Friends of Hell

Some weeks ago I was asked to design a LP cover for a colleagues friends birthday. And oh, how i loved it getting deep into the demanded Metal style and lingo – with all its darkness as well as the flashing neon elements that you truly just have to love about a good Metal cover artwork. So here is my hail to Iron Maiden and all the other bands with the crazy hairdoes and hard guitar rythms.

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Something new, something old.

I wanted to try out some new design and I’m quite happy with it. And of course, having chosen one of my alltime favourite motives, it was double fun working on it! Here’s to John.

A late summer invitation.

It’s been some time since I made new illustrations. So I was quite happy, having a good reason to pick that up again, when a colleague of mine asked me to design invitations for her late summer party. And that’s how it turned out to be:

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It’s leiwand, I guess.

Here is my second attempt in getting a little bit fitter at Adobe Photoshop CS6 3D possibilities. This is not really an original design, as I followed this very good tutorial to master this look. Also the quote is not mine, but I hold it very dearly, since David Petermann, Executive Creative Director at Wunderman PXP, stated this line to have been the most important question when judging the online advertising entries at Cannes. The expression “leiwand”, some of the most notorious Viennese dialect words, meaning “cool”, “easygoing” or “brilliant”.  And I only can very much agree with this quote and pin this sentence next to my computer.

Typo love.

I spent some time playing around with Photoshop CS6 3D and  added some effects and fonts later in regular 2D mode. It’s a quote from John Lennon’s song “Love”.

Those days in color.

I’m still playing around with the possibilities of colorizing old black and white photographs. Here are two more of my latest attempts: The first one is showing my great-grandfather and his family, the second one two of his sons – one being my grandfather as a baby.

My Great-Great-Grandfather.

Another attempt in colorizing old pictures. This time something more personal as this is a picture of my great-great-grandparents with their sons and daughter, somewhat around 1900 in the Czech Republic. It’s one of the oldest photographs our family possesses and I always was especially fascinated by it. I don’t know this people at all, and yet I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them. People who lived over a century ago in another country. Family.

Freud’s true Colors.

Okay, im officially hooked. Here is another try – this time I’ve taken this popular picture of Sigmund Freud and recolored it. During puberty I had quite an intenisve Freud phase, reading everything about the father of psychoanalysis I could find. This fascination recently got refreshed watching the movie “A dangerous method”. So here’s to him!

Colorized.

It’s not really a new thing around the web or the design community, but I recently started to look into colorisation of old photographs a little bit more. It really fascinates me, how old photographs suddenly look so much livelier and people seem much more real after (simplified spoken) adding some color. Black and white phtography has a thing to let people and places seem to be kind of withdrawn from the real world and like ghosts from a long time ago. And to turn this around and show their real faces has some kind of big magic in it.

I made a first attempt and colorized this old photograph of a broadway actress taken from here. But you can find some really stunning examples by Sanna Dullaway around the web.

Please don’t sing that song, that we all can sing along

Some memories of the Paul McCartney concert yesterday at Ernst-Happel-Stadion in Vienna. It’s his Out-There-Tour and it sure was a blast, of some kind. But I don’t need to see the biggest Beatles-Cover-Band featuring Paul McCartney. I don’t have the urgent want to sing “Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da” or “Hey Jude” in a drunken beer-mood. I want the real thing. I want to see a brilliant musician at work. Not an entertainer, celebrating his Greatest Hits over and over again. There should be more to it. And – I guess you can ask every real Beatles fan – there is.