Glücksschwein

Lucky pig!

This week I've been doing nothing but working. 
After finishing the Zomingos I finished the drawings for my upcoming artbook as well. Yesterday I prepared my screens and the model images and today I was in the studio, printing all day long. But I'm not done yet, so I'll probably continue my work tomorrow or on Monday. Now I only have 4 pages left for printing, so I hope the artbook will be done very soon.
Also I'm getting serious with my small exhibition! I already booked my unis gallery from the 30th of May to the 2nd of June. Yet I don't know if I'll open the gallery for two or for three days, because usually no one goes there and I'll be the one who hast to sit there during the opening times.
It's actually not worth the effort, but I don't care. I'd just like to see all my undead creatures (or actually any of my work) in a single exhibition for once in my lifetime. Though I'm still not even done printing all of them. Today I had a new idea for a screen print, but I haven't even sketched it yet.
(Plus I'm going to try and make the little sculpture I already mentioned.)

Adding

Today I was able to finish the Zomingos, after working in the studio for about 9 hours without taking a single break. At some point I only wanted to get over with it.
I'm exhausted, but now the only thing I still have to work on is the artbook. I'm so eager to finish this project, because I'm planning to make a little exhibition with my zombie prints and the artbook (Plus some little sculpture I was fantasizing about. I'm not sure if I'll really make it though, because I'm bad at making three-dimensional art lol). :)

Here's what my wall looks like now:

Kopflos

Here comes the 4th drawing for the artbook I'm currently working on. It's the headless horseman.
I actually wanted the picture to be a landscape format (so there would have been more comletely filled bookpages), but unfortunately that didn't work out.
I also think it looks too similar to the mambo picture I drew first, because of the white sun/moon in the background. So maybe I'll kick the mambo out and think up something different or I'll try and change the background (though I can't imagine in which way).

For tomorrow I planned to go on with the Zomingos (I already printed the blue layer of paint on Monday, despite my aching muscles), so I hope the printing studio won't be blocked by other people again. 
I can't waint to finish these prints!

I can't move my arms

Yesterday I finally printed one of my big zombies! 
I worked all day long  (it's an edition of 12 prints) and now I'm feeling stiff and aching, so I'll have to waint until my muscles aren't sore anymore before I can start printing the Zomingos.


(I took the photo of it hanging on the wall of my workplace, so you can get an idea of its size (about 60 x 80 cm). Unfortunately I only had my crappy camera with me, thus the Brainwafer is out of focus.) 

I didn't really get on with the artbook though. I still have only 4 (the 4th isn't even completely finished yet) pictures of  7 or 8 I'd like to do.

Bird brain

Bad mood...not only, but also because lately some pigeon chose my balcony as its lookout and now it's shitting all over the place.
I hate birds.
So here's another dead bird:

 

Another reason for my mood is that I still can't start my big prints, because I have to help preparing about 200 posters for an exhibition of the artbook workshop I joined last year. So today I was in the studio for some hours, doing prints of blue lines to decorate these posters and I'm not even done yet.

Plus I'm not getting on with my drawings for the artbook about the undead. 

I'd really like to only concentrate on doing my own work right now, but I can't.

Everything sucks.

Fleshy arms

Here's another picture for the atbook. I drew this and a second illustration on Sunday, but had to drop the idea for that other one, although I already finished the drawing. But after having slept on it, it looked kind of rediculous to me. So I'll have to rethink that idea.

It's actually another "Nachzehrer", there are historical accounts on corpses lying in their graves and gnawing at their own flesh, who then causes the living people around them to die.
Again there's a Christian symbol in this picture, because believes of evil undead creatures in Europe came up when the Christian church took over the continent. The evil undead were an instrument to gain power over the people, because they were in opposition to the "good undead", meaning the saints and this idea was supposed to frighten people into behaving the way the church enjoined them to.

Nachzehrer

I've been reading some more stuff about the undead, but it seems like all the texts I found on that subject are just copies of one another. So I decided to go on with my drawings based on the knowledge I got so far.

I'm still not sure about the number of pictures I'll put in the arbook. I planned on doing 8, but now I had to sort out one of them, because I originally wanted this picture to be composed of two parts:

 

Sometimes people were buried captivated and with a Bible placed under their chin, because it was believed that they were "Nachzehrer". The Bible was there to prevent the mouth from opening, so the creature wouldn't be able to suck out the life from its former relatives or other people.
I actually wanted to make one drawing, where the coffin lid is open and the body looks all normal and in addition to that picture another one, where everything is dark and you can only see the corpse with its eye and mouth open. 
But after trying that I decided it's too much and one picture is enough to get the message across.

Om nom nom

Dunno if it's because of my mood, but here's another dead animal:

 Yesterday I read that book about undead creatures. It was quite interesting, because it explaned some historical contexts, but it didn't really help me to get on with the artbook.
So maybe I'll just stick to my sketches, which are based on superstitious believes I read about. Still I'd like to know some more facts about that...

>: |

Everything I was working on is currently on hold...and I'm tired and pissed.

I probably won't be able to start my big prints next Monday, when the printing workshop manager is back from her vacation, because I'll have to attend some lectures. I'm also participating in two seminars for which I'll have to do some work and I don't even remember why I actulally joined in, because right now they're keeping me from doing my actual work and I'm most likely not getting anything out of those seminars.
Also I didn't work on the artbook anymore, because I was just too tired during the past 3 days. But I bought a book about undead creatures, so I'll read that first before going on with doing more drawings for the booklet (altough I already roughly sketched almost all of the images I planned to draw, but maybe I'll change some of them after I'm done with reading that book).

Now I felt like I have to upload something, since it's been a little while...so I wracked my brain to come up with an idea, but this is all I managed to do:

(Please klick for full view!)

I was terribly tired when I started sketching this yesterday evening, so please ignore any mistakes.

Plus here comes grumpy me:

Preparations

Today I overslept and then I went to my studio and went on preparing my big zombie prints for about 4 hours.

Just so you can get an idea of what I mean by "preparing paper" I took this picture:

It's a 1,5 x 10 m roll of paper, from which I cut 9 sheets, which are 150 x 80 cm each for my Zomingo prints (I decided they're going to be 120 x 72 cm).
Also I prepared my model images. I had to stick them together from many small sheets of transparent paper (42 x 29,7 cm each), because the printer at my uni can't hande larger sheets. 
Here's the zombie girl. 
On the photo you can see that I put the model for the red layer of paint on top of the one for the black layer, to see if the layers are congruent (They weren't so I had to blacken some spots with a brush. Now I hope everything's going to fit in the end) .

Plus I had to weight the paper sheets down. Since they've been cut from a roll they're always going to roll up again. Though I hope they're going to straighten if I leave them lying there for one week with the glasses of paint standing on them.

I'm still not finished preparing the Zomingo models. I didn't have enough transpaprent paper to put in the printer, so I couldn't print out the layer for the blue paint. 
(That's probably good luck for my fellow students, because I almost used up all of the toner while printing out the other models.)
I already put so many hours of work into these pictures, but the worst part is yet to come. I hope that I won't mess up anything while printing. I'd really kick myself for that. :\ 

Now I'm off to clean up my flat...thanks to oversleeping. >:|

The Z-word

Now that I have to wait more than one week until I can start doing my big prints (today I prepared my paper and I think the Zomingos will be bigger than I planned in the first place), I started working on a new artbook. It'll be about different kinds of undead bodies, so not only zombies (but no vamires and ghosts!), like they're known from movies. I already did some research and there are a lot of tales about undead creatures, which have their roots in medieval Europe.
Still I started by doing a zombie drawing. :)
Here's a mambo ( = female Vodou priest) and some guys she turned into what is called "zombie cadavres":
(klick for full view!)

I think there will be 8 pictures. But first I'm goint to have to do some more research.

Zomingo

Yesterday I prepared that new zombiegirl for printing. But right now I'll have to wait until I can get started, because I don't have a screen that's big enough (the print's going to be about 80x60 cm) and the workshop manager, who's in charge of the screens, is on vacation until the 18th of April. :(
But while I was working on my model images, there was some other student sitting with his notebook outside the printing studio. I don't know what he was doing, but his computer kept making this bird sound, which to me sounded very much like a flamingo. So then I had the idea for this:

I'm going to print this as well and it's going to be big (about 90x53 cm). So I still have to wait until I can do any print. 
Now I have a lot of time for preparing the model images and my paper. Or at least I hope so, because yesterday I heard from my fellow students that the printer, which I use for printing out my models, is broken...again. I hope it's going to be fixed soon, otherwise I'll be very pissed.

100

Today I went to a course on horror in movies and society and people were talking about zombies. Todays lecture was pretty okay, but I'm afraid the course won't be concentrating on the kind of horror I'm actually interested in, since it's very much based on media studies.
Anyway, all that talk about zombies made me draw another one:

But I'm not sure about printing this one...I'm still feeling uninspired about my work.


btw: This is my 100th post! Yay! 

Yes, I'm now the owner of a pair of zombie arms.

There is no title

The new semester starts tomorrow, so this probably means less uploading...
I'm feeling a bit "meh" again anyway.

Bling bling

Yay, today I printed gold! ...Or, at least I used golden paint for printing.

I did two different version of this picture. 
I thought the black/gold combination might look pretty cool without the other colours. Sadly I only did 4 prints of that version, since I didn't want to use up all of my paper. I've got 11 of the other one, because I had some paper, which has some misprints on its back, left and I wanted to get rid of it. So I printed the fullcolour picture on it, because the paint hides the misprints.

Unfortunately the photos won't show the golden glitter, so I took a close up, hoping it would prove that there actually is metallic paint on the prints. But it's...meh...you just have to trust me on the gold:

The prints are about 29 x 36 cm.

 

Also I somehow got my armpit painted blue while printing. I don't know how or why I did this, but...well, I just did it. :D

(Btw: yes, I finally got my hair cut!)

Close enough

Today I finished printing my postcards, but they didn't turn out the way I wanted them. 
I tried printing with golden paint for the first time and I found out (when it was too late, of course) that you have to use a special kind of screen for this type of paint. Because that paint contains glitter particles, it won't go through the fine texture of the screens I used.
So now the parts on the cards, which should actually be golden, look more like some kind of slightly glittering yellow.
I don't think they turned out very bad, but they still don't look like I imagined them.
But today I also found a screen for printing with metallic paint, so I'm going to think up a new picture with some gold in it and hopefully I'll be able to start printing it tomorrow.