Mutter mit Kind

Small study of a mother caressing her child. The painting style is intentionally gestural and vague. Hands are indeed difficult to paint.

Lilienstein im Herbst

This is another vacation photo turned into a small painting. It depicts the view of the Lilienstein as seen from Königstein in Saxon Switzerland. I took a long break between starting and finishing this piece, because I was not sure I would be able to turn the reference photo into an interesting p …

Notre Dame (Chamberlain study)

This painting is a small study of a plein air painting by San-Francisco-based painter Michael Chamberlain. The original painting can be seen (as it’s being painted) in this vlog on YouTube.

Greetings from France

Every now and then, I get contacted by someone who wants to use my old Star Wars Posters for some kind of cool project. I like that, to have created something that people find cool and useful. Last time, a guy from Siberia literally papered their wall with one of my posters. This time, it was so …

Lady Agnew of Lochnaw

This painting is a “Master Study” of John Singer Sargent’s “Lady Agnew of Lochnaw”. The goal was to copy the original as faithfully as possible. I chose to only paint a section of the larger original in order to have more room for details in my smaller size. It was very challenging for me to achi …

Feld in Wernershausen #3

This is an attempt at a larger version of Feld in Wernershausen #2. Although it is nice to have more room for details, some of the spontaneity of the original miniature painting is unfortunately lost.

Richard Starkey

A small portrait of Sir Richard Starkey, a.k.a. Ringo Starr from The Beatles. I used this photograph as a reference. Here is an animation visualising my painting process:

Feld in Wernershausen #2

I painted this pair of cute miniature scenes on a wooden Jenga brick as part of a wedding gift. I was inspired by the beautiful post-harvest scenery of the Werratal in the Bavarian Eichsfeld. It was an interesting excercise to paint on a surface that small. It forces you to focus on the most imp …

Feld in Wernershausen #1

I painted this pair of cute miniature scenes on a wooden Jenga brick as part of a wedding gift. I was inspired by the beautiful post-harvest scenery of the Werratal in the Bavarian Eichsfeld. It was an interesting excercise to paint on a surface that small. It forces you to focus on the most imp …

Mädchen und Tränendes Herz

Work-in-progress animation:

Stillleben mit Sonnenblumen und Klebstofffläschchen

Work-in-progress animation:

Lone Wolf & Cub

Inspired by the Star Wars The Mandalorian TV series. Work-in-progress animation:

Boote am Pier

Wismar is a cozy little town on the Baltic Sea with a pretty old town. And at the pier you can eat lots of fish sandwiches and watch ships. Work-in-progress animation:

Pont de Nyons

The reference photo for this quick study was taken from below the Pont de Nyons, a medieval bridge in the south of france. The river below was a lovely spot for cooling off in the summer heat.

Strandspaziergang

Work-in-progress animation:

Skizze Ostseestrand

This little sketch is my first painting done directly on the beach en plein air. Despite the burning sun, strong wind, and thousands of annoying bugs and flies, the subject is quite well taken.

Selbstportrait #1

Work-in-progress animation:

Zypresse in Südfrankreich

Quick study of a holiday photo of a small town in the south of france.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard

Starfleet captain Jean-Luc Picard, as portrayed by wonderful actor Patrick Steward, is probably one of my earliest childhood heroes. Even today, I admire his principled style of leadership. Here is a little animation of my painting process. I started out with a drawing that was way off, forcing m …

Cheeseburger

A quick “still life” of a beautiful (to me) cheeseburger. I like that this painting really conveys the essence of the subject and triggers an instant emotional reaction (positive or negative) in the viewer. Based on this photo by Ilya Mashkov.

Mäander

Quick study of a undulating river flowing through Norway. Reference for this painting was a drone photo shot by Norwegian Photographer Ruben Soltvedt.

Unter den Argonath

The “Argonath”, or “Pillars of Kings” are a great monument of the old Gondorian kingdom in J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional world of Middle-Earth. This painting is of a scene in the “The Fellowship of the Ring” movie adaptation in which the fellowship guides their small elven boats over the Anduin rive …

Lago Di Garda (Foggia study)

This is a study of a painting of Lake Garda by italian Painter Mario Moretti Foggia. This was my largest painting yet. To document this relatively sizeable project I captured a couple of work-in-progress images which I managed to combine into the following animation:

Blick auf den Rathausturm von Wolfratshausen

This is a quick small painting of a postcard motif I was given by a colleague as a painting challenge. It depicts a view of the tower of the city hall of the Bavarian town Wolfratshausen similar to this photo.

Stillleben-Studie (Claesz study)

The original painting I used as a reference is “Stillleben mit Totenkopf, Folianten, Taschenuhr und erloschener Öllampe” by Pieter Claesz from 1630.

Alpenlandschaft im Salzburger Land

Another vacation photo I turned into a painting. I had to make a lot of changes to this originally completely overcast scene. I also invented the little path leading into the woods which serves nicely to guide the viewer’s eye into the painting.

Ponta de São Lourenço

This painting is based on a photo by my wonderful sister.

Blick von der Nürnberger Maxbrücke

On the left is the “Wasserturm”, on the right the “Henkerturm”.

China Cove (Youngquist study)

This is a painting of China Cove, a famous beach in California. I admittedly only discovered that fact after I finished painting it. I believe it is a study after Romona Youngquist. I used this Instagram post as a reference, which I think I captured quite faithfully at my smaller size.

Bremsdorfer Mühle

I found this little old waterwheel I stumbled upon during a vacation so charming that I just had to paint it. It is the “Bremsdorfer Mühle” in the “Brandenburger Schlaubetal”.

Landschaft in der Nähe von Meißen

I took the reference photo for this painting out of a moving train.

Breath of the Wild

Gamers will recognize this image instantly. It’s the key art of the Nintendo video game Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The most interesting thing about this painting is the way the sky and midground evoke a lot of stuff happening with only a couple of brushstrokes.

Big Ship (Dawson study)

I always wanted a big ship painting, so I decided to make my own. The effect of light shining on and glowing through the sails was hard to get right. I greatly enjoyed watching it all come together when painting in all the little ropes at the end. The (much bigger) original painting is “Land Ho! …

Day 3 – Land

This was my first attempt at layering sections of landscape with atmospheric perspective. The effect turned out quite nicely. The pebbles in the foreground were a lot of work, but it was worth painting the individual rocks to get a good amount of detail in the foreground. Part of a series on cre …

Mountain Stream (Hill study)

This painting went through so many renditions! Because I painted it on a relatively large canvas, I was motivated to try again and again until I could make it work. I really struggled with achieving a realistic perspective on the river. But it was a lot of fun to paint the washed-out river banks  …

Detail einer Altstadt im Süden Frankreichs

I spent so much time on this painting! It is a pretty faithful rendition of a photograph of my son I took during a vacation in the south of France. I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out. The texture of the paper perfectly matches the disheveled look of the crumbling mediterranean house wa …

Driftless Area (Musil study)

A study of a painting by the inimitable Jim Musil. The original painting can be found at his website.

Einfacher Nachthimmel

This was a small experimental painting that I ended up immediately overpainting, since it did not turn out how I wanted and by far did not look as good as the photograph makes it seem.

The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

Again, something thats right up my alley, combining two of my favourite things: UX design, and LEGO. Interface designer George Cave does an in-depth analysis of 52 different lego instrument panel bricks: At a glance, the variety of these designs can be overwhelming, but it’s clear that some of …

Altes Herrenhaus in der Nähe von Innsbruck, Österreich

This painting is based on a holiday photo of a house in Austria we stayed in for a couple of weeks. This was my first time painting on a larger canvas and it was very challenging to get a good balance of detail all over the canvas. It was fun to paint the peak of the Patscherkofel in the backgrou …

Northwest Waterfall (Hankins study)

This painting is literally an imitation of an imitation of a Bob Ross painting. To paint it I followed this painting tutorial by Nic Hankins, an acolyte of Bob Ross. It was very interesting to paint on a pure black canvas in the lower half of the painting. It made for a quick painting with great  …

The code I’m still ashamed of

This post by Bill Sourour bringing together code and ethics really resonated for me. He describes working as a software developer and doing some ruthless marketing for a questionable medical drug targeted at teenage girls: Nothing that we were doing was illegal. As the youngest developer on my …

Birken im Herbst

This is one of my first completed paintings. It’s a paintalong of some Bob-Ross-style YouTube tutorial. It was thrilling to see the birch tree trunks come to life by combining whites and light blues. The layout is pretty wonky, but I like the way the colours turned out, especially the red foregr …

Greetings from Siberia

Some years ago, while I was still a university student, I had a bit of a creative phase and made a bunch of stylised Star-Wars-themed posters in Photoshop and put them on my website for anyone to download. Not too many people noticed, but every once in a while I get an email from somebody thankin …

Parse Bible and Quran versions with ScriptureKit for PHP

Today I am happy to announce I am open-sourcing a key component of my Devotionalium project: ScriptureKit is a PHP framework for working with Tanakh, Bible, and Quran XML files from the Zefania Project and qurandatabase.org. There are lots of free and open source Tanakh, Bible and Quran editions …

wp-toolkit – An object-oriented WordPress API wrapper

I am the developer taking care of the WordPress-based online magazine Die Eule. WordPress is not known for it’s clean and modern programming API. The WordPress coding style is relatively antiquated and there are many parts of WordPress that do not work in an object-oriented way. This makes it dif …

Reeder for Mac 3.0 Review

I have been using Reeder for Mac by swiss indie-developer Silvio Rizzi ever since the very first beta and bought it right on its first day on sale. Back then it was the most well-designed RSS reading app availiable for the Mac and with this week’s free 3.0 update, it still holds that title. 3.0 …

Passing text to your applescripts with Alfred Workflows

The great thing about Alfred, the awesome Spotlight replacement for OS X, is that – unlike Spotlight – you can run applescripts and shell scripts right from the launcher. This makes it a great tool to quickly run all sorts of actions and services1 – just type the first few letters of the name of y …

How to create a custom LaTeX build system for Sublime Text

My text editor of choice on the Mac is Sublime Text. I use it for taking notes in class, writing in Markdown (I am writing this post in Sublime Text), programming and – really important for my student work – making LaTeX documents. Once you get over the hump of having to manually edit your prefere …

WWDC 2015 Keynote recap

This year’s WWDC keynote brought no new hardware announcements. But with the announcement of new versions of OS X, iOS and watchOS, there was still lots of new stuff to cover. El Capitan appears to be a sort of “Snow Yosemite,” bringing few new features an instead focusing on speed and stability. …

Dropbox Sync for Heroku

As I wrote before this blog is hosted on (the free tier of) Heroku. A couple of days ago the hosting provider announced a great new feature for deploying apps and websites to Heroku: Dropbox Sync. This is a huge feature. It means that with Heroku and a static site you can build your own (free!) D …

Apple Watch

On this week’s event Apple – as anticipated – announced its upcoming wearable: the Apple Watch. But it did not solve the problems smart watches are facing. The Apple Watch's inductive charger. It turns out that I was wrong in hoping that Apple would actually solve smart watches. They simply anno …

Smart Watch

A few weeks ago I started wearing my good old wristwatch again. It’s a cheap analog metal watch, but with a sapphire screen, which appears to be all the rage these days. Plain old wristwatch – great at telling the time. There is one thing that watches do incredibly well: tell the time. I can alw …

Fancy footnotes with bigfoot.js

Footnotes on the web are a pain in the ass. You click on a tiny number, get transported somewhere near the bottom of the page, find the footnote you were looking for, and click on a link to go back to where you were on the page. This script looks to make that whole process painless. bigfoot.j …

Boot to Bootcamp with AppleScript

Ever since I got my first Mac I also had a Bootcamp partition with Windows 7 installed, because there are some programs that just don’t run on Macs and besides, I like to play the occasional video game. Booting from a Bootcamp partition is a little convoluted. You restart the Mac and keep the opt …

Switching from WEBrick to Thin

One great thing about Octopress is that you can always preview your site in your browser locally with the rake preview command. This is a great feature for fiddling with the design without making every change public.1 But ever since I updated to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, accessing localhost:4000 was n …

A Fantastical plugin for Alfred

I wrote a new plugin. It’s a Fantastical plugin for the excellent Spotlight replacement app Alfred. I use Fantastical every day to quickly input new appointments. Its natural language parser is the best and quickest way to enter calendar data. I had Fantastical set to ⌥ Space because I would use …

Typography is for everyone

I just finished reading something that had been sitting in my Instapaper queue for a long time: Matthew Butterick’s Practical typography. The foreword is written by famous german typographer Erik Spiekermann, so you know there is some authority behind this book. You are a typographer! Butterick’ …

Anatomy of a Jailbreak Trojan

Highly disconcerting: Ryan Hileman has discovered a jailbreak tweak that is a part time trojan. The tool was continuously downloading invisible advertisments in the background, earning the developer ad revenue every time the device was used in any way. In his post, Hileman explains in detail how i …

A Mail.app plugin for Sublime Text 3

I wrote my first plugin for Sublime Text. It is quite simple. It takes the text of the current document and turns it into a new Mail.app message. The first line of text is used as the subject line. Originally I wanted it to use converted markdown text, but Mail’s AppleScript interface has no prop …

Free blog hosting for nerds with Octopress

The point of this post is to briefly explain the technical solution I found for this blog and how I found it. At first I had moehrenzahn.de hosted on Wordpress.com. That was free, easy and quickly set up. Why Wordpress isn’t enough for me The premium features of Wordpress.com are pretty expensi …