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

Song excerpt from beautiful synergy by DJ SHARPNEL

• 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:

I know, I know. It’s been a long while since my last post but I’ve been having a busy time, mostly work and life

Last semester I dug into web-design with our gueast teacher from Cologne: Analysis, sketches, wireframes, mock-ups, style-tiles, usabilty, grids, responsive web-design, personas and prototypes – you get the idea. Now, I decided to go one step further and learn more about HTML and CSS (then I might finally redisign this blog and include a nice gallery). I don’t know why but I like the coding and the design part

At the same time I’m doing a lot of anatomy studying, sports, healthy cooking and meditation. I’ll try not to get a burn-out in my 30s

So the next 5 months at the uni I’ll be learning coding, film-history and continue my 3D project “The General”. Mixing it up!

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:

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 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

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

Of course there are more paintings but I only wished to share my personal favorites You might recognize some of the techniques as I actually used them for some of my Illustration course’s final exam artwork.