100 Ways to Draw a Bird and Make a Living from Illustration

Illustration is applied imagination. But this book is not only about illustration, though it does contain illustrations—lots of them. But there’s more. This book examines the profession of illustrator, from the vexing subject of money to the question of the right workplace. How do you get commissions? How do you negotiate successfully? What’s a fair price? How do you handle the everyday routines involved in illustration work? And, of course, it presents a wide variety of illustra- tion techniques. In short, it makes an effort to enlighten, be useful and answer as many questions as possible. Its author does so, on the one hand, by offering more than twenty really useful tips for budding illustrators—for example, how to stop the fear that a blank page often inspires—and, on the other, by presenting the twenty-five most important illustration techniques in a practical way that awakens the reader’s desire to learn more. As a parallel narrative accompanying the humorous texts, there are images by very different illustrators who work with a wide variety of techniques and styles. These pictures are diverse yet easy to compare, because they all show the same thing: a bird.

Felix Scheinberger was born on 14 October 1969 in Frankfurt am Main (Germany). The entrance exam for the FH für Gestaltung, Hamburg (University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany) would be his ticket to an education. There he studied illustration, which then seamlessly resulted in self-employment. In the past ten years, he has illustrated more than fifty books, worked for prestigious newspapers and collected various prizes and awards. He has also taught in Mainz, Hamburg, Münster (Germany) and Jerusalem (Israel). His previous publications have influenced design agencies to rediscover hand-rendered drawing as well as pencil and watercolours. Felix Scheinberger now lives in Berlin and is a professor of illustration at the FH Münster (University of Applied Arts, Münster, Germany).