the class here)and still enjoying it. What I appreciate most about the class so far is that it really motivates me to draw stuff I am terrible at drawing. I have always avoided those things, the classic stuff: Hands, feet, heads, faces, animals.... and I have always gotten around it by drawing very cartoony (don't get me wrong, it took a lot of work and passion to get there...but I have always had a hard time constructing bodies, etc.).

So I have started to draw almost every day, and I draw stuff that looks terrible because I am bad at it. But that's ok, because nobody will ever see those drawings. They land in the trash right away because their only purpose is to build new connections in my brain that will make it easier to draw.

Character Design Class Feedback

As for Silver's class, we are about to create a full turn around of our character. We have been working on an adaptation of the Jekyll and Hyde characters so far. I have taken the characters to a sort of Lovecraftian NYC 30ies setting, where a character based on Lovecraft is my Jekyll, and a weird, dark demon-ish entity summed by the Necronomicon is my Hyde.Below you can see my approach to "Liebkraft", my Jekyll character, a young author living in 1930ies NYC. Stephen Silver chose his favorite out of my sketch and gave some suggestions with red marker, as always. Essentially, the most important thing for me to consider is breaking up the shapes, creating diversity within the shapes and maintaining the volumes of the arms/feet/etc - clarity is very important, and I know I get lazy with that sometimes.

As some may imagine, I have more fun creating monsters as opposed to human characters, below you will find Silver's draw over of my Hyde characters, which were heavily inspired by tribal mask culture. 

Here are Silver's draw over of my approach to a character called "Bowler Hat Man", which was an exercise to create caricature off an image.

And below you can see my shaky approaches to exercise hands, eyes, ears, etc. This is the first time I actually dealt with the way an ear is build up. Seriously, how did I never look at ears more closely before? I still need a LOT of practice for all of those body parts.

What Time is it? It's DOODLE time!

Guys, at the moment I barely do any full-elaborated illustrations just for fun, mainly because I had to take care of some job-related drawing thingies :-) And I can't post them, because I assume they are secret until they come out, but I can tell you that I am working on some Minecraft shirts for J!INX (which also turned me into a slight Minecraft addict).

Back to pen and ink!

However, I have been doodeling a lot to get some away-from-the-computer time for myself and I also realized, that I spend to much of my work time in the digitalized world. So I sat down more often to get some good old pen and ink action. Also, Silver's Character Design Workshop is really motivating me to practice my many, many weak spots (Which is basically the whole human anatomy).  I will write a more detailed blog entry about the past workshop lessons soon!

But enough talk, here are some of the crazy insane doodles from the past weeks. 

Character Design with Stephen Silver

I am in my third week of the Character Design Workshop with artist Stephen Silver (watch the trailer for the class here) who is responsible for many great character designs for shows such as Danny Phantom and Kim Possible. I always really adored the design of Kim Possible, so doing this schoolism workshop has been a dream of mine for over a year. A half year ago, I finally felt I was able to afford it, and it started this January. (Character Designs below © Stephen Silver)

The class consists of around nine one-hour videos on the subject matter of character designs, plus a few homeworks. In the cheaper version of the course, the artists receives no feedback. The more expensive version of the course gets you a 5-10 minute video feedback, in which Silver directly goes over your art and gives you feedback and suggestions. I personally think one should try to afford the more expensive version, as personal feedback from a professional like him is worth a lot. As far as I can tell from watching the feedbacks of my classmates (which all course attendees have access to) he adapts to all levels with his feedback.

So far, the course is great. Silver points out aspects that I have either not paid to attention to so far, or he talks about topics that I maybe already heard about, but needed well explained to me again. He talks about shapes, the importance of diversity, the usage of everyday objects as inspiration, consistency and clarity of shapes - but he also will tell you if you are sloppy with anatomy, volume, hands and feet, etc. (which is usually my big problem).  This is week 3 of the course, and I can't wait what else is coming! 

The first homework was just about drawing a few character designs for "Walter Chipwhitter", a rich entrepreneur with a jolly personality. Those are a few sketches I came up with: 

And this is how a feedback can look like: Silver draws over my final version of the character and points out the positive sides he sees as well what can be improved - he totally got my on my big weaknesses here: I created some tangents in my design, was sloppy with consistency with some facial parts and the arms, created some parallel lines right next to each other (which isn't a big mistake, but can take away from the diversity of the design) and my character's body lacked a bit in 3-dimensionality:

I can't wait for my other assignments, lessons and feedback. This painfully reminds me of my strongest weaknesses as an artist, but also of my strengths. This workshop will face me with my fears of drawing certain things and I am pretty sure I will evolve trough it. Yo I recommend it to you if you want to invest in your future as an artist. I know it's a lot of money, but if you manage to improve trough the workshop, you will get the money back trough work later :-D 

You should also check out Stephen Silver's youtube channel, he talks a lot of smart stuff on artist's rights, protecting your art career, giving art away fro free, etc. 

 I will write more about this workshop soon!

Enlist as a Red Shirt!

Be prepared, my people, because this Friday my shirt "Enlist!" will go live on Teefury 12 am (EST) for 24 hours, 10 USD. I wanted to tell you a little bit about my influences when making this, and some other designs.

All of this started when I played Fallout 3. What I always loved the most about this game, was the design of the 40ies/50ies cartoon ads in the background and in the gameplay. Same feelings for Bioshock's gorgeous vintage cartoon graphics integrated in the game (as seen below, unfortunately I don't know the artist of those game graphics). This all inspired me for some cartoony vintage ad style shirt designs.

Since I had never done a Star Trek Tee before, it seemed like an appropriate topic. Some of you may have seen my "Adopt A Tribble" shirt from a few weeks ago. This week I'll focus on one of the bravest aspects of the Star Fleet: The Red Shirts! It all began with this doodle:

 

I wish I could tell you more about the process - but in this case, the process was very straight forward, without any additional sketch of stages. I did it right in Photoshop, and fortunately it was one of those designs, that worked out right away and didn't take me too long.The finished work looks like this:

Now, you can not only get the shirt on Friday, I am also giving away a few cute doodles if you share and tweet about the shirt on Friday. Got to my Facebook page and LIKE it to participate that day.

Art can break your back (or how to stay healthy at your workspace)

Today, I want to share with you a topic that might not directly be about art, but about staying healthy as an artist. It might not be an important topic for everybody, as some people are born with an iron spine and mighty muscles that never get tense, but I myself had to suffer from a bad back my whole life. I know each artist has a different problem zone, a good friend of mine constantly has pain in her wrists when drawing (but no clear diagnose), some always suffer from headaches, others just have to "good old" neck tenseness. Personally, I have a lot of problems in my lower back (from time to time, one of my intervertebral discs swells and pushes on my nerves) and my neck and shoulders are usually made of stone on a constant basis).

All I can say is that over the past years, I have FINALLY started to take some measures to improve my workspace and life and oppose the slow decline of my spine and muscles. Believe me: The problem will never go away if you work around 7-10 hours in front of the computer or drawing board, but you can significantly improve your situation. I want to introduce to you the things that helped me the most.

The Chair 

So, one of the most obvious things is a good chair. I cannot tell you how ignorant I was about that matter up until 3 years ago. I even worked on wooden kitchen chair for some time, for god's sake. I also had office chairs, but all of them were heave, ugly objects with no real support fot the spine. Now, I know everybody has different problem areas and enjoys different types of chairs. Since I was pretty money-less for some time, I decided to stay away from the 1000 EUR ergonomic chairs and chose "MARKUS" from IKEA: It's only around 150 EUR and comes in different colors. It enables me to sit like this:

 

As you can see, I chose to add a nice, soft neckpillow and another pillow under my legs to elevate my legs slightly. The chair isn't perfect, since the arm rests are slightly too hight for me. If you spend a bit more for a chair, you will be able to have control over that as well.

The Desk

Some of you know that I decided to spend lots of moneys on a standing desk. Now, a good friend of mine recommended a company in Scandinavia with high quality material (I e-mailed them directly for names of business partners in Austria)  and reliable electronics for the desk. I can adjust the height with two buttons in a matter of around 20 seconds. This might be one of the best investments I have ever made for my back. I can not only adjust it to the perfect height when working standing, but also when sitting (usually desks were always too high for me). I recommend doing goods research on companies before purchasing a standing desk and NOT going for the cheapest option. Since I have this desk, I work 30% standing, and 70 % sitting. I switch around every 2 hours, and I use a soft standing mat to stay mobile and flexible in my hip.  

Breaks

I always have been pretty horrible at taking breaks. I would work for hours straight, until my eyes would tear up, my mouth was dry from not drinking enough and my spine would cry for help. I recently talked to superb artist Florian Satzinger, who told me that he takes breaks every 45 minutes. I couldn't believe it: Every 45 minutes?! Wouldn't that break ones concentration? I tried it out: I got a 5 EUR egg timer and timed it to 45 minutes. The shrill ringing when it went off was my cue to take a break, from 5-15 minutes, sometimes longer, like for lunch. Sometimes I'll throw in a few exercises, like YOGA, into those breaks. Why an egg timer and not a phone? Because only takes half a second to time it which motivates me far more to use it.The result: I work much more concentrated, I stay fresher and my body feels better after a long working day. I HIGHLY recommend it if you work as a freelancer. If you are in an office, you should do the best you can to take those breaks, maybe visit the bathroom even tough you don't have to, get a coffee, whatever it takes. Or at least every 2 hours if possible.

 
Exercise 

What can I say. We all know it, we all want to do it, we all fail at doing it regularly: Sport, exercise, whatever you call it. But around 4 years ago I realized that doing sport at least 2-3 times a week is mandatory to not make my problems much worse. Consider the insane amount of stress we put on our body by sitting so damn much. Our eyes always focus on the same distance, our legs are always bend in the same way, our neck is bend in the wrong way from all the computer staring. Find the exercise you like Don't force yourself to run or swim if you don't like it. Try out different things. Dance if you like dancing. Just do SOMETHING and do it at least around 3 times a week for 45 minutes. I like to switch it up a lot. I bike everywhere, I go to the gym 2 times a week, sometimes I swim, sometimes I hike. I lost 20 pounds over the past year with the help of exercise and eating healthy, and that helped as well to feel much better at work.(Below, it's me at Bärschenschutzklamm, a great hiking trail close to Graz, Austria)

 

There are many other things that are worthy to improve as well. Going to massage on a regular basis (of course, that is a pricy thing again, but maybe worth it), getting a good keyboard/mouse and monitor, being happy in life, go outside once in a while, etc. etc. I just named the most important improvements for me personally, and it's up to you to decide what helps you.