Go behind the scenes with illustrator Christoph Niemann
Transcript
You come to Cambodia and Vietnam, going down Mekong River. And, you learn a lot here. The biggest realization I had was, the only exotic thing here is me. This place has been around for 2000 years. Everything is perfectly normal. But, this for me, is the travel experience. Questioning also your normal, by going to a place that has a different kind of normal. My name is Christoph Niemann. I'm an illustrator. And over the years, I always drew when I traveled. One of the most important things for me when I do these trips is, not to have any preconceived notions. You come there, and of course, I feel the creative pressure to create a story. And it's like, where are the good images? But, you have live a little bit, and you have to allow for something to happen, and kinda like go back and forth between your mind and the place. When I make a drawing, what I do is, utterly subjective. I look at a landscape that consists of a million different elements. And I pick some out and make them bigger. Some through conscious decision. Some through, just unconscious, "Oh. There's this tree. I happen to have red ink so now the tree is, uh, is red." You filter the world through the limitations of ink on paper. Another aspect that's very important for me when I create an image is a certain kind of contrast. And drawing is great because you can amplify contrast. We go to Angkor Wat in the morning for sunrise. Which is an incredible moment. But, even though it's an incredible moment, I've seen pictures of that before. So, you pair that against the photos that you've seen. But, real life has a lot of people with cell phones, uh, scrambling for the right position to get the right moment of the sun reflecting, in the, in the water lily pond. I think you can take this stock photo postcard moment that you have stored somewhere, and check that against the reality. My goal for a reader to look at that and say, "Yeah. That's my travel experience." It's not this perfect, uh, 4K, everything's amazing, uh, every detail is photoshopped out. But, it's like the moment where something's a little off, I think it becomes interesting. Where I see what I do, uh, is really being like a scientific amateur, and almost, you know, kinda turning the lens on myself, and how I experience this amazing world. I almost feel like I'm the reader who then gets to stand in the middle of the story, and we just see what happens.