Christoph Niemann
One of the greatest illustrators, interviewed on Escape from Illustration Island
He’s probably my favourite illustrator: not only a great cartoonist and the author of some of the most famous New Yorker’s covers, but also an amazing painter (his watercolours are simply perfect, innovative, great).
Here he talks about how to create a portfolio, how is living and working in New York (even if he moved back to Berlin many years ago) and how he creates his incredible, funny, always clever drawings.
This is a pretty old podcast (it was recorded in 2010), but its content is still updated and Niemann’s advices are always good. And he’s full of them: it’s like listening to a wise man we should always listen to.
Do you want an example?
Your portfolio should always display various techniques because it’s supposed to show how you face different problems and how you solve them (and because you’re an illustrator, isn’t it?).
The most important thing working in the media industry is to be consistent and realiable: being professional means that art directors can trust you, not only in terms of quality of work but also in timing.
What I get from his work is by far to look at reality seeing through the lines: everything has its objective appearance and, most of all, some hidden meanings. That’s the core of his Abstract Sunday project: looking at things not in themselves but for what they look like. Incredible things happen.
In the end, he says just one thing: never lose the perspective that you had as a kid and keep on imagining that there’s always something more in the world. To discover and to draw.
