There is something direct, un-fussed with and visually charming about the approach Boston based illustrator and artist Kendyll Hillegas takes in her representations of commonplace objects, most notably food items.
Hillegas works in a combination of pencil, watercolor pencil, colored pencil and gouache, as she describes in this post and video from her Tumblog.
Her website is divided into sections by subject. You can find additional images, as well as information about medium, on her Etsy store.
Maine based painter Colin page, who I wrote about back in 2007 and 2008, paints crisp, bright landscapes and still life, with a painterly touch and often a high-chroma palette.
His paintings of Maine’s rocky coast, small harbors and the surrounding landscape are set in strongly geometric compositions, which you can choose to read either as their literal subject matter, or as large, striking patterns of color.
In addition to the work presented on his website, you can follow back through his blog, in which he presents additional paintings, often of less common subjects like farm equipment and industrial sites, as well as giving background on individual paintings and process.
Page’s work is on display in a show at the Dowling Walsh Gallery in Rockland, Maine until August 30, 2014.
Grace Rose, Frederick Sandys
On Google Art Project, high-resolution downloadable file on Wikimedia Commons, original is in the Yale Center for British Art.
These videos on YouTube show an interesting approach to brushwork, in which the artist varies pressure on a large loaded brush to make a stylized dragon’s tail in a single stroke — albeit a slow one.
There are several videos, but they lack identification for the artist, and though the style and approach is similar, I’m uncertain how many artists are represented.
This dragon is multi-color, with a brush preloaded with more than one color (if you’re short on time, the tail stroke starts around 1:40).
The process may be clearer in this one, in which the painting is monochromatic (tail stroke at 3:40), and in this one, in which you can see the brush being loaded with multiple colors (at 3:20), of what looks to be gouache, or possibly thickly applied transparent watercolor.
Details are, of course, added in additional strokes; it’s the tail that is done with the single flourish.
While it may seem a bit of a trick technique — meant to please onlookers as much as be an efficient way to render the image — I think the process shows some interesting capabilities of brush loading and variations in the timing and motion within a single brush stroke.
[Via Neatorma]
Illustration from Wagner’s The Valkyrie, Arthur Rackham
From The Golden Age Site.
Another beautiful classic from the Golden Age of Illustration. They don’t call it the Golden Age for nothing.
For more, see my previous posts on Arthur Rackham, and here and here.
Back in 2007, I wrote a post about James Akers, an artist who, though comfortable with digital rendering and 3-D illustration, continues to do architectural rendering in watercolor.
In the post I made general points about both the way many people — even artists themselves — tend to unfairly compartmentalize and judge genres of art not considered “fine art”, and about how architectural rendering is also suffering from the misconception that 3D graphics have superseded traditional rendering because they are somehow superior.
Since then, Akers has revised his website, and of course added to his portfolio, as well as establishing a blog on which he tackles these and other related subjects. In addition, he touches on a range of other topics, including watercolor tutorials.
Akers’ work is a prime example of how traditional drawing techniques, and the middle ground of digital media used in traditional ways (i.e. drawing and painting in graphics software with a tablet and stylus) have a hand-made character, and visual warmth, that are difficult to achieve with 3-D modeling.
Akers bridges the gap between the utilitarian function of displaying an idea for a proposed building as it is intended to appear, and watercolor rendering as a visually appealing painting in itself. (I think architects presenting their ideas to clients may forget or discount the unconscious appeal the latter might have on their clients, as opposed to a dryly “photographic” 3-D rendering.)
I’ll also point out that architectural rendering is, in may ways, equivalent to film and gaming concept art — visualizations of proposed ideas. (You see these fields merge more clearly in the work of artists who do conceptual renderings of proposed theme park features.)
Akers’ website has galleries of work in several areas; the ones I find most compelling are for Architectural Renderings in Watercolor, and Architectural Illustration and Design Process, which includes some step-through process examples.
