University/College

the grave rocker gif and video

skeleton drinking a milkshake

And here’s the video, so you can hear the worms raving!

Song excerpt from beautiful synergy by DJ SHARPNEL

DMC’s Vergil: “Classical Appearance”

May I introduce to you Devil-May-Cry’s Vergil.

  • Materials: acrylics + oils on illustration board (250 g, rough)
  • Size: 12 x 17 cm / 5 x 7 inch

This is obviously a personal fanart piece. Although I enjoyed last years DMC 5 a lot, I couldn’t quite agree with “Neo” Vergil’s style… Reminiscence and gold-acrylics pressured me into painting the portrait you see before you and destiny led me to the decadent picture-frame. Thanks to a good friend (with a nice cam) I was able to take a picture with a 100-times higher quality than my crappy old mobile-phone. YES!

Behind the scenes:

Technically I finished this painting December last year but I was very cautious when it came to the oils, which as you probably know need a while to dry. You see, while I was painting a friend accidently wiped away his right eye and I couldn’t cope with the loss 😉

Here’s the painting, full-frontal, without the frame for you to enjoy:

 

DMC 3 Vergil portrait

Something new

 

 

Acrylics painting Process

A week ago I took some time to paint with acrylics and I have to say it’s a whole different experience than painting digitally. While working on “Coming Home” I developed a somehow stronger relationship to the piece than I would with a fully digital one. The finished artwork is a physically existing original. It was a lot of fun to paint!

But enough talk. Time for you to see some steps in the creation process of “Coming Home”, an illustration for a teenager’s horror anthology project at university.

Just click on any image to open the images in the lightbox:

Klaus, the skull!

A few months ago I got some free clay and I gave it a shot! I love working on my anatomy skills so I decided to sculpt a skull (and I didn’t really have a lot of clay anyway). I’ve never worked with sculptures before so I did some mistakes along the way.

Trying new things… Etching!

I did a basics course in etching at university! A friend of mine is planning on doing a tutorial. I’ll make sure to link it here for you 😉

Nevertheless I can share with you some progress steps from my first etching. It’s nothing fancy but I was really excited to see how it’ll turn out in the end:

And I tried something else I’ve never did before. I’ll show you what in the next post 😉

The new semester!

It’s decided! I’ll be concentrating on 3D and storybook illustrations this semester.

The 3D seminar:

This seminar is focusing on the basics of working with 3D applications. This includes planning, modeling, texturing, lighting, animating and rendering the three-dimensional objects. This semester’s main topic is Sci-Fi… I couldn’t resist! So except for all the technical aspects we also read books (Stanislav Lem – “The Futurological Congress“, Asimov’s robot stories and Strugatzky’s “Roadside Picnic“) and analyze movies of the sci-fi genre. For now we haven’t created anything too exciting, but we only had a 4 or 5 meetings. I uploaded 2 picas I did as homework so far (I’m still very new to 3D modeling though so don’t expect too much):

The storybook illustration seminar:

In this seminar we are working on a real to-be-published adolescent’s horror-storybook. Logically we have to stick to the page format and other rules (all illustrations have to be in grayscale for example). At the end of the semester the publisher’s editors will pick the illustrations they see fit in their concept. I’ll be experimenting again 😀 And again I’ll give you a few examples of what I have painted so far:

Well that’s it for now. I’ll be uploading more later on 😉

“White” – educational Flash application

Finally I can upload my very first Flash-based application “White – The theory of light and colors” 😀
One semester ago I created the concept for this educational program on the theory of light and colors in our Scientific Illustration seminar. I really wanted to carry it out so I started learning Flash and worked on this project over the course of the past semester beside my university seminars. Fortunately our university offers a Flash-course. I had someone to consult and help me specifically with my project 🙂

It was a lot more work than I initially thought it would be! Besides reading many different books on the topic and writing my own texts (plus I wanted the whole thing in English too, so I translated it) I created many icons to find the ones best suited. While working on the illustrations I went for a mix of artistic watercolors and precise vector graphics. This way I tried to bring in some visual variety and emphasize the different color mixture theories here and there. Finally I had to find proper free fonts and plan how to put everything together in Flash, code it and make an internet-friendly publishing. Although its only 2,6 MB big I decided to create a separate preloader for those of you with slower internet connections 🙂

About the concept: The main idea is to explain the theoretical essence of light and colors while discussing the question whether white is a color or not. Furthermore I wanted this to be a straight forward app teaching you the most important facts about the physics of light, the mechanics of the human perception and some of the most important fields of appliance for the different mixtures of color. It’s something to be used as an introduction to the topic. Or maybe you can use it to refresh your knowledge.

While working on the traditional illustrations for the app I had the pleasure to paint with some high-quality “Winsor & Newton” watercolors and inks! It really makes a difference what materials you use, especially when working with the very delicate medium that is watercolor. When you aim for good results you need good materials, that’s what we were taught in illustration class and I can only agree. If you’re just getting started with a technique or just want to experiment you can use anything I guess. And I’m not trying to imply that your paintings will be good just because you use good materials. But sometimes a painting will fail not because of your talent or skills, but because the materials you use won’t allow better results. Watercolors can be very capricious 😉

Now I’m just happy I pulled the whole thing through and I can share it with the world 🙂 If the app doesn’t start make sure to deactivate any ad blockers. And of course I would love to get some feedback! You can send me an E-Mail or a Facebook message. Comments are disabled on loyal2art.com