Greetings Earthling!

Happy new year everyone! Yes, I know the greetings are a bit on the late side and it has been a while since my last post. I’ve been occupied with some nice projects and of course the December holidays in which I somehow ended up in a continuos stream of epic diners, with a homemade six-layer rainbow color cake (a rarity here in Holland) at its apex. Also, I needed some time to recuperate from the already infamous ‘Cosmic Sans New Years Party’ that the amazing guys of the SingerSweatShop hosted and which lead to a city-wide shortage of tin foil, neon colored tape and silver make-up.

For those who weren’t there, but who will be in the neighborhood on February 10th: photographer Aad Hoogendoorn will exhibit some of the portraits he made that evening, so do drop by the SingerSweatShop to see what you missed out on!

FYI: My New Years Laika-the-first-dog-in-space-outfit was repeatedly mistaken for that of an Ewok. Which is mildly understandable and kinda cute, but also so much less cool. I mean: Laika was *cooked* to death – in space! Just sayin’.

In between all this fun I did manage to get some work done, like the desktop wallpaper in the above image. It’s available in several formats, so if you like it, grab yourself a copy at this link:

www.zerbamine.nl/goodies/ny2012

After the jump there’s some behind-the-scenes talk on how this image came to be. And I can tell you, it was a cumbersome delivery!

The initial idea was to make a new version of this picture, which seemed perfect to serve as a desktop wallpaper: plenty of empty space in the image to not scream off the screen and simple enough to make before the end of the year.

Over the holidays I had been paging a lot in the beautiful photography books ‘The Lost Vanguard’ by Richard Pare and ‘Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed’ by Frédéric Chaubin, which sample the beauty of old communist modernist architecture, so I was quite determined to merge some Soviet-inspired architecture pieces into the image.

But as it happened: sometimes an idea that looks good on paper just won't work out in low-poly. The image was kept empty on purpose, but that should not necessarily mean boring. Well, it was. I felt it lacked a 'punch' and the whole setup seemed unsteady and fleeting. Then I changed the scenery a bit, tried out a nuclear campfire idea and I kept coming back to the architecture. I lost myself in fiddling with the buildings' details, while I hadn't even figured out the complete image yet, so ultimately the image felt a bit lost.

Other ideas that were tried out were: a Sim City-like grid with old Soviet buildings, a wintery scene on top of a huge flat, and a tent & campfire setting that would be published in a day and night version, with different characters populating the two frames.

The above two images were from my next attempt: a short-lived idea for a '2012 Nuclear Winter Animal Catalogue', with critters neatly arranged in a grid. I don't know why this nuclear idea kept resurfacing. Maybe Fukushima made too much of an impact over 2011? Maybe it's something my subconscious automatically links to Soviet architecture? Maybe it's just an excuse to make weird animals? By this time I had given up almost any hope of making anything and started making my Laika costume (yes, *again* with the Russian thing!).

New year/clean slate: I was kinda intrigued by the mutant ape-man from the right bottom corner of the animal catalogue sketch, so I decided to promote him to astronaut. And with the trailer for the upcoming 'Alien' prequel 'Prometheus' fresh in my mind the new idea took shape pretty quickly!

It started out with a whole carcass, but with the ominous Big Giant Head being so present in Prometheus' promotional material the rest of the body was quickly discarded.

The sketch didn't feature a whole convoy of buggies and armored cars, but they were too much fun to make.

I *love* rocks! The tall pointy ones are actually only three distinct objects that were slightly rotated and scaled to look different from one another from this view.

The cone-shaped plants in the above render and the bamboo-like ones below were sampled from other scenes I made before, which saved me some time. And besides, they fit perfectly in this desert moon-like landscape!

A ringed planet with some moons was added as a finishing touch. The background gradient was made in Illustrator with a mesh object which allows for a more accurate gradient manipulation. The star grid was made by tracing the edges of a rendered icosahedron and in the end Photoshop was used to tweak the colors a bit . Voilà: mission accomplished! I hope you enjoy the view :)

:: continue>

Creating 'Creating Tomorrow'

It's been quite a few months since I worked on this project together with ShopAround, but I can finally show you the final outcome and some behind-the-scenes goodies! The illustration was made for the new 'Creating Tomorrow' campaign for the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam (HvA) that the wonderful people at lemonscentedtea came up with. Each faculty has been represented by a different illustrator and I got the honors to make a piece for the School of Economics & Management, which apparently has the largest group of students (a number of around 17,000 has been dropped on an occasion, but don't pin me down on this one!).

Lemonscentedtea had a very clear briefing from the start. They showed me this sketch which already consisted out of six boxes, each with their own theme relating to the Economics & Management faculty: data management, sustainability, connectivity, international, economics and Amsterdam. The hands are a recurring and connecting element throughout the entire campaign.
My first sketch looked more like a diorama of landscapes, with the boxes for connectivity, economics and Amsterdam looking pretty similar to the final output. In the end the box for sustainability had to go and some style adjustments were made to clear up the image.
The process of creating the mini-people look was a bit cumbersome, as you can see. What was I thinking?!
Building the final boxes was a pretty straightforward task, as I couldn't stray too much from the approved sketch. The only box that went through a bunch of iterations was the one for management. The earlier versions had larger and smaller characters to visualize hierarchy, but in between an embarrassing amount of color tryouts (not to mention the embarrassing color schemes!) that idea got cancelled and the client opted for the version with same-sized characters.
Piet Oosterbeek photographed the hands and supplied me with high-res images that I could map onto a digital placeholder hand. Or rather fingertips in my case, as I only needed the little elements to drop shadows on small parts of the fingers. This way I could get an almost Hollywood-like quality integration of the 3D elements with real-life photography!

:: continue>

Winding Up

This Friday, November 18th, dutch jewellery designer duo ZWARD will open their temporary minishop at De Meent here in Rotterdam. For a period of six weeks the ZWARD Wind-Up Store will feature and selection of works by 15 designers, illustrators and artists, alongside ZWARD's own jewellery line.
They've asked me to join the crowd as well, so I'll be selling two limited edition Ecology prints (I and III) and some prints of the smaller Island Still Life series. With the holidays coming up, why not drop by and see if there's a special gift to your liking?

In the mean time I have finally finished my little big planet! The fine people at Studio Output are currently busy making it work, so now all there's to do is wait and see. There's some work-in-progress goodies, once again, after the jump:

Aeroplane alphabet

Weird stuff going on with, as it turned out, some wrong settings for my irradiance cache file



My first attempts at animating bone objects

:: continue>

Work in progress...

My little big planet is coming along just fine! I'm really anxious to see this thing when it eventually gets launched, as there will be a lot of tweaking and faking needed to get it on the platform. What platform, you might ask? Well, let's just say for now that the above interface is enough of a hint (not to mention that first line).

Regular readers might have noticed that I've renamed (or finally named) my blog; from now on it's Bridges and Stitches!

It's named after two tools that I use a lot when 3D-ing and it seems appropriate: connecting to new and old places, or anything interesting.

Speaking of new stuff: I've been asked to participate with an upcoming initiative by the ever gorgeous Jelmer and Kirstin from ZWARD. They're still working on the invites and official announcements, but as soon as it's out, I'll post it here as well. And if you happen to be in Rotterdam on Friday the 18th of November: save the date!

:: continue>

Building Better Worlds

A few more pics after the jump!

Generating a new evolutionary tree.

Floral configurations.

View from inside :)

:: continue>

The party must go on!

I know, I know, it's a been long long while. Over here in Rotterdam we're enjoying a strangely mild autumn, which is fine by me after that miserable excuse of a summer. For the past two months I've been working closely with my agency ShopAround and advertising company INDIE to create a new campaign for the 'one happy island' of Aruba. It's kind of a torture when all the reference photos you need are defined in just two categories:

(1) White sandy palm tree beaches lining a gentle turquoise sea, bathing in a bright tropical sun,
or (2) Photos over overtly happy and uninhibitedly smiling people standing on said beaches.

Meanwhile, the average temperature in my living room was 15.3 degrees Celsius.

Of course, I mustn't complain too much, because there was fun to be had. Like finding out that Google images thinks the typical Aruban man looks like Joran van der Sloot. And that the typical Aruban woman has a DD cup. And yes, the rumors are true: I had to look up photos of Paris Hilton... and chihuahuas!

It's been a very busy two months, but I think it was worth it. The complete campaign, that the wizards at INDIE came up with, celebrates the happy-go-lucky attitude of the Arubans and consists out of five illustrations. While the other ads should roll out before the end of the year, I can show you the first one here:

Also, after the jump there's some work-in-progress goodies. Enjoy! ^_^

Happy islanders!

The first decor pieces.

Low-poly tropical plants in not-so-tropical shades of grey.

The first setups still featured a cute mini-van and a little girl making her way to the party, surrounded by local animals. Her orange avian friend is a typical islander: the troupial.

One of the almost-final versions of the illustration. The van had to go and after this version so did the girl and the iguana, to make room for the ad's layout. Luckily the troupial and the burrowing owls could stay. The fallen palm tree got accompanied by two crabs as the client didn't want to give the idea that a tropical storm might have hit the island (apparently, the ABC-islands, unlike the rest of the Caribbean, don't get visited by hurricanes).
:: continue>