The finishing short project for which we had half a day. Find a headline in any recent newspaper and make an illustration for it. I chose mine from the sports section...

Yesterday we started our illustration workshop with a lecture by Mette Dreyer, an illustrator who works mostly for the big local newspapers. I don't get all the jokes, but the ones I do get are pretty funny. After that we did a couple of different exercises, which all included (very) quick idea finding and sketching as we were always pushed by time limits. We were also forced to use black ink and matches or thin brushes as tools. Some of my results for:

Five torsos of characters. 5 minutes for all. Otherwise free.

Combine two words into a new image. 1-2 minutes each.
Dog/Scissors – Key/Butterfly – Phone/Car – Brain/Box – Book/Sunglasses

Visualize words or newspaper headline. 2 minutes each.
Jealousy – Depression – "People Get More Sick of Food" – "Housing Will Be Cheaper in the Future" – Results

And now something to make everyone happy again.
P.S. Embedding kicks ass.

I found this picture by Philip Jones Griffiths in the recent edition of the scandinavian Vice and it really twisted my guts. I'm not gonna write about the story behind it, just try to get a free copy at your local skate store or hip fashion boutique before they're gone and read for yourself...

That's exactly what this week has been so far. We are currently having our introduction week into the second half of the semester, which means a new project (editorial design/illustration). People here, unlike in Germany, seem to put a lot of thought into the question how the students can be introduced most efficiently and effectively. So instead of handing out some lame paper with a couple of books to read and a short round-up of the course theme, we get lectures, speeches, field trips and workshops.

It started out on Tuesday with two lectures. One by Ole Munk, co-founder of Ribergaard & Munk, and one by Kenneth Schulz, Creative Director of the danish lifestyle magazine Euroman. Ole Munk talked for almost two hours about newspaper design/layout design and it never got boring. Tiering maybe, as 9 o'clock is just way too early for such a speech. But that guy really knows his stuff. Although I don't really like any of his other works, his newspaper re-designs are very nice.
And Kenneth Schulz, starting out with a portfolio presentation showing a lot of David Carson inspired work, talked to us about the truth of art directing, which is in fact a whole lot of organizing and planning and not even that much of being creative. Oh and he also told us a bit about the typical ad agency/publisher/magazine lifestyle. The stereotypes of all people in charge losing their grip on real life and instead doing coke and the 18-year-old interns? They're all true.

On Wednesday the whole course went to visit Politiken, Denmark's biggest daily newspaper. After getting a tour of the really vast, not to say huge offices of their building, we listened about an hour to one of the guys from the graphics department talk about 'something' – unfortunately for all exchangies it was in danish. The essence, so we were told, is that they get a lot of inspiration from Miro.

After having lunch at the very nice and cheap (4€ !) cantine, I went back to school to take my danish lessons and then on to meet up with Yoshi, Schwan, two more exchangies and three danish students to go to Lousiana, a very nice museum a bit outside of Copenhagen, where I had already been once before to see the Richard Avedon exhibition. This time the main reasons to go were Lucien Freud and Tal R. To my disappointment the latter is way overrated and in my eyes just naive child's play put on 4x4m canvases. Anyways, Freud made up for it, plus there was another exhibition called 'Frontiers of Architecture' which was also quite interesting but I just happened to discover a bit too late. Back in Copenhagen we went to get dinner at a very cozy bar called 'Café Klimt' and I finished off my very pleasant and long conversation with August, one of the Danes, about modern art, fashion, music and movies. Funny, we just seemed to have the same taste in almost everything.