Episode 27: New Ways of Seeing the Ordinary with Arne Höpfner
Arne Höpfner is an illustrator and graphic designer from Hamburg, Germany. His works portray mundane daily life in a quirky and fun manner, adding a sense of irony and deeper meaning to his visuals.
What impression do you want people to have of your illustrations?
“I want to entertain with my pictures. It's very important for me that there is something interesting happening in the picture. That is the impression I want to make.”
Image 1: Relaxation Anywhere
“For me, the briefing for this illustration was great as it gave me a lot of creative freedom. And so at that time, I was thinking about drawing an ape and it was a coincidence that you gave me this brief. I made two other sketches, but I hoped that you choose this one and you did. I got this illustration idea from two pictures. One picture, it shows the freedom statue in New York, lying on a bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan. And the other picture was I think it was the gorilla as King Kong and this alien, Godzilla, sitting at the bottom of a skyscraper and smoking a joint, and these pictures fascinated me. I combined them and this illustration was what I got from it. That was the process.”
Image 2: Walk the Dog
“I often see situations where people jog with dogs, and the dogs don't have control over it. And so I wanted to switch the situation, and that's the idea of this image. I want to demonstrate how the animals feel when humans are the ones in control. Showing the irony.”
Image 3: Paradiso
“I want to draw a sky that was integrated with a rock. That was what made me curious, and I want to show with this picture, how fast life could go past. That was the symbolic concept and then I went into details like this cocktail bar, and the snake things as symbolic elements. I want to draw it in a way that made the image more exciting.”
Image 4: Chinatown
“I want to show in a symbolic way, how cultures have met together. It was very difficult to combine the dragon with a train. This needed a lot of time, but I like the smoke. I think this was one of my favorite illustrations.”
Image 5: Billy’s Fish Restaurant
“I got this idea in a restaurant in Amsterdam. I think it was a Chinese restaurant. There were these these aquariums around the place and normally the fish inside are swimming around disinterested. For this picture, I wanted to make them like humans. Looking curious at what happens on the outside, that was the idea.”
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