Lines and Colors

Lines and Colors is a blog about painting, drawing, sketching, illustration, comics, cartoons, webcomics, art history, concept art, gallery art, digital art, artist tools and techniques, motion graphics, animation, sci-fi and fantasy illustration, paleo art, storyboards, matte painting, 3d graphics and anything else I find visually interesting. If it has lines and/or colors, it’s fair game.

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The Castle of Cagliostro

September 25, 2006

Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro (Rupan Sansei: Kariosutoro no Shiro) was the first feature length animation by Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki.

Released in 1979 and soon overshadowed by films like Nausicaa, Laputa and Totoro, The Castle of Cagliostro is often overlooked in Miyazaki’s oeuvre, but undeservedly so. It’s a terrific film and one of the most fun adventure movies I can recall, animated or otherwise.

It doesn’t have the extraordinary graphic sophistication of Miyazaki’s mature work, but the backgrounds are lush and beautiful, there are intimations of the wonderful landscapes that would grace his later features and the staging and “cinematography” are excellent. (I realize “cinematography” isn’t quite the right term for animation, but I don’t know what else to use to describe the elements of composition, “camera movement” and cutting that are the equivalent of photographed films.)

You’ll also see hints of Miyazaki themes to come: wonderful flying craft, mysterious castles, dramatic landscapes and a fascination with the architecture of European cities. Also Miyazaki’s beautiful drawing, rich color and striking use of night and twilight scenes are very much in play.

You won’t find the sophisticated and thought provoking themes of Miayazaki’s later works, but in their place we have a superb lighthearted adventure fantasy that has much of the feeling of those great 1960’s spy thrillers and thief caper movies.

Although it’s part of the Lupin the III series, the story works just fine on its own. Brash, goofy and adventurous Arséne Lupin III, professional thief and inveterate playboy, is equipped with enough gadgets, wisecracks and casually reckless daring-do to make James Bond jealous. In the course of the movie he encounters a beautiful princess, an evil count, secret passages, traps, guards, Interpol agents, former lovers, car chases and all manner of other great adventure movie fare. It’s all played out against beautifully realized settings and is artfully staged and timed.

A new print of the film that has been released by Manga Entertainment. (Unfortunately, Manga’s Flash-based site that doesn’t allow for a direct link to the info for this film.)

The new print is beautiful. The picture quality is excellent. The colors are rich and vibrant and the linework is crisp and clear. The subtitles and dub are quite good and much closer to the spirit of the original than the VHS version from the early 90’s.

The one gaff is that Manga has inexplicably cut the film’s beautiful original opening sequence and replaced it with a montage of stills for the opening credits. (What were they thinking?! Just play the English credits before the full, complete film!! Hello?!)

Anyway, don’t let that lapse in judgement, or the poor choice in DVD cover art, dissuade you from appreciating this version. It’s still the best English language release of this wonderful film. Manga released a version in 2000 that had some other problems, make sure you look for the new one.

If you think you don’t like anime, perhaps because your impression of it is limited to giant battle robots, senseless, herky-jerky fighting amid frenetic motion lines, incomprehensible magical creatures and triangular-faced characters with enormous eyes, you should let Hayao Miyazaki show you how limited and inaccurate those impressions are; and allow him give you a taste of what you’re missing. The Castle of Cagliostro can be a great place to start.

Manga Entertainment
Amazon link
Cagliostro entry on IMDB
Review and screen captures on Anime Critic
Commentary from Chris Meadows
Conversations on Ghibli
Wikipedia article

Categories:
Animation, Anime & Manga
Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein

September 24, 2006

Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein was most famous for his large canvasses in which he reproduced bits of popular advertisements and, in particular, panels from comic books, complete with renderings of oversize process color dots.

As much as I enjoyed seeing representations of comic panels displayed large, I always had a problem with Lichtenstein’s use of them. My most basic objection was the fact that he was treating them the way Warhol treated soup cans (and also comic panels), in that there was an assumption that the act of isolating and painting them as he had was elevating them to the status of “art”, with the tacit assumption, of course, that they were not art in the first place.

This is not an assumption I endorse, obviously. Comic art (or graphic narrative if you want a high-tone term) is as viable an art form as any form of visual art or literature, and is actually the unique and special point where those two otherwise separate forms of human expression join.

So, despite the fun gee-whiz campy color dot fizz of it all, Lichtenstein’s uncredited swipes (as they are called in comic circles) from comic book artists’ work did not please me.

Not only did the panels not need to be “elevated” to the status of art, Lichtenstein’s renderings of them (image above, right) were flat, lifeless and seemingly clueless to the appeal of the original panels (above, left). This is possibly deliberate on his part, but the effect is a drab one regardless, and I have never seen anything from Lichtenstein that demonstrates an ability to draw as well as even the least talented second string comic artists whose work he cavalierly “borrowed”.

This is evident when you compare his renditions with the original comic panels, a process that has been spotty and difficult in the past but is now facilitated by a project called Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein by David Barsalou.

Barsalou has painstakingly found assembled and documented the original comic panels (and other sources) on which Lichtenstein based his panels.

I should point out that Barsalou probably does not share my attitude toward Lichtenstein’s work, and in fact, probably has the opposite opinion. I don’t want to seem like I’m putting words in his mouth.

His project, however, is a treat for me, because it makes it easier to say: “compare the originals”.

Link suggestion courtesy of Jack Harris.

http://davidbarsalou.homestead.com/LICHTENSTEINPROJECT.html
Flickr page
Background info from Barsalou
Intro from gallery show in 2000
Wikipedia article with links to Lichtenstein’s work

Categories:
Comics, Gallery and Museum Art
Edwin Austin Abbey

September 23, 2006

Edwin Austin Abbey was an American illustrator and muralist. Born here in Philadelphia, he moved to New York as a teenager (not that the term “teenager” was used in those days) and began doing illustration for Harper’s. When he was in his 20’s, Harper’s sent him to England to do research for an illustration project and he became a lifelong Anglophile, settling in London when he was 30.

He was one of the great pen and ink illustrators of the “Golden Age” of illustration. As his career progressed, he moved into painting and large scale murals. He was commissioned to do murals for the Boston Public Library, along with sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and painter John Singer Sargent, with whom he was friends, and created large scale works based on the quest for the Holy Grail. He also did murals and decorations for the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg, which were finished by Sargent after Abbey’s death.

He was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and shared their fondness for subjects from English literature, particularly Shakespeare. He did a series of wonderful works based on scenes from Shakespeare’s plays, such as the scene from Hamlet, above.

I’ve been unable to find many reproductions of his murals on the web. There are somewhat better resources for his painted illustrations. One of the best sources for his pen and ink work is Paul Giambarba’s nicely illustrated article on 100 Years of Illustration and Design.

There is a page on the John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery that features some of Abbey’s work as well as Sargent’s charcoal portrait of him.

Abbey’s images were rich in detail, vibrant in color, full of intense contrasts of dark and light and populated by graceful figures and dramatic faces.

Ciudad de la pintura
Art Renewal Center
CGFA
Illustrated bio on BPIB
Bio on Butler Art
Artcyclopedia (links)

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Illustration
William Wray

September 22, 2006

William Wray is a California painter. His blog, in fact, is titled California Painter William Wray.

He paints quickly realized, direct and painterly images of the California landscape in the area around where he lives; and frequently posts the paintings to his blog. He works primarily en plein air and sometimes supplements the outdoor work with reference photographs and further work in the studio.

He works in a muted, often dark palette, punctuated with brighter areas and splashes of color that sometimes become the focal point of the image and sometimes push the darker forms forward. He says in his recent posts that he is trying to move toward abstraction, stepping slowly through more flattened and geometric forms in his paintings from life.

Personally, I’m sorry to hear that, because I really like the balance he has already achieved between natural forms and abstracted blocks and chunks of color. His paintings read well as compositions, with large areas of light and dark balanced against bits of texture and detail. His brushstrokes are obvious and forceful, his subject matter is pulled from the everyday and overlooked rather than the picturesque, and his color choices owe more to Expressionism than Impressionism.

Wray has a background in animation and comics and is familiar to many for his work with painted colors on the Ren and Stimpy Show, as well as comics work for Mad Magazine and on Hellboy Jr. with Mike Mignola.

You can see a little of that history in the “springyness” of his forms at times, but most of the influence on his work seems to come from other California plein air painters, the Expressionists and the immediate nature of the California landscape itself.

http://williamwray.blogspot.com/

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art
JacksonPollock.org

September 21, 2006

Ever wanted to be Jackson Pollock, indulge in “Action Painting”, be the darling of the smart set and express your existential angst by throwing paint at the canvas?

JacksonPollock.org is a web site by Miltos Manetas that lets you do just that, at least virtually. It’s a Flash-based interactive in which you can spatter, drip and blob colors onto your virtual canvas to your heart’s content, whiling away those tedious hours that could be spent doing something ridiculous, like working.

Like Mr. PicassoHead, JacksonPollock.org is essentially a fun diversion based loosely on the characteristics of the work of a famous painter.

It opens with a blank screen, with no indication of what to expect until you happen to move your mouse, and then… color happens! Based on the Flash interactive, “Splatter” by Michal Migurski of Stamen Design, the interactive responds to movements of your mouse (or stylus – Wheeee!) with lines, blobs and swaths of color. Drag, click and create! Click to change colors. Click and hold to get bigger blobs. No art training necessary!

And you don’t even get paint on your pants.

Suggested by Lisa Harris.

http://jacksonpollock.org/

Categories:
Illustration
Elizabeth Traynor

September 20, 2006

I’m particularly fond of pen and ink illustration, and its less common variant, scratchboard.

Scratchboard is the inverse, or “dark side” (I couldn’t resist) of pen and ink drawing, in which a specially prepared board, coated with a thin layer of white clay, is used as the foundation for the drawing. Large areas of (usually) black ink are then painted onto the board, allowing the artist to scratch crisp white lines out of the black ink. There are special scratchboard tools, multi-pronged scratchboard “rakes” and so on, but any sharp instrument can be used.

Scratchboard is often combined with traditional pen and ink drawing on the same surface, as in the work of illustrator Virgil Finlay, and sometimes combined with color, particularly in some modern illustration. There are also artists, like Chet Phillips who mimic the effect with “digital scratchboard” in Corel Painter.

It’s not often that you see true scratchboard these days, and less frequent still that you see as exceptionally well handled as it is in the scratchboard illustrations of Elizabeth Traynor.

Traynor is an illustrator, formerly based in Delaware and now in Massachussets, who has done editorial work for companies like Simon & Schuster and Random House, publications like The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Esquire and advertising illustration and logo design for companies ranging from American Express to Coca-Cola.

Her colored scratchboard illustrations have a wonderful feeling of being simultaneously modern and traditional. She also does rich, detailed watercolor illustrations and her site includes examples of her logo design as well. The image above, in fact, was extracted from one of her logo designs.

Link suggestion courtesy of Jack Harris.

http://elizabethtraynor.com/

Categories:
Illustration