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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Arthur Rackham

January 24, 2006

British book illustrator Arthur Rackham, who was active from the late 1800’s to the 1930’s, was one of the all time great illustrators and one of my favorites. He was particularly noted for his illustrations of children’s books. Whatever he tackled, Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Rip van Winkle, The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens…, Rackham would own it. His unique vision and amazingly strong images became an integral part of the experience of reading the story.

Of the many artists who have tried to illustrate Alice in Wonderland in the footsteps of the amazing Sir John Tenniel, Rackham is the only artist I can think who doesn’t disappear into Tenniel’s shadow like a Cheshire Cat fading into the gloom.

Rackham’s fairy tale worlds are sometimes steeped in gloom and mystery. His misty forests are inhabited by elves and goblins peering about twisted roots, massive gnarled trees, mushrooms, ferns and sinuous, tangled undergrowth. I think his fairy tale illustrations were one of the main starting points for modern fantasy illustration, influencing artists like Frank Frazetta and Roy Krenkel and the generations of fantasy artists behind them.

Rackham was a deft pen and ink artist and most of his paintings started as pen and ink drawings into which he worked layer after layer of transparent watercolor glaze, a painstaking method associated more with classical painting than modern illustration.

The Arthur Rackham Society site has a good selection of links to Rackham’s illustrations online (pop-up warning: Angelfire hosted site).

There is a nice selection of images from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens here.

There are complete facsimiles of his illustrated versions of Aesop’s Fables and English Fairy Tales available online as part of Project Gutenberg. (For the quickest view of the material, go to the “Format” section, choose “HTML”, Compression: “None” and look to the index of illustrations.)

Here is a beautiful set of Rackham’s Alice in Wonderland illustrations courtesy of good ol’ Doc Ozone.

The link I’m suggesting below is to a nice broad cross-section of Rackham’s work on the Art Passions site.

www.artpassions.net/rackham/
Authur Rackham on nocloo.com

Categories:
Illustration, Watercolor and Gouache
Mark Goerner

January 23, 2006

Concept artist Mark Goerner has done conceptual illustrations for props, sets and environments for films like Minority Report, Constantine, X-men 2 and The Terminal, as well as upcoming films like the new Superman and Battle Angel Alita (for James Cameron).

Goerner’s site contains concept art from many of those movies as well as some of his other professional work and even some of his student work. The Superman section is interesting in particular because it showcases sketches and alternate versions as well as some of the finished design renderings. The “Student Work” section has an interesting variety of work, including product design, sketches and figure drawing.

His sleek futuristic designs remind me a bit of master concept artist Syd Mead (who I profiled in last November).

Goerner has done three training CDs for the Gnomon Workshop, for whom he is in instructor. There is an additional gallery of his work on the Gnomon Workshop site (images above). There is also an illustrated interview with Goerner on the CG Channel.

www.grnr.com/

Categories:
Concept & Visual Dev.
Kawase Hasui

January 22, 2006

Kawase Hasui was a Japanese printmaker, active in the first half of the 20th century, who created wonderfully subtle and entrancingly beautiful woodblock prints of landscape scenes.

His images were sometimes brimming with light and the brilliant colors of Spring or Autumn at other times almost monochromatic, depicting scenes at night, twilight or in the rain or fog.

He had a fascination with the play of light and shadow, the subtle patterns of dappled sunlight or moonlight, and the strange highlights created by late morning or early evening sun. He also often composed his scenes near water, adding reflections to his fascination with light.

Even though there is no overt similarity, I feel like he has a kinship with the impressionists in his pursuit of the qualities of light and the visual characteristics of the natural world. He sometimes created multiple images of the same scene at different times of the day or in different seasons, much as Monet did.

At times he takes a solid outline filled with color approach that is suggestive of comic book art. At the other end of his stylistic range, his linework is minimal and almost overpowered by the colored inks. He traveled extensively in Japan making watercolor sketches of his subjects and many of his prints have a watercolor feel to them.

The site linked below is to the listing about Hasui on the Hanga Gallery site. The gallery site contains a remarkably complete representation of his work, containing images of almost all of his nearly 600 extant prints, arranged by publisher and year or by series. I’m particularly fond of his work from the 1940’s.

There is also a nice gallery here, with click-through navigation and a good article about Hasui here.

Link via Illustrated Ideas.

http://www.hanga.com/bio.cfm?ID=2

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Prints and Printmaking
Electric Sheep Comix (Patrick Farley)

January 21, 2006

Electric Sheep Comix is a blanket title for a site featuring several webcomics by Patrick Farley. (“Electric Sheep” comes from the title of the Phillip K. Dick novel, Do androids Dream of Electric Sheep, from which the movie Blade Runner was adapted.) Electric Sheep Comix includes three main comics and several older ones. Some of them are drawn traditionally (ink on paper) and some use various digital image creation techniques. Some of the comics are augmented with bits of animation, (something that comics purists seem to object to, but I obviously don’t since I’ve always done it with my own webcomic).

Delta Thrives: set the controls for the heart of the sun (image above) is my favorite, a sci-fi short story done with images created in Poser and Bryce and then heavily manipulated and digitally painted in Photoshop. The comic is read in a long horizontal scroll, a format I’m normally not fond of, but Farley uses it to advantage here as his panels and background elements blend continuously into a horizontal band, creating the effect of one continuous graphic.

The Spiders is a much longer, traditionally drawn sci-fi comic about an alternate war in Afganastan, and Apocamon is “the manga version of the New Testament Book of Revelation”.

There is also a assortment of older, usually shorter, works, as well as a prologue for a new strip called Mother of all Bombs that is reachable only from the home page, not from the table of contents. I’m unsure of how recently the site has been updated. I do know that the site depends on donations to keep going; there are PayPal and BitPass links to make it easy to make a small donation. (I used BitPass, which also allows you to access or donate to a number of other online comics).

Note: the material contains nudity, sexual references, strong language and violence. Avoid it if you’re likely to be offended.

http://e-sheep.com/

Categories:
Comics, Webcomics
Mark Hallett

January 20, 2006

One of the most difficult challenges in paleontological illustration is making it naturalistic. That sounds like a contradiction. Dinosaur art is, after all, natural history illustration; but by naturalistic I mean that the animals need to look like they could really be alive. They need to stand and move like real animals.

It’s one thing to do that in paintings and drawings of modern animals, for which there are living examples and photographic reference; it’s quite another thing for animals that have been extinct for millions of years and must be painstakingly reconstructed from the evidence of fossilized bone and a knowledge of animal anatomy.

Paleo artist Mark Hallett has been doing it superbly for over 30 years. His giant sauropods look as though they should walk right past you, as if you should feel their footsteps vibrate the ground under your own feet. His Staurikosaurus and Compsognathus look as if they should dart out from the bushes as quickly as a bird.

Hallet’s work has been in major publications like National Geographic, Smithsonian, Natural History and Life magazine. His paintings have been on view in museums in the US, Europe, Australia and Japan.

Hallett’s site doesn’t have nearly enough of his art for you to get a real feeling for the scope and richness of his work. Consider the site a taste and look for some of the books he’s illustrated, some on dinosaurs, like “Seismosaurus”, with writer David Gillette (image above), and some in the series on prehistoric mammals with writer Barbara Hehner: “Ice Age Sabertooth : The Most Ferocious Cat That Ever Lived” , “Ice Age Mammoth : Will This Ancient Giant Come Back to Life?” and “Ice Age Cave Bear : The Giant Beast That Terrified Ancient Humans”.

www.hallettpaleoart.com

Categories:
Illustration, Paleo Art
Felice Varini

January 19, 2006

Felice Varini is an artist who paints on or in architectural elements in a way that creates the illusion of a flat pattern or object where one does not actually exist.

The illusion is visible only from one specific angle; when viewed from other points, you can see the fascinating series of markings that make up the piece. He paints on the outside of buildings, inside of rooms, in corridors, across walls, skylights, doors and archways, often creating the illusion of a physical object in space in the middle of an open area. His patterns are frequently optical patterns themselves, creating a sensation of Op Art by way of Christo.

At first it looks as if the pattern might be Photoshopped onto the image until you see the views from other perspectives; then the remarkable finesse with which Varini has created his patterned spaces becomes apparent. This work in particular is remarkable for it’s scale (not quite Christo scale, but pretty amazing nonetheless) in which he creates his illusory pattern across the space of a city street using painted markings on multiple buildings.

I learned about this from the gravestmor blog, which has a brief overview with a few sets of images. The Felice Varini site itself is harder to navigate, but worth the trouble. See my “Site Quirks” notes below.

Link via gravestmor.

http://www.varini.org/

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Vision and Optics