About Johan Scherft
Johan Scherft was born in 1970 in Leiden, the Netherlands. At an early age he showed great talent in drawing, and also an interest in animals and nature. The birds he observed inspired him at a young age to make birds out of paper, hand-coloured with coloured pencil. With these self-created models, and other drawings, Scherft was accepted to the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague. After studying graphic design for two years, Scherft switched majors and began to study free painting and drawing, in which he graduated in 1993. Johan Scherft has been working as a free artist since then, working in various disciplines such as painting, etching, drawing and illustrating. The themes of his oilpaintings are varied, but nature is the most important source of inspiration.The paintings of the 'waterworlds' and the 'treehouses' are made after models of boats and treehouses Scherft creates from paper. The paintings of the 'waterworlds' show a surreal world (at a very small size) in which people and animals are floating on peculiar boats, trying to survive. The treehouses show a romantic world of man in harmony with nature. However the treehouses, like the boats, are fragile and are not meant to last. Scherft’s latest works are large charcoal drawings of extinct animals. These drawings have an average size of 6.5 by 6.5 feet. In the drawings Scherft tries to give each prehistoric creature its own expression, and a sense of overwhelming power, making the viewer feel small and vulnerable while looking at them. Video’s of these drawings, and also about his paper art, can be seen on this website and on Youtube. Work by Johan Scherft has been exhibited many times, in the past in Art-gallery Petit in Amsterdam, nowadays in gallery Lieve Hemel in Amsterdam. Scherft also participated in exhibitions in museum 'De Buitenplaats' in Eelde, and museum 'The Lakenhal' in Leiden. Scherft works and lives in Leiden, the Netherlands. His working place is in a atelier complex just one hundred yards away from the house where Rembrandt was born. Here he can be found daily, working in his studio in a community consisting of artists and small enterprises.
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Milo and the Magpies, The Game
'Milo and the Magpies' is a point and click game telling a story of the little cat Milo who goes from garden to garden meeting all different kinds of people and animals. Milo gets a glimps of the people living in their houses and discovers that the appearance of a garden tells a lot about the people who live there. It started off as a little game or animated story, but over time the project grew bigger and more people got involved. I made the story and animations, and hand-painted the backgrounds. A part of the animations, especially the movements of the cat are done by the artist Barthel Brussee. At the final stage I got a lot of help from programmer Jeroen Wimmers who made the game more professional and suitable for Android. The team of the popular Rusty Lake games series decided to published this game as a premium game in their company 'The Second Maze' , which is a platform for special art games. In the final stage the composer Victor Butzelaar made a beautiful soundtrack which attributes a lot to the atmosphere.
