papernoise blackbook

After this long break, here they come again, the lazy saturday skeches! Lately I started to split my production in two, I’ve noticed that I like to work on two different styles. One is more oriented towards realistic representation of the human figure, relies heavily on stylized but dynamic brushstrokes, photocollages and anime-like atmospheres, with topics ranging from horror to surreal science fiction. The other is more on the cute whimsical side (but not too cute), with linework leaning towards ligne-claire, higly stylized and deformed characters. While I’m keeping the first under my very own name, for the second I decided to use the moniker Poka Bjorn, which is a mysterious word coming from Icelandic.

This style was born during my crisis period, after I had finished Giétz! and was completely fed up with comics and drawing. It was born in sketches I was doing at work while waiting for After Effects to render somethinge, or for the Terrible Marble of Doom to stop spinning.

I’ll be posting some of these in the next weeks.

Some more sketches from Sardinia 2010.

As you might have noticed I’m back from my vacation. We had a good time, the weather was fine, the sea in Sardinia beautiful as ever, and thanks to a friend of mine, Marco, I now am the proud owner of a Gameboy Camera! Coolest thing ever!

I thought I had been really unproductive at the sea, but now that I browse through the pages I have drawn into my sketchbook I see that it isn’t true, in fact I have been quite productive… I’ll be posting some of these drawing over the next weeks in my “lazy Saturday sketches” series.

Sometimes the forgotten past comes into your life like an unexpected visitor and sometimes you re-discover parts of yourself through it…

A couple of weeks ago me and Elisabeth went with my mother up the mountains, to the village where she was born, to visit our relatives. At one point we took a walk through the woods and I discovered this really weird “pietà” sculpture (a Madonna holding a dying Christ, which you can’t really see in the picture above). What I like about it is, that the face is completely white and the eyes look more like empty holes giving it a pretty unsettling effect. The figure looks more like a ghost or a vampire, than the grieving mother we are used to see.

According to my mother this sculpture was made by a granduncle of mine called Joseph Ploner, better known in the village as “Weber Våter”, who got into wood sculpture when he was 80. Somehow it makes me think that a certain interest for the macabre and the unsettling  might have its root in the family… at least on a latent, unconscious level. Now that I think of it, many of the old iron crosses in the village’s cemetery where made by my grandfather (should take pictures of those too, there were just too many people in the cemetery last time).

The unexpected visitor might have opened a door I had forgotten.

More memories from the holidays (this is going to end soon, promise!)

As expected more from the holidays. But this time… somethig unexpected. Because nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition… I mean, nobody expects The Human Chainsaw!

Some more holiday sketches from France (click for a bigger view)

Collioure, a cliff side protruding into the sea

A city in the sky

Argeles sur mer, how will it look like in 50 years? Like this maybe?