Lines and Colors – Page 667

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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Donato Giancola (update)

January 22, 2008

There are a number of science fiction and fantasy artists who will acknowledge their study of old master painting techniques and tell how it has influenced their work; there are few, however, whose work demonstrates that heritage as visibly as Donato Giancola.

Giancola is one of the finest science fiction and fantasy artists working in the field today, and to my mind, one of the best in the history of the genre. His extensive list of honors and awards, including multiple Chesley’s, Spectrum Gold and Silver Medals, World Fantasy Awards for Best Artist, the 2006 and 2007 Hugo Awards for Best Professional Artist, First Place in the Figurative category of the First International Art Renewal Center Open Salon and recognition in this year’s ARC event, indicates that not only do his contemporary artists and editors agree, but he is receiving notice in realist art circles at large. And well he should; Giancola is a terrific painter by any standard.

When I first wrote about Donato Giancola back in 2005, his web site was fairly well developed, but since then it has been expanded considerably, even if the appearance of the site hasn’t changed a great deal.

Giancola has added many new and larger images, and some paintings are accompanied by supplementary images of preliminary drawings, painted sketches and even works in progress on the easel.

Giancola’s excellent draftsmanship, graceful compositions and dramatic but refined use of color make his work a joy to look at. His blending and application of color in particular is exceptional, both in the overall composition and within the detailed rendering of individual subjects, particularly in in the portrayal of figures and faces. There his use of greens and multiple red hues give the sense of the varied and veinous character of caucasian skin found in Renaissance and Baroque painting.

He wears some of his other classical influences on his sleeve as well. His figures are painted with a chiaroscuro and drama inspired by Caravaggio and color and dynamism inherited from a study of Rubens. Some of his historical images reflect the influence of great illustrators like Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. Most of all, though, Giancola seems enthralled with the painting mastery of Valezquez. (If you’re going to learn, learn from the best.)

Whether painting gleaming robots, intricate spaceship cockpits, towering dragons or armored warriors, Giancola’s study of old master painting gives his wildly imaginative fantasy and science fiction subjects a force and gravitas that is uncommon not only for the genre, but in contemporary illustration in general.

His site includes extensive galleries of science fiction and fantasy illustration, work done for the Magic: The Gathering collectable card game and a selection of concept art as well as a section of very nice life drawings. Unfortunately the latter two are hampered by one those annoying navigation schemes that require you to hover your mouse over little squares to view the images instead of simply clicking on them; but hey, I’ll take whatever Giancola art I can get.

The site also includes a section on technique that includes a discussion of his palette, a brief step-through of the editorial illustration process, a discussion of influences and a few step-through painting sequences (again with the roll-over dots navigation, but I’m picking nits).

In addition there is a Bio, a FAQ and a section of books, prints, card proofs and original art for sale.

The News section indicates that Giancola will be participating, along with Dan Dos Santos, Julie Bell, Boris Vallejo, Scott Fisher, Rebecca Guay and Greg Manchess, in a week-long Illustration Master Class to be held in Amherst, MA from June 16-22, 2008. (If you’re interested, act soon; attendance is limited to 90.) Special guest for the event will be Tor/Forge/Starscape Books art director extraordinaire Irene Gallo, whose informative and fascinating blog The Art Department features several mentions of Giancola.

www.donatoart.com
Donato Giancola on The Art Department, also here, here, here and here
Donato Giancola on the Art Renewal Center

Fantasy Fine Art Gallery
My previous post about Donato Giancola
Artcyclopedia (links)

Categories:
Concept & Visual Dev., Sc-fi and Fantasy
Eric Feng

January 21, 2008

Eric Feng, a.k.a. Freic, draws images of what might be called constructs, combining mechanical elements with stylized forms from humans, birds, insects and other animals.

He draws them in elegant vector lines, usually monochromatic, but with delicate traceries of softer tones and transparencies, giving them a feeling of depth and x-ray dimensionality. The resulting drawings have a charm and informality that belies their vector origin.

His… entities have a charming whimsical appeal and are fascinating in their blending of the mechanical and natural forms. A bobbin-headed, Buddha-faced, doll-like character fishes out of the head of an elephantine mechanism apparently equipped for water and air travel. Owls have wheels. His Buddha-faced child wears an airplane. Mechanical birds sit in trees, and monkeys perch on the branches of a mechanical tree.

The galleries on his site, Fericstudio, are divided into Fevolution I, Fevoultion II and Inside Out. The later contains animated pieces as well as stills from a longer animation by that title. (There is a link to a video, but I couldn’t get it to come up in Safari or Firefox for Mac.)

In the still image galleries, many of the drawings have options to view enlargements or image variations.

[Link via Netdiver]

www.feric.com

Categories:
Vector Art
Stephen Rothwell

January 20, 2008

In 1934 Max Ernst published a Une Semaine de Bonté (A Week of Kindness), a Surrealist novel in collage. Ernst created his work, which I think is one of the earliest works that could be called a “graphic novel”, by painstakingly cutting out images from engraved catalog and periodical illustrations and arranging them in fascinating, sometimes jarring scenes that reel out into a dreamlike, subconscious narrative.

Modern computer technology makes the process of image based or photo-collage considerably simpler (as I can attest from my forays into X-acto knife and rubber cement collage as a teenager), but creating good, effective collage is still a challenge to the creative eye and imagination. (See my post on the remarkable photo-collages of Emily Allchurch).

Stephen Rothwell, about whom I can find little other information on the web, has created a modern collage story in a similar spirit to Ernst called Dark House Quarter. Rothwell draws on archival photographs rather then engravings, but with a similar tone of staid images from former years rendered asunder by their dream state juxtapositions.

Rothwell, like Ernst, matches his source imagery in a way that produces pictures that feel consistent and whole within themselves. Rothwell’s compostions are sometimes in sepia tones and sometimes in color that has been added to black and white images.

Also like his Surrealist predecessors, Rothwell intends for his images to provoke and disturb, but I never get the feeling he’s going for the cheap shock value present in some of the lowbrow art and so-called “Pop Surrealism” that is currently popular.

The narrative, such as it is, is more subconscious than overt. Apparently something bad has happened, or is happening, perhaps war. The images, though, are fascinating, each one a tableaux of disparate components that fit together with emotive effect.

[Link via BoingBoing]

www.darkhousequarter.com

Categories:
Outsider Art
Basil Gogos

January 19, 2008

Basil Gogos is a master of monsters.

I tend to think of him as a post-pulp pulp artist. He got to paint wonderfully lurid illustrations of famous movie monsters years after the high-period for pulp art had closed.

His delightfully ghastly portraits of Dracula, The Mummy, The Phantom of the Opera, The Metaluna Mutant, The Wolf Man and dozens of other creatures that crawled out of Hollywood’s “B” movie dungeons in the middle of the 20th Century graced the covers of issue after issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland. Not the least of them was Frankenstein’s monster, who Gogos portrayed numerous times and in a multitude of approaches, from horrific to sympathetic.

Famous Monsters of Filmland was edited by monster expert extraordinaire Forrest J. Ackerman and published by James Warren. Warren also published Creepy and Eerie, black and white comics magazines that featured some of amazing artists like Al Williamson, Wally Wood, Berni Wrightson, Alex Toth and others. Gogos did covers for some of those and a range of other magazines as well.

Gogos studied at The National School of Design, The School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League of New York, where he studied under the renowned illustrator and teacher Frank J. Reilly.

Gogo’s monster images are foot-off-the-brakes, no-color-barred excursions into monsteriffic sensationalism, with wonderful spooky spotlighting, eerie backlighting and great blocks of shadow defining the forms. Glaring colors wash over the looming faces like intense stage lighting, and the characters jump out at you as if screaming “Kid, you better buy this magazine if you want to see more cool stuff like this!”. Wonderful.

Gogos’ creepy creations and eerie evocations of monsters made famous in films have been collected in a new book, Famous Monster Movie Art of Basil Gogos, edited by illustrator Kerry Gammil and J. David Spurlok and with an foreword by Rob Zombie. (Gogos also did some album covers for Rob Zombie, The Misfits and Electric Frankenstein.)

The official Basil Gogos site is pretty minimal and the images are small, there are some larger ones in this page on Gathering Darkness.

Enjoy them…, if you dare!

Addendum, May 19, 2010: Unfortunately, the BasilGogos.com site is now gone. I don’t know of a replacement.

www.basilgogos.com
Gogos on Gathering Darkness
Posters on MSI Online
Google image search “Basil Gogos“

Categories:
Illustration, Sc-fi and Fantasy
Frits Thaulow’s Water Mill

January 18, 2008

When I wrote about Norwegian painter Frits Thaulow back in 2006, I mentioned that he had become one of my favorite painters on the basis of a single, striking painting that is part of the Johnson Collection in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

That painting is Water Mill, shown above. When I wrote the article I was disappointed to note that I couldn’t find any large reproductions of this particular work on the web, and made a mental note to take a photograph on a future visit to the museum.

Sometimes my mental notes can take a while to rotate forward on the cluttered bulletin board of my overworked brain, but I was at the Philadelphia Museum the other day and happened to take my camera (like many high-end museums, non-flash photography is permitted of works in the museum’s own holdings).

Since then, the museum has posted a larger view of the work on their site, including a Flash feature that allows you to zoom in. I’ve also done something I don’t normally do and posted a larger version of my shot here. I think the colors are slightly truer in my photo, but theirs has better definition. Also mine is slightly cropped due to the fact that I neglected to take lens distortion into account when taking my shot.

I just find this work striking, and visit it almost every time I visit the museum. Thaulow is a painter who walks that line between impressionism and painterly realism that I particularly admire, and his mastery of the surface reflections and translucency of shallow water is uncanny.

For more information and links for Frits Thaulow, see my previous post. The comments section to that post has additional information about Thaulow. Of particular interest are the comments from Vidar Poulsson, the Norwegian art historian who has written the definitive books on Thaulow, including the recent Frits Thaulow. En internasjonal maler (Frits Thaulow, An International Painter). Unfortunately, there is no English translation, and the book is not easy to come by here in the U.S. (You might try Alibris.)

I also found an additional resource from a company that sells painted reproductions of master paintings, but the images they show to choose from are of the originals, including Water Mill.

Water Mill at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
My photo (1000×681, 132k)
My previous post on Frits Thaulow

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art
Kinuko Y. Craft

January 17, 2008

Kinuko Y. Craft takes inspiration from many strata of the history of art and weaves them together into her own intricate and varied images of fantasy worlds; and isn’t afraid to let the threads keep their connection to the original sources of inspiration.

Looking through a gallery of her work, you’ll find a fascinating display of her interest in the styles and techniques of the Pre-Raphaelites and Symbolists, Da Vinci and other Renaissance painters, Baroque portraits, the Orientalists, 19th Century Academics and some of the great Golden Age illustrators who took inspiration in many of the same sources.

At times she will playfully create a homage to a particular artist or period style, at other times she can fascinatingly intertwine several seemingly disparate sources into an uncanny whole (Henri Roussau and Titian in the same image for example).

Craft is well known as a fantasy oriented illustrator and her clients include National Geographic, Time, Newsweek, Forbes, The New York Times, and Atlantic Monthly in addition to numerous publishers and commercial accounts. She has received multiple Gold and Silver Medals from the Society of Illustrators, and several Chesley Awards.

Craft has transitioned away from the demands of editorial illustration and now concentrates on her own themes, and has a successful line of reproductions and art prints that have a wide following. I believe she also continues to work on a line of children’s books in which classic fairy tales like Cinderella, King Midas and Sleeping Beauty are retold.

Her approach varies from elaborate panoramas on which she has lavished intricate detail, to quiet and emotionally focused images of single subjects, with colors alternately subdued or intense.

The image gallery on her site is unfortunately not as extensive as you might like, but it is still a fascinating stroll through not only her own fertile imagination, but also through her fascinations with great artists of the past.

www.kycraft.com
Wikipedia (article and bibliography)
Artcyclopedia (links)

Categories:
Illustration, Sc-fi and Fantasy