Technik / Wie entsteht eine Illustration

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The beginning is always hardest.
When you look at the images above, you´ll most likely ask yourself some questions. How do you do that? How long does it take? Etc..
First off, I find the passages in the text that I feel it would make sense to illustrate. When reading the text
I often already make small, although very rough idea sketches?. In the second stage the sketches get bigger and more detailed. Most of the time I work with a very soft pencil at this point. Multiple versions come about for each illustration until I am satisfied with the result. Here is an example.

How does it go on?
In the example shown above you can already see that it is not enough to have an idea about how the illustration should look,
but that it is also important to know where in the text it should be placed. I usually paste complete dummies together to see how it all looks
best and whether the illustration and the text give a balanced composition. Illustration Noah

Sometimes, as you can see here, the picture ideas are already sketched, but at this stage they are often just the simplest -scribbles- of which I alone know
what they represent. Only when the entire book layout is finished will the scribbles become sketches. Often, as I said, multiple versions for one illustration.
Then comes the next step. The sketch must be transposed onto the paper on which the illustration will be finalized. At this point it is important to know with which technique the illustration will be painted or drawn.
Right now my preferred medium is aquarelle. This way I have the chance to work very precisely and in great detail, befitting the time requirements and my style of illustration. I will get to other work techniques later.
I usually put my sketches and the aquarelle paper on a light-table and redraw the entire illustration onto the aquarelle paper. Sometimes I render the drawings onto the aquarelle paper without preliminary sketches, but in these cases I must be very sure what I want to draw. For this pre-drawing I use a hard lead, so it won´t get smudged.A number of changes often come to me at this point. Then I rework everything again with pen and ink using a very fine drawing pen, and instead of black ink I use a diluted sepia ink. Illustration Hexenhaus

The entire aquarelle paper is wetted and fastened to a hard surface with masking tape. This is done so that the paper won´t curl during painting and so large areas can be painted evenly.
Only now is the painting finished with aquarelle paints. A lot can still happen at this point, of course. You notice the color isn´t right, the composition isn´t optimal yet, or technical problems creep up. Aquarelle itself is very difficult to work with. You frequently need to start over, because there aren´t many options to correct aquarelle. For a work such as -Hexenhaus- (Witch´s House), for example, to be finished can take approximately 80 hours from sketch to final product. The time requirements naturally depend on the size, style, and technique of the illustration.
Illustration Zirkus

The picture -Der Zirkus ist in der Stadt- (The Circus is in Town) isn´t done in aquarelle, but rather with plain colored pencil: In a very time-consuming complex technique, nevertheless.
In this case it was important to use a hard, sturdy paper, in contrast to the soft porous aquarelle paper. The preliminary drawing was transferred to the paper in the same way and then redrawn with diluted ink again. Then the picture is covered in a grid made of thousands of extremely short colored-pencil lines, much like a four-color print. For example, I always start at the top left corner with a very sharp pencil of a specific color, working my way across the entire picture drawing at an angle down to the bottom right corner. Next another layer of lines are drawn in the same way with a new color, but at a different angle.
In this way the picture is built up and after multiple procedures the picture is finally finished. The great advantage to this method lies in the lengthy possibility for corrections.
For this picture - a 29x41 cm. size - I needed approximately 450 hours. The transparency of the single pencil strokes create an original work the type of which cannot be reached in any other technique.

Illustration Pinguin Other materials that I occasionally use for illustrations are pastel-chalks and pencils, and acrylics. Both are perfectly suited for large-area illustrations and for quick work. The -Penguins- is an example of acrylic work. This is a color sketch which could also already be used as a finished drawing. Illustration Teddy The -Teddy- illustration is a work done with pastel-chalks and pencils. I have used a background of white structured aquarelle paper here. First the base colors were laid in with chalks and partially rubbed, and then everything was reworked with a somewhat finer pastel-pencil.
Of course I also create black and white illustrations with pencil, chalk or ink. Samples of these can be found through this homepage under Gallery. I hope to have given you a bit more background information to better explain the work of an illustrator.

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