Albert Kiefer

Five years ago, the Dutch designer rediscovered a love of drawing with marker pens. He shares his techniques and reveals why anyone can do what he has done

Born in 1960, Albert Kiefer is a professional visual designer who lives and works in Venlo in the Netherlands. He studied a BA in arts and art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Maastricht and co-founded the visual design company StormHand in 1992.

Since rediscovering the joys of drawing with real markers in 2016, Albert posts daily sketches of buildings and street scenes on his Instagram account @housesketcher, where he has amassed more than 140,000 followers.

www.society6.com/albertkiefer

Setting ground rules

I’ve been working in visualisation for well over 30 years now. When I was in art school, MTV had just come out and I was really interested in getting into that. I got a job in a computer graphics firm in 1990 and I’ve been doing it ever since.

I work for a variety of clients, local governments, businesses… What I do is visualising in the broadest sense of the word, so anything that people need to be able to show: an idea, a concept, a product design, anything. I live near an old ruined Spanish fortress that they dug up a couple of years ago and they asked if I could show how this looked originally. I don’t use engineering packages, like Autocad, I use what I call artistic types of 3D studio packages – it needs to look great, they don’t have to build it.