Short Trip to the Golden City

In my last post I already mentioned my trip to Prague shortly so here are a little more details!

My friend and me drove there on Sunday and stayed in a hostel until Wednesday. We shared a room with 4 other people among them a 29-year-old american who spent 9 years in the navy and I can tell you, he LOVED his country. Our hostel was just about five minutes of walking distance from the Old Town Square, which is right by the astronomical clock.

The clock

The square with bonus butt

If you ever go to Prague in summer, I recommend going to the Old Town Square by night or late evening. Grab a can of beer or a beverage of your choice and sit down. You’ll meet a lot of people from tons of different countries. Everybody’s just sitting around, talking, drinking. One evening, it was somebody’s birthday and suddenly everyone on the square sang Happy Birthday. It was pretty nice.

By the way, some advice a tour guide gave us was to never ever buy something on the Old Town Square. On the square and around it are little Food Stands and Cafes but they are rather expensive. And while the square is pretty and it’s tempting to sit down in a Cafe there, better walk a couple of streets from the square and you’ll find smaller ones with a more unique offer for a lot less money.

During our trip lots of things happened. I became Misfits-girl, somebody decided that my high fives are not ordinary things but a blessing from god, we drank the cheapest Caipirinha ever and met a dude who tried to balance over Charles Bridge to set a World Record. We saw people who casually  stood around with snakes around their necks. All this are just things that made our trip unique and pretty fantastic but even without all this Prague has a lot to offer. Beautiful Architecture, interesting (living!) history, cheap food & Segways everywhere. We’ll definitely return.

A last recommendation:
When you go to Prague, take a walking tour, there are many offers of free tours (don’t forget to tip in the end though.It’s the only way the guides earn money) and then just go exploring.
Take a map and start walking. Leave the immediate center and you’ll see even more interesting buildings, you’ll meet a lot of people, believe me. If you want to save money go for a hostel. Many of them are very close to important places in the city and you’ll get to share the room with people from all over the world who might have interesting stories to share. And definitely go to Charles Bridge in the evening. When you go there a little late (10 pm-ish) there will be little other tourists on the bridge and you can see all the illuminated buildings.
Seeing this will give you an impression why the city is called “Golden Prague” as well.

A Galaxy in her eyes

Hello you beautiful people out there, I’m back! A new painting, not really inspired by anything this time. I just was in the mood to draw something that is not a portrait because I really want to improve myself anatomy-wise. I decided to not go for a full body portrait at first and instead just practice hands, arms and shoulders. Maybe I’ll have enough courage to go for all 4 limbs next time. I’ll see!
It’s been a long journey until this thing was finished since the process was interrupted by a short trip to Prague. This is pretty unusual for me since most of the time I try to finish my paintings in one sitting. Sometimes this takes up to 10 hours of sitting in front of my PC but I just can’t interrupt my self.

As always here are some progress-screencaps:

This is the ultimate proof why you should never judge a drawing because of the sketch.

Less ugly sketch

Colour

The dress and the crop

Hair. You’re worth it.

Background

Colour change. I’m still thinking about using this as the final version

Here’s the finished version. I’m a bit torn between the unmirrored one and this but I think I’m staying with the mirrored one. A friend of me said it looked interesting because the girl’s looking down and you don’t know if she can actually see the reflection or what she’s thinking.

Last but not least I got a little question for you. I already mentioned my trip to Prague above and I’d like to know if you’d be interested in a post featuring the photos I took there? It would be awesome if you let me know in the comments!

Two years of studies, sketches and painted soda cans

In my last post I already told you that I was able to pick up some of the things I drew at school in the final two years and here they are.

In our lessons we mainly did drawing exercises from photo references and from life as well. In our “normal” lessons we also did a bigger project.
In the additional lessons for the people who took their final in art we made two bigger drawings, one to practice painting humans and one to practice colours.
The black-and-white human drawing took us about half a school year, the coloured one a little less. We also practiced sculpting things from clay which made me begin to hate clay. I made one pretty decent looking cow skull which broke because I dropped it when I proudly showed it to my mother. I took it as a cosmic sign and decided to never work with clay again even if my life depended on it.

Colour drawing based on a photo I took

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Architecture study. This facade was wrecking my mind. It was also the last drawing I did in our art class

More architecture. Art Nouveau Metro Station, less bitchy to draw

Slightly deformed car, a practice on persprective

A…drill? I don’t even know what this thing was.

Triptych

This is from 2009. I was 12 back then. I don’t know why I didn’t get it back earlier

A very malicious looking bird.

We also did some photography-related exercises where we could first craft something 3-dimensional and then take photos of it. I decided to paint soda cans with patterns that were inspired by classic blue and white porcelain.

To be honest, I think the photos turned out super rad. Still very proud.

In our extra-lessons, which took place with a class consisting of six people, we also had an hour every month where we would look at our sketchbooks.
Right at the beginning of 11th grade everyone of us got a sketchbook and there were no limitations on what was supposed to go in there. Drawings, paintings, a friend of mine filled a full double page with uninflated party balloons and cling film, everything was possible.

The sketchbook was definitely my favourite part of 11th and 12th grade art and I was more than happy when I finished the last page of mine exactly two weeks before our first final because now I have a sketchbook that exactly documents those two years.

Since the sketchbook has a couple of pages, I decided to record a video of me flicking through the pages with cute, bubbly ukulele music in the background so we all can be happy.
I recommend watching it on fullscreen (or at least on the vimeo site since the video is quite small here) and with HD turned on!

Hey, do you still braid some flowers in your hair

Long time no see!

The statue the pose is based on

I’m back with a new piece inspired by a song (because there aren’t enough music-related drawings on here yet.)
This time it’s Stabat Mater by Woodkid.

I love Woodkid since his song Iron was used as a trailer song for Assassin’s Creed Revelations (Later they used “Golden Age” for AC Unity, which might have been a reason why I was especially excited for ACU and a little disappointed afterwards). I love his partly baroque-esque songs and the lyrics are pretty poetic. Seeing him live is definitely one of the things I want to do in my life.

Stabat Mater has always been one of my favourite songs by him, the choir, the orchestra, it’s just epic.
The title refers to a poem about Mary who is suffering because her son is crucified.
Vivaldi composed a pretty decent piece about it too some time ago.

My drawing was mostly influenced by the song and less by the Mother Mary & Jesus story, so I tried to reference the war-theme of it with the paint in her face and decided to draw her looking into the distance since I think the song is about saying goodbye without knowing if there will ever be a meeting again and she’s looking at the person who just left her.

The pose with the arrows and the dagger in her shoulder is based of a statue of Mary I actually had saved in my inspiration folder since a long time because while I’m not really a believer in the classical sense I really adore churches art-wise. The statues and the architecture are just extremely beautiful.

I really hope you like it!

By the way, this is not my first “redraw” of a statue with religious background, I already did one a while back, it was “Ecstasy of Saint Theresa” by Bernini.

Oh and yesterday I got all the things I did in my art class in the last two years back so there will be a bigger post with all my school-drawings in the next couple of days. Among them is a really malicious looking bird and a deformed car, so yeah, things to look forward to!

Hero Challenge: Loish

Told you I would be more active again!

Recently I got a notice on deviantart which told me that autodesk-sketchbook (developers of some sort of drawing program) were having a so called “Hero Challenge”. They did this a couple of times already, actually. In their challenges they ask professional artists to give the deviantart community a certain task, after the month is over said professional is going to choose five works, three will win some rad prices and the other two get a premium-membership, I think.

I don’t know if I already told you but loish is one of my personal favorite artists and I think her works are one of the multiple reasons why I started drawing digitally, so whatever the task would have been, I would have participated. But loish gave us a pretty neat one called “The deep blue”.
You can probably guess it, it’s water-themed. Underwater-worlds, fish, corals, all that nice stuff.

I wanted to draw a warm-up sketch first with a reference photo of one of my favorite deviantart-photographers, Queen-Kitty. Please pay her a visit and watch her, if you’re a deviantart-member, you won’t regret it.
After some time I quite liked the face I drew and decided to go on from there.
I moved away from the original reference a bit so now it’s more a “loosely inspired by” but no big deal.

Here’s my work on the topic “The deep blue”:

I’m lame and didn’t take a screengrap of the sketch, sorry!

Let’s get hairy

Colour-test

Disabled the colour-layer because it’s too much to look at when I’m still drawing on other things

Glow-boobs and tattoos

gave them fish some colour. fish love colour

and the bottle

Ladies and gents: The final product

Some detail-shots:

Find the Alt-J song.

My deviantart-page is here by the way

The suffering is over

In my previous two posts I already mentioned that I was working on a magazine-ish yearbook which was really time-consuming, so here’s a little more details about this thing.

This is the cover. It’s a pun because Prince Albert (husband of Queen Victoria by the way) gave our school its name and we shamelessly used it as our official motto. The text underneath “Albertrosse” translates to “Ready for takeoff”, so everything was flight-themed, we had boarding passes as personal profiles and all the teachers became the flight attendants, different subjects became the board-entertainment.

I just graduated, official end of my life as a student is June 26th 2015 (same day as legalisation of gay marriage in the US. Hell yes.) and here in good old Germany it’s sort of an tradition to create an “Abiturzeitung”(translates to “Abitur (=A-levels)-Newspaper”).
In it you can read about each graduate. Everybody answered questions about themselves and friends wrote longer texts about them.
Later on there are texts about teachers we had in our final two years of school, you can read about travels we made as a class and teacher-quotes, all that fun stuff.

A “best-off” of eight years of grammar school with a closer focus on year 11 and 12. It’s awesome. It’s funny to read, it’s nice to look at the photos the students share.

All is great AS LONG AS YOU DONT HAVE THE ACTUAL RESPONSIBILITY TO MAKE THIS THING.

During the last years I got to know the other students pretty well so I knew there would be a lot of people handing in their texts too late and there would be problems but seriously, the last week especially was just terrible.
We finally got all the articles but until the other team members handed them to me so I could make the pages print-ready it took even more time.
In the end I was forced to literally work 7 days non stop, it was not pleasant but at some point you just get numb and become an empty shell of what you were before the newspaper crushed your private life and your will to live to death.

Okay, this was a bit exaggerated.
Was it a very pleasant experience though? No.
Would I do it again? OH YES.

Because even though the nights were long and my blood was more caffeine than blood cells by wednesday(I’m just really glad that this was the first time in my life I actually drank coffee because otherwise it would not have helped keeping me awake this good, I’ll stay with my beloved tea in the future though), it was a great experience to design the whole look of this newspaper from cover to backside. And guys, I’m so looking forward to finally holding this baby in my hands, you can’t even believe it. Here are a couple of the graphics/illustrations I made.

Sadly we could not afford to print the whole magazine in colour but nevermind:

Ah look, a majestic Albatross

For the article on our school’s office because our secretaries were the best

Latin seminar. They had to organize a full Rome-themed day for the kids with roman food, clothes and gladiator games. Was pretty neat.

Another albatross. Who would have thought.

Short-movie seminar

For the article about our trip to Edinburgh

English seminar on American Road movies; still from Thelma and Louise

A map showing all the places we’ve been to during the last 8 years

Biology Seminar. Probably one of my favourite pieces in the magazine

Trip to England

So now you know what I’ve been up to those past weeks!
And by the way, a really great thing I discovered when I was going mildly crazy was that Alt-J’s music is the absolute best for spontaneous de-stressing and keeping calm

That morning feeling

I woke up this morning and felt nothing like P-diddy. (Do I get bonus-points for Kesha-references?)

It was too hot, too early, the sun was too bright and everything was horrible. I was basically a blinded, confused mole drowning in its own sweat. Very sexy.

Anyways, I decided to draw to distract myself from this misery. And also to celebrate that I am not the yearbook-slave anymore because we could finally send it to printing and guys, let me tell you, if you ever have to create all the layout and the illustrations/graphics in a magazine and have to write texts for it too, start months beforehand.
MONTHS. YEARS. DECADES.
We only had a week because it took time until all my classmates handed in their texts and we actually received the last one on Friday, an hour before we sent it to the print-people.

But let’s come to the actual topic and move away from my endless lament.
I tried to draw something inspired by that morning-feeling. Sadly I forgot to take progress-screenshots so this thime you just get some details, I’m really sorry.
The whole painting didn’t take a lot of time, maybe 1,5-2 hours in total

Eye see you.

The colours are inspired by the sunrise this morning, the only thing that makes it worth waking up this early. There are more than one of the same girl because I don’t know about you, but when I’m super tired it’s like a part of my self is still remaining in bed and I don’t really feel like myself in general when I’m this exhausted.

Last but not least, here’s a link to my personal morning-playlist. It helps me getting motivated and waking up:

And again, so sorry for the silence on here! Going to be more active again but the last weeks I spent pulling all-nighters, sleeping 4 hours per night and working on this stupid magazine all day. I might show you some of the work I’ve done for it in the next couple of days and going to update you on the new thing I started

The past said hi

My nail polish is not chipped. It’s grunge.

I know, I know, it’s been rather silent here during the last weeks and I’m incredibly sorry for this!

Currently I’m working on some sort of special yearbook. It’s pretty stressful since there’s a lot of things to do but I hope everything turns out good.

So right now I’m not really in the mood to do a lot of digital painting because I pretty much spend my whole day with my graphic tablet and at some point that’s enough.
But the good news is that I found one of my sketchbooks again. I’ve been looking for it since eight weeks and thought I lost it forever.

It’s my smallest one and I bought it because I wanted a really tiny one I can take with me without it taking much place in my bag. I even got it when I was travelling to Berlin in 2013, so I guess it’s quite fitting that I mostly use it to scribble when I’m not at home.

Here are some old drawings

The first drawing I ever made in this sketchbook when I was still in Berlin, 2013

Inspired by a City and Colour song, if I remember correctly; Berlin, 2013

City and Colour inpired again. Berlin, 2013

I sketched around during a woman gave a talk about becoming a graphic designer and the perks the school she works for brings with it. In the upper right corner you can see the only thing I wrote down that day: “Graphic Design=Diploma” Coburg, 2013

Another girl on the bus who had a love affair with her phone or the person she sent messages to. Early 2014

I saw a girl on the bus who looked like she had her head in the clouds. Early 2014

Dita von Teese inspired, sort of. Switzerland, 2014

Showstopper Siren 2014

Nurenberg, early 2014. On the train.

Scotland, 2014

Ar Dân, my hand, my iPod. Scotland, 2014.

Why’d you only call me when you’re high? On the left: “Life is a bit of an adventure when you only have a pencil with you” Munich, 2014

Spectrum-Zedd; Mid 2014

And the newest additons.
I decided to face my one true fear.
ANATOMY. 
Practiced with gorgeous photos I found on the facebook fanpage of my local theater where they have amazingly talented dancers. I’m afraid I didn’t really do them justice though…

Dishonored

Guys, It’s E3 time! There are A LOT of games which look  so so awesome. I guess I’m going to be constantly broke this year. But nevermind.

One trailer was especially amazing to me. Dishonored 2. I loved the first game already and I’m so excited for part two especially since Emily Kaldwin is going to be playable. Do yourself a favor and watch it now, please

I immediately wanted to draw Emily. So here’s some progress:

As always, ugly sketching

The accurate lineart. She begins to look like an actual human.

Colour colour colour

The Zombie phase.

Not so zombie anymore

Hair

Hair intesifies

Background shenanigans

Textures and colours for her clothes

Textures in the background because it would be boring otherwise

And finished!

Now go and play dishonored 1 if you haven’t already.