A few posts earlier I showed my travel journals. Among them was the first journal I made, about a trip to Prague, Budapest, Krakow and Berlin. For a typography assignment in Art College I used that journal as a source to make a small booklet about two cities that were 'spilt' in the middle: East and West Berlin (In 1991 the differences were still quite obvious) and Buda and Pest. I used he tickets and receipts as illustrations. I printed it the old fashioned way in the school's printshop.
Dutch illustrator/designer Christan Borstlap was commissioned to design the children's stamps for 2009 for the Dutch TNT. This charity project focuses on the promotion of children's education. Dutch children at the age of about 10 go door to door to sell these stamps. I remember when I was at the right age to sell them. I had to run home and start my selling activities immediately, otherwise someone else would have beaten me to it. The stamps were very popular, everyone bought them! Needless to say, that was in the pre e-mail era.
For the promotion of the 2009 stamps Christian made an animation which I saw at the Berlin Pictoplasma Festival. I had never seen the stamps, nor the animation... So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the animations I enjoyed most was designed by a Dutch illustrator! In fact, I was already familiar with his work. His brother Jan-Jacob used to be a colleague of mine at EdenSpiekermann. Check out his website for more great work.
One of the best animations I saw at the pictoplasma festival was Joanna Lurie's Le silence sous l'écorce. You can watch part of the animation below, but I must say the size and the fact that it's just a part of the film doesn't do it justice. Visit her website for more screenings and for information.
My first blogpost about Berlin and the things I saw there, is about Nina Braun. She was a speaker at the Pictoplasma Festival. I wasn't familiar with her work but during her lecture she introduced me to her wonderful work.
After art college she started her own skateboard clothing company called SUMO. After she left SUMO and discontinued the company she stayed true to the use of wool and fabrics, sewing and knitting in her art work.
For instance the sneakers (Sneak like a panther) where the result of living above a rude neighbour who complained about noise all the time. She decided to knit slippers for her friends to wear when they came over to visit. These slippers later resulted into a project of knitted iconic sneakers called 'sneak like a panther'. This project propelled her work into a fine art context.
Her textile pictures and objects are often handknitted which give them an almost child-like and naive look but on the other hand it looks abstract. I was extremely inspired by her work and almost wanted to start knitting immediately! The video below is called Business today, which concerns the credit crunch. Unfortunately the video is in a low resolution.
You may or may not have noticed but I have been in Berlin for 4 days. A sudden, unexpected and definately inspiring trip! For two days we went to the Pictoplasma Festival where we saw a lot of great character design by great illustrators, artists and designers. And we saw a lot of animations which were funny, beautiful, cute, endearing, scary, weird, amazing and sometimes psychedelic.
Here are some random pictures I took on our trip. I'll be posting more this week about my trip.
