Interview with Tom Krieger
Can you tell us a little about your drawing techniques and how much life references play an important part in your paintings?
You have to distinguish between classic painting and digital painting. I did professional paintings on airbrush board for over 10 years. At that time I always had to start on a white and empty canvas. This was always horrible. There were many steps to create an own photo real look. Mostly in combination with other techniques like aquarelle and sharp knives for the highlights and brushes and pencils and wet paper for some hairy structures...
But today I started digital with parts and structures of real photos in different kinds with self-made brushes in Photoshop. It’s different to describe because every job and every picture create its own workflow. The thing is now to start with a photo reference and to get a painterly look. Today I feel one half each as an artist and a photograph. My photo-equipment grows up for now.
What things inspire you when you start on a new piece of work and who is your inspiration?
Well, my last piece of art which was no job was the picture 'piratestyle'. The inspiration is always reality; in this case the pirates of the Caribbean film and all the hype about it. I wanted to create a possible cinema poster for self-promotion for my portfolio to show the clients new aspects of my producing. For this year I have many self-promotion-projects in my mind and I hope I will have some time to realize it.
If you are a very busy illustrator you have to take care to create own dreams and ideas from time to time. This will take you to the beginning time with full of enthusiasm and it feels great. Nature and music is a great inspiration for me, too
Will you tell us something about your image COWboy and how you did that?
This was a job for an agriculture client. The detailed briefing and a rough color-layout came from the agency. Sometimes I get layouts with full of accidents and mistakes and sometime not. My business was to create a very realistic with depth in field picture with a funny aspect of a wide-angle.
For the reference photos I went to a mellow with full of young cows. Young cows are very curious, so I had some salt and corn for them and they came to me. I did some photos with a wide-angle objective. In Photoshop I played around with some textures, lights and over painted everything for a funny look. The Photoshop file was about 100 layers and 1,5GB big. This is quite normal for such jobs. The cornfield is from my archive, too. Pictures like 'Fruitrain' are very huge too because every fruit and every drop is on a separate layer. You have to be creative for every job to get good reference material, I could tell you many stories about many jobs...
Would you like to give any 5 tips to the Photoshop users which like to create artwork like yours?
- Do not think about your own style or copy other styles, just paint and play around with photos, structures and layers as much as you can so the style will come automatically.
- Just be awake every time and imagine how to paint things that you actually see all the times
- Let you be inspired by nature
- Always compare with the best is a good way to know where you are
- The main tip: be creative and be inspired all the time and: just do it!
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