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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John William Waterhouse

April 1, 2006

How better to welcome Spring than with the paintings of John William Waterhouse.

Often considered a Pre-Raphaelite, Waterhouse was never actually a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was very influenced by them, however, and shared much of their subject matter.

Early in his career Waterhouse was more of a neo-classical painter, portraying Greek and Roman scenes, much like his contemporary Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. As time went on he came to share the Pre-Raphaelite’s passion for literary and mythological subjects, often painting many of the same subjects (in many cases in similar compositions) as Pre-Raphaelites like William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, John Everett Millais and Edward Byrne Jones. (See also the image of Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shallot, his most famous and most often reproduced painting, which I chose to accompany my first post on lines and colors, about the Art Renewal Center site.)

Waterhouse diverged from the Pre-Raphaelite painters, particularly in his approach to the handling of paint. Where the members of the brotherhood usually cultured a smooth, blended finish to their paintings, Waterhouse delighted in the sensuality of paint and his works are textured with painterly brushstrokes and obvious surface markings of discrete areas of color.

There are two excellent and comprehensive sites devoted to Waterhouse: The life and art of John William Waterhouse on www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.com and John William Waterhouse on jwwaterhouse.com. The first site (.org) has lots of drawings, preliminary sketches, alternate versions and studies for Waterhouse’s work.

Waterhouse is one of the best represented artists on the web and there are many good sources for images of his paintings, some of which are listed below. There is also a bounty of his work in print. A couple of good books at a reasonable price are J.W. Waterhouse by Peter Trippi and J W Waterhouse by Anthony Hobson.

Like the Pre-Raphaelites, Waterhouse’s images are bursting with vibrant colors, rich textures and the kind of glorious visual details that can only be drawn from an intimate study of nature and the world around us. Also like the Pre-Raphaelite artists, Waterhouse took great pleasure in the portrayal of beautiful women in detailed costumes and luxurious fabrics, as well as scenes depicting the visual bounty of the natural world and the English countryside, particularly in the Spring when that other beauty, Mother Nature, is really strutting her stuff.

Waterhouse on jwwaterhouse.com
http://www.johnwilliamwaterhouse.com/
Waterhouse on Art Renewal Center
Waterhouse on WebMuseum
Waterhouse on GCFA
Waterhouse on Artcyclopedia

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art
Daren Bader

March 31, 2006

How’s this for a transition, from yesterday’s post about eye-placement in portraits to today’s illustration of a cyclops. (What’s that saying? “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed, giant-tusked, white veined, maniacal, rampaging cyclops is king.”?… or something like that…)

Daren Bader is a fantasy illustrator who, among other projects, does a number of illustrations for the Magic: The Gathering card-based game. He steps outside the usual approach to that genre, though, in that he treats his Magic paintings like illustrations for the grand adventure fantasy books that were the stomping grounds of illustrators like Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth, who he obviously admires.

He tackles his mythological or fantasy subjects with broad strokes and painterly chunks of color, using strong value contrasts for drama and nice tonal control for atmosphere. The result makes for images full of action, adventure and lots of visual fun.

He creates interesting fantasy animals that are wierd amalgams of dinosaurs and mammals, and also paints more straightforward images of dinos. Some of his pen and ink illustrations show the influence of Franklin Booth and Roy Krenkel.

www.darenbader.com/

Categories:
Pen & Ink, Sc-fi and Fantasy
Eye Placement in Portraits

March 30, 2006

Here is an interesting bit of scientific/artistic conjecture. Christopher W. Tyler, of the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco suggests in this short (1 page) illustrated article that a high percentage of portrait paintings are arranged so that one eye, presumably the dominant one, falls on the horizontal center line of the image, even when the head appears to be centered in the painting. (He goes into more detail in a second article.)

He cites a number of examples and invites speculation on the part of the reader as to the purposeful placement of eyes in portraits according to several artistic models. His results from a sampling of 282 different artists suggest that he is correct a large percentage of the time and my own casual observations seem to agree.

Get out your ruler and art books and see for yourself.

The site is part of the Smith-Kettlewell Brain Imaging Center, which also includes The Eye Page, with interesting tidbits about eyes, both human and those of other animals, and a series of Art Investigations, scientific inquires into various aspects of art.

www.ski.org/CWTyler_lab/CWTyler/PrePublications/ARVO/1998/Portraits/

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Vision and Optics
Tsukahara Shigeyoshi

March 29, 2006

I hope I have the name right. I’m taking it from the copyright line. The site is iyasakado.com.

I’m a little sketchy about the details here, mainly because they’re in Japanese, and the Google translate feature, remarkable as it is, doesn’t work so well in translating from Japanese to English. (The results can be comical, in fact. Try translating a well-known phrase into Japanese with Google Translate and then translate it back. Send the phrase to your friends and see if they can guess the original. Hours of fun!)

Anyway, the high point of this site is a number of nicely done and imaginative Flash animations that are part of a series entitled “Steel Fantasia”. More vignettes than parts of a coherent narrative, they are nonetheless presented in order and take place in the same setting. They are delightfully done, with simple but clever animation, artful use of multi-plane backgrounds, imaginative painted settings and nicely designed sequences.

The animations are set in an alternate time or reality, in an industrialized society at about a World War I level of technology, amid tanks with mechanical, steam-powered legs, airships, ornithopters and towering city structures. There is apparently an ongoing military conflict, against the backdrop of which small dramas play out. The overall tone is actually whimsical and the animations are charming and thought provoking.

The movies are essentially wordless, the music is excellent and the sound effects are well done, so language is no barrier to enjoyment. The supplementary comments on the pages are lost, however, in the inability of Google to return much that is intelligible. Instead of the somewhat-readable translations Google returns from related European languages, Google’s attempt to translate Japanese gives us phrases like: “…industry it sends with self-confidence cow moth!” that are amusing but not particularly informative.

The animations are linked by graphics from this page, apparently in order from the bottom up. The movies can take a while to load before playing. You might want to start with the second from the bottom (image of the toy soldier’s head) to get a better flavor for the whimsical feeling of the better sequences.

Link via Cold Hard Flash, original link via Gil Crows website.

http://iyasakado.com/
http://iyasakado.com/steel/index.htm

Categories:
Animation, Anime & Manga, Motion Graphics & Flash
Gilles Tréhin

March 28, 2006

Gilles Tréhin is an autistic savant who began to exhibit a seemingly innate talent for drawing at the age of 5, as well as unusual abilities for mental calculation and music.

Autistic savants are people whose mental wiring seems to be a little different than the rest of us, resulting in limitations in certain areas but extraordinary abilities in others. Their phenomenal talents in the areas where they are gifted may hold secrets for the rest of us in understanding our own potential abilities.

I wrote two posts earlier about autistic savant Stephen Wiltshire, who also exhibited an extraordinary faculty for drawing from an early age. My first post was a general introduction and the second post dealt specifically with Wiltshire’s amazing ability to create memory drawings of complex city landscapes, like the skyline of Tokyo or Hong Kong, after viewing the subject for less than an hour.

Like Wiltshire, Tréhin seems to have a fascination with complex architectural themes, but in his case, his subject is imaginary, a fantastic city called “Urville” (named after “Dumont d’Urville”, a French base in the Antarctic). Urville is an large city (“11,820,257 inhabitants” according to Tréhin), with its own unique geography, street plan and architectural style, that exists in great detail in Tréhin’s mind.

Tréhin conceived of the idea of Urville at the age of 12 and started to construct it out of Legos. As he got older and the idea for the city grew, he realized that his drawing skills would let him expand his concept of the city and he began a series of detailed drawings of Urville, its streets, plazas, bridges, churches, promenades, airport, skyline and street plan.

The drawings are large scale, extraordinarily detailed and rich with the feeling of a real city, in which the buildings, streets and plazas exist in well-defined relationship to one another. It’s not like he’s drawing some imaginary street scenes with buildings put in as a convenience for composition, like most illustrators would do, it’s much more like Tréhin has been walking the streets of Urville in his mind, sketchbook in hand.

Tréhin has also created an entire background for the city, with its history (founded by Phoenicians), economy, culture and more. He is putting together a book but in the meanwhile his site offers a fascinating “Guided Tour”.

There is also an interesting article on the site of the Wisconsin Medical Society.

Maybe it’s because of the architectural subject matter, and maybe it’s just me, but I think his drawing style, although more sophisticated, bears a fascinating resemblance to Wiltshire’s. Food for thought.

Link via Boing Boing, original link via The Kircher Society.

http://urville.com/

Categories:
Drawing
Craig Mullins (update)

March 27, 2006

It seems odd to refer to digital art as “painterly”, but modern digital painting tools in applications like Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop make that eminently possible. Concept artist Craig Mullins excels at creating dramatic, believable concept paintings for movies and games that are rich with digital “brushstrokes”, at times appearing as abstract blobs of color when viewed in detail.

Mullins was an early adapter of digital painting for concept art and is one if its undisputed masters. (He was urged to try digital painting by no less than John Knoll, visual effects supervisor at ILM and co-creator of Adobe Photoshop.) Mullins has created matte paintings for movies like The Matrix Revolutions, Armageddon, Apollo 13 and Forrest Gump; and concept visualization paintings for games like Halo 2, Marathon 2, Final Fantasy, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent and Prince of Persia.

His site galleries are filled with a dazzling array of images from his professional work. One thing that constantly stands out is his brilliant use of light and color to highlight portions of the images in a way that adds tremendous visual drama. You find yourself wishing the the final movies and games had more of the visual power of Mullin’s images.

In addition to his concept art, his site also features digital sketches in various degrees of finish as well as works in traditional media: oil, watercolor and pastel (usually figures from life). He appears to work rapidly, both in his digital concept art and in his traditional life painting, which gives his work a feeling of immediacy and freshness.

There are also sketches and more finished pieces that are apparently done for his own amusement, in particular a series of swashbuckling pirate images in the grand tradition of Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth but with Mullin’s signature digital painting style. Very cool.

His work is featured in the Expose 1 collection of digital painting from Ballistic Publishing, in which he was unanimously voted the first “Grand Master” award for that series. There is an article about him on the Ballistic site. There is also an illustrated article on the BBC News site.

I first wrote about Craig Mullins back in October of last year, but a recent post in Acuarela prompted me to check in on his site, Mr. Goodbrush, and see what’s new. The answer is: plenty! The site itself hasn’t changed (I groused about the navigation then and I’ll do it again), but he has posted tons of new work.

Mullins is prolific, and the the delight of many, posts lots and lots of his images, and posts them large enough that you can get a really good ideal of how good they are! (Are you listening, all you other artists who think that tiny images are sufficient for an online presence?)

Mullins is not only talented, but smart. He has figured out how to maintain a career as a concept artist while living in Hawaii, instead of being tied to Los Angeles.

www.goodbrush.com/

Categories:
Concept & Visual Dev., Digital Painting, Illustration, Watercolor and Gouache