I have admired the work of Jochen Gerner for a while now. His style is pure cartooning — taking the complex, and abstracting it into something simple. This minimalist, geometric approach to drawing is not limited to just the design of characters and objects, but also to the layout of the illustrations themselves. The illustrations become diagrams, allowing the viewer to take in a lot of information at a glance.
Looking through his sketchbooks reveals the mind of an artist constantly honing his illustrative shorthand, and his own cartooning vocabulary.
His experiments in abstraction and subtraction is no more evident than in a series of modified IKEA catalogue pages:
When I visited the Owlkids booth at TCAF this year, I was pleased to see that their publishing imprint had released a fun book of drawing activities for kids called ARTastic!: 200+ Art Smart Activities. It’s a colouring book with puzzles, challenges, and creativity-sparking activities all drawn in Gerner’s simple, chunky, kid-friendly lines.
It’s quite similar to Japanese artist Taro Gomi’s equally awesome and art-smart Scribbles, Doodles, and Squiggles drawing books for kids — books that encourage creativity and thinking by requiring one to colour outside the lines.
Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog |
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Tags: Cartooning, Creative Thinking, Drawing, Illustration, jochen gerner, Taro Gomi
Creativity is around the corner you have to make some effort to walk through the door and reach out.
Hi, this is the first time I've looked at your site. I really like the top two Jochen Gerner illustrations, especially how he omits words all together. Omitting words and just relying on the strength of the picture is something I have dabbled in myself – it's not always as easy as it looks!
Thanks,
Rob
That guy rocks ! He made himself essential to economic or scientific press, giving this minimalist (and very educative) vision of the complexity you talked about.
guys i admired his works!! It is so cool and inherently beautiful..maybe I let myself try to do this things mmmmm lol:)
Wow, I really like his style. I sense a little influence from Chris Ware.