Fairytales...

Still working on the fairytales... These are some recent sketches...Still a work in progress...

Plein air sketch

Plein air sketch I did in Dochamps, Belgium.
I placed a complete step-by-step on my tutorial blog: LINK

Red riding hood

Development of an illustration from start to finish. The tight deadline doesn't allow me to do a lot of sketching. Still the 'design' stage is very important to me, so I try to put as much effort into it as possible. Then I solve a lot of problems while actually painting the illustration.
The foliage on top is meant for typography.

Fairytales...

This is a finished illustration for the fairytale book I'm working on. I'm pleased with the result, especially considering I have only one day for each illustration. This Illustration is for the fairytale: 'The story of a boy who went forth to learn fear.' In this scene, he spends the night in a castle, Not afraid at all of the monsters and ghosts there. Instead, he falls asleep...

Typography for the stories will be placed into the illustrations, which explains the big black area at the left side of the illustration.

Life drawing

Sketch from a previous session

Evil stepmother

Illustration about the ever growing influence on the world of the Disney company.

Fairytales sneak peek

At this moment I am creating illustrations for a fairytale book. The stories will be rhymed by Ivo de Wijs. These little sneak peeks are details of the illustrations for the Grimm fairytale: 'The story of a boy who went forth to learn fear.'


I'm having a lot of fun doing these illustrations, and I plan on sharing more soon...

Esquire

Illustration I did recently for Esquire for a story about fatherhood.

Papiria comic strip creator

The Papiria comic strip creator is now online!! The project was initiated by The Children's books museum in the Hague.
When you create an account, you can drag characters, backgrounds and objects and create your own comic strip. The library of images was created by Flo de Goede, Alice Kok, Sylvia van Ommen, Michiel de jong, Alex Turk and myself.
The website is in Dutch. LINK

Plein air study

Quick gouache sketch at the end of the day...

Plein air study

Persoonshaven , Rotterdam, April 15th 2011 .
On a sunny morning like this, the light changes extremely fast... It is best to define the placement of the shadows first, so you can still keep consistent lighting, when the sun is moving on...
It can also be a good thing to limit the time to do the sketch, so the initial idea remains intact. After an hour, the scene has changed completely...

Warmup sketch

Todays warmup sketch.

Quest

Illusration for Quest magazine. The illuustration accompanies a story explaining the dutch expression: "Heilig boontje" (Sacred bean)

Plein air

Yesterday's plein air sketch. Gouache on moleskine sketchbook.

I used only a few colors for this painting:
-Titanium white
-Ultramarine
-Gold ochre (W&N)
-Burnt Umber
-Greenish yellow (talens)
-Turquoise blue

I created most of the painting with only these colors. In the end, I added a few accents with:
-vermillon (traffic lights and the barriers)
-Cad yellow (foliage in the back left)

Celebration

Today my blog is exactly 5 years old!! I'll celebrate it with this quick warmup sketch of Rihanna.

For this sketch I used brushes from the talented artist Niklas K. Andersen. You can buy his brushes here: LINK
Check out his amazing artwork here: LINK