Invitation :)

Tomorrow I'm going to set up my exhibition! 

Here's an invitation for all of you:

[Btw.: I'm still not done with the drawings for the first chapter of my book, but now I know, there are going to be nine pictures. Four of them are double-page spread, this means it's going to be very difficult to print and bind them, so each half will fit its opposite.]

Off to work

Here's another picture for the "dead birds" chapter:

There's still a lot to draw and I need to come up with some more ideas for this chapter. But when I'm done, I think I'm going to print it before starting to draw the next one, so I won't overwork my joints, since I'm not good at taking breaks while printing. 
I'm outsmarting myself!

I only just remembered, the other day I found this magnet sticking to my paper shelf in the printing studio:

 I don't know if the person, who printed this, placed it there intentionally...but thank you anyway. :D

Major idea continued

Today I spoke to the manager of the printing studio about my book idea. She immediately helped me find the right paper for my project. It's rather thick and ivory, I like it very much and I can have a package with 250 sheets of it! I don't know if I'll need all of it tough, because I could make 25 books using that many sheets ( I decided to stick to 5 chapters with 16 pages each). The paper is 44x55 cm, so I can cut it in half to get the right size for the book pages.
I also did the first drawing for the "dead birds" (working title) chapter.

Major idea

I'm feeling better and I had an idea for a huge project!
I'm thinking about making a limited edition of handbound hardcover artbooks. 
This means they will contain a lot of pages (otherwise you can't bind a hardcover book) and a lot of pictures, too. 
I'd like to divide it in different chapters, each dealing with one of the topics that I'm repeatedly dealing with in my work, like: dead birds, zombies, cephalopods and so on. So in a way it would be a collection of my whole graphic work.
Each chapter would hold...uhm, let's say 4 sheets of paper (I haven't planned that yet) = 16 pages (but probably less pictures).
So if there will be 5 chapters, there will be a shitload of potential sources of error in the making of those books. 
Yup, it would be more work than my maltreated joints can handle and more difficult than I am able to imagine right now...but who cares, I guess I'm going to try it anyway.

I think the most difficult part is getting started with the drawings and finding the right style for the whole thing. :\

x__x [pidgeon edit]

I'm sick since Monday and yesterday I was just lying in my bed the whole day, so I didn't do much. But I took a couple of notes on some ideas for drawings.
Today I'm feeling a little better...or at least I manage to sit in front of my computer.

Here's what I did last weekend:

As I said I fixed those 3 prints of "The battle". 

Before:

...and after:

 You can barely see where the layers of paint are overlapping, so yes, it worked. :)
I didn't take a photo of the complete print, because I forgot to take my good camera with me...as always.

Plus I worked a bit more on the sculpture. Paniting it is more difficult than I thought,  I'm currently having troubles with finding the right level of realism. I think this is going to take a while until it's finished.

On Sunday I found a little snail on my balcony:

I don't know how it got up there, because it's a pretty long way from the ground to my flat. After taking this photo I turned away for a few minutes and then I had to find out that the snail was suddenly gone. So since snails aren't moving that fast, I imagined a bird must have appeared an eaten it. Maybe it was that stupid pidgeon, who likes to shit on my balcony.

So much for today, I'm going back to bed now.

Extra icing

Now I did 10 prints of "The battle" and 7 of them turned out pretty okay. But because I had to cut the paper for the screen prints by hand, the black layer of paint is displaced on 3 of them and I still have to fix that. But today I was too tired from working for hours, without taking a single break, to start preparing the layers I need to print on top of the displaced parts. So maybe I'll work on those prints tomorrow or so...there's no rush.

Also I still haven't taken a photo of that zombie print with the human heart I did on Tuesday, so here's the digital drawing:

Warhead

I'm still not done with the sculpture yet (and the most difficult part, painting the iris, is yet to come), because I've been preparing my stuff for "The battle". Today I started printing...I wish everything would go right, just once! But it never does. So tomorrow I'll try and fix the print. Fortunately I only did the first layer of paint, so there's still hope that I can make the others match.

I've been fiddling about this ribcage forever. Maybe it's my mood, but something feels wrong about it...as always!

>:|

Work in progress

Here comes the little sculpture I'm currently working on.
It's far from being finished, but I guess you can make out what it's supposed to be.

It's papier-mâché, painted with acrylics. On the inside it's made of a styrofoam ball, florist wire and two stones to weight the whole thing down.
I placed it on a piece of cardboard, but I'm going to cut the edges off, so you won't see the whole bottom piece in the end. 

Plus today I prepared two screens for printing "The battle" . I ran out of paper though, so maybe I'll start printing it this weekend. Btw. I didn't change much about the squid. Two of its tentacles are now a bit longer and I edited some other small flaws but it still looks almost the same as my first digital drawing.

Auf der Mauer, auf der Lauer...

Still working on the prints for my exhibition.
On Saturday I drew the one with the human heart, yesterday I finished "Frankenfinger" (now my muscles are sore again) and prepared the model images and the screens for the former one.
Also I pulled myself together and tried fixing the rest of the "Untot" artbooks. I saved 16 of the 20 booklets I printed. Two of those turned out pretty good (so fortunately I have at least one booklet to show at my exhibition), but the rest isn't worth much I guess...they don't meet my expectations after all the trouble I had with them. 
Well, at least I learned some things by making all these mistakes, especially about retouching!
Nom I'm already thinking about a new project to start...maybe an artbook about witchhunts or so...aaaand I'd still like to make a big screen print of "The battle", but I think I'll have to rework it a bit, because the squid looks a little too cute (its tentacles are so tiny).
Plus I'll have to start thinking about what to take with me to the Comic Con at the end of June!

Frankenfinger

(Yup, the title's inspired by the movie "Frankenhooker". :D)
  
As I said, I tried to come up with another undead for my exhibition, so today I drew this guy:

 

But I'm not sure about printing this yet.

Plus I have this half-baked idea for a picture...something with a human heart or so...hmmmm...

I wish I could take a break from me fucking everything up

Yesterday I reprinted those pages for the artbooks (the pictures even turned out better than the first time I printed them), but the black paint I used is total crap. It's not really opaque, so the layer of red paint always shines through. Also it somehow makes the pages stick together even though I let them dry for one day (usually they're dry within one hour). Plus now I had to buy black pigment to mix with the paint (haven't tried that yet), because I don't want to throw all of it away, since I have a shitload of it and it was't cheap.
The only thing that works is replacing the pages and then then putting the booklets back together again. I only did this once today, because after cropping the exchanged pages they stuck together so tight, that by trying to open them the sticky paint tore part of the paper off. So I gave up for today.
(Fuck this shit...I actually don't even want to try anymore.)

After that I went home and took a break.

I was playing around with scissors again, but the picture didn't turn out that good...I don't know what it is, but something bothers me about it. (I actually had another version of it where there are bugs placed between the scissors, but that looked even worse.)

Bad day

...really, really bad day.

It actually didn't start as bad as it ended. This time I didn't even oversleep.
In the morning I went to the studio, to print the "Rubus oculus". Yesterday the workshop manager even lent me a new restringed screen, so printing went pretty well.

Here are photos of the finished print (I did 12 of them, they're 43 x 61 cm):

 

But then everything went wrong. After printing I started retouching the artbooks and now 11 out of 18 are fucked up. They all got these stains of paint in the middle of the 2nd and the 6th picture. 

(The photo is from the 2nd picture, because the 6th looks even worse).
The actualy problem is that the single images from which the pictures are put together are out of place, so they don't fit together. And by trying to fix that I made everything worse. (I hate mysef so much for doing that and I'm still extremely frustrated.)
At first I thought I couldn't do anything but throw those 11 artbooks away. But then I thought it over and decided to try one last thing: I'm going to reprint those pages and try to replace the fucked up ones. But I don't know if this'll work, because the booklets are already bound and cropped. I don't know if I can put them properly together after taking them apart.
Anyway...I went to prepare my screens so I could print those images unhurriedly tomorrow. But after being done and having regained a little bit of hope, I dropped the only glass of black paint I had left:

Of course this happened exactly the minute the only art supply store around here was closing, so I couldn't get any new paint. Now I'll have to waint till Monday, when there are a bunch of pepole in the printing studio getting on my nerves...as if this shit wasn't bad enough already.

After everything that happened I was pretty pissed and I only wanted to go home, which I did. As always I rode my bike, but today I was wearing a skirt (plus shorts undearneath it) and it was pretty windy, so every single guy I passed couldn't help but gape at me. I know none of them will ever read this, but: FUCK YOU.

Trying to relax a bit I did this: 

...but it didn't really help. 
Maybe I should take a break tomorrow...but I actually can't. When I walked past the empty gallery at my uni, I realized how big that place is and now I'm afraid I won't have enough pictures for my exhibition. Thus I'd like to come up with at least one more middle sized zombie/undead to print.

But right now I'm done...

Print, print, print ~

This (bad) photo is from yesterday, when I printed the zombie candy (it's about 29,7 x 42 cm and I printed 11 of it):

I think it turned out a bit too dark...I should have taken a lighter green or mixed the blue with some white paint. :\

Today I've been working in the studio all day long. I finished binding the "Untot" artbook (still have to do some retouching though) and then I printed 18 invitation cards for the exhibition and 27 postcards with the same motiv on them (because I kinda like it and I won't need that many invitations, I'll do most of them by e-mailing). But I'm not going to show them here yet.
Also I thought the idea with the "Rubus oculus" through and now I decided not to show it in the exhibition, because it's too different from the rest. But I used part of it for the invitation cards.
I'm still going to print it though. However, I'll need to work a bit more on the model image first, since the outlines in my first draft are too thick.

Rubus oculus

This is the picture I was planning to print for my exhibition (it goes with the sculpture I planned to do...and I hope I won't mess that one up):
(Klick for full view!)

 

Now I actually already had a title for the exhibition, but it was all about the undead creatures and this isn't one of them, so I have to come up with a new title... :\
Anyway, I still have to print my zombie candy and some invitation cards first.

Untot- artbook no. 6

Today I finished printing the "Untot" artbook. I messed up the first and only one I bound today, so here comes a bad photo of what it looks like from the outside (on the inside it has 7 pictures, which are all in red and black):

I think I'd like to present the booklet in my exhibition first, before showing all of it here.