Marf Productions

MARF Productions is a collaboration art project started byMarenandJanawith the aim to challenge and support each other creatively. We'll tackle one theme a month to try out new things and broaden our horizon artistically. Feel free to join in via submitting or using the #marfchallenge hashtag!

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Marf Challenge December 2016

Snow Stars: We’ll be making snow stars. Yes, the ones made from paper. No kidding.

I don’t know if there is an artist famous for his or her snow star making, so I will redirect you this time for inspiration to google. Or pinterest. Or actually, tumblr. :D

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Invisible @checanty | Jana Heidersdorf December 2016, Snowstars

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Marf Challenge December 2016

Snow Stars: We’ll be making snow stars. Yes, the ones made from paper. No kidding.

I don’t know if there is an artist famous for his or her snow star making, so I will redirect you this time for inspiration to google. Or pinterest. Or actually, tumblr. :D

The women of my family are rather crafty and when christmas time aproaches there will be a lot of self made stars around.

Even my great aunt’s christmas present to me this year was a self made straw star. :D She used to teach us how to make them and it has some family traditional value to me.

So, in the beginning I thought about making a typical straw or paper star and then paint on it or hang something paintable on it. But, with little time on hand and the motivation to paint rather than craft, I decided to do an illustration, thats aesthetics are oriented on the symmetry of snow stars, as well as integrating some astral motifs.

Since I’m doing a lot of anatomy inspired stuff laltely, I decided to draw some stylised muscles and bones in combination with a lot of symmetry and some stars and crescent moons. I first drew with a pencil on thick cardboard and used a book on anatomy in arthistory as a reference.

Then I gessoed the cardboard repeatedly, so it would be able to handle the inks. Then I used undiluted coloured inks to paint the different areas, dimming the brightness with a white wash and smoothing out high contrasts in the drawing. Then I started redefining the details with coloured pencils, adding highlights with a tiny brush and opaque white ink.

After that I moved on to Photoshop, smoothing out some of the unwanted textures and adding further details.

And this is how it turned out in the end:

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‘Red Riding Hood’ @checanty | Jana Heidersdorf November 2016, Fairytale Sculpture Process

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Marf Challenge November 2016

This month it’s getting 3dimensional. The idea is to create a fairytale inspired sculpture or scenery.

Here’s some inspiration:

Red Nose Studio

Virginia Lee

Deanna Wardin

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Jana’s artworks for the Month of Fear Challenge

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Marf Challenge November 2016

This month it’s getting 3dimensional. The idea is to create a fairytale inspired sculpture or scenery.

Here’s some inspiration:

Red Nose Studio

Virginia Lee

Deanna Wardin

I’ve been meaning to create a little sculpture based on Little Red Riding Hood for a while now and this challenge seems like a great reason to finally get to it! Irresponsible as I am skip the sketching process and just go for it, curious where my materials will lead me.

Since I already know I will need a face, hand and feet I sculpt them first, using an air drying claylike material. Mine is already a bit old and brittle, but still works for the simple shapes I’m using. Then I start building the girl’s and wolf’s skeletons from wire and an aluminium foil core wrapped in plaster bandages.

I slowly put everything together, using the plaster to rough out the bodies. Since I don’t aim for a high degree of realism with my dolls that’s sufficient for the further process.

I use a piece of cloth and found, dried plants to add details and clothing. Everything is shaped and held together with wood glue. Some rough stitches give some resemblance to clothing to her coat. My doll process is deliberately messy, so I don’t worry about my non existent sewing skills.

After glueing on some more plant fur, adding some cardboard ears and finally cutting of the unicorn horn I prime everything with dark brown acrylics. The more careful I am in this stage the less do I have to worry later on about white plaster flashing through the coat of paint.

First colour! i use some cheap acrylic paint I have lying around. Painting on textures surfaces like this will mess up your brushes, so make sure whatever you use is cheap or already ruined.

I block in every colour I need. After that I soack everything in a wash of sepia ink, which will get into all nooks and crannies, leading to a textured look. Where I want more saturated colours I take some ink away with a tissue or my fingers. I wait for everything to dry before I dust lighter colour over most areas. This, too, helps to make the textures pop out. Finally I paint in details with a fine brush.

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Marf Challenge Oktober 2016

Choose a challenge: Be it inktober, Month of Fear, drawloween or any other challenge you know of.

I chose Inktober this year. I have been following this challenge for the last two years, never having enough time or the nerves to actually participate.

This year Jana and I decided to make one of the existing october challenges a Marf Challenge. October is so packed with art-stuff, it’s crazy. Jana is participating in both inktober and Month of fear and picking one of those as Marf seemed reasonable. For me deciding to make this our topic was the final push to actually participate in inktober this year.

So, as I am late to the party, at least here on tumblr, I would like to point you to my instagram, where I have been uploading my first inktober pieces - I will upload them here at the end of the month.

Looking back at the drawings I did for inktober there are two main themes or projects: the ink-sketchbook project with fantasy illustrations partly inspired by Gustav Klimt and Emilie Flöge, a lot of lunar symbolism, feminity, mortality and melancholy. I was only able to ink about a third of my sketches, the rest will follow in the next weeks. The other project was the filmstar project, depicting actors from silent movies but also from movies form the late 20th century.

The filmstar project started as a way to loosen up and find an own style in inking. I did not have much experience with the medium before, so I was very cautious and overthinking at first. I had an idea of what I wanted to achieve but realised, that trying to get to that exact goal was limiting myself in finding my own way of execution. I drew the actor portraits on seperate paper, so it wouldn’t be a tragedy, if one didn’t work out as planned. In the beginning I drew Downton Abbey portraits, trying out different kinds of shading and pens, mainly the nib pen, fineliner, brushpens. After doing a handful of drawings I realised, I liked the aesthetics of a few lines as shading, following the curves of the object and creating plasticity and varying in thickness.

I got more comfortable with my lines and moved on to the ink-sketchbook, to the images that felt more personal to me and therefore beared more pressure for success.

You can check all my inktober illustrations on my instagram.

And this is a overview of my insta feed at the end of the month:

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‘A fairytale’ @kuckenburg / Maren König September 2016, Pictures on words

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‘The Mermaid’ @checanty / Jana Heidersdorf September 2016, Poetry

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Marf Challenge September 2016

Pictures on Words: Use your favourite poem or book page (Okay, maybe don’t destroy your favourite book) and make art on it.

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Marf Challenge September 2016

Pictures on Words: Use your favourite poem or book page (Okay, maybe don’t destroy your favourite book) and make art on it.

I’ve decided to change this challenge a bit. I don’t really have poetry books I wish to destroy and while I love the look of old yellowed pages as much as anyone, the only ones I have at hand are mediocre German SciFi and fantasy books from the 80s, which I find less than inspiring.

Way more inspirational are all the

@chrisriddellblog

sketches popping up on my dashboard, so I’ll be inspired by those. 

One of my favourite poems is

The Mermaid

by William Butler Yeats. For me its the ultimate essence of what a mermaid means to me, even though I have the inkling it’s really about love and not fantasy creatures. Then again I love that art can mean so many different things to different people. 

Anyways, I’ve never managed to find a concept that really sums this poem up for me, so maybe this Marf challenge will finally bring a conclusion to this matter.

A mermaid found a swimming lad, Picked him for her own, Pressed her body to his body, Laughed; and plunging down Forgot in cruel happiness That even lovers drown.

First thing to do: finding a layout that let’s me include the poem (which is thankfully quite short) and the mermaid. I want her to vanish slowly into the depth of the sea, enveloped by darkness.

Then I transfer a rough drawing to watercolour paper. Since I already know a lot will be lost to the dark paint I don’t have to be especially detailed. Getting the general proportions right is more important.

At first I use black watercolours to create first textures and values. For details and getting the darkness right I switch to acrylic colours. Later I add gesso for white areas and draw in lines and details with carbon pencils and a white colored pencil. I also use that pencil to hand write the poem. Several times and more or less successfully.

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Marf challenge August 2016

This month we will finally get to the image titel themes we postponed in june and july. We decided to squeeze both of them in one month. Everyone who would like to participate can choose one of them or think of a new one they would like to illustrate. The goal is to have one finished illustration in the end, but everyone is free to do both themes or multiple images to one theme… whatever is achievable in time and feels right to you. :)

Jana’s theme: ‘The Absence of Stars’

Maren’s theme: ‘The Nature of her Soul‘

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'The Nature Of Her Soul’ @checanty​ | Jana Heidersdorf

August, 2016

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Marf challenge August 2016

This month we will finally get to the image titel themes we postponed in june and july. We decided to squeeze both of them in one month. Everyone who would like to participate can choose one of them or think of a new one they would like to illustrate. The goal is to have one finished illustration in the end, but everyone is free to do both themes or multiple images to one theme… whatever is achievable in time and feels right to you. :)

Jana’s theme: 'The Absence of Stars'

Maren’s theme: ‘The Nature of her Soul‘

This month I decided to combine Marf with a little spontaneous commision for nymla. She figured out a kind of riddle I posted on instagram and thewrefor got do choose my next illustration topic. Which was: an atlas beetle with a very little person riding on top of it.

I instantly wanted to do a symmetrical view from above, because symmetry is fun and I really was into the idea of painting those wings. Because of this perspective I decided to depict a little sleeping person curled up on the back of the beetle. I chose Janas title suggestion 'The Absence of Stars' thinking of the beetle being a fantastic creature, that picks up dreamers in their sleep and takes them on a wonderful trip through the nightsky. So the golden sparkles we see at night are actually the dreamcarriers, not stars. :D :)

In this year I have started to record a lot of my workprocess. So this time I can actually put a lot of short WIP-videos in here. Strangely enough I couldn’t link the videos from my tumblr account, but instagram works. :D so, first step: getting a nice atlas beelte reference and starting sketching.

A video posted by Maren König (@kuckenburg) on Aug 20, 2016 at 12:33pm PDT

Then setting the base acrylic paint layers and deciding the colourcomposition of the illustration.

A video posted by Maren König (@kuckenburg) on Aug 21, 2016 at 4:33am PDT

More acrylic paint, a lot of scratching with a palette knife in the still wet paint and additional goldpaint splattering. This part was fantastic and good for the soul; there were no rules, just happy messy fun!

Then I added transparent paint layers with oilpaint. I like to use oilpaint at the end for the creamy paint transitions and the highlights. But remember, oilpaint can take forever to dry, deending on the surface your painting on, the paint you’re using, how thick you apply the colours and how much diluent you use.

A video posted by Maren König (@kuckenburg) on Aug 22, 2016 at 1:41pm PDT

Redefining some tiny details with a scalpel and some coloured pencils.

A video posted by Maren König (@kuckenburg) on Aug 22, 2016 at 5:12pm PDT

(Fancy shot with my colour palette.)

(A little makro video of the details. Very sorry for the shaky recording, I really need to do something about that... :/ )

A video posted by Maren König (@kuckenburg) on Aug 22, 2016 at 9:27am PDT

A makro photograph of the little dreamer. I really like the colours! And brush strokes up close are cool, no matter how the rest of the painting might look :D

Yes, and that’s it. That’s the finished painting! I have to say I like it more in person, there is a lot of goldshimmering going on and the white highlights are applied thickly, so you can’t really transfer this thick paint look into a photograph. But yeah, all in all I’m rather happy with how it turned out. And mostly it was a very enjoyable process and I actually figured out a bit what workprocess works good for me when it comes to oilpaint. Because doing everything solely in oilpaint often doesn’t work very good for me, so this combination of different mediums seems to have potential!

'The Absence of Stars'

‘Every night a dreamcarrier picked her fragile soul up and carried it gently through the darkness. A golden glimpse in the nightsky, a friendly whisper for anyone with hidden wounds that no human could see. The repeated promise that everything would be alright, eventually.‘

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‘Hatch’ @checanty / Jana Heidersdorf July 2016, transparent

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‘Growing affection’ @kuckenburg / Maren König July 2016, transparent