Competitions - putting yourself out there

Hello everyone! Apologies for my absence lately. I just wrapped up a big project (client work) and will soon get the time to start a couple of new illustrations! Thank you so much for your patience :)

First: I can't believe it has been four months since I wrote my last blog post!!! Time just flew by. Summer is knocking at my door and I hope to be able to write more, since summer is a time without client work. There are many subjects I would like to write about. Just to name a few: “Fake it 'til you make it”, “Two Freelancers living together...madness in a nutshell”, “Refilling your batteries”, “The imposter syndrome” .....

But right now I think it is the time to give you an update about WHY I was absent for four months!!

First I was engaged with clients work which I won't be sharing for different reasons. Second: I am engaged with rebuilding my portfolio. Polishing up some of my scientific work from the last two years and *drum roll* build a new portfolio from personal work for ... eh... hm... illustration. Like....not scientific illustration. Fantasy illustration I guess. In Dutch and German you would call it 'free illustration', which makes no sense in English, since it is just...illustration...without a certain field of expertise. Third: Sending out portfolios and solicitations and finally: Fourth: taking part in competitions.

When I finished my study I made a list of interesting competitions to take part in with my final exam and for future fantasy illustrations. Back then I just randomly googled for illustration competition, design, drawing, painting etc. Now I found a really neat website who does that for you and has a broad variety of competitions for you to chose from:graphiccompetitions.com

Over the last six months I have taken part in six competitions, although I planned to take part in thirteen competitions until this summer. Three of those didn't go through with their annual competition, making it ten. Out of those ten I decided to postpone two until I have better/more fitting work and missed two illustrations due to client work. All in all.... six out of ten in six months is still good. But let's have a look which ones paid of to take part in. I didn't make the first round in two out of those six (one of these did'nt come as a surprise), in one case I made in the 'selected but not hung'-section, in another case my work got in the exhibition, one I made the short list and the last is still pending.

Some of my friends ask my why I would take part in so many competitions. So here is why: Working from home, living in a small, but artistically overcrowded city, I think this is one of the best ways to get my work out there. Not that I would purely rely on taking part in competitions. It is something you can do next to networking and sending out your portfolio. I myself think it is a good way to showcase your work and (which is maybe even more important for me) to up my game. If I don't make the selection it is either because: 1) The quality of my work compared to the other illustration not good enough 2)It is not what the judges were looking for in this competition. The first reason wants me to become a better artist, the second makes me think about my target audience (aka the judges in the competition). But there is a third reason for taking part in competitions: Developing a thick skin for the right moments. I know quite a few people who would get discouraged when taking part in a competition and not making it in the selection, or not winning. Of course I don't like it either. But it makes me realize that it is nothing personal. It is not that the judges didn't 'like' my work (or me for producing it), it is just that there may be 200 or 2000 other works and just 50 will be selected. If there are 500 mermaid illustrations 1500 various illustrations and 50 submissions will be chosen, then it is just pure bad luck that you sent in a mermaid illustration. If there are just 5 mermaid illustration in the 2000 submissions your chances are a lot higher to get in with a mermaid illustration. For some competitions you may even want to develop a good technique how you present and when to send your work, as Dan dos Santos points out in his Muddy Colors blogpost: The Strategy of Submitting to Spectrum.

For those of you who are curious about my competitions and exhibitions: I made the 'selected but not hung' catalogue of the David Shepherd Wildlife Foundation: The Wildlife Artist of the year with this little fella:

I made it into the biennial exhibition of modern birdpainters, the MoVo, in Halberstadt, Germany with my Ara and the Blue heron:

(I just remembered that I didn't post anything about finishing my Green-winged macaw)

I couldn't attend the official opening personally, but a dear colleague, Lisa Pannek, took a picture for me!! - and I feel honoured to have my drawings next to the painting "Montagu`s harrier male preening" made by Paschalis Dougalis!


And I made it on the shortlist for the World Illustrators Award by Association of Illustrators and the Directory of Illustration with the illustrations of my final exam:

A new year begins

...or...has...nearly two weeks ago. Everybody knows how time just seems to run through your fingers, right?

In the last post I told you guys about my 'Happiness jar'. It is not just there to end my year in a good mood, but also to start the new year in a good mood too.
Of course there are the new year resolutions...BUT if you think 'Oh my, what a failure the last year was - I hope this new year is finally going to change some things' or 'I HAVE to work harder/more/get better, because last year was so terrible' it already puts you in a negative state of mind. I confess I am quite a negative person myself. The glas is mostly half empty and not half full. There is always this catastrophic chain of events in the back of my head of what COULD happen... although nothing has happened yet and nothing will happen and even IF something is going to happen...it is certainly not as bad as my imagination makes me believe.

For me it is very important to be positive. That's when I make good illustrations. That's when I will end up 'in the zone' while illustrating. Otherwise, I will not finish anything. There is always something to change, always something to do better and I didn't even start about taking big decisions. When you are in a negative place, you restrict yourself. You tend to be more aware of bad strokes and every tiny little 'mistake' is a failure. In the end you get so frustrated that you want to give up on this illustration. Maybe you don't even want to be an artist or an illustrator in that moment. Maybe you start to think 'All this is not for me, not when it is so hard to do it.' This is restricting, being to aware of what you are doing.

In my case, when I start with a positive mindset and I make a 'mistake' - or a happy little accident, as Bob Ross would call it - I just let it go. Maybe that stroke is not as you wanted, but let's see where I go from there. In the end it maybe fits in better than you thought. If it is really heading a direction I am not comfortable with, I just get a new piece of paper and start again, take the parts of the illustration I do like and then go on from there. Nobody knows and if you just let it go, it won't restrict you. The more you draw or paint, the more you practice, the better you will get.




'Talent is a pursued practice. In other words, anything that you're willing to practice, you can do.' - Bob Ross

So when I look at my notes from the 'Happiness jar' it makes me aware of all the forgotten tiny but precious moments. That puts me in a good place. Being in a good place, makes me free.

Ofcourse new years resolutions are still allowed! :) Such as: making more illustrations, being more active, losing a little bit of weight, drawing A LOT MORE, learn spanish, draw more and never forget: to be more positive!!

PS: That's what I am working on right now:

A year is ending

Not just any year. It was a quite exciting year!!



Since two years, I have something that I call my 'Happiness jar'. I write down all the little and big things that made me happy in at some point and put them in that jar. Each year a new glass. I started this new tradition in 2013 because I tend to lose track of all the things I did or experienced and always feel disappointed when a year ends because I wasn't able to fulfil everything I intended to fulfil - or even if I did everything I intended to do - I still think I could have done more or could have done these things better....
At the end of the year I open that jar... and I get a warm fuzzy feeling that this year wasn't so bad after all ;) .



It is something I can just highly recommend!! I just have one rule: I don't put things in which I don't know how they will end. For example: Somebody contacts you for an awesome project and it even seems that it will be a very good paid job. You love the project, you love the client. But... first talks are not always how a project will turn out. The bigger the project the bigger the risk that it will in some way turn out totally different from assumed.... So this is a thing I would not put in my jar. If I would put it in e.g. in April and it gets cancelled shortly after I will feel stupid reading the note at the end of the year that I was so happy about it in the first place. I try to keep a lot of the small daily happy moments in it. A nice talk with someone you look up to, a good meal, something you did you never thought you would have the courage to do so, a perfect day, somebody on street telling you that you look nice etc. Even if you read about it months later it will instantly take you back to that moment. It is also good to mention that I mostly put in events and memories of experiences and not possessions. The later does not make as happy as the first things.



So there were many many things going on this year. I finished my Master with a masterthesis about birds, made some new friends, reconnected with some old nearly lost friends, grew my own vegetables in my own garden, was the maid of honour at my brothers wedding, moved officially to another country (with all the bureaucracy involved...), made my very first progress video, presented at a Behance Portfolio review which had a live connection to New York, visited Paris for the first time in my life and got myself an allotment garden for next year and re-opened my Morlo-shop... :) And these are just the big things... there were many small things which made me just as happy. Of course there were also lows but for me it is better (and I honestly think that is true for everybody else) to highlight the highs to have the feeling of a fulfilled live.

And for next year...


... ahh... I think of next year tomorrow ;)

Polly wants a cookie!

I think parrots are very inspirational birds. Obviously because of their intense colours but also because of the pure variaty of them. Plus the go through big changes in their looks from hatching to being an adult parrot.
That's why I am at the moment busy with an illustration of a green-winged macaw (Ara chloropterus), also known as the red-and-green macaw.



Black and white sketch.



First colour pencil layers to give it some generall shape.



Details in the head are nearly finished!!

PS: You can also follow me for this illustration (or others) on Instagram: http://instagram.com/ankatsart_insta

Final year II

And...now you get the second part of the promised post!! :D

After I visited a parrot breeder, different bird parks and bird of prey centers, the collection of the biodiversity center Naturalis and of course the Clinic for Birds, Reptiles, Amphibians and Fish in Giessen. And making the first sketches to portray the birds I also had to study the important parts: The urogenital-systems of the blue-fronted amazon and the saker falcon.

Not only I had to see these parts to illustrate them in the correct way, but I even had to see them in their different states. First you have the juvenile urogenital-systems: That's when the birds never had been sexually active before. Then you have the active and the inactive urogenital-systems: That's when the birds are sexually active at the time of breeding season or not active because it is not their breeding season. Their sexual organs do change, active = bigger and inactive = smaller.
These anatomical illustrations have never been produced before so I had nearly no books I could rely on. That meant that I had to do many dissections to prepare the sketches for my illustrations.









For the representative of the Psittaciformes shown I chose the blue-fronted amazon because it is a common pet parrot in Germany. That gave me easier access to specimens of this kind. To illustrate a falcon and not another parrot species was important, because there is a big difference in the anatomy of the females of falcons, hawks and kiwis and females of other bird species. Due to evolutionary reasons most female birds just have only one functional ovary (the left one), connected to an oviduct. Kiwis, hawks and falcons have two. So that was an important aspect to illustrate.





Two anatomical sketches made during dissection.

Final Year I

So.... now you get the promised post about my final year!

It all started with a video on the internet. It showed part of a short documentary about a new method to inseminate birds which was used in the Loro Parque Foundacion. Since I grew up with two ornithologists/nature photographers I was hook in an instance. A brand new scientific project about birds and how to protect bird species with it. AND there were no illustrations produced so far for it. Just perfect!!
So I contacted the LOF in Tenerife and after a few mails and calls my application got forwarded to Prof. Michael Lierz from the Giessen University who actually developed the new method with his research group.
A few more calls later I was happy that I could look forward to start my final project in september 2013 in Giessen.

In september I started with studying the birds (and their urogenital systems) I would portray. I visited a parrot breeder, different bird parks and bird of prey centers, the collection of the biodiversity center Naturalis and ofcourse the Clinic for Birds, Reptiles, Amphibians and Fish in Giessen.






But before I got to my finished illustrations I had to make many sketches:



The Pelvis of an amazon parrot





and the skeleton of an amazon parrot (without and with the sternum)





First sketches of the urogenital system of the femal saker falcon.

Little pet parrot

Sooo.... things are sorted out. Summer vacation is knocking at my doors... This was the last year for me as a student. But more on how I finished my Master Programme in Scientific Illustration in tomorrow's post. This past few days I just enjoyed to relax, work in the garden and get some fresh ideas for new projects and illustrations :)

But now I want to show something which I worked on next to finishing my thesis:

A demo of a bird illustration: Forpus Coelestis:






And the finished illustration:

Flying forpus

Detail of the wing

Detail of the head

Sitting forpus


I showed the making of the Forpus coelestis at my Behance Portfolio review in Düsseldorf. If you are an artist living in NRW (or as I am very very close to it) I can just recommend to sign up for the big adobe event happening there next week!! You can register using this link: Adobe World Tour Registration


Tomorrow I will show my final thesis :) Stay tuned!

Questions and Answers

Since I got asked quite a few question in the last time I though I would should share the most common asked questions and answers!!


Q: Can you recommend me some books, maybe instructional videos, or any other resource on colored pencils?

A: In general my answer to that would be that the best thing to do (especially if self taught) is to draw, draw and draw even more.
Actually that is what my teachers make us do. The first year it is all about live drawing classes and trying to really understand what shape and texture you are seeing before you put it on paper. This takes most often more training than it needs talent. I can just repeat what a lot of illustrators, painters and other creatives who inspired me said. You have to keep drawing, even if you have a bad drawing day.



This is a speech of Neil Gaiman about being creative.


About books.... there are MANY books worth recommending, but I would start out with these:

The first would be 'Die Gestalt des Menschen' by Gottfried Bammes. Actually MOST of the books by Bammes are GREAT, why I also recommend 'Der nackte Mensch' ....which I think is one of the few fully translated books 'The naked human'. There is also a book about drawing animals by him.

Right after that there would be two books by James Gurney. These would be 'Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter' and 'Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist'. Although the second one doesn't seem to fit in drawing realistic it still offers a lot of good insights, tipps and tricks.

And if it is just about colour pencils I have one book by Ann Swan which is called 'Botanical Portraits with coloured pencils'. If you need a guideline how to start with coloured pencils I think this book offers some good advise. Although I personally do also some stuff which I just came across while drawing.




Q: What materials do you use?

I personally use Polychromos by Faber Castell. I really like the feeling when I draw with them and for me it is the perfect mix of oiliness and pigments.
There are some other colour pencils as these ones (e.g. Prismacolor, Caran D'ache and some others) but I would just try what works best for you and what you can get your hands on (and what is not too pricey).




Q: What paper, do you use?

For the paper: I have the chance to use the paper we use in the academy which is Schoellershammer Duria 300gr (but I think they stopped producing that and now it is the 250 gr).



In the next entry I will present some inspirational blogs, website or artists :)

Deadline is near

....for handing in my final exam! And you can bet that I am quite stressed out about it. Now it is just about finishing everything in time and make it all come together. That is also why I have put my shop (and designing the new layout for it) on pause.

I thought it is time to show you some sketches and wip's! Here we go:

What you see would be a sketch of a saker falcon, some sketches of blue-fronted amazon's and the 'under-drawing' of one and the nearly done illustration of the other blue-fronted amazon. They will be used for different things in my publication (e.g. introduction...).
The rest will consist of anatomical illustrations, in-vivo and isolated urogenital system and a manual of collecting the semen and inseminating. More details soon! ;)

Sign of life or... Happy New Year!

Didn't I tell you in the last post how things are planned but sometimes don't work out....?? Yup....so much about posting regularly again.
The reason is my final exam. Although I am moving on more slowly than I planned (again....hff) it consumes most of my time and now I even have to go faster.


At the same time I am working on a new layout for Morlo's World - the Fb page as well as the Etsy-shop - and some new Morlos. So I hope there will be some updates there as well.
Besides these things we are still working on our home. There are still the tiny (or last things) to be fixed e.g. painting the old stairs in a new colour or get the garden ready for spring as well as some tiny improvements in my workspace.
For the rest of the time I am just trying not to panic because I have to hand in my publication in about....MARCH allready. Can somebody hand me a paperbag...hfhfhf!!!



But here are - as some kind of starting the big update flood which I promised the last time - some hand drawings with the hand-skeletons. This is part of our Master and we had to draw many more hands to be abple to draw them okay in the future. Hands are a pretty important thing if you are going to illustrate in the medical field ;)

Flood

So i had this idea to just try to post everything from the summer until now in chronological order in a few entries.
Yeah...hm... sometimes you plan things... and it just does not work out that way ;)
At the moment I am overflooded with new and exciting and interesting things which are happening arround me!
That's why I decided to just post everything when it's done or whenever feel lik it and I hope that the past illustrations and back then exciting news will be all posted until december.



This is a new illustration of a red-backed shrike and the second illustration from the 'peekaboo' (temporary title) series. It is also published in my second bird series on behance: Birds II
There you can also see a new illustration of a hoopoe for a spanish agency.

Hope to be able to update soon with my old academy assignments and maybe even some new stuff.

But for now just a picture of me and Lima the Black-chested Buzzard-Eagle in Hellenthal.



I went to Hellenthal a great station for bird of prey in the Eifel in Germany to do some research and get some references for my master publication. There I could follow a day-long workshop on bird of prey and falconers. That's how I got to know Lima and even had a go in traning together with a harris hawk named Cora.

Long time no see

Hei guys,

I had quite a busy summer. Because of that I had to abandon my blog and some other pages for some time. But I am back now!!!

To get you back on track:

I finished the sheep illustration and went on with two rat illustrations :) One in colourpencil (which you can see right here) and one in line which still has to go through some minor corrections and will be shown in the next entry.

After that I finished an anatomy assignment which is still being digitalized and a spread about the 'Double opozing z-plastic' which still awaits correction of the surgeon we worked with.
As soon as everything is ready to be shown I will post it here :)
Next to finishing my last assignments I moved together with my boyfriend in an old house which wasn't renovated since the 50's. Now I have my own workroom with enough space for all my stuff. A single workplace for digital drawing, traditional drawing and sewing ;) Pictures the next time!! :D

After I was just done with all of that I started my final exam at the clinic for birds, reptilians, amphibians and fish in Gießen (Germany). I got to do what I wanted to do: to illustrate a publication about the arteficial insamination of birds using the example of parrots and birds of prey. So I get to draw cool birds :P

I hope to be able to update the blog soon! With the remaining assignments and maybe some final exam sketches. Stay tuned!




PS: There is a new about section on my website!!

My little sheep

So.....I finally finished this assignment for my study. This is my second animal we had to dissect and illustrate. Ofcourse I didnt't dissect a whole sheep (although I nearly bought a whole sheep by accident - still wonder how I would have brought it home with me on my bike :P) but I got a sheeps brain which is a quite common specimen to dissect. Since I was interested in the brain nerves and the eye movement I made this.
Other assignments are coming very very soon!!