I went to Frankfurt today to pick up Alex’s and my visa for our trip to Japan. On the way back I tried to draw somebody who had falled asleep. Here is the result.

I’ve been working on the cover of a book the last few days and yesterday it was almost finished. Except for the text I had everything painted and colored. I hit the magic “save now” command keys for one last time but then it happened. Painter stopped responding, showing me the dreaded “spinning beach ball of death”. I had to force quit the application facing the loss of several hours of work… Fortunately I have an automatized back-up routine running every morning at 5am and so I didn’t loose the complete file which would have been disastrous.

Why am I telling you this? Well, as I see it there are almost no so called “happy accidents” anymore in digital art. Everything is planned and everything has to be planned. There is not much entropy anymore and digital paint does not yet splatter about like it does in MeatSpace™. I did not think about this yesterday and also did not expect the “happy accident” that I was about to see when I reopened the file to continue my work in painter! Look at it. Isn’t it a beautiful picture? Something which I could have hardly achieved if my tools (the application and the powerbook) wouldn’t have stopped responding for a while… I love it.

The first image is the file as it looks if it where to fit on my screen…

The second image shows an enlargement at 100% actual pixel size…

The last image is a detail shot at about 500% enlargement.

Here is some more stuff that I made during work. Some Japanese words with pictures and then some other things. A robot and a dude playing what?

Something in the process of evolving. Spare time stuff made during my last shift at my day-job.

Inked version. Done whilst cursing at my slow computer.

Before going to Japan I wanted to see my hometown Kiel once more and besides visiting a few dear friends and my dad this is what caught my eye whilst sitting at the dock in front of my dad’s atelier.