Yet another tavern

Another sketch for my book on Jheronimus Bosch, which i am happy to announce as completed! You heard it here first!

Dutch, German and English editions have been secured, others are likely to follow.

This sketch was somewhat inspired by the photographs of Rheinlandish farmers by August Sander.  I have been scanning a lot of these sketches for the purpose of lectures/presentations. I did one last week. A nice experience.

Headless Poster Design

Here's something that I finished last week, a film poster for an independent horror film titled Headless which is premiering in various festivals and screenings this spring. And I recently found out this will be used on the cover of the big box vhs versions that will be released so I suppose this is a film poster and vhs cover design. I'm hoping to be doing more stuff like that in the future. You can see a selection of photos from the film and the trailer in this article at Fangoria.

Beyond that I'm caught up working through 30 interior illustrations for a horror anthology called Madhouse that will be published by Dark Regions Press later this year.

Book

I'm still working on my book. Here are some more pages (if you don't mind....).

Tarot

After much ado, i am finally releasing my all revised, complete, Tarot deck in the Spring. In the restored order with 24 trump cards, that means 80 cards in total.

                                                                         The fool

                                                                        The world

                                                                           Cups 5

                                                                       Pentacles 9

                                                                         Staves 1

New book

I started working on a new book (an "artist-book" that is: only one original, handmade copy). Here are some of the first made pages.

More like it

More sketches...

My Flickr

Busy, Busy, Busy But Still Worried About the Rent

Hello, everyone. Happy new year and all. Glad to see that you all have a lot of great work just pouring out! I've been busy with freelance work (mostly table top RPG stuff and advertising work), so it's been kind of a bum year for personal work. Here are some quick ones.

A drawing I did for a gallery show (on the day of the gallery show).

Flower Girl. I grew up drawing with Pilot felt tip pens, and I still love drawing with them. I like how the nib grips the paper and you can adjust the pressure or twist it a bit to get different line thicknesses. 

A Nightgaunt sketch. I wanted to do a drawing of two Nightgaunts in conversation. They are completely silent and speak only in gesture- so it would be this intimate scene with these two demon characters. Maybe someday.

Lastly, my hand with holes for all the trypophobic ducks. A Facebook friend uploaded a photo of some sort of fungus he was having for dinner, so naturally I had to Photoshop it onto my hand.

Medieval speech bubbles!

I would like to bring to your attention a very funny and interesting entry on historian Erik Kwakkel's blog (in English) on the use of speech bubbles and other comic-like means of visualising speech in medieval manuscripts. He's always good, but it doesn't come more comic-y than this.

some recent stuff

R.I.P. Peter Pontiac

The year 2015 had already started in a cruel way with the assault on the creators of Charlie Hebdo. We all heard about that ad nauseam.

Today, the sad news came of the death of Peter Pontiac, Holland's foremost underground comics artist. He was 63. Unfortunately, not much of Peter Pontiac's outstanding graphic work has been translated into English, so he may not be a household name, but he is to Holland what R. Crumb is to the US. (He was a kind and very modest man who would have objected to that comparison, for sure!)

Gaga & Gigi, iconic punk characters of the 1980s.

His work has always been rooted in rock 'n roll and punk.

In 2000, his graphic novel Kraut was published. It's a haunting tale about his father's shady war past and even shadier disappearance. Its flowery language combined with intricate hand-lettering proved quite difficult to translate, so it hasn't gotten the English edition it deserves, yet.

You can find some background information here. Peter Pontiac never made a secret of his drug use during the 70s and 80s. It eventually caught up with him and destroyed his liver. He regretted it as a big waste of time and was working hard to finish what he envisioned as his last book: STYX, about death. When i  last met him, a few months back, he was fairly optimistic about its progress, but it was not to be. Alas!

Some recent stuff

dildo faced mask hook guy overcome by the reasons

Pieces in progress

 

I previously didn't want to do work in progress scans because (1) it might take the impact away from the final image (2) the final image might be a disappointment to those who felt the sketch showed more promise, particularly since I'll be coloring some of these and I'm not that confident about my paint skills yet but it really needs to happen (3) I'm worried I'll get lazier if the gist of the image is already there for everyone to see, that'll I'll maybe feel more complacent about finishing; sometimes I talked about drawing castles so much that I forget I haven't actually done that many finished pictures with castles.

On the other hand (1) maybe this will be a good thing that takes the pressure off a little, maybe I'll draw more because a certain stage of these drawings are saved and I don't have to worry about the images being completely destroyed in an accident before they are seen in any form, because some of these take a very long time even if I was drawing as regularly as I should (2) I think a few of these are going to be my best work and maybe being too precious about the impact they make when they're finished will steal away from future efforts, as if I'm putting them on too high a pedestal when I should think about always going onto better things all the time.

 

 There are way more unfinished drawings but most of them are even more vague than these.

water from the well for you to drink

Father didn't bring water from the well for you to drink.
Mother didn't bring water from the well for you to drink.
You stupid orphan.

Shaltmira, 2014. 148 x 210 mm paper, rapidographs, ink.

Hieronymus Bosch meets the lumpenproletariat

Much has been said about Bosch being very rich and therefore he could paint whatever he wanted, but this is nonsense. In those times, artists worked on assignments only. And success did not come overnight for Bosch. Only after around 1500, he became an international household name. But even then, it remains unclear how much he was paid for his assignments. I suspect that it may not have been as much as superstar painters like Van der Weyden or Cranach the Elder. What we do know, is that he belonged to the class that paid the most taxes in his city. A telling fact is that he left no money after his death.

By our standards, the life of the rich was not that great, so that of the poor must have been, well, shit.

The resemblance of this composition with that of Martin Schoengauer's Saint Anthony is damn intentional.

New Stuff

Hey everyone.  I finally got a new scanner so I'm going to start putting up some of this new stuff on my Flickr: 

Albin Brunovsky paintings

In 2009 I posted several Brunovsky images in among a lot of other blathering . Since then his art has spread around the internet much much more and I'd like to think I made some contribution to that. But next to none of his painting was online and you'd think maybe that was because his painting was inferior but it obviously isn't.
 In the time since I bought Complete Graphic Work he's become one of my main guiding lights, I can't think of anyone I rate higher, it's an astonishing book with hundreds of images. It's expensive but it's not even vaguely close to a rip off, it's absolutely packed.
 I hoped a book of his painting would come out someday and I just became aware earlier this year of such a book. In the introduction it says it simply wasn't possible to be as completist with the paintings as they were with the graphic work but there's still so much there, many of the paintings are amazing variations of the graphic works but there's quite a bunch of complete originals too.
Buy both Painting Work and Complete Graphic Work here.