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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Promoting some friends and some clients of my website design business

Frank Reilly

August 5, 2006

Some artists have as much, or more, impact as a teacher as they do as an artist.

Although Frank Reilly had been fulfilling assignments as a professional illustrator even while he was still a pupil at the Art Students League, it was on his return there as a teacher that he would make his greatest contribution.

Reilly was one of the most influential American art teachers in the 20th Century. He is credited with codifying methods for teaching drawing, painting, illustration and other aspects of representational art in ways that became the foundation for teaching techniques still in use today.

Reilly organized the study of color, value, form, composition and other elements of painting and drawing into systematic programs built on Munsell’s scientific study of color and the knowledge he acquired from his own teachers (who included renowned anatomist George Bridgeman, Frank Vincent DuMond and his friend and neighbor, the great illustrator Dean Cornwell), as well as his own experience as a working illustrator.

For the 35 years he taught at the Art Students League his classes and lectures were waiting list and standing room only.

I can point you to two excellent sources of information about Reilly on the web. One is an article American Art Archives, the other is a remembrance by contemporary realist Doug Higgins in which he gives a wonderfully detailed account of his experiences as a student of Reilly’s, profusely illustrated with his notes, drawings and paintings from his classes (images at left, bottom).

Because Higgin’s site is in frames, I’ve popped it out of context here because it’s the only way to link to it directly. The original context is a link within Higgin’s main site.

Another of Reilly’s students, Jack Faragasso, who succeeded Reilly at the school he founded, has published a book, Mastering Drawing The Human Figure From Life, Memory, Imagination which is based in large part on Reilly’s instruction.

www.americanartarchives.com/reilly.htm
www.dhfa.net/artiststatement.html

Categories:
Illustration, Tools and Techniques
Jeremy Lipking

August 4, 2006

Value is one one of the most overlooked and misunderstood properties in painting. No, I don’t mean $Dollar $Value, the only property that seems to matter to some art collectors, I mean the range of value from dark to light, which is often difficult to separate from hue (the particular color) and intensity (how much color).

Jeremy Lipking is a California painter whose work is a study in the understanding and use of value.

He paints landscapes and figures. In both he employs careful control of value contrasts to move your eye and create focus within his images. His compositions are often created in a range of middle or even dark values punctuated by areas of white (or close to it). At other times he will do the reverse, place an almost silhouetted figure against a bright, almost white background.

Lipking shows a marked influence from John Singer Sargent (which is a Good Thing). He also acknowledges admiring the work of Joaquin Sorolla and Anders Zorn, but it is the Sargent influence that I find most interesting. Not that he is slavishly trying to copy any Sargentisms in his work, he has just absorbed elements that he likes and has put them in service of his own approach.

Lipking came from an artistic family and was formally trained at the California Art Institute. He has garnered a number of awards including Best of Show in the Portrait Society of America International Portrait Competition this year.

As you browse through his galleries try to think of the compositions in terms of value. What would they look like if all of the color were removed? In our quickness to be dazzled by color in painting, we often overlook the power of value. Jeremy Lipking does not.

Link via Karen Hollingsworth.

www.lipking.com/
www.arcadiafinearts.com/index_lipking.html

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Painting
Bob MacNeil

August 3, 2006

As mentioned last week on Drawn, Bob MacNeil is a multi-talented illustrator and concept artist with a wide variety of styles.

An illustration of his was given a special spotlight in back of the new Flight 3 comics anthology, along with an inspirational story about dealing with tragedy and almost giving up on being an artist.

Fortunately for us, he didn’t give up and is creating illustrations and concept art for a number of projects for toy companies, gaming and TV development, including the new season of Venture Brothers from the Cartoon Network.

He is trained in traditional media. Having worked for a few years in acrylic and oil he made the leap to digital drawing and painting some years ago and finds the speed and flexibility of the digital mediums advantageous.

His approach ranges from highly rendered to simplified and cartoonlike, realistic to highly stylized, indicating an adventurous attitude toward exploring and growing as an artist.

MacNeil also has a blog (with the wonderfully simple name of Bob’s Log, which makes it seem like the term “blog” was invented just for him). The blog often features discussions and step-through demos of his working process.

In addition to the mention on Drawn, MacNeil was recently interviewed on Design Inspiration.

www.taminglight.com
bobmacneil.blogspot.com/

Categories:
Concept & Visual Dev., Digital Painting, Illustration
Bermuda Shorts

August 1, 2006

Bermuda Shorts is a UK animation firm that lists itself as the first animation company to represent individual animation directors in the commercial animation arena.

Their site is organized that way. In addition to showcasing new work, the reels are organized by director and designer. You can also browse them organized by type: commercials, broadcast, promos and short films.

Most of the animations are for broadcast commercial applications, with clients like Volkswagen, American Express, MTV, Nikelodeon, Kraft, Coke, Nestle and the BBC.

There are also a fair number of experimental animated shorts and fun self-promotional pieces, but most of the commercial work is just as fun.

There is a broad variety of approaches between the directors, and all of them seem to be very imaginative and demonstrate the ability to communicate and entertain in short bursts, often 15 or 30 seconds.

The animations are done in a variety of animation media, 2-D cell, Flash, 3-D CGI, stop-motion, photo-montage and altered live action.

Images at left: History of Animation Nicktoons short by Filipe Alcada, Save the Children spot by Ian Bird, Nite Nite Volkswagen ad by Will Barras and Paper Dinosaurs Nickelodeon spot by Model Robot.

Gate: bi-monthly animation contest

Bermuda Shorts is sponsoring a bi-monthly competition called Gate for animation freelancers who want to break into directing, designers looking to move into animation and animation school grads who want to break into the biz.

If you’re chosen, they will feature you on the site as a guest director, bring you into the studio (assuming you’re in reach of London, UK, or can travel there) and promote your work for two months. If you get a positive enough response from the industry they’ll back you with a production team and give you studio space to produce your first job. Details here.

Link via Articles and Texticles

www.bermudashorts.com

Categories:
Animation, Motion Graphics & Flash
Stuart Immonen

July 31, 2006

Stuart Immonen is a Canadian comics artist and cover illustrator with a crisp, confident style. His drawings can have a loose, stylized and modern feel, but are always based on an underpinning of solid draftsmanship.

Immonen has done work for mainstream comics companies like Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image Comics and the French publisher Les Humanoides Associés. Most of his work in recent years has been for Marvel, where he has worked on high-profile titles like The Hulk, Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimate X-Men.

I particularly enjoyed his run on the Ultimate X-Men last year, an 11-issue arc (#54-65) inked by Wade Von Grawbadger and colored by Justin Ponsor.

For those not familiar with the process, mainstream American comics are usually created by an artistic team, the art being broken down into pencil art, final ink drawings and then color, usually applied digitally. This allows for the creation of 22 page continuing stories on a monthly basis. (Personally, I think the old practice of crediting the color artist on a level with the letterer rather than equal to the inker is way out of date. Ponsor’s nice work on this series is a case in point.)

Immonen started in comics by self-publishing a series called Playground. He moved from there to small companies and then the major publishers. In addition to his mainstream comic work, he still produces his own work in the form of webcomics. He has two titles, Never as Bad as You Think and Misery Loves running on the subscription based Webcomics Nation comics portal.

In addition to Immonen’s own site, which is somewhat disappointing in the limited amount and scope of the artwork in the galleries, I’ll suggest the unofficial galleries on Comic Art Community, as well as some interviews from Top Two Three Films (re: their Adventures into Digital Comics film), Sequential Tart, and Newsarama, in which he discusses his 50 Reasons to Stop Sketching at Conventions, a painfully humorous insight into what comic artists sometimes put up with at comic conventions.

www.immonen.ca/

Categories:
Comics
Joan C. Gratz

July 30, 2006

With the Mona Lisa as a starting point, Joan C. Gratz took paintings by 35 artists, rendered her versions of them in colored clay, animated parts of them and morphed them into one another in a fun, short (7 minute) animation set to music and sound effects called Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase.

Aside from Da Vinci’s enigmatic portrait, the majority of the works are from the 20th Century. Particularly fascinating are the sequences where she morphs a face or figure from one painting into a face or figure form another. It’s nicely done and fun just to try to identify as many of the artists and paintings as you can.

(Although Duchamp is in evidence in the image of his mustache and goatee’d postcard version of the Mona Lisa, seen here morphing into Magritte’s The False Mirror, I didn’t see the titular Nude Descending a Staircase.)

Gratz works in a fascinating animation technique (which I believe she pioneered) called “clay painting” in which colored clay is used as if it were paint. The advantage is that the clay can be repositioned and re-blended in a way the permits the creation of stop-motion animation, similar in principle to the the 3-D stop motion process used in popular films like Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Nick Park’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and an entire school of Eastern European animation called Puppetfilm.

Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase won the 1002 Academy Award for Best Animated Film. Gratz also applies her clay painting animation technique to commercial work and you may have seen her spots for Coke, Wishbone and Microsoft. If not, they are beautifully done and well worth checking out.

Gratz is also the author of a new book of yoga humor (yes, yoga humor) called Downward Facing Frog (Amazon link, more details on her site).

Link via Nita Leland’s Exploring Color and Creativity. Leland’s own new book The New Creative Artist is also available from Amazon.

Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase (Google Video)
http://gratzfilm.com/ (Yoga Humor Book)
http://gratzfilm.com/page3.htm (animations)

Categories:
Animation, Gallery and Museum Art