Category: 2016

2016, Portraits

The Project That Took Me Almost Entire 2016 To Finish It…

Miss Escapist

“All that we desire
Is to find our source again
The meaning of life”

Epica – The Quantum Enigma

I couldn’t have chosen a more complicated reference photo for this drawing. I definitely couldn’t have. But I’ve fallen in love with the photo when I saw it for the first time and haven’t been able to get it out of my head ever since. It’s truly a piece of art. So one sunny afternoon in spring I got out my pencils and an A3 sheet of paper and started doing a rough sketch of Simone. The first thing I drew was the corset which already took me a lot of patience, as I had to draw white details on a black background. So I left out everything that had to stay white and shaded the rest. After that I went on with detailing and shading the parts that I had left white before. The legs and the shoe were quite simple to draw and quickly done. I continued with the arms, the face and then the hair. “Great!”, I thought. “Only the background left.”. Only…the background turned out be an absolute suicide mission that drove me totally crazy. I tried to draw every single sheet a true to the original as possible, from positioning to shading to the notes written on them. In fact, I tried to copy every single note 1:1. It took me ages and I almost lost my sanity over it. When I finally finished the drawing, it was already December. I had started in spring. Wow. That one required a lot of patience…

But it was absolutely worth it, I love the drawing so much and I’m really proud of it.

Paper size: A3

Materials: Faber Castell blacklead pencils

Time: Forever… (I really can’t tell how many hours I spent on it.)

Reference photo for the drawing has been taken by: Tim Tronckoe

2016, Portraits

Dianne Van Giersbergen

Miss Escapist

“All hear the oceans howling
Voices of the Fallen”

Xandria – Voyage Of The Fallen

When I went to see Powerwolf live last year, Xandria were the opening act. Until that day I had known Xandria but never payed to much attention to them. For me they had always been “just another symphonic metal band” that didn’t stand out in any way. Seeing them live definitely changed my opinion because they were absolutely amazing. Dianne’s stage presence and her incredible voice have proven me wrong. I listened to Xandria’s discography after that concert and I soon came to realise the reason why I had never particularly liked Xandria before: I only liked those songs sung by Dianne. But I liked that ones a looot. So I decided to give Dianne her own portrait. I used a different paper than usual for drawing, a rather rough one with a lot of texture. And if I’ve learned one thing from it it’s that I’ll never do it again. No matter how hard I tried, the shadings always looked a bit weird and I just wasn’t able to make the skin look as smooth as I wanted it to. Also, the perspective is kinda messed up. The hair, on the other hand, turned out quite good and I guess in the end the portrait doesn’t look too bad. At least you can see the parallels to Dianne.

Paper size: A4

Materials: Faber Castell blacklead pencils

Time: approx. 5 hours

2016, Portraits

Tarja and Anette

Miss Escapist

“The faces of the past keep calling me to come back home, to caress the river with awe”

Nightwish – Rest Calm

When it comes to Nightwish it seems to be people’s favourite activity fight over who is / was the best singer. I usually don’t participate in such debates as I think that every singer brought something unique and valuable into the band. They’re all so very different, why should I even bother comparing them with one another instead of just enjoying their music? With this thought in my head I decided to do a portrait of both, Tarja and Anette, standing right next to each other. Because I wanted to respect both previous singers in the same way. So I searched for reference pictures, got out my pencils and then started drawing. I needed a surprisingly short amount of time to finish drawing both ladies and all that was left to do was shading the background.

Paper size: A4

Materials: Faber Castell blacklead pencils

Time: approx. 5 hours

2016, Other Artworks

Moonbathers

Miss Escapist

“We’ll let it storm and rain
We’ll be the hurricane”

Delain – The Hurricane

There are few bands whose album artworks are as appealing to me as Delain. They always manage to capture me with the beautiful illustrations in their booklets as they are super atmospheric. Furthermore, they’ll most likely include a moon and/or a hummingbird and/or my favourite colours. So I was bound to fall in love with this one, of course. And I just had to paint the motive, there was no way around it. Luckily, I still had a canvas lying around so I was able to start right away. I started by drawing a big circle right in the middle and then went on with painting the moon. When the moon was done, I sketched the face and hummingbird silhouettes on top and filled them and the background with a basic layer of black. Now I had to paint some areas red / green which wasn’t as easy as I had imagined it to be. The black background just seemed to absorb every bit of colour that I put onto it. After 8 layers of paint the colours were finally visible and I could continue with making it look like a starry night sky. Therefore, I added fine sprinkles of white paint to the painting. For the stellar hummingbird constellation, I used a fine white gel pen to be able to draw all the lines steadily. I think the result comes quite close to the original, though it of course will never look as perfect. This is one of the artworks that I’d really like to get signed one day, let’s see if I’ll be lucky enough to show it to Delain one day

Paper size: 30 x 30 canvas

Materials: acrylic colours

Time: approx. 6 hours

Reference picture used for the painting: an illustration from the album “Moonbathers”