This Blog is closed.

I opened a new blog with a new name and new art.

Go here:


jonaslittke.blogspot.com

I will not update nachodoodles. I do not like the name of the blog and to be honest, I don't like most of the work shown here anymore. I still love concept art, SciFi, Fantasy art and everything in between, it's just not what I want to be doing right now. I might return to it at a later time, but for now I'm trying different things, which you can see at the new blog.
This place hasn't seen an update in a year, so I guess noone will even read this post... ;)


Jonas

this n that

Here's a rather quick painting I did for a weekly activity at digitalartforum. The topic was "refuge". I won!
I actually did a rough 3d model in google sketchup, which was somehow stupid, since I don't have any weird perspective going on... oh well...



Then, there's this painting of a burnt-down forest I did last week, when Max and Bohne came over to draw/paint. (yeah we actually do that sometimes, we meet to sit together and paint. It's the artistic equivalent of a LAN-party, and yes, it's quite nerdy.)



Also, a pencil sketch! Yes, I still do these from time to time, it's not all digital..

Selfportrait (again...)

I just finished this selfportrait. Took some time..
I tried to achieve a more traditional look with some nice fleshtones. Realism is still quite difficult for me, I tend to stylize colors and facial features.
I have mixed feelings about the pose, it makes me look a kinda arrogant. Hank said that it looks like I'm working very concentrated, which was definitely the case..
I wish I could achieve something like this with real colors.

Anyways, it feels great to get back into the painting groove, I've been slacking hardcore over the last couple of weeks.



Edit: Ok, now I've changed and uploaded this pictures three times, I changed the nose, the eyes and the lips.. I'm getting tired of this.

rain machine

Here's something I painted the other day.

Fun with bricks

I bought two small Lego creator sets some time ago. It's fun to build stuff with a limited amount of parts, though I feel the urge to get more Lego, so I can build cooler shit.

First I made some kind of dragster/car thingie..



Then I built this aircraft/spaceship, with moveable parts and all..



I had a blast playing with Lego, it brought back quite a few childhood memories.. The most painful of them is that my parents sold all our Lego by the kilogram when we were older.

Reynold and Bronko..

I worked on the character sketch some more. I named the guy "Reynold" and he has a dog named Bronko.

Black Burt Reynolds..

So school's out until end of september and I've been lazy as hell. Also, I had a light food-poisoning last week, which was a great oppurtunity to watch all three seasons of Battlestar Galactica. It was awesome, but the last episode ended with a HUGE cliffhanger and I think I'm starting to show withdrawal symptoms already.

Anyways, I painted this just now, because I have to get back into things. I'm way too lazy.

I think he looks like Burt Reynolds. Kind of.
I actually think he's one of the guys flying the balloon from the last post.

ballooney

Painted this tonight, when my friend Max came over to paint. We burned through two bottles of whine while he did a comissioned illustration (which turned out awesome) and I tried my hand at an environment.. I'm quite happy with the outcome.
The picture kind of emerged from some abstract shapes (as usual), but I took it a bit further than usual.

I feel like I've been making progress with my paintings lately, since I dare to move out of my comfort zone much more often than before.. It feels good.



Later we tried our hands on two collaborative paintings, but we where too drunk/tired to do anything decent and had used up all our creative juices on the bigger paintings. Still, these were fun to do. Quite speedy and stupid, too..

one

two

In other news, I finished all my college-projects in time (yay all-nighters) which makes me the most relaxed person on earth. Sleep is awesome.

awesomecyberpunktrooperstuff.

Here's a sketch I did yesterday.



And a lifedrawing.




Been pretty swamped with schoolwork lately..
Cheers.

black and white.

Here's a speedy bw sketch I did today. We had crappy weather today, so no drawing outside for me...

It's me.

Hello my loyal readers (both of you)..
it's been a while, but this time I've got a good reason! I moved to Hamburg to study illustration.
So far, everything has been pretty awesome.

I've been doing tons of lifedrawings, here's a small selection from my sketchbook.











And here's something I did for fun when Max came over for a nerdy speedpaintsession.



I'll try to do draw some architecture from life this week, and I want to draw more from imagination.
Stay tuned..

squidhugger

I painted this today, while I should have been doing important stuff:



I don't know why.
So now you know about my secret fetish.

Here's a quickie from last week:

23

Yesterday I felt this slight pinch in my back and I tried to stretch to make it go away... and then all hell broke loose. My back hurts like hell, I got no sleep at all tonight. I turned 23 on the 8th, so this can only mean one thing.. I'm getting old.

Here's a sketchbook page, a selfportrait and a digital sketch..







I listen to a lot of party music lately, dirty synthesizers and stuff.... My lastfm charts say, I like Girl Talk. If you don't know who or what Girl Talk is, you lose.
You can get his latest track over at pitchfork. It makes me dance, even with a broken back.

speedpaintings and schtuff

So what's been going on..
I'll be leaving my beloved Berlin soon, to go and study illustration in Hamburg. I'm excited!

Also, I did my first job as a caricature artist at a big event in Düsseldorf some time ago.. which was pretty awesome. I have some photos which I'll post next time. Thanks to Roberto for the hook-up, much aprreciated!

Did some speedpainting lately, some lifedrawings... not much more.

I get quite a few art-related comments concerning "style".. I guess I get influenced by other artists very easily, which bothers me a lot.
I'm well aware of the fact, that my stuff looks like this or that artist. I have a hard time deciding what I want my art to look like. I guess it will take some time to smooth out the bumps in my style.. everything will come together just fine some day - My influences, my knowledge and.. well, me.
It's just that I feel like it should be going faster.

Anyhow.. You guys will probably be able to tell who's making a big impression on me right now, by the pictures I post today. :)

Here's a knight I painted today.


I like painting fantasy related stuff from time to time.. so here's another one.


Some lifedrawings in my sketchbook, done in ballpoint pen. These are fairly small.




And some abstractizzle shizzle, which I painted one night when I couldn't sleep. Arty!


Nothing else to show right now. I should do some more pencil sketching or actually dabble with real paint..
So lazy.

Art and Dicks.

There was a call for entries for the show "anonyme künstler" (artists anonymous.. i think?) at the Bluetenweiss gallery some time ago. I sent in two pieces, one that I really liked and another one that I just sent because I thought sending only one would be kind of lame.
The one I liked didn't get into the show, the other one did.

Ironically I only scanned the one that didn't make it. Here it is.



I snapped a photo of the other one, it's the one on the right. The two pictures with cocks in them were the only two sexually explicit pieces in the whole show, I couldn't help it but wonder why they put me in the porn-corner..



I made some photos, you can click through them HERE.

I did another selfportrait (yeah I know, boring..)



This link is just for Beni, because I keep telling him to check out the exclusive sketchbook of Nic Klein on Conceptart.org... SO BENI IF YOU READ THIS, CLICK THIS LINK YOU LAZY &#!%§, IT'S WORTH IT.. If you are registered on Conceptart and for some obscure reason know my blog but never visited this awesome thread, do it now. If you are not registered, you should do it just for Nic's art.

Two older quickies

Some time ago,Roberto recorded a video of him doing a quick pencil sketch (timelimit was the length of the song "troy"). You can watch it here. I painted over the sketch. It reminds me of a character from "Asterix & Obelix" on steroids or something.



I also painted my good friend Benjamin some time ago. I had a crappy Fotoref (with flash), so it's not the most original thing ever.. it was more of a warm-up sketch.
I screwed up the glasses..



If you like wacky electronic music with beeps and boops, check out Crystal Castles, some of the stuff might cause a seizure so be careful, but make sure to give their track "Air War" a try. You can download it at their myspace page. Do it.

Ok, I'm off to partaaay. Have a nice weekend.
Jonas out.

Thunderdoooome...

I finished my Thunderdome picture a minute ago. I really can't work on it any longer and when I notice that I'm just pushing pixels around it's usually the point where it's best to just stop and call it a day.

The topic was "the escape"..

Please click the image, it doesn't really make sense to look at it at this size.



It started out quite different from the final version.. the colors where warmer, the whole image was very... comic-style. After a few hours, I didn't like it anymore so I changed it. I'm pretty happy with the final painting.

checkitoutcheckitoutcheckitou....

Two pages from my sketchbook.





Tomorrow, I'll meet up with a bunch of guys from different forums. I don't know any of them, I hope to find some people who like to draw.

Marko Djurdjevic got a blog, go check it out. The guy actually lives about 15 minutes from my place now, small world.

James Jean shows how he works his magic on a Fables cover, go check it out!

Three new links on the right, Ondrej, Tonci Zonjic and Maxetormer. Go check'em out..

Currently, I'm listeing to The Blow, especially their track "Parantheses". Click the link.

In case of boredom, visit Shawn Barber's website (he is awesome) and go to his links, it's probably the best collection of links I've seen in a while. Great art and stuff. But make sure to look at Shawn's art first if you don't know him. If you do know his art, go check it out anyways.

That is all.

Astronauts rule.

I've been obsessed with astronauts lately. I bought this awesome hoodie with astronauts on it some time ago and I can't stop thinking about astronauts, because they are sweet. I'm actually wearing that hoodie right now. It's the only thing I ever wear lately. Besides pants. I even got my buddy Max to paint astronauts so there is no denying the pure awesomeness that is astronauts in general.
So I did a quick sketch of one of these nerdy heroes today.



I watched an interview with that German guy who's in space right now and they asked him if they were allowed to watch movies up there. He said they had "Apollo 13" and "Armageddon" among others. I thought that was hilarious. Who'd want to watch a movie that's all about a desastrous space mission while being on a mission in space? Astronauts are so badass.

Not dead.

Ok I know I neglected this blog and I actually feel bad about it. Apologies to the three people who read this thing.
I won't even go into the details of my absence, "lazyness" pretty much sums it up though.

This is just a quick "blog'n'run" to let people know, that I'll be updating more often again.

Some pictures..

My entry for the first round of artbattle at the digitalartforum..
I got owned by Jaster, here's his entry. He pretty much RULES.

My picture summarizes my frustration with the topic for this round, which was "pan, telephone booth, skull".



Then there was the judging for the first round of thunderdome over at Conceptart.org, and I got into the next round! Wheee.
Here is the picture..




Hm, what else...
Oh, I did a step by step selfportrait some time ago, you can check out all the steps HERE (scroll down for all the steps), and here's the final piece:



And here are two recent pages from my sketchbook..
Doodling:



My father, who had to undergo an operation on his knee some time ago. I used the oppurtunity to draw him while he sat there unable to move and helpless like a newborn. He had actually passed out on me shortly before I drew this because of his narcosis, which was REALLY fucking scary, I panicked for a moment there... his knee is getting better though. Love you dad.

Digitalartforum Artbattle..

Today I painted my character for the Digital Art Forum Artbattle..



I did some sketches earlier, they were pretty boring though.. So I did something completely different.
Here are the sketches, fucking lame.

That's it for now, there should be some finished art coming soon, with the Artbattle and Condeptart.org Thunderdome coming up.
The heat is killing me right now.

ramblebla..

Last weekend I traveled to Frankfurt to meet up with the digital decoy crowd. I think it's save to say that everyone had a blast. Read more about it at Alex' blog because I'm too lazy to write about it right now.
Since there were tons of collabos going on at the cintiqs and ultramegasize intuos3's somehow the Painter VS Photoshop discussion came up.. People would paint in PS and I would load the file into Painter to work on it. I just CAN'T paint in PS. Why anyone would use that program for painting is beyond me.

I made a boring sketch in PS yesterday, just to give it one more chance at least. PS failed.
I hated painting this:



The whole Photoshop suckiness got me in a bad mood, so I fired up my trusty ol' Painter and did this:


Oh the satisfaction..


I'm waiting for the collabos to be posted on the brandnew digitalartforum so I can post them here, until then, all you guys get are some sketches..

"Blessralle", from life..


Doodles on the nighttrain:




Some girl that slept all the way from Frankfurt to Berlin:

Two more..

Here's two more quickies.. The first one was fun to do, because Max was sitting next to me and we were goofing around. I think it shows. It doesn't really make sense.

The second one is probably my favourite so far, although it only took something like 20 minutes.





I've literally done dozens of these in the past days, most of them aren't really worth showing though. I still feel like I'm barely scratching the surface of the whole approach.

Take a look at the "finished section" of ConceptArt Forums, there have been some fantastic threads lately. Off the top of my head, I strongly recommend checking out the threads by James Kei, Marko Djurdjevic, JasonChan, Carl Dobsky, Gezstar, RasselTassel, steak-tron and Aleksi.. I'm sure there's more to look at. They are all on the first page as I'm typing this, so go get'em while they're hot.

FUN

Today I watched the Gnomon DVD "creating unique environments" with Scott Robertson.
Basically, he scans some very quick marker drawings, loads them into one file in Photoshop, plays with layersettings and -opactity, crops a part of the whole mess that looks exciting to him and starts painting. The whole prcess is very happy-accident based and you never really know what you'll end up with..
Well he seemed to have tons of fun doing these sketches, so I tried it myself. After running into some problems (because I'm using Painter7, he's using PS:CS), I finally "got it" and did two speedpaintings. It was amazing and so much fun. I can't believe I never tried something like that before...

Here's the markermess for the first one:


And what it looked like a good 30 minutes later:


...I was HOOKED.
So I did another one.

Markers:


One hour later:



This is fucking awesome. It makes me paint things I would've never thought of myself. It really tickles my imagination and forces me to be creative.
Thanks to my brother (I think it was him..?) who gave me those markers for christmas years ago.. I never really used them up until now. Thanks man!

More to come!

Color practice

Today, I painted a sketch I did weeks ago, I'm very happy with how it turned out, considering I did not use any ref/mirror/model. This is the updated version, people said it was too red, so I played with the colors a bit. This is a speedpainting, around 40 minutes I guess..



Been doing tons of pencil stuff, most of it is too big to scan though and my camera sucks at taking pictures of drawings. It's boring stuff anyways, anatomy studies and other crap. I might post some thumbs and smaller sketches I did for bigger pieces.

What summer feels like..

So summer arrived in Berlin and it's awesome. Yesterday, I tried hard to get this year's first sunburn but I still look pale and sickish..
The weather lures even the hardest of the hardcore geeks out of their holes though, so I don't really stick out.

I'm looking forward to sitting in the park and sketching, drinking, chatting.. hard to believe that I used to be a winter-person.

Been listening to a lot of great music, which also feels different in summer. Lots of Kings of Leon (Thanks to Valentin for that one), some Sufjan Stevens... but there's one song I've been listening to all day. It's Jim O'Rourke's "Fuzzy Sun" Which I found on Feed Me Good Tunes yesterday. It's fucking awesome.
I dunno if it's ok or not to host the song somewhere, I suggest you just head over there and grab the track..

Here's a weird thing I painted today:

Sketchbook doodles

Hey there, sorry for not updating..
This blog thingy has been acting up lately, when trying to upload pictures and posting stuff.. that combined with my extreme laziness and ridiculously short attention span caused the lack of bloggy goodness. I'll try to change that.

Here's two random pages from my small (A5 size) sketchbook.





Also, my buddies Valentin and Max each got themselves a blog, go check them out right now, these guys kick some serious ass.

If you like good music, you might enjoy Beirut. I will not try to describe their music, I'm not good with that kind of stuff. You can download some tracks from their website, I highly recommend "Postcards from Italy", which is the greatest song I've heard this year.

REPRAZENT!1

Today, I painted this portrait of friend and rapper Serk MC. He's pretty much the only german Hiphop artist I like, but I might be biased.. :)
Don't be hatin, go check out his website, there's some music to download..

I used a very blurry and tiny black and white screencap from his video for the track "Ich zähl die dunklen Tage" as a reference. I rushed the whole thing because my neck hurts like hell and I can't stare at the screen for too long but I think I captured the likeliness pretty ok.




peace
or whatever the hiphop kids say these days.

Fake model photos..

Heh, so I really got into building models, here are some photos of what I build the past few days:





...

Just kidding, I did these after seeing the tilt shift tutorial on receding hairline. I don't have Photoshop, so I used Painter7 to make these fakes, doing the masks by hand and stuff.

The first one is the view from my balcony, the second one is a foto my parents took on their holidays on Madeira.

I have no idea why exactly these things trick the brain into thinking "Oh it's a model."...
Anyways, there's tons of these on the internet and some of them are really good. Here's a flicker group for tilt shift fakes, go check it out, there are some gems in there.

selfportrait madness

Ok, so I spent some more time on self-sketches and none of them turned out as expected. Here's the last and best one of about ten I did..



I guess I'll have to try harder.
To anyone who met me in person and is thinking up some witty comment right now, about how this doesn't look like me at all: Don't.

I thought about the whole digital vs. pencil thing and came up with an explanation. When I paint an sp using the computer, I do a rough line sketch which usually doesn't resemble me all that much, then I lay in big blobs of color, roughly defining the shapes and planes of the face and a fat dark blob that is my hair. This will get me a rough likeliness pretty early on, even though the initial sketch didn't look like me at all. It's kind of like a very basic wireframe when doing a sculpture with clay.. to have something to start with. With clay, you start out with big blobs of the stuff to get a rough shape, then you start refining with smaller blobs of clay.. That's like painting.
Drawing is like making the entire sculpture out of wire, with no clay at all. This means, of course, it takes longer to get something that resembles the face you want to portrait.

So I think I'm really just impatient with the pencil, I expect the portrait to look like me a few minutes into the process (like it does with painting), which doesn't happen so I get angry and sloppy to the point where I just want to get the damn thing done so I can move on to things that are more fun. Like.. orcs. Or stupid shit like that.
I just need to be more patient.

Or maybe that's complete and utter bullshit and the only thing that I need is more practice. I guess that'll do the trick.

edit: I just noticed that I look REALLY angry in that portrait, maybe that's because my nose seems to be broken.. >_<

Also, here's PFRT-MAN!

RANT

I'll post some stuff tonight.. been away from the computer for the past days, hanging out with my girlfriends family and eating too much.

Right now I'm trying to draw a selfportrait in pencils, though I will probably not post any of my 999 tries to get the damn thing to look like myself. I seem to be unable to think in shapes when looking at the mirror and drawing on paper with a pencil and it is really really frustrating right now. I have no fucking clue what I'm doing wrong, because I don't have near as many problems drawing other people from life. I don't get it. It's a lot easier to do on the computer although there should be no difference at all. I'm trying hard not to start laughing hysterically while typing this down,because this just doesn't make sense.

You'd think I know what I look like by now, I have done countless selfportraits before plus I look at my own damn mug in the mirror every fucking day!
This sucks.

I'll post some halfassed sketches later, after finishing the selfportrait or stabbing my eyes out with a pencil.

Noisy noise noise..

I just spent a good two hours on this self portrait, all the while those stupid neighbour kids were playing the same fucking song over and over and over again, NOT EVEN GETTING IT RIGHT, which caused me to turn up my stereo, countering their sonic torture with bloc party at the volume of a starting space shuttle.

Thus the enthusiasm on my face....



The problem with digital stuff is, that my palette ist not limited, I have like 16 million colors to choose from.. which results in some weird colors most of the time, especially when doing selfportraits.
Here I spent some time actually observing my reflection for a while, picking eight or nine colors to paint with and then started to paint. I added some darks later here and there but all in all I used my previously picked colors only.
I think it turned out pretty good.

Now I'm gonna do a pencil selfportrait, haven't done that in ages.