Blog category

Art & paintings

38 articles

20 Aug 2017

Christoph Niemann: How to Overcome the 3 Fears Every Creative Faces

In this 99U talk, illustrator Christoph Niemann shares his three biggest fears: the fear of not being good enough, the fear that our work will be irrelevant, and the fear of running out of ideas. Each of these cripple our process in different ways, but as Niemann explains (complete with hilarious illustrations), there are solutions we can apply to each.

11 Nov 2016

Decorative Stitch Brushes

For a client project, i created decorative borders in Illustrator. When this project was done, i decided to create a new collection of these decorative brushes for use on any vector element.
The brushes are made for vector border work, they have a shiny and decorative look and feel. The brushes are great to use for strokes in elements in illustrations.

28 Apr 2016

Bister Brushes

I was experimenting with scanned drawings in Illustrator, and this resulted in a new collection brushes I created. These can be used to add some bister borders to illustrations.
The brushes are made for vector border work, they have a bister, brown ink look. The brushes are great to use for strokes in elements in illustrations. This is a set Bister Brushes and all illustrations come with the brushes applied.

14 May 2014

The history of Adobe Illustrator

Back in time: the first time i created a logo (sort of) on a Mac with Adobe Illustrator was late in the nineties in a friend's studio. It was my first experience with Illustrator and since then it has captured me till today in my daily work. My friend had her own studio at that time and I was eager to learn how she made all these beautiful stuff so i asked her to introduce me to the basics of drawing on a computer. It took me some time to learn these drawing skills and i am still finding new ways to accomplish certain drawing tasks but it quickly became a tool that i use on a daily basis. In that period of time, i used Freehand and learned most of vector drawing in that tool, later on i switched to Illustrator. I was watching these wonderful short movieclips about the history of Illustrator and want to share them with you - i particularly like the story about the logo and the Botticelli "The Birth of Venus" painting in the Chapter 2.

24 Apr 2013

Weeks ago, i made an illustration for iMinds that was published in a flemish paper. I was very curious to see the end result in the paper as working for print gives a total different result - you have to wait to see it. Before i submitted the final result, i sketched different ideas. I want to share that illustration process here.

07 Dec 2012

Drawing a robot

My son asked me to draw him a robot. I did a few sketches from older postcards and started to draw the robot in Illustrator. I made this tutorial on how to draw a robot with simple shapes like rectangles, circles, triangles and other simple combined shapes. With this basic shape, you can make a Christmas robot out of it, like i did in the illustration or choose whatever you like to make the robot more stand out. Hope you enjoy it!

24 Jun 2012

The design process of the Digimeter report and poster.

Last week, i finished the design of the Digimeter Report, Wave 4 and a poster that is published together with the report Wave 4. In this post, i give an insight in the design process i did for the different chapters of the report, the illustration work of the profiles, the icons i used to illustrate the different chapters, the info graphics i made, the reworked cover page, the reworked logo, the poster design and the color and fonts choices i made in this project.

29 Mar 2012

Creative workshops this summer

A while ago, a good friend of mine, who's a ceramist, Françoise Busin, proposed to do a workshop together this summer. She has organized several ceramist workshops before in the south of France, a place for ceramists. She asked if i could give a drawing workshop and a watercolor painting workshop. Because I love drawing and painting i agreed to help with the program and the lectures of the workshop. We also invited, my sister Sarah to give a workshop on sewing and making clothes and accessories, she has made her own clothing & accessories label Hummingbird and Bumblebee - that is now active as B is for Bird. So in the end, we decided to make it an allround creative workshop. The place where the workshop will be held is Russeignies, a tiny little village in the french part of Belgium, near from where i live.