Lines and Colors – Page 559

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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Promoting some friends and some clients of my website design business

Ryan Church (update)

April 5, 2006

If you are interested in learning to paint and render digitally, particularly within the area of concept art and fantasy and science fiction art, there are some great sources available. One of them is Ryan Church, who is widely acknowledged to be one of the foremost concept artists working today. As I reported in my previous post about him from last August, Church is a Senior Art Director at ILM and was a Concept Design Supervisor for Star Wars Episode II and III.

Church works digitally in Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop and he talks briefly about his methods in the “how I work” and Q&A sections of his site. In the latter, his lists his choice Painter and Photoshop brushes (which is instructive in itself if you know something about digital painting), and in the former he offers some of his custom Painter brushes for download.

While he was working on SW III, he was teaching “Advanced Entertainment Design” at the Art Center College of Design. He eventually found that too demanding on his schedule to continue, but later got together with the Gnomon Workshop to produce a series of instructional DVDs with specific topics on digital rendering like Rendering Shiny Vehicles and Rendering Hi-Tech Architecture, that are available through his site as well as the Workshop’s site.

There are also galleries on his site of his professional work, including concept art from the Star Wars films and personal work, including images used in the Gnomon Workshop tutorials.

Church’s work has also appeared in the EXPOSE 2 collection of digital art from Ballistic Publishing as well as The Art of Star Wars, Episode II – Attack of the Clones (Mark Vaz), The Art of Star Wars, Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (Jonathan Rinzler) and The Making of Star Wars, Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (Jonathan Rinzler).

There are interviews with him on CGChannel, VFX World, CG Networks and others listed on his links page. There is also an additional gallery of Church’s work on the Gnomon Workshop site.

One of the great advantages of living in the digital age is not only the availability of digital art tools, but the ability to learn to use them with help from some of the best in the field.

www.ryanchurch.com/

Categories:
Concept & Visual Dev., Digital Painting
“Painting a Day” blogs

April 3, 2006

Back in December of 2004, Virginia artist and teacher Duane Keiser started the terrific practice of painting one small (usually postcard size) painting every day (as far as I know, starting with the painting of the baseball above). At the same time, he started a blog on which he would post an image of that day’s painting. See my original post about Keiser and his A Painting a Day blog from last October.

Since then, a number of other artists have begun to keep this kind of routine as well (I regret to say I’m not among them). Not only is this an excellent discipline for any painter or visual artist, it may be financially beneficial as well. Keiser, and most of the other artists who have added this practice to their daily routine, usually offer their images for sale directly through their blogs. Most of Keiser’s “postcard paintings” (which he paints using a small easel made from an old cigar box) have been offered for sale (originally for $100, now for much more). Occasionally, he will do a larger scale or more complex painting within the context of the series and offer it for bid on eBay.

The other “painting a day” painters follow a similar model; small format paintings posted to a blog and offered for direct sale or bid on eBay. This not only allows the artists to leverage the fondness the web has for frequently changing content (which is one of the primary reasons for the popularity of blogs) to increase their potential audience, but also lets them connect directly with those interested in their paintings, effectively doing an end-run around galleries and their high commissions for at least some portion of their work. (A $100 postcard size painting would have to be at least 2-3 times that if sold in a gallery to accommodate the gallery’s commission as well as framing and preparation for hanging.)

The paintings all share some similarities as well. Of necessity they are small in scale and directly done, which usually translates into a fresh, painterly approach, and they are most often of individual small household objects: salt shakers, fruit, painting tubes and other studio paraphernalia, flowers, dishes, etc. Many of the sites, including Keiser’s, offer a “gallery view” of thumbnails of the paintings in addition to the chronological blog listings.

After keeping up this amazing discipline for over two years, Keiser announced on Saturday that he will be slowing down for the time being, posting a little less frequently for a bit while he focuses his energy on larger projects. My hat is off to him for making this admirable practice worthy of note and worthy of emulation.

I’ve included here a sampling (certainly not comprehensive) of some of the “painting a day” style blogs of artists I’ve come across or who have contacted me. All of them are worthy of a full post and I’ll try to revisit them in detail in the future. Clockwise from top-left: Duane Keiser, Karin Jurick, David R. Darrow, Shelly Grund, Julian Merrow-Smith, Elin Pendleton.

Duane Keiser: A Painting a Day: http://duanekeiser.blogspot.com/
Karin Jurick: My Daily Blog: http://web.mac.com/kjurick/iWeb/Site/Welcome.html
David R. Darrow: Everyday Paintings: http://www.everydaypaintings.com/
Julian Merrow_Smith: Postcard from Provence: http://shiftinglight.com/
Shelly Grund: A painting a Day: www.shelleygrund.com/FineArt/painting-a-day.htm
Elin Pendleton: Daily Paintings in Oil and Acrylic: www.dailypaintings.com/

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Painting, Painting a Day
Mort Drucker

April 2, 2006

Mort Drucker is one of the finest caricaturists and cartoonists of our age. He is often overlooked for a couple of reasons. One reason is that he is overshadowed by the attention paid to people like Al Hirschfeld and David Levine (both of whom I admire, but not as much as Drucker), along with editorial cartoonists and other caricaturists who work in more literary and cultural venues. The other is that Drucker’s main venue, aside from occasional Time and TV Guide covers, has been Mad magazine, and you don’t get much more culturally disrespected than that.

Drucker has been creating splendiferous move and TV parodies in the pages of Mad since the late 50’s, for a time appearing while the great Wally Wood was still plying his visual magic at the magazine. For my money, Drucker is the only one of the post-EC Mad artists who is in the same class with Wood, Will Elder and Jack Davis (and that class is within the all time top echelon of comics artists).

Drucker is the absolute best ever at combining consistently brilliant caricatures with comics, i.e. sequential storytelling; in this he even surpasses Wood and Elder. Unlike Herschfeld and Levine, he doesn’t just create a likeness in a single image, he draws multi-page comics stories in which the caricatures are consistent, recognizable and hilariously dead-on through the course of a story, requiring a wide range of position, action and expression!

On top of all of that, Mort Drucker has one of the most wonderfully realized humorous comic drawing styles I’ve ever encountered. Every line, every figure, expression and background element is a visual treat. His lively, springy lines are full of energy and a loose, comfortable feeling that makes Drucker’s drawings just vibrate with visual fun. You get the impression that his pen just dances across the paper, leaving its marvelous marks almost as a residual effect of the joy of drawing. David Apatoff’s Illustration Art blog has a wonderful post dedicated just to the way Drucker draws hands (from which I borrowed the image above).

Angelo Torres and other Mad caricature artists have tried to do a fair job of walking in Drucker’s footsteps, basically by imitating his style, but none have ever matched him.

I link to Drucker’s official site below. You can also find his work on his rep’s sites: here and here.

There was a book published in ’98 devoted to his work, Familiar Faces: The Art of Mort Drucker by David Douglas Duncan. Unfortunately, it’s out of print and demanding high prices as a collectable. For an easier (and perhaps better) way to get a look at Drucker’s genius, pick up some of the Mad collections that feature his work. Some good ones would be Mad About the Sixties : The Best of the Decade, or Mad About the Movies: Special Warner Bros Edition and Mad About TV. Another would be Mad About the Fifties, which doesn’t contain as much Drucker, but has the bonus of including brilliant work by Wood, Elder, Davis and Harvey Kurtzman.

www.mortdrucker.com/

Categories:
Cartoons, Comics, Illustration
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