Nadine Redlich

0:00Hello. My name is Nadine Redlich. Thank you, it's nice that you're having me. And a big thank you to Liv and Lucy who always write such nice things about my work on the website. And thank you all for coming tonight and for listening to me talking about myself and about my work. I'm a cartoonist by the way and also a very stable genius. The truth is I'm really, really nervous right now and if I fuck this up please don't upload it to the internet. So now I will show you some of my work.

0:48This is a croissant. No seriously I'm going to show some pages of my previous books and then go more into detail about my latest book. I start with Ambient Comics. It contains stress and tension relieving comics.

1:09I wanted it to look as formal and impersonal as possible. So as you may be seen before my drawings are a little bit wonky and wobbly.

1:20So I started drawing them with a ruler and other technical drawing instruments and later on I discovered the magic of Photoshop. So now I will show you some of the pages of the book. Breathe in and breathe out. Close your eyes. Only if really necessary. The ISPN number of this book is 978 3940 304 57 and five.

2:31I also have some copies with me. That's it for Ambient Comics. I'll be right back after the shot break. You can not keep interrupting. I'm having a conversation. I'm right here. Panic totem.

3:14This is my stress opus. It's a collection of cartoons and comics I did I guess between 2014 and 16 or something like that where I just put all the drawings I made that can contain an underlying feeling of stress and discomfort into a book. Here are a few examples. There are a lot of dogs in the book. This particular dog has a problem with his work life balance.

3:52This is what I look like naked. This comic strip is about the horror of waking up in the morning. Some of the illustrations I also made in Little Gifts. As you can see many of my strips are already very close to animations. I'm fine by the way. Never been better.

4:37This is probably my most successful joke from the book. From here on it's going down here.

4:54This is a cartoon about love. Or to be more specific about relationships and codependency and claustrophobia.

5:06So I guess the topics of my latest book were already there.

5:10This is a housewife and a smashing keynote effect. I was told by many of my single friends that this pineapple gift got really popular until the end of the year. Creepy. Here's another dog pooping. Man I love keynote effects. That's it for Panic Totem. Now to my latest project. A tiny book called I Hate You. You just don't know it yet. Just because it's hard to love somebody especially over a long period of time. At first I want to show you a little bit about my general work process.

6:33It always starts with an idea. The idea is a little bit, still a little bit vague maybe, but just the right amount of vague so that you can't anticipate the struggles and the work that will come with realizing this idea. Therefore you write a great thing. That's it. What a brilliant idea. I'm a stable genius after all. I feel like I can do anything right now. As a result you're going to pitch this brilliant idea to your publisher and you're really really confident that it will only take you like three to four weeks maybe to finish the whole project. Then the worst thing that can happen happens. Publisher says yes great idea let's do it and you have a deadline. The publisher of course will have a little bit more foresight than you and puts the deadline to spring.

7:20This is the summer of the year before by the way.

7:27Now that you have a deadline your confidence collapses like a souffle and gets replaced by the fear of disappointing others. So now you do nothing. But just before the deadline let's say right about here the fear of disappointing others by doing bad work gets replaced by the fear of disappointing your publisher by doing no work at all. Therefore you start working night and day like an animal and pretend you did this all along and deliver the work at the very last minute to the annoyance of everybody involved. I hope my publisher doesn't see this but she probably knows anyway. She's really smart. Love you Rita. Back to the book. By the way this process is unnecessary stressful but I guess there's something to it by putting a seed in your head and let your brain ponder on it while you do other things and you later come back to harvest these ideas.

8:29What a beautiful metaphor. Geez. Back to the book. I got the idea and the title for the book from an old drawing I found my sketchbook. It's a couple lying in bed. One of them is sleeping. The other one is watching him or her lovingly and whispers I hate you. You just don't know it yet. This thought cracked me up so much.

8:55I wanted to make a book out of it. So it became the title of the book and the rest is something you would only whisper into your partner's ear while he or she is asleep. Once I had the underlying feeling for the book I produced a lot of sketches to illuminate this feeling but I didn't want to put that much energy into these drawings because as you already know I was moving pretty fast towards the deadline and I also thought it would be creepy to put a lot of ambition into a book that is called I hate you. You just don't know it yet.

9:28Like some kind of serial killer's diary with glued in hair or something like that. Therefore I decided to just sketch everything with colored ink. As you can see here the drawings are very simple but you still can see the structure of the ink so I was relatively pleased with the results and started producing them a lot and scanned them all in and retouched them in Photoshop and blah blah blah. Little did I know that at the end I would decide to print the book with special color and end up scanning everything and retouching it again because I had to scan it black and white. Genius.

10:20Now I'll shut up and show you some pages which made it into the book. That was uplifting. To end on a little bit lighter note I would like to show you what I'm working on right now.

13:20This is a reoccurring character of mine, a stone. I'm working on new strips right now because of course I already promised to Rita my publisher that there will be a book next spring.

13:36This is him in action. That's it. Thank you for listening.