Wacken – Miss Escapist Art

“Where is this greatness I’ve been told? This is the lies that we been sold.”

Sabaton – Great War

This project is one of the bigger ones that I did this year so far. I’ve had some plans concerning a Sabaton drawing for quite some time and with the release of their new album „The Great War“ and their special anniversary show at Wacken coming up, I felt like it was finally time to start drawing. I wanted the artwork to be connected to both – Sabaton and Wacken – as I had my ticket for Wacken and was definitely planning to see their show. First, I wanted the band portrait to be based on live photos of the band playing but as I couldn’t find suitable references I decided to go with “standard promo pictures” instead. The ones that I found on Sabaton’s website were exactly what I had been looking for and so I started to arrange the photos of the single band members until I had a nice group constellation. The next part was a lengthy but relatively easy-going procedure: pencil portrait time! For the background, I used acrylic colours and painted another sheet of paper with them. To bring together portrait and background, I cut out the guys and carefully glued them onto the background which was the most stressful part of this artwork – at least emotionally – as I was terribly afraid of ruining the portrait by making a mistake while cutting. It all came to a good end, though, and you can barely see the cuts at all. For Wacken, I got my drawing printed on a large flag. I took the flag with me and we hissed it in our camp for the entire seven days of the festival.

I recorded almost the entire drawing process and made time-lapse videos that I uploaded to my YouTube channel, so if you’re interested in seeing how I worked feel free to head over there (the channel is called “Miss Escapist Art”, not much of a surprise, I know…).

Paper size: A3

Materials: Faber Castell blacklead pencils, acrylic colors

Time: approx. 20 hours

Reference photos used for the drawing: taken from Sabaton’s official website

“Deep into a dying day I took a step outside an innocent heart “

Nightwish – Wish I Had An Angel

This is one of the drawing projects that is most dear to me as it captures a moment from my very first Nightwish concert – at the legendary Wacken Open Air in summer 2018. I was there, standing in the front row (I had waited there for Nightwish to play for about 11 hours straight). I was a Nightwish fan for more than 10 years at that time, so it was kind of a BIG moment for me. I really wanted to dedicate a drawing to this special show and searched for a reference picture that I wanted to use for months. I finally ended up with drawing this scene. In my first attempt I tried doing a coloured portrait but I kinda messed things up and decided to stick with the things I knew for that drawing as I really wanted it to be perfect. Fortunately, my seccond attempt went way better and I made good progress, though I still needed a lot of patience. Especially Floor’s corset took me ages to finish as there are so many little details I had to pay attention to. Once I had finished the portrait itself the background wasn’t much of a problem anymore and I finally held the finished drawing in my hands. I’d really love to show it to Floor in person one day and I hope that I’ll get the chance to do so – sooner or later.

Paper size: A4

Materials: Faber Castell blacklead pencils

Time: approx. 20 hours

Reference photo used for the drawing was taken by: Natalia Kempin

Tag: Wacken

Sabaton – 20 Years

Floor Jansen of Nightwish (The Wacken Edition)