I need to excercise.

When working I'm sitting on my butt, staring at the screen and only moving my hands a little.
Not only do my back and neck say: "Hello??? You stupid or what?" but my belly grew from cute to not so cute anymore ;)
Today I went to a gym class for back therapy, because I need to do something about the pain in my back. I really enjoyed it and was ridiculously exhausted afterwards :D
I'll definitely keep on going.
Back home I browsed through my favourite blogs and found a great article about how illustrators should take care of their body. I really enjoyed reading it and can't recommend it enough, here ya go: 
Marc Scheff on fitness

Enough, now it's time for artsy stuff again :)
A short while ago I did a private commission for a friend of mine. He wanted to have a cartoon-like portrait of his friend as a birthday gift. It was nice and easy, not much planning and very little time involved. I really like to do things like that from time to time :)

Look at my messy desk :D
I used watercolor paper, pencils for the drawing, watercolor for the background and then ink for the lines.
When I work traditionally I like to use my custom-made lightbox, it's super easy to use and sooo convenient! You can adjust the angle and put a lamp underneath it for tracing a sketch on to better paper for the final drawing. It also works very nice with a clip lamp, as you can see :)
The lightbox was built by a friend of mine, if you like to purchase one, just let me know.

Let's stick with portraits for today. I love portraits ♥
During ArtCamp I had the chance to paint a few faces, even if it was only photo studies:

The references are taken from the wonderful and talented Mark Laubenheimer.
Here's one with the reference on the left side and some process shots:

As you can see, I almost always start with a line drawing and then block in the basic colors. After that I start rendering and work out the details and textures.
I like this photo a lot, because the lighting is really nice and shows how different skin-tones can look. Even if the lightsource isn't on the photo, we know that the girl must be sitting in front of a window and that the weather outside is great, because the highlights on her skin are of a light blue, which comes from the blue sky outside :)

Stay tuned ♥