Brains

Yesterday I said I'd need a break from all the blood in my pictures...well, that was a short break. :D
Just some digital stuff:

I don't know why I'm currently so much into drawing brains. Maybe I'm slowly turning into a zombie...that would be awesome.

Break

I guess I need a break from all these bloodsoaked pictures. 
So here comes something different:

 

 

Fan art

Today I printed some fan art. :D
Both screenprints, about 30 x 42 cm or so.

The black knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

"This' but a scratch!"

And Derek from Bad Taste

"I'm a Derek. Dereks don't run. "

I only got an even worse photo of Derek, so that's actually the original digital drawing up there. But the print looks almost the same...

Hot off the press

Yesterday evening, at 6 pm, there should have been an important lecture at my uni. So I rushed there, but had to find out that it was cancelled.
Instead of going home I stayed to work in the printing studio. I never worked there that late and when I was done it was already 10:40 pm, but it was actually pretty good, since no one else was there to get in my way.
I printed the Nom nom nom picture. I was eager to find out if everything would work out the way I planned it (especially the part with the layer of white paint).
While working I took some photos of the printing process.
Here you go:

First things first, here's my screen before it's been coated:

Here's the original for the layer of grey paint, laying on the lightbox:

Then comes the screen after it's bee exposed, the violet stuff is the coating and the light parts are the images which are going to be printed:

 Here's the screen while printing the layer of brown paint for the brain wafer (which is a good title for the picture, I guess):

 And here's what the picture looked like after adding each layer of paint (forgot to take a photo of the grey layer though):

Et voilà! The finished print:

I really expected it to look worse, the colours don't look exactly the way I wanted them, but I guess it turned out okay.

Also here are some pictures of my hands being maltreated:

Counting sheep

I just watched "Shaun the Sheep Movie" :)
....nothing more to say but this:

Carmilla

Finally! I finished reading "In a Glass Darkly" by Sheridan Le Fanu, after leaving it lying on my desk without having read the last chapter for about 1 1/2 month. The last one in this book is called "Carmilla" and it's a vampire story. 
I do like horror stories from the 19th century, but I don't like vampires and I didn't like that story. (There's actually only one good chapter in this book and that's the first one:"Green Tea", about a demonic monkey).
Anyway...so "Carmilla" wasn't my thing, still there was one sentence that I loved:

"At the same time a light unexpectedly sprang up, and I saw Carmilla, standing, near the foot of my bed, in her white nightdress, bathed, from her chin to her feet, in one great stain of blood."

I had to draw this...at least I tried to get that image out of my head, though it didn't quite come out the way I intended (maybe I'll try again).

 

Carmilla a.k.a. Marilyn Manson, hahaha...

Chronology of a bad day

First of all I woke up at 6 am, which is always a bad thing to do on a Sunday. 
Then I sat forever in front of my computer, because I wanted to prepare the Nom nom nom pic for screen printing. I almost broke my brain because of that, since I didn't quite know how many layers of paint I'd be going to need. So I decided to print it like this: 
grey -> brown -> green -> blue -> red -> white (to get the pink, light green and light brown) -> black + maybe varnish.
After being done with that I went to the studio, to finish a print I started yesterday. Remember this Zombie? It was the first sketch for this little beauty:

It's 34,5 x 55 cm and I was working on it for almost 3 weeks now (the drawing took most of the time). Here's a detail:

Rasterizing ftw! 
I'm almost proud of it, because only a few things didn't go too well, but I'm okay with that.
After finishing this print I started the "Nom nom nom" thingy. Good thing I've got my fuck up kit, cause that's what I did. I fucked it up. The colours I chose were too dark and the paper that was left was crap. Also I didn't prepare the screen very well, so there were bits of paint in places of the picture where there souldn't be anything. So I'm going to start all over again. Which wouldn't be a problem if I wasn't afrait that my second attempt will probably go wrong, too. As I said, I want to print white paint on top of some of the colours, to get the lighter tones. So this is going to be the second to last step while printing. It might be that step, wich is going to ruin everything, because if the white is too thick, there won't be any pink, there'll only be some muddy, pale rose. But if the white is too light, the red will be too dominant. I'm afarid this could mess up my whole work...again. But we'll see, I'm going to try anyway.
Also I found out how to bandage my wrists so I won't hurt my joints while printing: The trick is to wrap the bandages around my hands and wrists as tight as possible. So my hands looked like this today:

 

(Yes, I used different coloured bandages, I wanted at least to look pretty while crushing my hands with them.) 

My joints won't start hurting if my fingers are drained of blood. Good deal.

So after fucking stuff up I was ready to go home. When I went to the studio the weather was quite okay but when I wanted to leave it started to snow. Note that I wasn't dressed too well for riding my bike through snowy weather. It was very cold and wet and I didn't have gloves (guess how my fingers felt in the cold after being squashed while printing). Anyway, I had to bike home. That's when this happened:

I'm not even exaggerating. Okay I didn't yell at the snow (I'm not that crazy...yet), those were only my thoughts, but the rest actually happened like this. I thought I was the only one out there, who thought it'd be a good idea to bike in the snow, until I saw some other insane person riding their bike through that shitty weather, too. At least I wasn't alone.
I got home, dripping and soiling everything. But I didn't care about that, since I still had to clean up my whole flat (after not having eaten in like 9 hours or so). Yay.
I foreced myself to finish that task, too. And then my back started to hurt like hell, so I decided to not give a shit, take a shower and finally eat something.

Bad day...but still I'm somehow not even in a bad mood.
I guess I just like torturing myself.

Nom nom nom

 Just for fun...

 

Artbook

Today I tried to make the best of a bad job, so I printed the pictures for my artbook using an ordinary laser printer. The picture on the cover is done in screenprinting though. It's the only thing I didn't mess up during the printing process, so I didn't want to throw the covers away.
The booklet is about 21 x 29,7 cm, the cover is printed with white acrylic paint on black cardboard. I bound them myself (I had to ink the sewing thread in the middle of the book black, because otherwise you'd have a white stripe there, which would mess up the whole picture.).

 

I guess it turned out okay. 
Still I don't like the look of this laser printer crap...the black is too shiny and you don't have that nice embossed feel of an actual screenprint.
Also I only made 4 booklets (of 20) today, because I didn't want to use up the printers whole toner (I already wasted 1/3 of it). 

Well, at least my work wasn't completely for nothing at all.

Fuck Up Kit

Here's what I did today:

 

Also I fuked up my whole artbook, that I made for that workshop at my uni (today was the last day I could work on it).
I printed until my wrists startet to hurt like hell (they still do and the pain will probably stay for a while), the pictures actually turned out pretty good, but then I realized that the inside of the pages doesn't fit their back. So two weeks of work and a lot of pain for absolutely nothing. 
I'm still very depressed because of that...I don't even want to go to the workshops final presentation tomorrow, because I'm going to be the only one who can't show anything.
Plus I won't be able to start a new screenprint I already prepared because of my damaged joints.

And just now I even fucked up the potatoes I was cooking for supper, they taste kind of uncooked.
This day can't get any worse.

Zombunny?

I wish I had one of these:

Good news

Professor Farnsworth © Matt Groening

drawing: Tanja Hehn

Last month I applied for a table for illustrators at the Comic Con Germany 2016 in Stuttgart and they actually accepted me. So I'm going to be there next June, showing off my stuff. Yay!

By the way: the artbook workshop at my universitiy isn't as stressful as I thought it would be. But I'll have to speed up my printing process, otherwise I won't be able to finish my booklet in time. Problem is my wrists are starting to hurt again (although I've been using bandages to stabilise them) because I overworked them.

I hope I'll feel better until Wednesday, so I can print the last 4 pages and the cover. Then I still need to bind them...or at least one of them for the presentation on Friday. I hate this pressure.

So I guess Glowworm page 4 will have to wait for a while, I'm too busy doing other stuff. 
Also I'm more into drawing zombies right now:

 

Postcards

Here's some older (I did this about two month ago) stuff of mine, just to let you know I'm not dead yet.
These are postcards I made by screen printing. They are 11 x 15 cm. It was the first time I experimented with acrylic varnish on top of the other colour coats, it gives the cards a really nice feel.

 

I guess I'll have to reprint them some day, because something went wrong. The colour coats are in the wrong position on about half of all the cards I made.

Anyway...I don't really feel like doing something new or even thinking about anything. Right now I'm only occupied with the artbook workshop and my upcoming diploma in January. :\

Tomorrow

Tomorrow starts another workshop at my uni, it'll go for two weeks. It's about artbooks and artists as independent publishers (that's actually its title). 
I already have an idea for an artbook, but it's going to be a shitload of work...and two weeks is not much time. Plus there are going to be lectures and stuff like that which I'll have to attend. 
So right now I'm trying to prepare myself mentally for the next weeks. I'm definitely going to feel like a zombie all the time.
I don't know how I'll survive this, but I'm armed:

 

So it's not going to be too bad...right?