The truth about TV fortune tellers

This series of illustrations tells the truth about the TV fortune tellers. You may think they are total hacks, but maybe they're the real deal?


The Swamp
In a swamp not so far away lays the house of the fortuneteller you may know from the television. The swamp is the place where people get lost, cars dissapear and souls get stolen. Campers are scattered across the swamp and lost things never to be found again. The house is put together with junk from the swamp.

Tv Broadcast Room
The broadcast room spreads the message of the tv oracles worldwide.

The Study Room
Learning how to predict peoples fortune is not a trick, it's a lifelong study of the mystique. A family car used as study platform is one of the many remnents of the unfortunate swamp victims used as decoration in the study room.

The Work Room
This where the stuff of nightmares are made! Frog Legs, life chickens, money of the greedy, alligator eyes or the lost souls of the fallen are just some of the ingredients used for concuctions with effects no normal human wants to comprehend. The work room is built in an old camper toppled on it's side.

The Witches

Ah The Witches how I loved that book when I was small, correction I still love it :). I bought a bunch of Roald Dahl books to relive some of the more scarier and amazing moments of my childhood. A part of the fun of the books came from the charming pen illustrations done by Quentin Blake. 

I don't know if it was because of my birthday, but in a nostalgic fit of creativity I started drawing witches Quentin Blake Style! And the second pencil sketch was me trying to capture the scary insane comical feel of the witches drawn by Quentin. For the fans of the book I even drew some squared off feet. And yes I know they wore normal shoes in the book, but I liked the idea too much :) 

Interior Sketches

I'm practicing my interior sketches. Trying go  from pen doodle to black and white sketch and set a mood in one fluent go. Feeling more confident with every sketch I do, hopefully resulting in a quicker more efficient workflow. I even reaaranged my desks so that I can quickly switch from my drawing table to digital drawing.

Snowy Room Final

I finished the snowy room sketch in order to enter the Gnomon competition. Hope to show off some completely new illustrations soon. Too bad the monitor shows different color everywhere :/ If the room is yellow instead of blue... then uhmz well then you can't see the illustration in it's full glory.

Happy 60th birthday dad!

Cutout Characters

A little experiment with creating easy readable characters. Although the black outline feels a bit cheap it was a good excercise in thinking about lines :) Hmmz come to think of it, it kinda looks like a sticker page :)

Spiderman Spiderman!

Kitchen Sketch

Tree Dynamics

I recently bought the amazing "elemental magic: The Art of Special Effects Animation" book by Joseph Gilland. As he talked about the dynamics of fluids I thought it sounded quite similar to the dynamics of a tree and I got a sudden urge to apply the theory on some tree sketches. And it payed off ( and I'm only on a quarter of the book), can't wait to experiment further. So thanx mister Gilland!

The Balloon Man

QuickSketch of a ..... room

It was a while since I did a speedpainting. Most of my free time goes to my little pet project game. Had a nice 45 minutes of drawing this during rendering times of 3dsMAX :) and a good 15 minutes doing the snowy road thing.

Overlord 2

I sure hope people picked up a copy of Overlord 2 if so they will recognise these decadent grotesque characters I concept. These were my first big story characters I concepted for Overlord 2 and boy were they fun. Somehow I really like to make hideously looking characters, you can put more details in it and mister gravity gets a chance to do his work on all the flesh. The posing of this screenshot is done by Michiel Wouterse. This screenshot was also featured in an article in the newspaper here in good old Holland and with that I got my 15 minutes of fame :).

Médecins Sans Frontières Game

This was a graduation project done about a year and half ago. The game never was released officially. So I think it's okay to post some artwork related to the game. We made it with a team of 5 people. The art below is art I worked on individually. My task was to art direct the game.

Snowy Room Sketch

Color Studies Part III

Color Studies II

Finally got some time to do some personal stuff. Spend a day working on my little pet project switching it with these two paintings. The dinosaur drawing was inspired by the book;' If Dinosaurs Came to Town' by Don Mansell. I grew up reading this book and I bought a copy online :) Happy times!

Sweater Lady

VVVVVVEEENNNOOOM sketch!

After drawing a lot of speedie spiderman doodles I started drawing venom doodles ( in my ongoing quest to draw a good spiderman or spidey like character ). This one I liked a lot as it reminded me of an old McFarlane venom issue, who's drawings I still think are my favorite spidey drawings.

The Stickfigure Huntsman

A small doodle made on a sketchblock while waiting. I liked the character so I thought I would do some coloring on it :) Then I put it away and my friend Edwin (http://rhemdoodles.blogspot.com) put down some lines over my sketch and voila the guy came to life!

-Daniel Ernst-

Crunchtime and me 8-)

Pfew. Crunchtime stays tough, stress, deadlines and in the end the big payoff that the people will hopefully enjoy :) And next to my work there is me, the artsy fartsy autonomous I want to make my own stuff guy.

I got two projects that I'm working on next to my fulltime job, an illustration book ( which is coming along nicely) and my graduation project. Which I do for fun because I graduated a year ago :). Also I like to animate as well next to my illustrating and gamedesigning and making a game combines all of these disciplines.

* sidenote: I had a very nice story written with wise words, right in this place where I'm typing this, about my study years that I wanted to share, but blogspot deleted them because they did not liked it when I put in a heart sign with letters in blogspot. Be warned people no smoochie letter symbols!*

People usually don't like a webgame to be anything more then a fun passtime that you can easily click away if somebody walks past your desk at work. So if you want to have a magnum opus deep psychological drama game that teaches you important lessons about life, love and death, most people would go for a fun game in which you can blowup blocks or kill stickfigures...... I know I do.....

here are some character designs I did for the game. I went for the more reserved watergod design of the third from above. But I sure loved the other one as well, but it would be al ot harder to animate.

So enough with the reading letters, bring on the drawings!

Daniël Ernst