A total of 11 cut-out animation short films were created during the week.

These 11 short films, along with all other exhibits, will be on display at Magdeburg Cathedral. All those interested, project participants, and of course the young artists along with their parents, families, and friends are warmly invited to the exhibition opening on June 24.

On that day, art workshops will be offered for everyone to join from 3:00 PM to 5:30 PM.
At 6:00 PM, the exhibition will be officially opened by Deputy Mayor and Head of Culture, Education, and Sports, Regina-Dolores Stieler-Hinz.

In the beginning there was the idea to reprint plants and to weave a story into the resulting botanical leaves. In collaboration with the Berlin author and filmmaker Andreas Strozyk, who wrote a wonderful story for me, I developed illustrations about a bear that slips into a summer dress.

The technique

Monotype is a simple and accessible technique that allows me to add interesting textures to large areas. Using paint rollers, stamps or palette knives, I will apply paint to a Gelli-plate and press paper onto it to create my own unique illustrations.
On this created background, I add more figures and drawings using mixed media, finally a graphic with great density is created.

Since forest is the theme of my story, the technique is very fitting. For the backgrounds, I collected leaves, plants and structures from my surroundings and used them to create a large background. For the animals of the story, I experimented with brush-structures for the fur. Since the technique is too random, I decided to glue the pages with the animals in the forest onto the paper as collage elements. Because you can’t predict exactly how the result will be and whether it might destroy the elements already on the page.

For the colours I used Intaglio inks from Cranfield. But the result on simple drawing paper did not convince me, the colours smear very much and in connection with black the look becomes dirty.

Based on this fact, I switched back to acrylic inks. According to YouTube tutorials, these are the colours that are most commonly used for Gelli-printing. However, I noticed that it is not so easy to draw on them afterwards, because acrylics act like a plastic layer and are repellent to coloured pencils and inks.

To make the print workable, I painted it with a light glaze of matt acrylic paint, thus giving the paper a fine grain on which the crayons could now stick. After mounting the elements on the sheet, I continued working with coloured pencils, acrylic markers and watercolours. I scanned the result of the collages and will prepare them for the text pages of the Gecko children’s magazine.

I am especially pleased that the children’s magazine Gecko will print the bear story in 2024, so it remains exciting!

This project was funded in 2023 as part of the “Kultur ans Netz” grant from the Investitionsbank Sachsen-Anhalt.

I always wanted to use it for my illustrations, to create a phantastic level in my art. It also helps me to get away from “knitting the picture to death” The freestyle Marbling effect gives the audience air to breath and space for own thoughts if they look at the illustration.

It was a long way to find the suitable colors, paper and marbling ground, but finally I found my favourites

Although the technic is ruled by coincidence, I hope I can “tame” the colors to do what I want

Marbling Paper will play a big role in my next children-book. Nothing a digital brush in photoshop can copy