Author: derekroczen

Affe Wilhelm

Animation, comic, film, illustration, Uncategorized

affewilhelm

 

This is a rather stupid drawing I found in one of my old sketchbooks. Those are elements for cutout drawings, and the ape is one of the bad (and stupid) ghosts of German history, Wilhelm II. I probably chose it because the media is full of stories about 1914. My ancestors fought on both sides and one of my English relatives is buried here in Cologne in one of the soldier´s cemetaries.

The drawing is from a film about the brave soldier Schweijk by Natasa von Kopp, a documentary with some animated sequences. I am not really content with my work here, but I learned a lot. For the brave here is a link to the film…..

Captain Bligh Sketches

Animation, comic, film, fun, illustration, television
Preliminary sketches for shortfilm Captain Bligh by Derek Roczen
Preliminary sketches for shortfilm Captain Bligh by Derek Roczen

These are preliminary sketches for my short film Captain Bligh from 2003. There a lots of small ideas that had to be left out of the film (…what a pity). The drawings were exhibited at the Filmakademie for quite some time.

Italy 2014 Sketchbook

illustration

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…

New Book, Pirat voraus Käptn Klaus….

comic, fun, illustration, science

Piraten_cover_13

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

Animation, comic, film, fun, illustration, Uncategorized

asseco_stillsImagefilm

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:

Christmas Cards

comic, fun, illustration, Uncategorized

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.

Weihnachtspostkarte_vorne_neu Nordkoreanischeweihnachten

Cookies

Animation, comic, film, fun, science, television

 

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.

Cookies_final_20_11_01  Cookies_final_20_11_01-2

Cookies_final_20_11_01-4