Category Archives: illustration

illustration, news

Selling Calenders

Leave a comment

Stenberg-calender-2016-Rob-Tijink

Here’s a picture from last year, just before Christmas, when I was selling calenders in the Stenberg cafe. It was freezing cold that day, so I was glad to be asked to sit inside!

I made this calender for the year 2016 and it is illustrated with twelve drawings of old farm buildings at the Stenberg Museum.

Stenberg-christmas-market

I only have a few left, just send me an email if you are interested in having one.

Stenberg-Kalender-2016-Rob-Tijink

Andrew Loomis, illustration, painting

Painting into a wet underpainting

Leave a comment

Head-illustration-in-blue-underpaint

In the book ‘Creative Illustration’ by Andrew Loomis there is an interesting  theory about color relations.

In short, he explains that by mixing a little of one color into all the other colors on the palette, the colors become related and a harmonious painting is automatically the result.

Instead of mixing on the palette you can also paint directly into a wet underpainting.  I tested out this technique and copied one of the four example portraits from the book.

I covered the whole canvas with a thin layer of blue, into which I painted all the other colors.

 

drawing, illustration, news

Illustrations for a poetry book

Leave a comment

Poetry-book-project-1

For the past few months I’ve been very busy working on illustrations for a poetry book, written by author Elin Sveen.

She has published three books; “Fra barnsdommens rike” in 2008, “Minnebok fra krigen” in 2009, and “Å spinne seg en gylden tråd” in 2010.

“Hålasdaar Mæ Sokker På” was released last week on the 1st of May 2015.

The poems are written in the “Toten” dialect, a norwegian local language from the Toten region, about 100 km above Oslo.

In Norway there are many different sounding dialects that even sometimes a native Norwegian speaker may have difficulty understanding.
Speaking the local dialect is encouraged and people are proud to do so.

This is the opposite in the Netherlands where I grew up. There I learned to hide my original dialect -in my case “Twents“- from a young age. Fortunately this is changing a bit now and dialects are more appreciated.

I made the drawings in this book with the common theme of the poems of nature and traditions in mind.

This was a great project to do and I’m pleased to be part of the making of this wonderful book.

Poetry-book-project-2

illustration

Retro illustration

Leave a comment

This weeks’s Illustration Friday theme is “retro”.

I really like illustrating in a retro style; starting with an inked pencil sketch, scanning and then adding a few flat color’s in Photoshop.

Portrait-on-easel

The inked drawing before colouring:

Portrait-on-easel-inked willem-art

Here’s another one I did recently, with a more modern vector finish:

reed-pen-sketch-lichtbak-en-pencil-edited

Haunt
illustration

Halloween Witch

2 Comments

For this week’s illustration friday theme ‘haunt’.
I started with a small sketch in one-point perspective:

After painting the shapes in photoshop, mostly with the polygonal lasso tool, I merged all shapes of similar color to one layer. So all the windows are on one layer, the moon+street on the next, the shadows of the building on another, and so on.

Then I stretched and moved these layers a little to obtain a screenprint-like effect.

Finally I added a paper texture and some scratches and dirt with various brushes.
A similar technique is used in my illustration ‘lost’.

Concorde
illustration

Concorde flying over city skyline

3 Comments
Once when I was in London I heard an airplane flying low overhead. I looked up and saw the very distinctive silhouette of the Concorde. It must have been one of it’s last flights; soon after this the Concorde was grounded.
As a guide to get the perspective of the buildings right, I studied drawings from the book “Perspective Made Easy” by Ernest R. Norling. He points out that the tops of all the buildings are made with square corners, but that it’s not a hard and fast rule.

Stuntplane greeting card
illustration

Airplane Comic

Leave a comment
I’m working on a comic strip series about Radio Controlled airplanes. The first goal is to make 12 three panel strips in color. For this airplane illustration I used Artrage for both inking and coloring. The inking pen in Artrage with with a little bit of smoothing (about 10 percent) gives good results I think.