Merry Christmas!!

from the fat snowman that wets my deskchair... :)

Waldschrats Katze

My attempt to draw an atmospheric concept art / speedpainting or something (took me about 1 hour). A Waldschrat meets a cat.

Happy Happy Birthday pictures

What could be better for a good friend's birthday than drawing a picture ? It's the most personal present you could give and the cheapest at the same time :)
So here are two pictures I have drawn for friends in the last time:

by Scherke round about 2000

This second picture is based on an old sketch that Scherke gave me about 10 years ago asking me to draw it in a comic style. I never did that, because that paper got misplaced and I recovered it no more than two month ago when I moved back to Bo. And Scherke's birthday was the best chance for lately grant the question. (I only added goat priests, skulls, cables and tentacles... just things that make a good picture :p

How to draw an owl

For a change something educational that I found on the net :)

 

via

Kugelhund

If you are already searching for the perfect christmas present for your 5+ years old kids, I warmly recommend the skill-game Kugelhund (Roly-Poly Dog or Chiens en folie pour nos amis francaise:) that has just been released at Schmidt Spiele (and I do not only recommend it, cos I did the illustration...!)

It's a real fun digging game and it even has it's own gameplay-trailer (OMG!)



From the game instruction: 
Bella and Bello are completely over the moon! Their friend Isabella has come to visit unexpectedly. And of course they want to give her their best bones. But where on earth have they buried them? Oh yes, under the garden gnome and there, beside the watering can.
Bella and Bello run about tirelessly, burrowing here and digging there...
The one who guides them over the lawn skilfully and is first to dig up the bone for Isabella together with them wins the game.

My roly-poly dog on this year's games fair in Essen.

So write it on your wish list for santa or directly order it via Amazon! Dog'n'roll, baby!

Seafood dinner

I haven't drawn rats for ages! So here it comes: This little rat keeps struggeling with it's seafood dinner... ain't it cute?

A new Fred

This time in the health food store...

Twisted neighbourhood

I passed this creatively arranged shopwindow of a nearby bakery store in my new neighbourhood in Bochum the other day. And I was so impressed, so deeply moved by the aesthetic coupled with a subliminal eroticism the decoration radiated, that I had to take this picture.
It's a chocolate Fiege beer bottle next to a potato with boobies!! 
This is madness! Madness? THIS! IS! BOCHUM!

TÖRÖÖÖÖööö

Before ALF and The Hoffmeister (as Michael Knight) became my childhood heroes, there was this big, friendly and talking elephant Benjamin Blümchen and his smart friend Otto, whose cassette adventures made me fall asleep every single evening. All the happier I was to draw a Benjamin Blümchen puzzle (I had already drawn him when I was four, so I was practiced ;)

But believe me, it was harder than it looks to hit the pretty strictly defined style.

So get Benjamin Blümchen out with the refuse collection (...bei der Müllabfuhr)

Was nich passt, wird passend gemacht*

Samma, watt machen Bauarbeita, wennse Pause vonne Maloche habn? Schön Bütterken beißen und dabei passeln!

Fittingly my new puzzle for Schmidt Spiele deals with working on a building site again! So get the puzzle and enoy it as much as my little cousin did the last days... (the picture doesn't really convey the intense joy she actually had while piecing it together ;)

 *what doesn't fit is made to fit!

Mind vs. Instinct

Fred made his decision...

I'm really looking forward to...

A Bäckereifachverkäuferin

A bakery shop assistant for a new Backjournal column

Cholor Cthulhu

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

I recently started to listen to audiobooks while working and came across H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" (or "Der Ruf des Cthulhu" - I listened to the german version) on Youtube. I have already read the story years ago, but again I were pretty excited after listening and had to quickly draw it. Maybe I will color it when I've got the time!

Oh and yepp - to take the wind out of the Cthulhu follower's sails: I know, that Lovecraft described C's body  being huge and bulky, but I always imagine it the exact opposite and so it's my interpretation - basta!

Guerilla Advertising

Bonjour! Yesterday I went to France to promote my upcoming calender for 2011.
I changed Fridolin the funny pharmacist fox into Mona Fridolisa and smuggled the picture into the Louvre. (To change the paintings I cleared the Mona Lisa room by shouting that the Venus de Milo had lost her blankets and wasn't able to cover herself cos of her lack of arms. Even the guard wanted to see her naked!) Muhar har, me is perfidious!!

Now I don't know what to do with that scruffy original. Maybe I will whitewash it for the next kitchen party...

MATH-terpiece (Cornelsen Klick! 6)

Good morning, pupils, sit down, it's time for math again!

The school- and working books for the 6th grade will be released soon and I it's more and more fun to illustrate them. Like I told you in the last post on that subject, "my" book-pupils are growing from book to book and it's fun to give them more and more character and own personality (as much charakter and personality as kids in a schoolbook can have).
This time I even had the possibilitiy to place some personal insiders in the illustrations, like friends that play the part of teachers or parents (yo, Krazy-K, you see Murat's dad?) ;P Not to mention the close friendship between Tim and Anna (the resemblance to real existing illustrators is intended by all means). So it's still fun and I'm glad that there will be four more books for me to illustrate.







Did I ever introduce my kids to you? Well, on this older picture from Klick! 5 they introduce themselves :)

I would never have thought that I would ever have so much fun with math books. I hated math at school and all I wanted at that time was a WEAPON OF MATH DESTRUCTION (HAHAha, oh man, I had to tell that one...)

FRED - the four headed fish

COME AND SEE THE INCREDIBLE FOUR HEADED SHARK WALKING THE EARTH ON HIS FISHTAIL AND USING A WHEELED WALKER TO CARRY HIS BUREAUCRATIC PAPERS! IT'S FRED FISH!  
The disgusting smell of fish is not based on a lack of body hygiene (or so he claims...).

I do not regularly show my monthly Fred Fish on here, but the newest one is really worth to be gaped at! The topic of the next month's book recention is about the rampant growth of the bureaucracy due to a growing headcount, that slows down the workflow insteat of improving it. In other words: Too many cooks spoil the broth.
This is the original Fred Fish illustration that I turned into the oldschool Freakshow placard just for fun (I'm very into those oldschool trash posters at the moment).

Still-Leben A40 Ruhrschnellweg

Here are some impressions of the "A40 - Stilleben" ("A40 - Still life"). Over 3 million of people from the Ruhr Area partied, skated or rode the bycicle together on 60km (37miles) between Duisburg and Dortmund.It was great and peaceful and somehow strange to experience the known highway in "slow motion". Isa and me made our way from Bo-Stahlhausen to Wattenscheid and back -  a way you usually drive by car in 5 minutes, but we nearly needed three hours to walk (you see a motorway with other eyes when you once walked it).

And after a whole day on a ca. 37 degreese hot highway without sun blocker we felt as knocked over as this little fellow (those are the things you don't notice when you drive the street with 120 km/h). I didn't wrote the chalk comments and I think it's extremely morbid, but it's somehow part of the daily life on the street, too.

PAUL - The psychic octopus

IT HAS 9 BRAINS AND 3 HEARTS AND IT COMES FROM THE ENDLESS DEPTH OF OBERHAUSEN TO LET THE NATIONS FEAR OR CELEBRATE IT'S PREDICTIONS - PAUL, THE PSYCHIC TENTorACLE!

I just had to draw Paul! I love this modern, news media made monsters of today. After the ash-monster it's the second creature from this series!
This is the original pencil sketch and the picture without the typo:

Bye bye Schland!-Ratte

The world cup is all over now and I grudgingly congratulate the Spanish national team for winning the cup! You just were the best team in the match... and we won the match for the third place... again (damn, nobody ever remembers the thrid world cup winner). But we kicked England and Argentina 4:1 and 4:0 and that's more than historic! And so I'm looking forward the next Euro Cup... and for that event I will finally wash my Schland!-shirt that looks pretty rough after the matches (and smells like beer and tears ;) - yes, it was a hard fight.

They're coming home, they're coming home...

...but the football stays in South Africa and so does the German team :D 3 Lions on the ground... :P

deutschLANDRATTE 2010

________________________________________________________ 
In three days 2010 FIFA World Cup begins and so I chose spreadshirt.de to order an self made fan-shirt with my Euro Cup '08 Schland!-Ratte on the front!

I got the shirt several days later but spreadshirt.de was so kind to inform me that the word "Schland" was registered as a word mark by Raab TV-Produktion GmbH. (How can you trademark one and a half syllables of a country's name? Well, Stefan Raab can do everything! (that's why I still want him as our german national team coach - and I want to see a Schlag den Raab versus Chuck Norris!!))
So I had to make an modified version of the original shirt to put it up for sale in MY SHOP. It says deutschLANDRATTE now and you better not ask me to draw you a holLANDRATTE... ;)

So I'll keep my fingers crossed for Germany and wir werden Weltmeister sein! SCHLAND!!

Headcrab Zombie

A well known enemy from Half Life wearing his pet as a hat! See game model

180° couple

Girls & Corpses & Piranha Mermaids

Never jump into a lake without paying attention to warning signs! There could be carnivorous piranha mermaids in the unknown waters!

About the consequences I made an educational illustration that has just been published in this year's german edition of the american satire magazin Girls & Corpses!
I don't know if any bookstore sells this life- & deathstyle magazin (I have not seen it yet), but you can order it HERE!

iFred.

In the next month's collumn Fred Fisch presents a book about the apple founder Steve Jobs and his secret of success. So I decided to draw a Fred Jobs who stuffs himself  with golden apples (don't know if that really is Steve Jobs secret, but it was fun to draw...)