Tonight, at Teefury!

Watch out guys! At Saturday, the 11th of February, teefury will sell my latest shirt for 24 hours for only 10 USD! This will be especially sweet for – SPOLER – Dr. Who fans! So watch out for the shirt, plus, check out my face book fanpage and share the news for the chance to win an art print from my society 6 shop!

Man, do I love demons

Drawing a couple of really absurd demons before sleeping is awesome. Especially while watching a silly movie. My favorite thing to do is to take a shape/face/object/situation from the movie that grasps my attention somehow and invent a creature from that. It's a good way to relax the brain!

My favorite one is this one:

I like drawing before sleepy time recently

I listen to a good audio book and draw characters on cheap copy paper. I love drawing on copy paper recently because I cannot withstand the pressure caused by the fresh, new paper of a sketchbook!
Those are some of the best! This page includes Jon Snow, Sam and Ezio from Assasin's Creed.

My art at the Society of Illustrators NY

The Society of Illustrators NYC hold an annual illustration competition in several different categories. The winners get "gold" and "silver" medals. I didn't win, but I made it into the show in the category "Uncomissioned" which is a great honor. The fact that a slightly untypical piece by me won is interesting - it's a design I did for a Threadless submission, a piece honoring Poe's countless stories involving animals as guilt inducers for the protagonist.

I met a couple of people there who have helped me out a lot during studying at FIT: Dennis Dittrich, who is on the board of directors at the society and teacher for my capstone class, Anelle Miller, current director of the society and my previous teacher in the business class, Katherine Streeter was one of the jurors and she taught an art class for us and Bill Plympton, my ex-boss, won a silver medal for an animated short.
(from left to right, Bill Plympton+Dennis Dirrtich)

I enjoyed the evening a great deal, especially with Evelyn as my art show buddy. I was honored to be among such beautiful art pieces.

Design Process Shirts

A couple of people have e-mailed me asking about my design process. I tried to put a small documentation together, but I want to point out that my process is always a little different every time, but follows some basic ground rules. Additionally, what I talk about might sound a little complicated but everything makes a lot of sense for me after using it for the past years.

Shirts are also different to the usual illustration I make. They have to have less than eight colors because if they get chosen they will be screenprinted. Therefor, the work process has to be advantageous for color separation - before you hand in the file to the people who produce your shirt, you have to have every color on a separate layer (in Photoshop in my case).

Anyway, let's start. One of the most important things to me is the concept doodle. I think I have never done a design without roughly doodeling it out first. This is vital to accomplish a good composition and to realize if the joke is working on a visual level. I started to hang doodles up my wall and let them sit there for weeks, sometimes month. Ideas which still seem good after a longer time are usually good ideas. Bad ideas seem silly the next day and land in the paper basket.
(Below: This is how my shirts start; As rough drawings, barely readable to anybody but me. But they usually capture composition and mood better than the final pencil sketch)

(Below you see one of my fevorite ideas from doodle to finish. I have a liitle sketchbook in my bag and fill it with little ideas like this. Usually I realize a good idea as a good idea pretty quickly, while bad ideas seem bad really soon as well)

From the doodle, I start sketching a detailed pencil sketch, usually on a pretty big-sized paper, usually A2 (I don't know that in US-size). It's important for me to draw big, so I can draw details without going crazy. The pencil sketch is usually really dirty, has some mistakes in it - but basically I try to draw it as correct as possible to have an easy time inking it. For inking, I use super smooth paper so the multiliner has no interruptions in the line quality. I fix it on top of the pencil sketch with paper clips and trace it on top of a "Light Tracer 2" light box which I bought at Blick Art. It took me a long time to figure out what fine liners to use, but my favorites at the moment are Copic Multiliners (the none-refillable ones) from size 0.5 up and from size 0.1 to 0.5 my favorite are Pigma Microns. Why? Because I have a strong grip and I need pens that can withstand my impatient hand good. And the pens mentioned above are pretty good at that.

The outlines for my shirt designs don't require to be perfect. Important is that all lines are closed, and that I use a fine pen, such as a Micron 0.5. The linework should be clean and clear. I will explain a little more by using my latest design "Exposed!" as an example.

As you can see, all outlines are very clear. The drawing itself isn't perfect, but I usually try to correct errors during the coloring phase. Using the outlines+Magic Wand in Photoshop, I lay out the basic ground color for the design; Shirt color (which I take from Threadless's shirt templates), in this case Navy. I don't always know what shirt color to use from the beginning. Sometimes I change it last second. But let's just assume I knew what I was doing from the beginning here.....which I didn't haha.

As you can see in the picture above, I put all the basic colors on one layer to reduce complexity. I only separate colors at the very end, once I know I'm getting printed, otherwise I don't bother. However, the assumption that one has to do the color separation later should be in your mind all the time so it's easy later.
SO once I'm kinda satisfied with the ground colors (which is usually 2-4 different shades of the shirt color and maybe one poppy color, like the red in this case) I start using textured brushes for a more 3D-traditional effect.

I would go too far if I tried to give you a tutorial on brushes here. Basically, I have one favorite brush which I got from a teacher at FIT a year ago. I use it all the time, and play around with the settings a lot. The most important settings for textured brushes for me are Scattering -> play around with the scattering and Texture -> apply texture to brush and play around with depth and size. One of the things to keep in mind is to not use different transparencies/opacity on the brush, as that doesn't work in screen print. But this is a whole other chapter.....

The basic thing I do is, use the darkest color as a texture in the brighter color and vise versa. That creates the effect of more colors and volume and shading. It's hard to explain. I hope you know what I mean. I keep all differently colored textures on different layers because color separation is not easy with textured colors. I use layer effects such as "Overlay-> color" to try out different colors.
When I am kinda satisfied, I mock the design up with one of the shirt templates I have to put it up for voting at Threadless.

I know this sounds probably all kinda complicated. But I hope I could give a little insight on my process. If I confused you more, I apologize.

The Unseen Helpers up for sale

One of my most successful scoring designs, The Unseen Helpers, at is now up for sale at Threadless's LABS, an experimental line of shirts which are up for sale for a minimum of 2 weeks, longer if they sell well - so get yours fast in case it will disappear from their page. This, by the way, made about 2000 notes at tumblr :-)

When I met Matt Groening...

Ok, dear followers, dear interested people, let me tell you something; When I was but a very insecure, little teenager who hesitantly told people that she wanted to become a cartoonist (but wasn't quite sure of that herself), I was on a trip with a group of other teenagers at the east coast and found Matt Groening's older comics "Life in Hell" and "Love is Hell" in a dusty comic book store. In it, irritated, depressed characters like Akbar and Akbar, Binky the rabbit and his son, one-eared Bongo had to fight the stupidity of society every day or were personally involved in being a part of it.

After reading the major anthologies, I literally drew like Matt Groening for about 2 years. Even my topics were very similar. I adored the man. I admired him. I wanted to write him a letter and tell him how much his work had influenced me. I think I gave up on the idea of a letter after a while. Maybe I didn't expect him to answer, ever.
However, nowadays I think I can claim I have developed my own style, but I have always kept the Matt Groening "Simpsons-eyes" and the classic "Simpsons mouth with the round teeth". But I'm pretty sure I can say that Groening's work was significant in me being what I am today.
When I accidentally bumped into him at The Brooklyn Comics and Graphic Festival last weekend, it was a very meaningful moment for me.

The story behind it:
I was wandering between the tables with my comic con buddy Tim. For some reason I had to think about the "Life in Hell" comics by Groening. I told Tim;" Did I ever tell you how much Groening's comics have influenced me when I was a teenager?". He told me:" Yes you did - by the way, did you know he was HERE last year. He might be here this year." I couldn't quite believe that Groening would travel all the way to the East Coast for a tiny comic festival. I looked around. I saw a man standing two tables away who might have been him, but I wasn't sure. Tim googled his picture with his I-Phone. After a second of comparing we realized: It was indeed HIM.

I approached him, and told him what I just told you: That his work played an important role in my cartoonist-life. I think he appreciated that, he gave me a little finished drawing and a "stalker business card". He even asked me if I had work with me, but I didn't, I only had my business card - and he was a little distracted by a girl trying to make him read her scripts (?) or something. I politely waited for a photo opportunity. I am the happiest girl in the world in this picture.
(Below: It's Binky the rabbit from the "Life in Hell" series. I think he gave me this because he appreciated that I knew his old comics and not just the Simpsons and Futurama.)