Moved!

Hey all,
like all the cool kids I'm leaving blogger and moving over to Tumblr, so from now on you can follow me here!

Something new

Here's something I made as a little distraction from other drawings.

Sketches

Sometimes when you're working on something you have the misfortune of liking a different sketch than your art directors or editors. Such as this one.
Oh well.




(The challenge is now of course to turn the sketch they like into an illustration you like as well)

Gallery Nucleus

A couple of months ago Seb Mesnard asked me to contribute to his Edward Scissorhands 20 anniversary blog. I made this piece for it: http://scissorhands20th.blogspot.com/2010/12/kim.html
As well as a blog Seb also organised an exhibition with the fine folks at Gallery Nucleus, who in 2009 also hosted the Where the Wild Things are exhibition based on Cory Godbey's blog: Terrible Yellow Eyes.
For the show I made a slightly altered version of my piece. (I printed it out without some of the snow and then painted it in again).
You can see that here, along with all the other fantastic pieces. http://www.gallerynucleus.com/gallery/exhibition/292



And recently I was asked by them to provide some work for their online exhibition Power in Numbers. I made these two pieces, and there are two others in the works!



And I'm happy to report all of those pieces are sold too!

Poetry parade

Last night I finished four illustrations for the new Querido childrens poetry anthology. This is the third year I've participated on these wonderful books. Editing and art direction as always by the inestimable Ted van Lieshout.

I can't the show the complete illustrations until the book comes out in the summer, but here's a sneak peek.

Here's part of something I've been working on the past few days. Unfortunately I've kind of hit a wall with it. Frankly, it's a big mess, so I'm shelving it for the moment while I work on some commissioned (and paid!) work. Hopefully I can have this finished before autumn:)

Stumptown Cartoonist Show card

Stumptown Cartoonist Show card, originally uploaded by Studio JFISH.

Hey, I have a couple of pieces in this show! So if you're in the neighbourhood do stop by to take a peek.

Prints for sale!

Hey everyone, this has been a long time in the coming, but if you ever wanted to have a print of one my drawings for yourself, you can now get them from here: http://www.society6.com/studio/greenink/store They're totally not expensive, and this week the shipping on the smallest two sizes is free.
And if you do, you'll be helping me pay the rent!

I posted the drawing above before, but here's a cleaned up version.

In unrelated news, I've started a tumblr to collect interesting and inspiring pictures I find online: http://groeneinkt.tumblr.com/

New Orleans

As I've recently mentioned I moved to the United States a while ago, and not long after my arrival I married my fiancee. Then I got very sick and had to go the hospital for a week and about two weeks after that we went on our honeymoon. First we went to Pennsylvania to visit my wife's family and afterwards we went to New Orleans. Now I thought rural Pennsylvania was quite lovely, but New Orleans has to be one of the most beautiful cities in the US, if not the most beautiful.
So here are some sketches I did while there.

Kim

Here's a piece I did for Seb Mesnard's Edward Scissorhands tribute blog: scissorhands20th.blogspot.com/ (Hard to believe that film is already 20 years old!)

The Stockholm Subway

I completely forgot about this! This is a drawing I made last summer for singer Bram de Wijs. It's an illustration for his album Blah Blah Blah Yeah Yeah Yeah.

Seeing as how I've wanted to make some artwork for a cd for a long time I leapt at the opportunity.
It was rather fun to make something that didn't need to correspond strictly to the text or be suitable for young children.

Happy Holidays!

Is what terrorists say; Merry Christmas from me!

A night among polar bears

As previously mentioned here are some of the illustrations for the last book I did for the striped books series. As the series progresses along with the readers this book was for kids of about ten. So the story is slightly more mature than the one I did last year. Instead of a guinea pig saving some kidnapped kids this one is about an Inuit boy who winds up marooned for a night on an iceberg where he's forced to shoot a mother polar bear (!).

New book!

This arrived today, all the way from the Netherlands. It's the last striped book I illustrated. In fact I only completed it late october, I was rather later than I should have been because I was trying to finish another assignment and then I was very busy because I moved to the United States in october as well.
Then I was late another week because I had to spend a week in the hospital. It was rather a nuisance. But despite not having eaten for days and with numerous tubes going in and coming out of me I managed to finish it.

I'll do a blog post tomorrow about the actual illustrations.

From the archives again.

Just a fat pinguin I did for my friend Marije's site Dikkepinguin.nl

From the archives

And by archives I mean giant pile of paper sitting in an old suitcase of course.
This is a drawing I made for an illustration I never finished a couple of years ago. It was for a news paper in the Netherlands. They were doing a weekly feature on their children's page where they had an illustrator making pictures for poems. I was actually the first to do it, and it was quite a fun job.
This one however got the better of me, I couldn't get the colours to work and a day before the deadline I had a different idea that worked out much better than my initial drawing ever would have.
This is one that was published.

Boekie boekie -Catching up part 7 (!)

Here's an illustration I did over the summer for Boekie boekie magazine. It's for a story by Anna Woltz called The secret of the Ice cellar. It was part of Boekie boekie's special 'Castle Groeneveld' number. Everything in it had something to do with the castle.
Like this comic by Jeroen Funke from Lamelos: http://www.lamelos.nl/weblog/2010/12/09/victor-vishnu-en-het-spookkasteel-huuuuu/

This drawing was quite a pain. I never got the foliage to look right (it still isn't quite what it should be), and it turned out my screen wasn't calibrated properly so it took forever to get the colours and the contrasts looking acceptable.
Then they told me that the size wasn't entirely right and I needed to shift everything around.
By the time I was finished I could have illustrated a small book. Twice.

As you can see the top version looks somewhat different from the one below. These two are still the original versions, before the size had to be altered. But between the messing with contrast and colour profiles, I really lost track of which version I prefer.
Probably it's the one that's inside my head and which the ones on my screen will never quite match.

My name is Hare - Catching up part 6

I drew the brush, the paint can and the daubs of paint here. Oh my!


Over the summer and start of this autumn I worked as assistant illustrator on a computer game for children. Something I'd never done before.
The game was called Mijn naam is Haas (My name is Hare). There were already several games about Haas on the market, all of them about an inquisitive Hare and his animal friends. They're designed to help young children increase their vocabularies, and they were making a new game.

I was asked because of the similarity between my work and that of their original illustrator: Wouter Tulp. He had already designed the characters, defined the style for the most part and loads of objects used in the game. However he wanted to devote more time to other projects, so I was asked to take over some of his duties.
And since this was something I'd never done before I thought it might be worth a try.

I worked three days a week in Amsterdam at the studio, where I had the pleasure of seeing my drawings immediately handed over to the animators who set to work on getting it in motion.
In the three months I worked there I drew an incredible amount of things, some of them trivial, but most of them rather fun. I've always enjoyed drawing plants, and that was a large part of what I got to do.
In the game the player gets to shape the landscape the story is taking place in, so many objects and props were required for that. Under the guidance of the Art director Daan Velsink I set to work on those.
Below is a large collection of those things.

As much as this was a job of subsuming my ego and adapting my style and work to the requirements of the game, it was made more than worth it by the pleasure of working with a group of wonderful and dedicated people and of course by seeing my own drawings come to life in the actual game!



ps. Needless to say the copyright of this lies firmly with me and Mijn naam is Haas.

The Little Leaf ~ Catching up part 5

These are some of the illustrations for a new book in the 'Little Striped Book' series. As opposed to the books I've previously illustrated in the series, which were for kids who were starting to learn to read, this one was for (even) younger children. So I had to adopt a style that was suitable for that. I'm not sure I really changed that much, the requirements of the story put these illustrations firmly in a child friendly-zone, what with the talking leafs and all.

To make up for it I promise that the illustrations I did for the next striped book are appropriately more butch and gruesome. But seeing as how I finished the last book in april and it didn't come out until just now, I won't be able to show much for a while at least.









As always you can purchase the Little Striped Books from their site: www.degestreepteboekjes.nl

bits of 8 bit

A while ago I got a rather fun request, Diego Garcia wanted to redraw one of the monsters I sketched for my last contribution to Picturebook report.
Now I can't find that drawing at this point, it's out there somewhere on the internet. But you can see Diego's work here: http://radstronomical.blogspot.com/, and here: http://themoviethegame.blogspot.com/
and here: http://drawedgoods.tumblr.com/
(along with doodles by such talented folk as Jordie Bellaire and Reed Bond).
It was there that he drew this: http://drawedgoods.tumblr.com/post/1718569194/borlo-is-a-halfling-ranger-twang-twang-arrows-b
And I thought it might be fun if I in turn were to redraw that.
So here we are, that's my roundabout way of explaining this post.

EDIT - here's Diego's version of my doodle.