I started browsing through my old sketchbooks in search for some drawings I could use. So far I choose those three. The last one is from my time in Dublin when I worked for Brown Bag Animation in 2007. Once again it rained….
Italien 2014
These are drawings from my sketchbook from my trip to the Bologna Children´s Book fair in march 2014. I first went to Ferrara, where I drew a lot, than to the fair in Bologna where I met with a friend, and then to Ravenna. We stayed for about a week.
What is sometimes tough is that after drawing for an hour you realize that your book was slightly canted on your knees. You can see this in the above picture with column. It is anyway hard to find a place where you can sit and draw and have a good view…
There was a lot of rain in the beginning that trip. I was driven away by the pouring rain while drawing the unfinished bw picture in the right lower corner…
A new book I have illustrated about pirates will be available in august. I have just found the announcement on the Arena homepage. Work on this project proved to be more difficult than I thought, because the more I read about pirates the less I liked them. The thing is that you start realizing that our image of pirates is 3oies Hollywood Kitsch.
http://www.arena-verlag.de/artikel/pirat-voraus-kaepten-klaus-978-3-401-60016-1
But on the other hand I had fun. I love drawing ships and reading Patrick O´Brian novels is one of my great guilty pleasures ever since I have finished my animated short Captain Bligh in 2003. (For those who haven´t seen that:
Imagefilm
An Imagefilm I did for Asseco Germany. Most of the work was spent on the design. I like it. Music by Frank Schreiber, script Susanne Decker, voice artist Christian Deutsch.
Here is the youtube link:
I normally do a Christmas card every year. This year there very little time because I am working on another book from the same series like the Dinosaur one. So this year´s illustration is actually a christmas card I did for Heipha Pharmaceutical, and was used as a wrapping paper for chocolate bars, which might explain the format.
When I still had more time to spend I used to do two Christmas cards every year. A nice one and politically incorrect one. This is I think 3 or 4 years old, and I like it, although reactions were varied. My own interpretation was that the way we celebrate Christmas is very uniform, but a lot of people saw very different thins in this card.
And yes, perhaps I watched to many parades celebrating the anniversary of the October revolution, and Santa does look like Brezhnev on this one.
Another Film for Planet Wissen, this time about Cookies. I did a variation on the simplified style I normally do, because I was starting to get bored. This was done in about 5 days which was only made possible by the help of Cologne based animator Kerstin Unger (http://kerstinunger.com/). Thanks to her. It is a little rough but it works quite well.
Small statement with a little delay. I am now represented by Barbara Küpers for children and youth literature.
BARBARA KÜPER
LITERARISCHE AGENTUR
Alter Wartweg 3
60388 Frankfurt am Main
Germany
Tel. +49 (0)6109 24 87 30
litag@barbara-kueper.de
www.barbara-kueper.de
Here are two book I have illustrated in 2011/2012 for Arena. I like the sidekicks especially- the small mammoth and the dinosaur. The cooperation with Volker präkelt and Bärbel Müller was very pleasant. I am working at another volume of this series about pirates at the moment. 
http://www.arena-verlag.de/helden/derek-roczen
I made 5 new films for Planet Wissen
Sozialversicherung (Social Insurance ), Vegetarismus (Vegetarianism, Risiko (risk taking), 2 for Existiert die Welt (Does the worl exist)
Risiko is probably the most funny one. I am gonna post a link as soon as it is online, although I am afraid you need to know some German to get some of the jokes. I will post a link as soon as it is online.
Vegetarianism:
Risk:
Social Insurance
SWR Planet Wissen
One more chapter in the works I did recently. This is for a German TV-show about science. I did several episodes during the past year (wind, primitive times, urban gardening, social insurance, vegetarians). I developed this style for limited budget animation, and it works quite well.
They can be found on the Planet Wissen homepage:
http://www.planet-wissen.de/index.jsp
This is my scribble about life in primitive times:
http://www.planet-wissen.de/sendungen/2013/09/24_oetzi.jsp
Unfortunately the quality of the video isn´t particularly good.
Here are some stills
Derek Roczen's Weblog 
