Blueberry Muffin

Eine Kleinigkeit die ich Anfang des Monats für Anne gemacht habe im Austausch für ihre Hilfe an einer Visitenkarte.

A little something i did for Anne earlier this month in exchange for some help with a business card.

 

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Das ging schnell nicht wahr? Tja scheint so als würde das Maintenance-Plugin nicht verhindern dass Posts über den RSS-Feed rausgeschickt werden, d.h. diejenigen von euch die meinen Blog via RSS verfolgen dürften sich wundern was hier passiert.
Schauts euch an. Ich hab noch nichts am Design verändert, bisher habe ich lediglich Theme-Funktionen und Plugins ausprobiert und angefangen meine Freundesliste in das Artikel-System zu übertragen.
Dann muss ich das wohl in aller Öffentlichkeit machen. Tut mir leid.

That was fast, wasn’t it? Well it turned out that the maintenance plugin doesn’t stop the rss-feed from functioning, so those of you watching my blog from afar might be wondering what’s going on.
Well have a look. I didn’t tinker with the design yet, just testing out functionality, testing plugins and transcribing my friend-list to the new, post-driven format.
Seems like i have to do the working in public. Sorry ’bout that.

Something deadly happened

There isn’t much to this image. I painted it a few weeks ago. Another take on giving story hints in illustration work.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas from Steven Bagatzky

I wish you all a merry christmas and a great festive season. I hope to be able to share some insights on what’s going to happen in 2012 when we come closer to New Years Eve. Its going to be an interesting year!

Don’t forget that Daniels Wormworld-Saga will continue on Dec. 25th. That’s one big Christmas present for us all: The Wormworldsaga

Playful magazine type of illustration

I did the following images yesterday and today as a sort of experiment. I’ve been a fan of Bernie Fuchs, Coby Whitmore, Jon Whitcomb and the magazine illustrators from the 60s since i first saw images from them (which sadly is not so long ago).
I also took inspiration from Charles Vess whose artbook i bought last week in a local comicshop and who seems to be an admirer of Aubrey Beardsleys work as myself.
And than there’s a little bit of Tadahiro Uesugi in there as well… along with all the other artists i favor.

I wanted to see how the above mentioned illustrators (not so much Aubrey in here) might leave a mark on my way of painting.


Personally i like the pool murder image the best. Nowhere to run – which was the first – shows too much lineart and too little painting, and by that looks more influenced by Tommy Lee Edwards stuff (which might be due to the fact, that i read his comic “Turf” on the weekend).
The easy life on the other hand went to far in terms of realism on the car, the buildings and the overall colorscheme.
I’ll conduct more experiments in that direction, since it is one sort of illustration that i have been eager to learn and do more since some time. Maybe i even get an author to provide me with a nice little short story, so that i don’t have to make up crappy titles any more!

And a little b/w-sketch which has nothing to do with the above posted experiments, other than that i used the same brush for the lineart that i used for most parts of the paintings.

Today was my last day at Bigpoint

Those of you very close to me already know, that i decided to leave Bigpoint some time ago. Today was my last day.

There’s very little for me to say about it. I was able to work with 19 concept artists, i came in contact with many more artists througout the different fields, I met tons of great people and we have done some great stuff together. But…

The following image has been my desktop background ever since i joined the company.
For me at least it contains most of the reasons why i decided to take the unforseen job-offer to work at Bigpoint as the lead concept artist, one year ago, and leave 8 years of solo fighting freelancing behind.
It also contains all the reasons at the end, why i decided to leave the company again.
my desktop background image over the last year

It might not make much sense to you, but i won’t explain it further.

I don’t know yet what I’ll be doing in the future.
I have lots of ideas, some of them totally unrelated to illustration. Maybe I even have a start up in me.
I just started learning HTML(5)/CSS(3)/Jquery/Ruby… on saturday night, over at teamtreehouse.com.
Bryn Chainey has been working on a first draft of a story we want to collaborate on, and i’m excited about that.
I’ve been talking to lots of people about game ideas, but so far it’s only been talks and ideas and words come cheap ;)
And i’m totally open for suggestions for.. whatever.

So. That’s it. While you’re reading this, i’m out having a little sent-off in some bar with the guys i worked with closest.

Interesting times again.

figuring myself out

It’s becoming an almost annual thing that i try to figure out what my website and my blog should look like. Actually until now i mostly acted on impulse and just changed stuff when it felt necessary, but never thought of long term use and appeareance. Because i recently registered at mindmeister and because i hope to have mentally matured a bit, i thought this might be a good opportunity to approach things differently. So here’s my first try on puzzling my “web identity” together. What do you think?

It’s unfortunate that mindmeister right now doesn’t allow for other visual organization than the “star”-organigram, I’d love to transfer this information into a different, more creative briefing like sheet when i’m going to approach web designers to get some quotes.

the new webidentity of Steven Bagatzky - Mindmap

and because mindmeister allows embedding, i’m going to try this here and open this map for everybody to add/edit and experiment:

Das Magazin – Dezember Ausgabe – Cover Sketches

Letzte Woche schrieb mich dasMagazin an ob ich einverstanden wäre, wenn sie eine meiner Illustrationen für ihre Dezember Ausgabe nutzen würden. Natürlich war ich einverstanden, allerdings ist die Illustration schon ein paar Jahre alt und ich wollte zumindest noch etwas neues vorschlagen. Also hab ich Sonntag abend noch schnell ein paar Skizzen gemacht, die aber leider nicht genommen wurden. Naja kann man nix machen.
So oder so wird eine Illu von mir die Dezemberausgabe schmücken. Bin gespannt.

Engl:
Last week the german magazine dasMagazin contacted me and asked if i would allow them to use an illustration from me for their december issue. Of course i agreed, but since the illustration is a few years old i at least wanted to suggest something new. So i sat down saturday evening and did the following sketches, unfortunately they weren’t approved.
But nonetheless the december issue will feature my illustration on its cover. I’m looking forward to it.





Shortly after that, she died.

She trembled for a moment. Was it supposed to be this troublesome? Nobody had warned her about all this. She got worried. “If this was to be expected, they surely would have told me”, she thought. “This can’t be right. This is so odd.”
But trembling is not falling, and so with little doubts she continued with small but steady steps to climb up her way. Her destination in an arms length reach. Or so she thought.

pleasurous training

Does the word “pleasurous” even exist? It should. sounds pretty good ^^

not the only thing i drew yesterday evening after work. but the rest will follow at a later date because so far, it’s a 24panel comic which i will certainly not be able to finish so fast in just 3 hours after work.

Everything is amazing & nobody is happy.

Hunting hounds

More training, somehow i started drawing a hound, failed at it and than stuck with training drawing basset hounds.
F for Free
R for with reference

crawling back up

It has been awefully silent on this blog for the last couple of weeks again. The reason is that after some troublesome times at work i found myself in a state of immobility. I lost all motivation to do anything. Wouldn’t draw or paint and there were only to states of mind: Reaaaally really angry or really depressed.
Thankfully and with the support from Maike i was able to start crawling up again from this pit. I got my equipment back home again, so that i can draw a bit every evening and changed something more major but i can’t speak about that just yet.

I wasn’t confident about sharing those sketches, because they are not “good enough”. But since i always shared the good as well as the bad ones from my sketchbooks, i decided to do it with these sketches as well.
I still feel mentally handicaped, but looking at this sheet i’m starting to get my confidence back that i will make progress. Hopefully fast ;)

Come on, lets catch some fireflies.

At some point when you’re good at doing something, it doesn’t matter if you like doing it. It is expected of you that you continue doing so, because you are just so damn good at it.

1000px sized version
It took me about 14h to complete, from white canvas to this.

This time the reference map consisted of images from Arthur Hacker, Fausto Olivares, Frederik Marinus Kruseman and Mother Nature

You are restrained! – So I’ve been told ever since i married.

-You look bad, Herald, she said.
Beauty was never a requirement he answered, not when i was made king nor when i was made slave.
-What a shame.
Did you come here to mock me or to set me free, witch?
- Can’t i do both?

Beauty in a beast

Another mindless Speedpainting

The long lost trumpet

Wie gestern bereits gesagt, habe ich auch für dieses Bild Sargents Chess Game als Referenz benutzt, aber nicht nur das. Hier meine für das Bild angelegte Referenzpinnwand. Neben Sargent finden sich darauf auch mehrere Werke von Peder Mork Monsted, John William Waterhouse und Ruan Jia.
Die beiden Fotografien von asiatischen Frauen sind aus der Google-Bilder Suche entnommen, leider ohne Urheberangaben.
Ach ja und rechts bin ich.

A summer well spent

I am referencing John Singer Sargents Chess Game a lot lately, it’s interesting to see how different the results turn out to be. You’ll probably wouldn’t have thought that the Chess Game was a colour ref for this image, but in the one you’ll get to see tomorrow it will be more obvious I think.

I am officialy on vacation right now and originally planned to spent my time wisely on something more valueable, but because there’s a lot of stuff going through my mind right now the pictures i do produce while on vacation turn out to be … more of a occupational therapy, unfortunately.

Journey to Monet

Flash. Fullscreen. Speakers on. (Wecam & Mic optional)

Journey to Monet

Andrew Hem

Aus sich selbst herausleuchtende Farben gibts in den introvertiert wirkenden Bildern von Andrew Hem.

Andrew Hem Portfolio
Andrew Hem Blog

Takemitsu Zamurai

Illegaler Konsum von urheberrechtlich geschütztem Material ist böse, egal ob das Material ausgefallen großartig und abgeschlossen im Netz vorliegt!

Artist: Matsumoto Taiyou (Tekkonkinkreet)
Manga: Takemitsu Zamurai
Google-Ergebnisse

Voll Art Baby

Für manche geistiger Dünnschiss, für andere ganz große Kunst. Für mich der nächste Joscha Sauer.
Simon Höfers Vollartbaby

Fight night


A quick study after reading an article on the VFX-decisions made on Spartacus: Blood and Sand.


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