For it’s third time the “illustratoren-festival” was held up in cologne showing more than 50 artists.

Initiated and organized from illustrators for illustrators it became a big success in the first two events in 2012 and 2014, attracting more than 2000 visitors. So the stakes were high.
Because the former venue wasn’t available anymore, the show moved to a new Place. And what a beautiful place it was: Horbach Stiftung in Cologne Südstadt is located in fully renovated industrial buildings, seperated in three main halls with walls reaching up to 6 meters.

It’s been so nice and inspirational to meet all my fellow colleagues. Meeting some of them for the third time in a group show, it felt very familiar right from the start.
For this exhibition the Illu 16 Team spend some money on new wooden walls and they were worth their money. With lots of helping hands we put them together and started hanging our work. For me that was quite a challenge. This time I wanted to show a lot of smaller prints and one or two large ones. But I didn’t do any planning on where to hang which one. So I just started by climbing up the highest ladder I could find and hang one large print as high as possible, just to see if it would look good. It looked good, so I hanged another one on the other wall and started filling up the spaces in between with smaller ones. And it worked quite well even without any planning or grid. Perhaps I was just lucky.

We were still a bit afraid that the new venue or other events on that day could mean few visitors. But we were quite wrong. The opening of the show was a sucess and the next days brought so many visitors that there was a queue up to the street from time to time.

For three days the show was opened, and I hardly managed to speak to every artist or to go to all lectures. It was just too much. And full. More than 3000 vistitors on three days. phew!

Big thanks to the organizing team who did a great job putting up this wonderful powwow of regional artists.

Walky

Freitag 20. Juni, 17:00 – 19:00 Uhr
Auf der ILLU25:

Michael Horbach Stiftung, Wormser Str. 23, 50677 Köln

Holzdruck Workshop

Ein Stück Holz, ein einfaches Motiv, ein Schnitt, ein Druck.

In diesem Workshop schnuppern wir in die Technik des Holzdruckes und probieren es selbst aus.
Keine Vorkenntnisse erforderlich.

10 Plätze
pro TeilnehmerIn 10 €
inklusive Material

Der Workshop richtet sich an Erwachsene.

Für eine Anmeldung oder Fragen bitte eine PN an @jojoensslin oder per Mail an jojo@jojoensslin.de

Ich freue mich auf euch!

I was invited to do a sollo show in my Reps house, known as an exhibition-venue under the name “der kleine Mann mit der Kamera”.

For just a couple of days it had been quite an effort to put together but totally worth it. The vernissage was well visited and received, I was happy to meet interesting new and long not seen old friends. I was able to sell a couple of woodprints. Even to Tatort actress Barbara Philipp!

I enjoyed a couple of wonderful summer days “camping” next to the skatepark so I could enjoy a couple of rides after my daily duties.

For Canadas Neighbourhood Pharmacy Gazette I was assigned to do 4 Cover illustration.
Each cover represented a season and a typical canadian region with its typical architecture and features.

Client: Neighbourhood Pharmacy Gazette
Agency: Twocreative  / Shawn Samson
Anna Goodson Illustration Agency

Together with my riend Lars we started to found a new brand: Fluffy!
We aim to produce high class icecream aand sell it via vending machines at selected spots.
Here are some first illustration and concept sketches.

I guess as an illustrator, halloween has got to be my favourite holiday…

And it is.

client: me myself and I

LA SANTA, LANZAROTE

I’ve spent some time with Prof. Superheiss on the lovely Island of Lanzarote and we went surfing a lot. On this trip La Santa was working most of the days and on one occasion I brought my GoPro to film myself.

That day the offshore wind was very strong making it hard to breathe while paddling and taking off.

Here’s a fun edit.

Illustration for the airport of my hometown.
I was asked to produce a couple of illustrations für Düsseldorf Airports webpages.
Am a  bit proud;)

Client: Flughafen Düsseldorf

This clip was Originally thought to be used at the Frankfurter Buchmesse but actually became a short and nice standalone clip showcasing the diverse spectrum of kombinatrotweiss’ illutrators and linking to our group-project called “Let’s Collab!”. Of course it’s just a glimpse into the amazing work my fellow illustrators have to show.

I had just about two days to do it, so from the beginning it was clear that I will have to reduce and focus on few elements in this animation. As I was trying out a new character rigging and a totally new mouth-rig, I was eager to try it out in this project.

Svetlana Jakel @kombinatrotweiss did the voice recording herself and Christoph von Chamier did the music and sound design. The rigging worked very well and it was nice to see, that in a relatively short amount of time it was possible for me to provide lip-synced animation. I was also very glad, that Svetlana liked my character design of herself, as I often find this to be the hardest part.

client: kombinatrotweiss illustration
voice over: Svetlana Jakel
music and sound design: Christoph von Chamier

Rock Trust is an Edinburgh based organiziation fighting youth homelessness in a very active and creative way.

Bi-annually they organize an art exhibition showcasing donated artwork on postcards they send out to selected artists.

For over ten years now I was happy to regularly participate and provide additional artwork for some of their events. This years topic was “untold”, and I decided I wanted to make a three colour woodcut.
I had been sketching a lot with color pencils in the past couple of weeks mostly using three colors: blue, red and turquoise. I liked the roughness of the drawings and wanted to transport it to the woodprint, so my thought was that using three plates would add some imprecision. I could also use the overlap of colors, something that normally isn’t possible in the “lost cut” technique I normally use.

Even though it was more actual cutting than normally I am very happy with the outcome. I used lino printing colors instead te oil based colors which I normally use and for this motif I love the “dusty” look the paint has on the paper.

I documented the whole creative process and cut it down to a qick minute tutorial: