Waiting for Botticelli

For all who don't know: There is pretty rare exhibition of Botticelli paintings and graphics in Frankfurt am Main in the Städel Museum. They gathered a lot of his stuff from different museums and privat collectors from all around the world. If you like Botticelli's art you should go there. (Check out the rest of the museum as well. They have some nice paintings there with a wide range from gerhard Richter to Picasso and Rembrandt.) But be warned, you might have to wait between 30 to 60 minutes due to a lot of people wanting to see it. (Btw, the famous 'Birth of Venus' cannot be seen there: It is still at the Uffizi gallery in Italy. )


So I made this little sad sketch while standing in the line and waiting for entry. I should mention that it was very cold on that day and I can't remember my fingers hurting that much ever. This and standing while drawing didn't make it easy to come up with straight line. :)

The devil's in the detail

Three is a charm as they say. So here's the third steam locomotive. I am not sure if it is the last one, but for now it is. By the way, this one was a tricky one, because of all the pipes, rivets, the whole grade of detail in general. This time I even remembered to scan the pencil sketch beforehand so you see all three (there it is again:)) stages of the painting.

I'm on the night train

As I mentioned in my first post I'm painting several steam locomotives (for a project in the university). Here's the 2nd one. First traditionally painted with a sepia tone water color, then scanned and abused in photoshop. The speed lines are done with a crow quill and indian ink. Btw, all the pictures are still work in progress.

Once again updated: The first steam locomotive.

Smoking Caterpillar

Today I joined Bobby Chiu's little challenge on sketchoholics.com. We were supposed to paint anything related to Lewis Carroll's classic "Alice in Wonderland". I figured most people would choose Alice herself or the always present Cheshire Cat, so I went for the smoking Caterpillar. As I was already on my next steam engine painting I used water colors, which were already ready. Unfortunately I did not win, but that's fine, because I had a blast in those round about 50 minutes we had to finish the painting. 


What you see here is of course the finished version (about 2 hours) and not the one I uploaded to participate.

Space Turtle 'Plug' and the fat Lady

That's what happens when you start drawing without a certain picture in mind.

The train moves on

Interesting how the same picture looks totally different with a few strokes of Ink and a little photoshop tweaking.

Master & Slave

A friend of mine wanted to draw a line for me to start a picture, another one made a 2nd line. If you want to know how it turned out, well just look at the picture.

From the mists of the past

Another little scene I drew yesterday. Tried to only work with shadows, negative space and not so many outlines. And to try even something else I went for a little coloring.

Winterchurch

I really like churches. They always have something mystical about them and even more when it's snowing. (I like snow, too :))

Here's a sketch I did today, while waiting for someone "very important" to arrive.

Here starts the train

This steam locomotive is the first of a series I will do over the next weeks.

I never really used water colors in this way, but I must confess I'm quite happy about the result and really liked doing it. Steam all the way!