kuschelirmel

Kuschelirmel is a word comprised of two German words: “kuscheln” means “to cuddle” while an irmel is an invention of my boyfriend (usually called “Schatz” by me, which means “treasure” in German). He claims he has no clue where it came from. But it sounds cute and can be combined with any activity to express different aspects of my personality. For example photoirmel (irmel taking photos), kocheirmel (cooking irmel), schlafeirmel (sleeping irmel),… So it kinda stuck 😀

My every-day name is Jasmin Junger, but I am known as kuschelirmel throughout the internet.

What started as a means to an end to create images for my first website (which never saw the light of day) soon led to me diving deeper into the world of photomanipulation when I joined deviantart.com in 2004. There I realized, that my images didn’t need to serve a designer’s purpose but that they could stand on their own. I’ve been hooked on Photoshop ever since – for more than 15 years now!

I soon discovered that I needed a lot more images than were readily available on stock sites to be able to express myself properly. So I bought my first digital camera (a Canon Powershot) in 2006 and from then on also started sharing photos that others could use in their artworks (so called “stock images”) via my second dA account. During my time at university where I studied process engineering (so no, my studies were not art related, at least not in the classic sense), I had time to develop my Photoshop skills. During that time, I started writing tutorials to give something back to the community which had helped me so much by proving free tutorials and resources for me to begin with.

Today I still try to give as much as I received, but with me taking up a full time job (as a process engineer – if you would like to know more about that, you can read this blog entry) more than 10 years ago, the manner of giving has somewhat changed. I unfortunately don’t have the time to do a lot of tutorials any more, but having a job with decent income means I am now actually able to afford a proper DSLR camera (a Nikon D7200) and I can go on holidays and trips and bring back loads of stock photos to share as stock or present as my photography.

Recently, I have also been teaming up with local photographers and models to learn how to take even more of my own stock images and realize bigger, more complex projects.

PS: If I look a bit “forced” in the picture, that might be because I hate it when photos are taken of me – even if I asked for them to begin with ^^;