wonderblog at hudillo

Brian Snoddy teaches guouache at Krab Jab this spring!

2012-01-31T17:03:00.000-08:00

My friend Brian Snoddy is teaching a series of classes in gouache this spring. He's a master of the medium and a mensch, and the classes will offer great insight into handling this traditional illustration medium of opaque watercolor.

I won't post images out of respect for his copyright, but check out his sweet art on his site!

Monday Morning Monster; the Doggilo

2012-01-30T08:55:00.000-08:00

This is the doggilo, or toy doggerelle...

It's a paint up from the same sketch as last week, with more respect for its original silliness. The doggilo has been domesticated in all the worst senses of the word.

The serious monster paintup can be seen in last Monday's post, here.

Monday Morning Monster; the Doggerelle

2012-01-23T10:53:00.000-08:00

The doggerelle seems to be some kind of carnivorous antelope. It may be a thecodont or related mammal-like reptile, one that evolved on the savannah then moved uphill in response to environmental pressures. It is now established on the steppes of certain mountainous regions. It forms hunting packs based around an alpha male and 3 to five females and their young.

The doggerelle goes from bad to verse...

The doggerelle evolved out of a doodle. To make it less silly, I shooped the sketch heavily before I started painting. Why I needed to make the doggerelle less silly, I now cannot recall.

Degenerative or toy doggerelle...

I wonder what a paintup of the original sketch would have looked like. If dogs like pugs can walk the earth today, a paintup of the original doggerelle should be perfectly credible.

Thoughts on technique -- I've been doing a lot of alla prima oil painting, getting ready for a show that coming up, and I can really see the effect of all that real-world brushwork on my digital rendering.

Leopard Prints!

2012-01-17T08:48:00.000-08:00

Hey, someone bought a print from me thru my Fine Arts America store! And it's one of the Clouded Leopard illustrations!

I love painting fantasy, and I'm honored when folks enjoy my art as they play the games I've illustrated. But knowing that someone has enjoyed my work for its own merits, without a beloved IP to give it added luster, is a lovely thing as well.

Thank you, art lover in Connecticut, you made my day!

Monday Morning Monster; Badger Dog Warrior

2012-01-16T11:42:00.000-08:00

This post is not just the Monday Morning Monster, it's a trip in the Wayback Machine as well. The Badger Dog here is actually a paint-up of a sketch I drew in 2005 for the Wizards miniatures game "Dreamblade."

Dreamblade -- one of the few games based on Jungian analytical psychology.

There's no reason to paint up a sketch to which I no longer have any legal claim, but I always liked the Mujina sketch. I share this only as a personal piece, painted for fun; the Mujina sketch is copyright Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro Inc., and is used with permission as a portfolio piece.

Games come and go, but copyright is forever.

It was commissioned as "Mujina," for the "Chrysotic Plague" expansion, and I think it was specc'd as a badger warrior in Japanese armor (?) with a symbolic flail. It wasn't clear to me at the time whether the intent was a true badger or the Japanese badger dog, aka the tanui. Apparently this is a common problem -- the term is used for one or the other, or for both, or for a third supernatural manifestation in different areas of Japan. My sketch had elements of both, but I have always had a warm spot in my heart for tanuki and "Mujina" has the enormous belly of that kind. In the paint-up, the coloration is definitely tanuki. Although he is missing some other elements, alas...

I don't remember ever seeing the sculpt of the Mujina figure, so this image is as new to me as it is to you. The grasp on the flail has been very reasonably revised to make the figure more sturdy and easier to cast, and if I thought that miniatures were still being drawn by hand, I would certainly make note of it for future use. The armor turned out roughly the same color in both versions, and the mini's flail coincidentally uses the same colors that I painted into the trim.

But I like my painted guy's expression more.

Monday Morning Monster; Swimming Mermaid

2012-01-09T11:10:00.000-08:00

Yay, Monday Morning Monster is back again! Yay!
Last week I was unavoidably out of the studio, but now I'm back and here's a paintup of one of my mermaids from the old Monster a Day series.

For comparison, here's the original sketch.

As you can see, to make decisions about color is to make decisions about light. To make decisions about light is to make decisions about the environment. There are metaphorical implications to this...

Artist tricks explained -- the switch from leftwards to rightwards was nigh-accidental, a side effect of switching the art back and forth to check how the face looked from either angle. In traditional painting, you can see drawing flaws more clearly by looking at the art in a mirror, which gives you fresh eyes to see things you otherwise overlook. In digital media, the equivalent flopping from side to side is so damn easy that I lost all interest in which way the thing was supposed to go and just called it finished when I liked the overall look.

My only other thought is that I can certainly keep working on that refracted water thing...

Monday Morning Monster; Home Improvement

2011-12-26T07:45:00.000-08:00

This is my week. Merry Xmas.

When you paint onto the void, the void paints back on you.

I expect a proper monster to go up next week. Studio Wondercabinet regrets the inconvenience.

Monday Morning Monster; Industrial Steam Zombie Hunter Dot

2011-12-19T12:33:00.000-08:00

Here's another steam-zombie-hunting girl from Edwardian England, this one a tough upstairs-maid called Dorothy, or Dot. The industrial steam zombie can be seen here.

When Buffy met Jeeves...

I'll probably post more of these girls over the next couple of weeks. It will do me good to finish them, and in the chaos currently operative at Studio Wondercabinet, it's nice to finish up half-done projects instead of creating them whole and entire.
Here's a conundrum to consider... the green baize arm protectors were used by the better class of servant when doing messy jobs like pot scrubbing or heavy-duty dusting, to keep their uniforms clean. The apron is a big piece of cow hide, tied at the waist, a variant on something I saw on photos of early 20th C. blacksmiths. Both seem reasonable ideas for a zombie hunter of the lower classes, particularly one who wants to stay tidy, but I don't know if they translate to a theoretical audience who is not the artist. You tell me.

Dot evolved in production.

Since the school-girl zombie hunters were a team, I started off with simple geometric shapes to make sure that visual distinctions were built in from the start. At that point I thought the fifth hunter would be a teacher, as shown in the digitally painted thumbnail that followed. Looking at the lineup, tho, it felt like one adult teacher and four schoolgirls would create an unbalanced team so instead I explored making the fifth hunter the same age as the other girls, but of a different class.
Frustrated with sketching digitally, I drew the revised version in pencil.
After I had a concept and a sketch, I worked up a 4-tone monochrome study to figure out the lights and darks of the piece. At this point, helpful criticism suggested that she looked too much like a maid and not enough like a zombie-hunter, so I took away the mob-cap and gave her the leather apron and the protective sleeves.

Looking at the finished Dot, I am pleased with the way that the initial triangle remains visible in the finished character, and saddened that she lacks the strong blue element that marks the rest of the team. I do like her face, tho. There is something about her chin that speaks of that unflappable, silent dependability that the upper class has always expected from the help, if they cannot manage it themselves.

This week my main painting project will consist of several rooms of fresh sheet rock and several gallons of white primer. Husbandman's broken foot will keep him from sharing the fun, and the contractor will be back after Christmas and must not be kept waiting. Don't know if I'll have time to paint a monster -- or a monster-hunter -- for Boxing Day, but I'm gonna try! Merry bloody Christmas one and all.

Monday Morning Monster; Industrial Steam Zombie Hunter

2011-12-12T11:51:00.000-08:00

"C" is for Cathleen. Cathleen hunts industrial steam zombies. Generally on Tuesdays and Thursdays, after Maths.

More fun than French with Miss Grimly, anyway...

This was painted for class and features perhaps the least impressive weapon against the undead ever built. That it might possibly be effective against a coal-fired zombie is beside the issue.

It is dangerous to become enchanted by reference material: thus I wound up illustrating five Edwardian schoolgirl zombie hunters.

Monday Morning Monster; Industrial Steam Zombie

2011-12-05T11:42:00.000-08:00

This evolved out of a more traditional zombie when I started to build a back story for zombies in Edwardian England.

The dehumanization of the industrial revolution hits a new low...

Not the most polished monster I've sent out on a Monday morning, but not the worst either. A concept sketch rather than an illustration, but mostly a learning experience. Machinery is always good to practice.

The steam zombie here is one of my homework projects for a digital painting class I'm taking. The focus is in digital painting in Photoshop for the digital game industry, and one of its particular charms is that I can reach it two nights a week without flying across country or camping on a friend's couch. It is instruction. The fact that I do not plan a career focused on digital game illustration is extraneous.
I do my homework and try to learn what the teacher tries to teach. I figured out a while back not to ignore material that does not seem relevant to my current interests, that material will always be needed later, when I can't remember it.
The class offers basic instruction in digital painting in Photoshop, and also in what the game industry expects the basics to be. In return, I offer the class experience dealing with humans who are old and female like their mother, and yet aren't. We both cope.

Back to life; Riveted

2011-12-02T10:42:00.000-08:00

My friends at Krab Jab are hosting costumed life model sessions again (yay!), so this is my first oil study in a couple of weeks. Last night's session featured a model dressed as Rosie the Riveter. I meant to do a full figure study but got interested in her eyes and the head scarf she wore, so that's what the painting focused on.

This is a relatively limited palette, tho not as limited as "Wrenched," here. The red is venetian red, a rather cool and heavy color by itself that makes a lovely flush as a tint against the yellow ocher highlights of the skin.

Gadzooks, I went looking for better work than mine to show what can be done with a limited palette and wound up looking at these works by Joquin Sorolla. Then I looked at some of his higher chroma pieces. Thanks to Iain Vellacott for creating sorollapaintings.com for putting together this introduction to an amazing artist! If you find you live near a museum where you can see some of Sorolla's work in the flesh, do it!

Not the Monday Morning Monster -- Thorns

2011-11-28T10:15:00.000-08:00

I do not have a monster painted up today, mea culpa. Rather than make excuses, I'm posting a treat for the miniature gamers and any fans of Wizard's miniature game "Dreamblade" from a few years back.

I recently received a couple of minis for which I drew the original pencils, years ago. One of them was this sculpt for "Princess of Thorns."

Princess of Thorns, sculpted

I expect that the process for designing miniatures has changed quite a bit in the last few years, what with the advent of digital sculpting and relatively low-priced 3-D printing, but in 2005, when she was drawn, the production process commissioned sketches of each figure from least two angles then sent out the approved sketches out of house to be sculpted. While a full-on miniatures gaming company might find it cost-effective to fund a local team of sculptors, Wizards was a very paper-based game company at the time and subcontracted production to a company in China. Sketches were accepted, disappeared, and new sketches were commissioned with very little chance for me to see how the final art turned out. Occasionally I'd be given a couple of common figures from this set or that, but mostly I was sketching in a vacuum without seeing the final work I'd helped create.

Princess of Thorns sketch circa 2005

This was a bit unfortunate -- commercial illustrators learn a lot from seeing their work in print (or whatever) and I had never worked on a miniature game before. I was given a set of basic instructions ("no pointy bits pointing straight up, no undercuts, etc...") and I started drawing. My husband, bless him, pulled out a couple of dozen of his own wargame figures for me to pore over like Indiana Jones trying to figure out which holy relic would keep him out of that damned flying refrigerator. "This one is a strong piece," he'd say (my husband, not Indiana Jones) as he'd hand me an elf bowman or a particularly poorly dressed war maiden. I wondered at the time if I should be drawing a sketch of a character or a sketch of the miniature, but in the end I just drew the best, most evocative sketches I could and trusted that somewhere in China, some poor soul wearing very strong prescription lenses would be grateful to have something interesting to look at as he started into in nine-hundredth tiny sculpture.

Btw, drawing the same imaginary figure over and over from different angles may seem tedious compared to sculpting it digitally, but it was fabulous great drawing training and I will always thank Dreamblade for leveling up my drawing skills and starting to give me the serious interest in pencil work that's motivated me ever since.

I have wondered about those semi-legendary Chinese sculptors, living in a society presumably very different from my own, making their daily living by creating the collectable figures and game miniatures of an alien pop culture. How do you image a foreign country that you know only by grinding out, day after day, week after week, Todd McFarlane's latest Spawn figures?

As I've met the Dreamblade figures, little by little over the years, I've noticed that some sculpts are stronger than others. The princess here turned out very well -- I think she's a pretty thing in herself, without considering that I drew the original sketches and without playing the game. Once again, I feel rather sad that I'll never meet the sculptor.

Holiday card 2011

2011-11-22T11:09:00.000-08:00

I realize not everyone feels the same way about the holidays that I do. For those that do, I'm offering a card for the holidays, "Have a Holly Jolly Dino-Zombie Christmas."

HaHJDZC was our personal card last year, and was so much admired that I decided to offer it to the public this holiday season. The card is now available online at my store Heather Hudson Art on the Fine Arts America site.

For the enthused collector, small art prints on rag paper and canvas are available. I feel, though, that the whole purpose of the image is to give my friends in the geek nation a Xmas card to share with their loved ones. A card that says, I care about you and wish you well this Christmas, and also a dinosaur eating a zombie is cool. Enjoy!

Monday Morning Monster; My Emancipated House Elf

2011-11-21T11:10:00.000-08:00

My house elf has been emancipated. He has a pair of little red shorts to prove it, and he's certainly not doing any work around the place. Possibly he is too busy playing Skyrim, like everyone else I know.

"Dishes? Wash 'em yourself, sweetie."

This is yet another paint-up of a sketchbook doodle, this one drawn in the margin of some class notes. Drawn in the dark, too, which is why the sketch is not appearing here this morning. Sometimes good intentions aren't enough to make good art, if you can't see what you're doing.

Once again, this is an experiment with digi-painting with the brush opacity set at 100%, an experience which I once again compare to wet-into-wet oil painting. It's a bit slippery and requires lots of thoughtful directional blending brushwork, I mean.
I recently listened to experienced, 100%-digital painters talk about collecting images of real paintings so that they can study the application of paint with real brushes. In contrast, I've been told repeatedly by real-world painters that looking at a picture of a painting is useless as a learning tool, and that one must look at the real painting to understand how it was constructed and how the paint was applied.
The layers of artifice involved make me a bit dizzy, honestly. If one is making an imitation of a representational (ie, life-imitating) painting with an imitation paintbrush, is an imitation of an imitation painting a better source than its original?
Btw, the Frye Gallery still offers free admission...

Monday Morning Monster; the Psychopomp

2011-11-14T11:25:00.000-08:00

Cold weather has finally come to the Pacific NorthWest and right now, most of the time I have to work with the heat turned off, due to Home Improvement.
(That pretty much sums up most things in life right now; why is it cold, why don't I have any clean socks, why is there a strange man using our bathroom..? Home Improvement. Enough said.)

What are you waiting for? It's freezing out here!

Anyhow, this little fellow is a psychopomp, and he'll guide your soul to the land of the dead when you die. But it's cold and you're not dead yet, and his toes are starting to go numb...

Don't make me come in there!

The original sketch was drawn back in 2009 for the monster-a-day series, and I've always been rather fond of it. I tweaked the face a bit, and I bulked up the branch to give a better sense of the smallness of the monster. In the original pencil the branch is rather wee, and the critter looks roughly the size of an eagle because of it.

This is my second shot at painting with the paint opacity turned up to 100%. (Mostly, anyway -- I do dial it back when I use the "airbrush" setting to glaze or scumble a bit of atmospheric perspective.) It is a lot like making the jump from acrylic to oils -- more subtlety and blending are required. The psychopomp isn't perfect but I am quite please with his personality.

Monday Morning Monster; A Scary Warrior Guy

2011-11-07T11:46:00.000-08:00

I was originally going to do a centaur from the original Monster a Day sketches, but I thought I'd try a new technique and decided to work from a looser sketch instead. I quite like the centaur drawing and would like to work it up into a painting that actually looks like the line art. So here's "Scary Warrior Guy" instead.

This guy came from a sketchbook doodle so sketchy that I do not even show the original here. The challenge was to paint with my brush at 100% opacity instead of the 20 to 45% that I usually use, and I thought that a weak drawing would give me more impetus to strike boldly and obliterate the line art.

On the other hand, I think better with a pencil than a brush, and the weak drawing kept evolving in production. It is hard to know when a piece is done if you're not altogether sure where you're going with it, and this monster wandered over to my default setting, "probably cool to a 12-year-old geek boy."

Things that I have concluded are probably cool to 12-year-old geek boys are monsters, zombies, random dismemberment, really big fangs and other spiky bits, crazy big weapons, impractical armor, explosions, and gi-normous hooters. So really, this piece could be much, much more disturbing.

Oil study

2011-11-04T10:16:00.000-07:00

I was rushed for time last night, setting up my oil paint at the last minute before the Krab Jab live model session, so this piece was painted using only three pigments; titanium white, burnt umber and blue-black.

Wrenching!

The orange of the burnt umber plays pretty well off the blue in the blue-black, what with being compliments and all. Once again, notice that the burnt-umber tint painted directly onto the gessoed board (dangling hand) looks much brighter and stronger than the wet-into-lighter-wet of the face.

Also, safety helmets are challenging! This probably means I should paint more of them.

Monday Morning Monster; the Ghoul

2011-10-31T11:33:00.000-07:00

Happy Halloween! Here's a ghoul to keep you company today!

Some enchanted evening...

This one is based on a sketch from the original Monster a Day series a while back, but I've dinked with him a bit in Photoshop for this workup. Didn't quite go full Transform: Perspective on him, but it was close...

Can you spot all the differences in these two pictures?

I've been drawing ghouls for a while, particularly the Lovecraftian ghoul, the Elder Ghoul, as it turns up in derivative works of Mythos fiction and gaming scenarios. I suspect that Lovecraft himself envisioned them as pretty conventionally demonic, but since they reproduce by evolving out of contaminated humans as well as in the usual way, I've always thought they should look a bit kit-bashed and that the original human element should be around if you looked closely.

A word on design -- there should be a sweet spot in every piece, a place where the eye naturally tends to fall when it first sees the art, and where it ends up again after rolling around the entire painting like a slimy organic pinball. The two great tools for creating this sweet spot are tone and edge. Okay, hue -- particularly a complimentary hue -- is good, too. A strong contrast in tone, in hue and/or a slightly sharper edge tell the eye that something is Important. On that sweet spot, you should put the most important narrative element of the piece; the tiny bit of the picture that the entire picture is there to tell.

Unless you are creating a certain type of picture, that tiny bit of sweet spot should not be the crotch.

Digital painting info for irl painters

2011-10-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

Seems like most "intro to digital painting" instruction is geared around the notion that the students know everything about the digital and squat about the painting.

For us oldtimers who have read Loomis and figured out the importance of tone and painted our pieces with a brush, this can be as disheartening as the computer interface itself. This is, in turn, a Bad Thing because (a) Learning never ends, and (b) Digital art has eaten the illustration business like a coyote sucking down a miniature schnauzer.

Sometimes the artist's journey needs some help...

Here's a nice online instructional program from illustrator Matt Kohr (and Lifehacker) that seems to actually be designed to teach Photoshop painting to traditional painters. Check out "Digital Painting 101" at ctrlpaint.com. I'm liking it so far.

Monday Morning monster; Kiffoidia

2011-10-24T10:19:00.000-07:00

I've been reading space opera again, waiting at bus stops on rainy afternoons. Books that I first read 20 years ago read rather differently today but the series is still well written. Where once I just processed the words, now I actually try to sketch out what the critters would look like. These two are completely unlike the creatures described in the series but still worthy monsters.

From somewhere green and leafy, apparently.

These guys are painted from a recent and particularly quick sketchbook doodle.

You can pick your friends, and you can pick your nose...

This is why I like sketch books -- a sketch that doesn't quite work for one purpose can be a great idea somewhere else on short notice. And as far as I can tell, short notice is what artists usually get.

Tiny Art and the Hot One Inch

2011-10-20T10:53:00.000-07:00

I'm beating the drum for the guys at the Hot One Inch Action button contest -- they're looking for creative types to submit something to the Seattle show of Hot One Inch Action. This would be a bit of a rush job because the deadline is 25 October and the opening for the 50 winning pieces is 5 November. There's no money involved, you win 5 buttons with your own art on them. On other hand, the size of the finished art requires a minimalist approach anyway and the party sounds like a fun way to meet people. If you're up for a quick personal project like this one, check out the submission guidelines.

Designing tiny art has its own set of challenges. It is not enough to shrink big art down, you need to design with tiny in mind to make the art work. The best suggestion I can make is to limit your initial thumbnail to 2 tones -- Your first concepts should go down in black and white. If it works in black and white, it will work in color. Save the greys for larger pieces.

On the subject of tiny art, here's something to look at, artwork from a few years back that I painted for the Hidden City game Clout. The art was painted at 8" square and was meant to fit on a poker chip.

Bone Warrior? Skeletal Shield?

If you shrink it down and look at it in monochrome, you see many different greys and no white to make the blacks sing.

But it would look great on the side of a van!

This morning I shooped it around, mostly tweaking levels to reduce the number of midtones. I also enlarged the shield; while the original layout was designed to fit the whole shield and the warrior's upper body and head into a round template, I decided to push the shield as a visual element here. The piece was originally commissioned as "Bone Warrior" meaning the warrior was the the important bit, but it turned into "Skeletal Shield" in production; seems like this version would have made more visual sense in play.

Yep, that's a giant shield made of bone, alright.

In monochrome you can see that I've pushed greys either up towards white or down towards black. Now the shield leaps out of the dark background, even at a very small size.

No matter how much you reduce it, this shield will read.

In small formats like poker chips and 1" buttons, one of the goals is to have the art read at any size, even if it's just a glimpse across a room. That glimpse could excite someone enough to come over and look closer.

Monday Morning monster; Wall Dragon

2011-10-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

Here's the Wall Dragon, which magic fans will recognize as a victim of a Wall of Blossoms.

The original 2009 sketch was drawn on the back of an Artist's Proof card, which accounts for the tall, narrow format.

Turning concepts like"wall" and "blossoms" into a dynamic, interesting image can be challenging. Monsters help.

Live in Seattle!

2011-10-14T11:17:00.000-07:00

The Enchantress, from a 3 hour session at KrabJab

So I'm sitting in class the other evening, listening to folks talk about where they can find -- or start! -- a live drawing session, and it occurs to me that maybe these are not as hard to find around town as one might think.

Most of the drawing session I've attended over the years have advertised in the traditional manner -- word of mouth supplemented with fliers on the public bulletin boards in art schools and supply stores. But here in the Seattle there's also a great on-line resource, www.Seattle FigureDrawing.com, which acts as a clearing house for the local modeling sessions. Here's the October calender; if you want to draw from life in this town, you have options!

It is generally good form to...
     ... contact the organizer if you're not sure how open the session might be.
   ... bring your payment in cash, preferably small bills. The model does not take checks or plastic.
     ... bring your own drawing board if you're sketching, and if you're painting in oils, bring a medium that won't poison the folks around you.
     ... always treat the model as someone who is doing you a great favor by posing. Because they are.

One of my favorite local session is the costumed 3-hour pose put on every Thursday night by Julie at Krab Jab Studio. We're looking for more folks to join us -- the more artists attend, the easier it is to pay the model -- so if you'd like to attend a session and do fantasy art from life, get in touch with Krab Jab to find out more!

Monday Morning Monster: Ephemera (the Mummy)

2011-10-10T10:16:00.000-07:00

This is one of the rare monsters that has been turned over in the back of my mind for a while, the tones and hues already known. It says something about life, work and stuff, I expect.

The original sketch was much less dramatic.

I roughed out a color thumbnail to work from, but after I started painting, I liked the painting less with more polish. In the end I threw out the first attempt and started over from a blown-up copy of the thumbnail, trying to leave the blotched quality visible as I worked up the form.

Mummies seem to involve a lot of texture. Lost edges, also, places where folds of skin press into other folds and the form disintegrates. This is probably a photoreference thing that wouldn't happen so much in real life, but, eh... it is a distinctive feature to me since I mostly see mummies in photos.

Monday Morning Monster: the Priestess

2011-10-03T12:56:00.000-07:00

Today's monster is not really a monster, but that's cool because it's now 12:02 as I write so it's not really morning, either. It's Monday, true, but only in certain places on the planet and by the time you read this it's probably not even Monday at all. Too much philosophy! Here, look at this instead.

The Priestess

This is Jody, posing for the Krab Jab crew as an Incan Priestess. This is also, from a different perspective, my second oil sketch from a live model and arguably the more successful of the two in that this one actually dried. Yay! The first attempt can be seen here; it was painted with safflower oil on a gessoed board and still feels a bit soft and vulnerable, roughly the consistency of a freshly baked cooky. This one was painted with refined linseed oil and Gamsol. The refined linseed oil worked fine and I'll use it again. The Gamsol will probably not be back; while, as advertised, it did not smell, it did leave me walking into walls and tripping over quite large objects, so I deduce that it is not a good medium for me to work with.

This piece uses the same pigments as last time but in paints from reliable manufacturers. The first session was painted with adorable wee tubes of hobby grade paint that someone gave me and that I used because they were so adorably wee that I could make up an adorable wee paint kit with them. The first painting looks a bit peaky, doesn't it? The wee tubes had relatively low quantities of actual pigment in them. Generally, any tool or material marked "hobby-grade" or "student-grade" is actually harder to work with and less rewarding than the regular version.

This week has consisted largely of destroying the basement in the name of home improvement, and class work for the digital painting class I'm taking two nights a week. In retrospect, it was a bit of a challenge to do both at the same time and I probably wouldn't recommend it except for wanting to get both done before I die of old age or the zombie apocalypse, which ever comes first. So, I have not had time to finish my proper, digitally painted monster this week, which is why you're looking at Jody the Incan Priestess up above here. On the other hand, I have been introduced to the mysteries of Filter; Other; Offset and can produce a repeating texture tile like nobody's business!

Oranges!

Monday Morning Monster: the Frogdog

2011-09-26T10:26:00.000-07:00

He seems happy...

Frogdog says hello!!!

The Frogdog lives in marshes and mudflats and is easy to socialize if you don't mind his eating habits. He's another recent doodle that had potential. In this guy's case, I credit his winning smile. In retrospect, said smile could have used a better defined jaw structure, but -- eh. It's a nice smile.

Hide patterns and specular hilites really pulled this painting together.

Eventually I got sick of hiliting marsh grass.

This week we destroyed the basement, and I started a digital painting class across the lake that meets two nights a week, so my actual painting time is very sweet to me. Also a bit hard to find, which of course adds to the sweetness. The last few days have involved a lot of manual labor as I try to scrub efflorescence off of 90-year-old concrete walls with various (caustic) solutions. Manual labor sucks. Painting is easier, even on a computer.

Safflower Oil, Alla Prima and Me

2011-09-20T11:22:00.000-07:00

This is my first oil study of a live model. I've painted still life setups for years, and I've drawn live models for years, but this is my first attempt at painting in a modeling session. This piece is from a 3-hour session at Krab Jab earlier this month. It was great fun and I'm eager to try it again this week, but there's still a few bugs to work out...

One major problem isn't visible on the computer; the thing is not dry yet and, for all I know, may never dry, ever. I used safflower oil to dilute my paints, experimenting with nontoxic substitutes for turps. Safflower oil may be great for cleaning brushes, but it's been 10 days now and the sucker is still moist and smeary.

I'm used to working with turps in my own studio, but I have good ventilation there. The Krab Jab studio atrium is a shared space in an old warehouse building, and I'm afraid of poisoning everyone including myself if I open a jar of turpenoid while I work. I know folks who work with an orange-based thinner, instead, but I don't know if that's not just turps with a pleasant, citrusy aroma.

Maybe walnut oil next time? If anyone has any suggestions in this department, let me know.

Monday Morning Monster: Skullfly

2011-09-19T10:49:00.000-07:00

Here's the skullfly that I painted this week.

I'm a nuturing parent!

Helpful tip for the week -- the key light is the compliment of the shadow hue. So if the shadow looks red, the light will be green as it affects the local color and is visible on the highlites. I'm used to working with warm lights, it takes me a while to figure these things out sometimes.

Here's the original sketch from 2009.

Me too!

Generally I pick next week's sketch right after I post on a Monday, set up a workspace and pull a few pieces of reference for general inspiration. By the time I get to work on the piece, I've had a few days to jostle ideas around in the back of my head and when I do work on it, the painting unfolds comfortably. This week I punted that sensible approach for the generally popular (but not recommended) Put Everything Off Until the Day Before process. The latter involves 75% more panic. If you like panic, I would definitely recommend this method. Otherwise, set things up early and come back to it with some ideas about light and tone and color.

One of the nice things about doing a series is the order that it gives to an otherwise chaotic phase of life; and all phases of life are chaotic.

Monday Morning Monster; the Giant

2011-09-12T09:45:00.000-07:00

I wanted something a little more lively than the last couple of monsters -- or at least not corpse-like -- so here's a relatively fresh-faced giant this morning.

A random shadow has been added to the composition in keeping with my belief that many a sucky piece can be mended by pushing the value range. It pushes and controls focus through contrast.

I drew the original sketch in '09, back before I saw "Troll Hunter," so any similarities can be put down to my fondness for Bauer trolls in general. Note that this fellow has no cow tail, so he's probably not a real troll anyway.

It's not shown here, but this sketch was extensively messed with in photoshop as I tried to push the perspective, until finally it was reduced to a giant foot with legs shooting off into the sky. Then I threw out everything I'd done and went back to this original sketch. If I was going to make the paint-up about an enormous foot, I'd need something better than imagination to work from.

The rest of my week will be spent gutting my basement, because it needs to be done. Have a good week!

This Week, the Snakeweasle!

2011-09-06T09:52:00.000-07:00

The Snakeweasle only looks like a confabulated taxidermy specimen. I thought he had a lot of personality, so here he is in his very own paint-up.

The snakeweasle wants to be friends...

The snakeweasle is another ringer, a recent sketchbook doodle rather than an original Monster-a-Day sketch.

I'm an original graphic statement!

See those firm dark shadows? The Exclamation Cat! should have had shadows like that. I am quite pleased with those shadows. When a finished piece shows you a weakness in your work, it is useful to do a new piece with the same set-up so that you can work through the weakness and figure out how to carry out the idea properly. Just thinking about a new piece is not a substitute; good intentions are as useless in art as everywhere else.

Also this week, I went to the Seattle Art Museum's show, "Beauty and Bounty; American Art in an Age of Exploration." It's a wonderful show -- late 19th C. paintings of the landscape by Bierstadt, Moran, and many more artists of great talent whom, alas, I had never seen before. It's only showing until the 11th of the month, so see it sometime this week if you can. I was struck by the diversity of handling of the landscapes; many of the paintings were of landscapes familiar to me, the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, and they were, by and large, good and recognizable representational paintings, and yet the handling and color choices ranged widely. The aesthetic fingerprints of the artist marked each one.

Monday Morning Monster; Zombies

2011-08-29T10:38:00.000-07:00

The zombie is a consumer in its purest form. Mindless and predictable, lacking personal identity, almost useless alone but overwhelming in groups, its current popularity is probably related to the suspicion that our own society is on the verge of collapsing into mob violence of a more traditional kind. As an added benefit, violence against the undead carries no stigma, as it would towards starving members of the proletariat.

"Marat, we're poor..."

The original sketch for the zombies didn't prioritize one zombie over the other. Possibly I drew all three looking for a functional monster, then decided to slap them together in photoshop and hope that a scene would result.

Well, I guess we'll just sit here until you bring us a brain...

Prepping the sketch for painting, I felt that the original design was killing its own dynamic by drawing the eye down and into the ground. Establishing a horizon and reshuffling the figures, I got a composition that led the eye upward and forward, as the zombies got bigger and more aggressive from left to right across the picture plane.

Mmm, proactive!

Seattle has a large and active zombie community. Think about that sentence...

Monday Morning Monster; Exclamation Cat!

2011-08-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

Or as we call him, 'Exclamation Cat -- poop!"

The original pencil sketch for Exclamation Cat! is more of a stress doodle than a creature design.

Exclamation Cat 2009 -- poop!

Exclamation Cat! has too much stress to deal with this!

(He makes my husband uncomfortable, which is a good sign in creature design...)

Monday Morning Monster; the Angelcore

2011-08-15T11:52:00.000-07:00

Today's paint-up of a Monster-a-Day sketch is the Angelcore. The Angelcore is like a manticore, only with wings. The old monster-a-day sketch was actually called "flying manticore," and like the earlier manticore, he's based on the notion that the double jaws of the traditional manticore are actually a second set of forelimbs that have devolved into mandibles.

"I'm a monster! Rowr!"

Angelcore here is a particularly quick paint job. The real monster I painted this week was our kitchen porch, which was constructed by an incompetent lunatic and combines the worst features of a bronze-age fortress and a gypsy caravan. This part of the world only gets a couple of dry weeks each year, so when good weather strikes I wind up outside, painting over all the broken places where the rain is getting in, and have not so much time free for personal projects. Angelcore was a rush job -- I cheated by pushing the contrast of sunlight and shade, and leaving the shaded bits flat; if it works, it's because your brain says you wouldn't have seen those bits anyway.

For contrast, this is the original Flying Manticore sketch from late 2009. Like most of my pencil doodles it is all line and very little tone. Without tone, it's hard to feel the form of the critter, which is why I generally do a quick monochrome study before going into color.

A monster somewhat lacking in self-confidence.

Without a strong dynamic line to give him energy the original sketched looked limp and lifeless (as they say in the shampoo commercials) and so the Angelcore sketch got a hearty work-over with the Transform tool before painting started. Part of the fun for me is going back to old ideas and turning them into new ones, re-editing the idea of the monster as well as the pencil lines.

Monday Morning Monster; the Coybaby

2011-08-08T11:01:00.000-07:00

The Coybaby looks like it's half coyote, but I think it's actually a therapsid. The straightness of the snout gives it away.

It lives in ditches and ruined houses and eats vermin and lead paint, and thinks hopeful thoughts.

The Coybaby evolved out of a quick doodle, drawn during a 5-minute break in at Lifedrawing a couple weeks ago.

Things are a little busy right now, and I wanted to keep this week's monster small and manageable, and the Coybaby was certainly small. I didn't tweak the sketch much, just added a couple of toes. He looks like he knows he's going to have to struggle to get by...

Monday Morning Monster; Walking Manticore

2011-08-01T11:22:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd be working on the house this past week, but the wet weather held on to Seattle long enough for me to paint up this manticore.

Here's the original pencil sketch from the old Monster-a-Day series.

It got worked over pretty thoroughly in translation; the face was pulled out and the jaws enlarged, the scorpion tail was transformed by actual photo reference, and the forelegs were pulled into perspective and made more feline.
Some of the changes were the result of imposing tone structure on a flat pencil sketch -- tone implies light and shade, which implies a figure in space exposed to light, and that brings up the perspective issue. But I also blame the unholy enticements of the Warp tool. I've heard that part of learning a martial art like ju jitsu is learning when not to fight; part of the learning curve of digital art seems to be learning when not to mess around with the art... even though it's so easy...

Outside the studio -- if you're in the Seattle area, go to the Frye art museum and see Gabriel von Max: Be-tailed Cousins and Phantasms of the Soul, because it is a great show both in content and in craftsmanship; impressive oil painting, sketching and illustration by a philopher/spiritualist/ artist who liked monkeys and painted about his interests. In particular, his larger spiritualism paintings work in very neutral hues in a generally high key, yet they do work and that alone should interest the painters. The Frye is always free admission, and the show runs through Halloween.

Monday Morning Monster; Gameroid 2011

2011-07-25T11:42:00.000-07:00

This one should be pronounced with a soft "a", as in "Gamera" not a hard "a" as "gamer." Thanks!

Gamera is really neat, he is made of turtle meat...

Gameroid here is the third in my current paint up of the monsters from last year's Monster a Day personal challenge, and I had a lot of fun with him.

Perhaps some variation in tone would help... yes, yes it would.

The original sketch was rather boring, but I started fiddling around with a high-contrast light and shade to suggest outdoor light which made the picture more interesting. Once I'd made decisions about the light, it implied an environment, so I put that in too. And seeing him in his environment, I had to soften some edges to reflect the atmospheric perspective that would certainly affect a turtle of this magnitude. Whee! Explosions, also!

If it rains a lot this week, come back next Monday for the next monster. If it's sunny, I'm afraid I'll have some house painting to do instead, which is a monster of a different kind.

Monster of the Week 2; Sad Fay

2011-07-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

First off, a big thank you to Sarah L. Covert and "She Never Slept", for a glowing review of Casino R'lyeh, the Mythos poker deck; we're glad you liked it! Sarah reviews all things SF and horror-inspired, and it's an honor to be featured in her blog. (Now back to the monsters...)

i haz a big sad...

She's not officially one of the Monster-a-Day series, but this little critter dates back a few years so I've used her for this week's paint-up... the Sad Fay.

I like the volume this has, but looking at it as a finished piece, I see that the tonal contrast and sharp edges in the skirt and feet pull the eye a lot more strongly than the face. That's what high contrast and sharp edges do, they say "Look here!" Unless I was illustrating a story about elf feet, this could be a problem. On the plus side, the skirt does have an attractive toothiness to it...

better living through scribbles!

She's been in the to-do file for so long I forgot what she originally looked like, before I redrew her as a submission for a fairy art challenge in 2009. I found this preliminary sketch in a different file; the face has evolved a fair bit but it looks like the feet have always been an important part of this sketch for me. Darned if I know why.

Later I went back to the polished sketch, flopped it and softened the the lines to prep it for painting, then forgot about it. When I went looking for a sketch to work on last week, she was right there waiting.

Waiting... heh heh....

Banshee Paint-up

2011-07-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

A while back I ran a project here that I called "Monster-a-Day," a personal challenge to draw and post a monster sketch every day for a month. It was fun -- good practice and a great way to meet people, and it got me used to working with the blogger interface. Later on I started to paint up the sketches, but my approach to digital was pretty formal and after three or four paint-ups the project languished...

I've been working more loosely with digital paint lately, so I picked a piece at random and tried again.

For contrast, here's the 2009 sketch that the piece is based on.

Yeah, the hands miraculously shrank in painting. I have a tendency to exaggerate hands anyway (they're a symbolically loaded motif, so sue me) and when I translated the fingers into color they turned into enormous sausages. Revision was necessary. I like sausages, but not on my hands.

Due to Life&such I don't have time in my schedule to paint a monster a day right now, but it would be cool to see how long I could post a new paint-up from the series every week. I think I want to see how I tweak the old sketches to make them work as new paintings.

By the way, thanks to everyone who liked my "Old Witch" piece, the Grimms fairy tale art I painted for Jon's Art Order challenge. It was really touching to place in the top five; I'm glad you liked my work.

Grim(ms) Fairy Tales, part 4; finished version

2011-07-05T11:51:00.000-07:00

Here's how my Grimms fairy tale piece looks in (digital) paint. I submitted it to Jon at Art Order Sunday.

Final art, "The Old Witch"

For contrast, here's the initial color sketch that I was working from...

Preliminary color study, "The Old Witch"

I got darker and brighter in the final version, and it happened fairly late in the painting process, when I worked up the flaming head of the witch. Originally I liked the subtle tones of the study because they felt like art from old childrens books and I wanted a sort of Rackham feel. But when I got the witch's fire dark and smoky, a colder fire than that of the girl in the fire-place but still glowing, the rest of the art looked washed out in contrast. I don't like to reorient a piece in production, but here I think it was the right choice, because the lower key palette emphasizes the brightness of the girl's flame. The darkness of the witch and the brightness of the girl were always the purpose of the piece.

Taking up digital paint after a couple of decades of traditional media can be confusing -- the flexibility of the medium means it's harder to say "This piece is done!" because tweaking the thing is always so easy and so (relatively) fast. There's a Richard Schmid quote about traditional painting that I think applies here:

The strength and clarity of the picture you envision at the start will tell you when you are done. You are finished when you have said what you wish to say, when nothing added can make it better. (Richard Schmid)

Postscript -- I've replaced the final art at top with a larger version after being yelled at by my friendly neighborhood art director for not giving him an image that was large enough to see. My apologies.

Grim(ms) Fairy Tales, part 3; final pencil sketch

2011-06-28T20:07:00.000-07:00

This is how the concept in the last post evolved into a pencil sketch. In my working process, a tightly finished the final pencil sketch makes the painting get done faster.

Now I paint!

Grim(ms) Fairy Tales, part 2; WIP sketches

2011-06-27T15:11:00.000-07:00

Some WIP sketches for the Art Order project described in the last entry. I'm working from an English translation of the German folk tale, and I do wonder what the Grimms really meant when I read the translator's phrase "a creature with a fiery head." I imagine it as something like a hawk or one of the smaller eagles, only with more teeth and a catlike grin. It needs to be human enough to grin. And its head is on fire, of course.

Here's my first thumbnail, trying to catch the idea in the back of my head.

Initial WIP sketch, "The Old Witch"

I wasn't sure what I wanted the witch's head to look like, but I knew I'd know it if I saw it. So I drew a a quick page of thumbnails, figuring that if I cranked out enough versions a few would be close. Most of them started as a round ball of a head and a grin, then I filled in the face around it. Over all they're a bit cute. But this is a fairy tale and as long as it's blood-thirsty, perhaps I can get away with a bit of cuteness.

Assorted creature heads, flaming.

Some of these work better for me than others. You know what they say, You have to draw a lot of flaming creature heads to draw a flaming, creature-headed witch properly...

Mmm, toasty!

I like drawing reference photos as a general rule anyway, but this sketch was particularly useful for understanding the outstretched hands and the collapsed skirt.

Since this project is due next Sunday, join me next week to see how the finished art turns out.

Grim(ms) Fairy Tales, part 1

2011-06-21T15:02:00.000-07:00

I managed to come across the latest Art Order artist challenge from Jon Schindehette while there's still time to work on it; final submissions are due at midnight, Sunday July 3. Jon's called it "Grimm Tales;" pick a Grimm fairy tale and illustrate it. Any proportions, any media, just have fun and bring your innovation and inspiration to the piece.

The traditional Grimms tales are much bloodier than the bowdlerized versions animated for children today. They focus on the results of being a good child rather than a bad one, and they do not suggest that life gives do-overs. A similar spirit can be seen in the Shock-Headed Peter stories of later in the 19th century, horrific little stories that mean to edify the child, not to amuse.

I've been needing to jump back back into digital after a weeks of traditional painting, so this sounds like rollicking good fun! Admittedly, we here at Casa de Fixit/Studio Wondercabinet are preparing for the advent of contractors during the same period, but hey -- if I were going to be reasonable, I wouldn't have gone into art in the first place.

Looking through our copy of the complete Grimms Fairy Tales for something short, unfamiliar and representative, I found the story "The Old Witch," from 1812.

THE OLD WITCH
THERE WAS once a little girl who was very obstinate and willful,
and who never obeyed when her elders spoke to her; and so how
could she be happy? One day she said to her parents, “I have heard
so much of the old Witch, that I will go and see her. People say she
is a wonderful old woman, and has many marvelous things in her
house; and I am very curious to see them.” Her parents, however,
forbade her going, saying, “The Witch is a wicked old woman,
who performs many godless deeds; and if you go near her, you are
no longer a child of ours.” The girl however, would not turn back
at her parents’ command, but went to the Witch’s house. When she
arrived there the woman asked her, “Why are you so pale?” “Ah,”
replied she, trembling all over, “I have frightened myself so with
what I have just seen.” “And what did you see?” inquired the old
Witch.
“I saw a black man on your steps.” “That was a collier,” replied
she.
“Then I saw a gray man.” “That was a sportsman,” said the old
woman.
“After him I saw a blood-red man.” “That was a butcher,” replied
the woman.
“But oh, I was most terrified,” continued the girl, “when I peeped
through your window, and saw not you, but a creature with a fiery
head.” “Then you have seen the Witch in her proper dress,” said
the old woman. “For you I have long waited, and now you shall
give me light.” So saying, she changed the girl into a block of
wood, and then threw it into the fire; and when it was fully alight
she sat down on the hearth, warmed herself, and said, “Ah, now
for once it burns brightly!”

Now that's edification!

I'll post WIP sketches here as I work on the project. Check back over the next two weeks to see what happens.

Another sketchy Monday

2011-06-20T11:58:00.000-07:00

Sketch of a model in Victorian costume, drawn in prismacolor on pastel paper.

The Krab Jab sessions continue! This is a sketch on pastel paper, and I think it is the last one on this particular paper. The big studio is kept rather dark, to keep the lighting on the model clear and directional, and between the paper and the studio it was hard to see my own lines on the paper. This jpg image has been adjusted to raise the tone of the paper, which means that even after I left the studio, it was still hard to see the lines on the wretched paper. Note to self -- get lighter paper!

It is a wise thing to have several projects going at once, in different stages, so that you're working on a preliminary pencil sketch on one side of the studio at the same time that you're painting on the other. This saves time by avoiding the tedious floundering that frequently happens between projects as you search for Inspiration. It also keeps you drawing.

Drawing -- better for you than drinking more coffee.

If you've kicked around a few years, you can generally find a likely Inspiration by going through your old sketchbooks or looking in the corners of your studio. There's generally a few unfinished projects waiting in the corners of the closet, waiting to be restarted, re-envisioned, and completed. Every project has something to teach the artist, but you only level up if you finish it.

Monkey-yell Monday

2011-06-13T13:11:00.000-07:00

Due to circumstances beyond my control, what I am painting right now is a door. Not art on a door, not a trompe l'oeil of a door, just a door (Navajo white interior trim semi-gloss) that needs to get out of the basement before the next contractor comes to visit. These things happen.

For your artistic enjoyment, tho, here is a warm-up sketch of a chimpanzee. Technically he is yawning rather than screaming, but I like to think he's expressing my thoughts right now anyway.

Really, Earthlink? Really, after all these years, my website suddenly won't upload since your redesign? Thanks a lot!

The Costume Sessions show at Krab Jab Studio opened on Saturday as part of the Georgetown Art Walk. If you plan to stop by to see it later in the month, you might want to go this week as several works sold by the end of the evening and may not be on the wall for much longer. The Queen of the World painting I worked up from the "Day of the Dead" session has been finished and found a buyer; I'm delighted to think that a piece that I created for my personal pleasure has pleased someone else as well. I'm really looking forward to starting a new piece in the costume series.

My friend at the Point Defiance Zoo says the donation sign I worked on last month has been installed and that the folks who work there like it a lot, so yay! By the way, if you're in the area, check out the grand opening of the new Clouded Leopard exhibit on the weekend of July 23/24 – the PDZA folks are calling it CLAW: Clouded Leopard Awareness Weekend. This is especially neat because their young clouded leopard pair are about to become parents, and the folks who will be nurse-maiding the new cubs are going to be very aware of clouded leopards indeed!

In parting, here's a link that could be useful if you're like me and hate writing about your own work. Enjoy the Artist Statement Generator, folks!

It's official -- we're putting on a show!

2011-06-08T13:11:00.000-07:00

Join us Saturday, June 11th for the opening!

Art Shows and Oil Paint

2011-06-07T10:31:00.000-07:00

Oh look, it's Tuesday...

The Northend Artists Group show at the Angle Gallery went up last week and opened on June 2nd for June's First Thursday art walk. The Angle Gallery is a beautifully lit hallway in the Tashiro Kaplan building, perhaps one of Seattle's oldest and most centrally-located art colonies! It was great to see so many folks out looking at art on a fine June evening. We all thank everyone who stopped by!

Looking at art

NAG is a disparate band of art makers from the north end of the city. The Angle Gallery show features the work of Doug Keith, Marty Gordon, Craig Van den Bosch, James McFarlane, Sam Day, Tim Manthey and myself. Artwork will be up through June.

Meanwhile, in Georgetown, my friend Julie Baroh is preparing for the June Georgetown Second Saturday art walk with a show of work based on the Krab Jab Studio costume sessions. Krab Jab runs a weekly drawing/whatever session in which we work from a costumed model, with the avowed purpose of working from that sketch into a finished illustration. This is our first show of work as a group, and I hope you'll stop by to say hello and see what we've been doing. Participants include Julie Baroh, Mark Tedin, Kyle Abernethy, Timothy Taylor, Jethaniel "Spyder" Peterka, Amanda Michele Dellinger, Peter Pan and (again) myself. Several of us are working desperately to finish work for this one! Krab Jab will open at noon for the annual Georgetown Carnival (formerly Artopia) and the official reception for the show will start at 6 p.m. See you there!

Currently in the studio...

IRL desktop!

Magic Monday; Intervene

2011-05-30T11:53:00.000-07:00

I'm packing up clouded leopard art today for a show that opens Thursday at the Angle Gallery in Seattle's Tashiro-Kaplan Building as part of the First Thursday art walk. (The event starts at 5 p.m., you are of course invited.) Because things have been a bit busy here and I haven't had time to think up something new to share, today's blog post will be about a piece of existing art, an old favorite Magic illustration from a few years back, "Intervene."

"Intervene" was painted in acrylic for MtG: Urza's Legacy (c. 1998) back when I was just starting to appreciate the power of tonal structure. It's an Uncommon spell card that never was terribly popular in play, but I enjoyed pulling together the forced perspective, the foreground/background play, and the confused client input on how much naked water sprite bottom was acceptable in a family-friendly game (hint -- the right answer is "none.") Among my various cards in which illustrations the size of a fat postage stamp had to illustrate paragraphs of directorial narrative, this piece still stands out as a good use of space. And magical bubbles.

I've been asked if I knew that this or that card was a "power card," and whether that would cause me to make better art for it. Nope, sorry. Most of the commissions I received during this period avoided suggesting how valuable the card would be in play. There was a sense that artists couldn't be trusted not to show off art and blab about their work, and that could cause problems if they knew enough to blab about card mechanics as well. For me, it was mostly a matter of how the initial concept came together on paper and to how soon I could look at the unfinished piece and see what it was supposed to look like at the finish.
The sooner I know, not intellectually but in the mind's eye, what a piece is supposed to look like, the faster and better it will look done. This is why I do so bloody many concept sketches.

Skull study -- Let's put our heads together...

2011-05-23T10:57:00.000-07:00

This is a study for an oil painting for the Krab Jab studio show next month; I put the (plastic) skulls on the lightest-toned cloth I had and it turned into a study in yellow.

The palette is pretty tight -- titanium white, Cad yellow light, yellow ocher, raw umber, burnt umber, and ivory black. The ivory black is only used to push the burnt umber darker (when necessary) and in the cool bluish-gray light coming in from the right side of the piece. I haven't done a lot of work in yellow before, so it was fun to see how the study quickly became a dialog between the fabric and the skulls; sort of a friendly pushing match between yellow-towards-red and yellow-towards-green.

On a color chart like the Quiller wheel, this painting covers a narrow vertical strip at roughly 12 o'clock. It's literally monochrome. I've used the two umbers as neutralized complements instead of a true violet to push the yellows around. But it's got a pretty good value range, so the picture still reads.

The Krab Jab show will focus on the art from our ongoing Thursday sessions, when we render costumed models. The show will accept anything from the actual original drawing to a personal work based on it. I worked up a sketch I liked based on the Day of the Dead girl from our second session. Now I need to get painting if I want it dry and ready to hang by early June...

Feeding the kitty; Clouded Leopards and me

2011-05-16T17:32:00.000-07:00

In which I renew my acquaintance with the last of the sabertooths.

The clouded leopard is a small big cat from SE Asia, primarily arboreal, famous for the size of its teeth, the beauty of its coat, its modest and rather overwhelmed expression, and its immanent danger of extinction. Our wonderful local zoo, the Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium, plays an active role in clouded leopard conservation both locally and in Thailand. Now PDZA is opening a new clouded leopard habitat on June 1st. A while back I agreed to paint a donation sign for the new space.

PDZA offered to cut the signboard in their shop, deliver it to me to work on in my studio, and pick it up when it was finished. (Note -- given the size of the sign, by "studio" I mean "garage.")

Initially I worked up a rough sketch based on images from the earlier book project, using the size requirements and optimal mouth-hole-heights to figure placement. When it was approved, the shop manager at the zoo used a projector to trace my rough sketch onto the signboard for cutting placement, and made sure the outlines of the cats were visible for me to work from; this was important because the mouth holes were cut before the sign was delivered, and it was critical that I was able to place my transfer sketches accurately around them. Then he gave it a couple of coats of gesso and sent it off to me. Fortunately the zoo has a handy van (painted with clouded leopards) for just such emergencies!

The sign as it was delivered

Something I should have remembered from my own past projector experience -- even if the projector is perfectly square with the sign board, the projection tends to distort at the edges. I wound up creating my sketch onto the sign in a combination of freehand drawing and graphite-paper transfer, gridding my little sketch to correct the distortions in the transfer and directly tracing only the cubs and the mama's face.

This is how the finished sign looks, photographed from as high up in the garage as possible. The unfinished pentagon at the base is brown paper over a transparent plexi panel that will eventually reveal the collection jar.

One of the challenges of working in the garage was the lighting, which consisted of a weak overhead flurescent (blue shift), a double headed halogen work lamp that shifted yellow and cast the shadows of protective wire baskets over the work surface, and whatever outdoor light found its way in through the garage door lights when it wasn't raining. And it was almost always raining...

Some details...

The sign gets picked up tomorrow, transported back to the zoo shop to be varnished with a graphite-proof clear coat so toxic that I couldn't apply it in this work-space. I had a lot of fun on this project, and I think that despite the primitive working conditions it turned out well. I really look forward to seeing it installed!

MtG Mod, series 1; Monkey

2011-05-08T08:10:00.000-07:00

Here's my first real set of Magic mods, Series 1; Monkey, inspired by artwork I did a few years back for the card "Pongify" from MtG; Planar Chaos, painted on the cycling lands I'd painted for MtG; Onslaught. Mod is short for "modification."

This was a project I'd been thinking about for a while, and I had the sketch ready. When I brought out my acrylics to work on the Clouded Leopard sign, I transferred the monkey sketch to the cards and worked them up as well. It was an interesting juxtaposition, working on the little Magic cards and the 8' sign.

I'd like to do more series like this one; it's a fun challenge, and I think the folks who play and collect Magic have a stronger relationship to mod paintings on game cards than they do to the original paintings that illustrated them. Since I have a great respect for copyright, my rule is that I can't use other people's images -- no other card, no magic creature that I myself have not illustrated at some point in the past. On the plus side, I illustrated around 200 cards over my time in the Magic artist pool, so I still have a lot to work with.

Fetish model and sign painting

2011-05-02T11:35:00.000-07:00

Thursday evening drawing featured a fetish-costume on the model at Krab Jab.

detail of fetish model sketch

The sign for the clouded leopard habitat for the Point Defiance Zoo is in process this week; it is too big to fit in my studio -- or even get up the stairs to my studio -- so I will be working in the garage. On the bright side, our unusually cold, wet weather (yes, even for Seattle) will make the paint stay workable longer. I don't have a way to mount it vertically, so the 4'x8' sign is resting flat, on saw horses.

Btw -- If you have to work on a big, horizontal piece of art, make sure the horizontal surface up above the level of your hips. Put blocks under the table legs to raise your work space up so you don't give yourself horrible back problems.

The sign project is an off-shoot of a book project I did a few years ago. I'd illustrated an informational children's book about clouded leopards, and the client contacted me recently to ask what kind of reuse fee would allow a graphic designer to kluge together a sign for the new clouded leopard habitat out of existing illustrations from the book. The original artwork was painted as 18"x 30" scenes while the sign was planned to have three life-size clouded leopards on it, meaning my work would be blown up more than 400 per cent.

If you make art for reproduction, you know that printing art at larger than actual size is a Bad Thing. Traditionally painted illustration was produced at between 150 to 300 percent of final size -- frequently higher -- because the flaws and weakness of the details would disappear in reduction. Digital painters work up details at 200% for the same reason. Blowing the artwork up would be like watching your favorite actor on high-def for the first time and seeing all the pores, zits and wrinkles that ordinarily would be obscured by merciful and antiquated technology.

This issue alone made the idea unworkable for me but I wanted the client and the leopards to have their sign, so I suggested a new piece of art based on the leopard illustrations instead. The sketch above was intended as a preliminary sketch, but turned into working copy when the client's shop needed to cut and set up the sign board on short notice. (Quick! The band saw is open!) The red marks indicate holes in the sign, and the artwork needs to fit around them perfectly.

I'm having a lot of fun already, but I'm also making of list of things (Hudson sprayer! cinderblocks!) that I'll want to locate if I do more big work in future...

Monday morning round-up

2011-04-25T09:39:00.000-07:00

The long pose from yestereday's life drawing session at the UW.

This is Van's first modeling session for my group, and he was great to draw -- lots of interesting poses, great energy and an amazing ability to take and hold contorted, dynamic poses for relatively a long time. However, I want to state publicly that they were entirely of his own invention, especially the 5- and 15-minute poses with the rope and the pole. They "went out to the peoples of the world suffering under oppression," which I'll repeat to folks who ask to look at my sketchbook any time soon.

In other news, the sign board from the Point Defiance Zoo arrived, and it looks great! I'm painting a sign for their new clouded leopard habitat, and their shop kindly offered to cut and prime the board for me.
I had been a bit concerned, because the sign will be set up so that folks can feed money into the cats' mouths, for fund-raising, and I didn't know how big the mouth-holes wood be or how accurately they'd be placed relative to the sketch. Well, the sign board is here, the mouth holes are exceedingly small and precise, and the shop guy even transferred the basic outlines in marker for me, very neatly and with relative detail. Bless him, he did a great job!

Possibilities

2011-04-18T10:09:00.000-07:00

Still working on the April project...

Life drawing sketch from yesterday; pencil on paper, roughly 1 hour 15 minutes.

My thought of the morning...
Concept artists and illustrators are fundamentally opposite creatures in one regard; concept artist are hired to expand possibilities, illustrators are hired to collapse them into one single possibility in the form of a realized illustration. At some point in the arc of an illustration project, the expansion of possibilities must reach its greatest extent and begin to collapse upon itself down to a field of roughly a single possibility with probability 100%.

Most of my professional work has been done for art directors who act as an interface, translating the expanding universe of the conceptors into static, functional descriptions for the illustrators. I would like to take this opportunity to thank them all for their work.

Monday morning update

2011-04-11T11:20:00.000-07:00

It's been a great week for starting projects, but a bit shaky on the whole "doing art" side of things.

Both last week's drawing sessions fell apart when the models failed to show up, and I've been too busy getting things organized for the summer to do more than warm-up drawings for personal use. Sigh. So here's a page of warm-up sketches, because this is an art blog, gosh darn it!

In other news, the Norman Rockwell show at the Tacoma Art Museum is well worth seeing. The museum is publicizing it as American nostalgia, but artists should see it for the narrative skill, the portraiture and the technical mastery of a man whose professional career was longer than my life and maybe yours combined. Then you should look up some of the earlier Post covers by Leyendecker because he established the look for the Post that Rockwell developed, and he doesn't have nearly as much name recognition today.

Finally, last week I mentioned that I costumed a production of the Mikado once. Sigh. Here's a pic... On my own behalf, I'll point out that this was the late 90's, a time when anime was a mysterious nerd-form circulated on fan-subbed VHS tapes, and the internets was something that happened to other folks somewhere else.

Foam rubber hairdos FTW!

Pastels and Kimono...

2011-04-04T13:41:00.000-07:00

More drawing in pastels at the Krab Jab sessions...

As a contrast, here's the page of my sketchbook with the three 2-minute warmup sketches we do before the long pose, as well as a short sketch I did afterwards, from a different position...

By no coincidence it's sakura time here in Seattle. The cherry trees in the UW quad were blossoming this Sunday when I wandered through the crowd after life drawing; very Hiroshige it all looked.

It is a coincidence, though, that I wound up doing illustration art because of Japanese costume. I was researching a show I was costuming as part of my MFA work -- Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Mikado"-- and found myself thinking that the artwork I was looking at seemed much more fun than costume design. Mind you, I was looking at the artwork of Yoshitoshi and didn't know that he was a broke drunk who died in a ditch shortly after being released from a madhouse... but still, he had fabulous line quality and I'd probably make the same choice today anyway.

This model reminds me of the Mikado, both Victorian and Ukiyo-e.

Of pastels and spray fix.

2011-03-28T15:01:00.000-07:00

"Dark Eidolon" is on hold until I get the current illustration project going, so here's some pastel drawings from the Krab Jab sessions...

I've started playing around with pastels at the weekly costume drawing sessions, and amazingly, this time I think I'm getting the hang of it. This amazes me, since I think the box set of chalk pastels I'm using probably dates back to the mid-80s at least. Anyone remember when you could get a starter box of 24 colored pastels for 3.99 and tax? The set is that old.
I'd try to draw with the square blocks of pastel as if I was using a fat pencil, collapse in rainbow colored failure and put them away for another few years. And repeat.
This time, tho, I approached the pastels not as a drawing medium but as a painting medium; stiff, chunky strokes from the shoulder to block in the form and model it the way I work up still-life studies with oil paint on a brush. I lightly sketched the form out in black and white prismacolor beforehand, because nothing will stop me from drawing altogether, but this time the painterly approach paid off and the results at least looked recognizably human, hurrah!

I've worked in pastels for the last two sessions. The first time I worked on a sheet of brown wrapping paper; it's a nice light tone, a mild color and it's so cheap I can't feel afraid of wasting it in a learning experience. The texture isn't too bad, actually.

The second time I tried a piece of Murano paper from the art store, and I have to say it seemed harder to work on, if only because the model was a particularly elegant young lady whose smooth textures seemed too refined for my chunky application and the texture of the chalk on the paper. I wound up modeling her face heavily with black prismacolor and using the chalk texture of the pastels to plaster over the harshness of the shadowing, and therein lay disaster.

A few days later I decided to photograph and spray-fix the drawings before I put them away. Most of the pastel artists I see regularly don't like to spray fix their pastels because theoretically it changes the color, but I didn't want the drawings to shed chalk dust all over the rest of the art in the drawer, and... how bad could it be?
Pretty bad, actually!

Yes it was evening at this point, how did you guess?

This is Blair's workable spray-fix, though I expect any brand would have the same effect. The harlequin looks pretty good still, but the highlights on the face of the blue girl have vanished. Now we see the natural color of the paper, and the prismacolor under-drawing, but without the highlights. Sigh... note to self, avoid unnecessary spray fix in future...

Dark Eidolon; retrofitting the sketch

2011-03-21T10:36:00.000-07:00

One of my challenges on this project involves working from a small sketch at a high dpi to see if I can create a large final piece without losing the spontaneity of the original drawing. Well, here's the hitch in this plan, discovered while cleaning up the original sketch. Blown up to final size, the central figures -- the human victims -- are looking pretty weak. Details of the hands and headresses are particularly unsatisfying, and the faces are more caricatures than preliminaries for tonal workups.

Here's the original sketch before cleanup.

Here's a detail of the central figures blown up.

Part of the problem is my understanding of my reference. The first sketch I made from reference was in graphite on white paper and quite small. It didn't convey a lot of information about light on form. I drew a new sketch on toned paper, a study of the central figures, to tell me more about the forms and details of the victims. I also found and drew a quick sketch of a columbine flower (not shown) to inspire the concubine's headdress.

Then I put a piece of tracing paper over a printout of the original sketch and drew a new version of the victims that I liked better. Working it up on tracing paper insured it would fit seamlessly into the rest of the sketch.

Here's the new, improved sketch, with tone added.

It took a lot of time to redefine the flat and tone layers to match the revised sketch, time that I could have used for painting if I'd committed the revisions earlier. In general, the sooner a problem is recognized and fixed, the less time it will waste; fixing something "later on" or "when I paint" always takes longer. This is a shame because there are always other projects stacking up that could use that time, so save it where you can.

Dark Eidolon; Sketch to underpainting

2011-03-14T13:18:00.000-07:00

So... I now have a complex sketch at 600 dpi, a value study and a color rough. Now what?

At this stage, I start by breaking the sketch down into flats. For anyone out there who knows less about digital painting than I do, let me explain that a flat is a transparent layer on which the major elements of the image are defined by areas of flat color, so that they can be quickly selected; once selected, the area can be painted on a third layer without digipaint smooshing over into adjoining areas. Think of them as digital friskits. At this stage of my transition from traditional to digital painting, I like flats. They're like the seat belts of digital painting.

Think of flats as a simple, tasteless puzzle...

Now I have a 600 dpi sketch with a layer of flats on top of it. The next step, from my point of view, is to work up an underpainting. In traditional painting, the underpainting is a neutral-colored work-up of the forms of a piece; I'd glaze transparent dark hues on top of the underpainting then go back in with opaque light colors to build out the final painting. My digital work is approached in much the same way.

It's easiest for me to work from strong contrast to subtle.

I've talked before about working up my WIP sketches in four values; white, light gray, dark gray and black. (Okay, dark subdued brown, here, but you get the idea.) When I translate the preliminary sketch into the final underpainting, I divide each tone into a light and a dark version, which gives me the eight tones I intend to use in the final art. When I work digitally, I select an area from the flat, go to the underpainting layer (also transparent), and dump a layer of flat color -- one of those four basic tones -- into the selected area. Then I work up the forms against that basic tone.

With pixels, what I'm doing at this point is sculpting everything out in a subdued brown, and when I've finished, I'll go into the cool areas and neutralize the hue to approximate cool grays. With oils, I'd sculpt out warm colored areas in burnt umber and cool colors in ivory black -- basically the same colors I'd mix pigments with, if I was trying to push real colors down towards the darkest darks.

With tone, light starts to happen.

Alas, the 600 dpi size of the piece prevents me from blending in real time at full size, and I do a lot of blending. I'm also having trouble moving quickly from overall view to closeup, which I need to do to keep a sense of the overall piece as I whack down the basic blocks and forms. The answer I've come up with is to make a copy of the file at 72 dpi, working up the basics, then enlarge that file to 600 dpi and drop the painted layer onto the original sketch. Once the broad overview is nailed down, I'll be able to creep over the surface of my full-sized art, polishing details.

However, as I work out the tones of the underpainting, I'm also seeing that the underlying sketch -- the real and original 600 dpi sketch -- is going to require some clean up. Quite a bit, actually.

This is a learning experience for me; Dark Eidolon is the largest and most complex piece I've painted digitally to date. I decided to paint at 600 dpi instead of 300 to get a satisfactory degree of reduction but art doesn't blow up as prettily as it shrinks down and now the central figures in particular are looking crude and cartoonish. For the next painting, I'll probably draw the sketch in a larger scale and just consign myself to wrestling it through the scanner afterward. On this one, since I have learned that it is easier to retrofit a piece in the sketch phase than in paint, the next post will deal with the fine art of clean-up.

Dark Eidolon; size matters

2011-03-07T12:27:00.000-08:00

As I transition from traditional to digital painting, one of the concepts I keep stumbling over (and over and over) is painting size and its conjoined twin, scale.

Just a quick study to see how silk works. Nothing fancy....

As a traditional painter, I dealt with illustrations that were commissioned at a finished size and rendered them at a size that represented the intersection of "largest I can afford given time/resources" and "smallest that will look good in print." And resources can mean a lot of things...

For example, the original Magic; the Gathering card art was spec'd at around 6"x7", or around 300% of the size it appeared on the card, because that's what fit on the art director's scanner. A lot of book cover art was painted in the proper proportions at the largest scale that would fit on a piece of hot press watercolor paper, or could be gotten out of a sheet of hard board with minimal waste.

After a few years of seeing my work in print, I developed a sense of far my work should or could be scaled down to create finish without losing detail. I also noticed that if artwork were reduced in great enough degree, enough detail dropped out that the nature of the illustration became very different from that of the original artwork.

This frame of reference is of course dead like Bela Lugosi. It is now standard to evaluate art in every size from individual pixels to geosynchronous orbit regardless of the final print size.

Part of adapting to embrace the dominant paradigm is creating enough digital paintings to get a sense of how many steps in scale I need between the size I digi-paint and the final application. This is a revelation personal to each artist so it can only be found through trial and error. The error, at least, needs to be done on my own time.

The Dark Eidolon art is theoretically finishing at 7"x10", the size of the oldest "Weird Tales" magazine I've found. If I were painting it traditionally, I'd probably paint it at around 250% up, 18"x 26" or thereabouts depending on the size of the stock available, and scan it in at 300 dpi. Since I'm painting digitally from scanned pencils, I've wound up with a working size of roughly 9"x13"that works well with the size of my scanner and of the drafting vellum to which I've become addicted. Since this is only 130% larger than the final cover, I'm doubling the scale by working at 600 dpi as well. It feels immense, but the numbers say it should give me the degree of finish I'd want in my traditional work, so hey, I'll try it out.

Dark Eidolon project; final sketches

2011-02-28T14:04:00.000-08:00

Here's the final pencil sketch, tone study and color study.
This is the information that takes me into the painting stage. I'm aiming at a look that references the art of J. Allen St. John who actually illustrated Weird Tales covers back in the 30's when this story was first printed. Thing is, I'm painting digitally. Much as I hate saying it, illustration today is painted digitally or it is painted in conscious defiance of how the illustration process today is set up to function. These days I figure that if I'm painting for reproduction, I'm painting with pixels.

It's sometimes a challenge to keep the foreground figures as interesting as those in the background.

The eye prioritizes strong contrast in tone.

Now with hue!

It is interesting working the high-key tints I associate with JASt.J's artwork into art for a story as emotionally dark as "Dark Eidolon." The scene I've chosen is lit by the setting sun, so I've pushed the colors towards red, which I think emphasizes the ominousness considerably. I haven't bothered to work up the tonal gradations of light giving form to architecture, tho, which I'd want to at least indicate before offering this to an art director.

The most valuable thing all this work can do is to give me a mental image of what the art will look like completed. Up until that image pops up behind the artist's eyes, the art is just an intellectual conceit. Once the mental image emerges, the art is on the way to being done.

Dark Eidolon project; reference sketches

2011-02-21T16:43:00.000-08:00

The best way to work from photo reference is to sketch it, then draw your illustration from your sketch.
It might seem like a waste until you factor in time lost to false starts. When you consider trying to jump straight from photoreference to well-developed final concept, drawing the reference first seems like a real time-saver. It also helps develop a distinctive style of your own and keeps your drawing quality unified. The process was described in one of Andrew Loomis' books on illustration, and I've seen it done today by artists I admire, so I recommend it here despite the perception that illustration should be produced instantaneously with as little personal effort as possible.

(I believe that some people work directly on top of reference photos with their computer machines these days. There are many things people do today that I find unwholesome, and I'd be grateful if they do it in private and wash their hands afterward.)

So, having drawn my reference, I consider the usefulness of two kinds of reference sketches. Pencil on white bond paper and prismacolor on toned paper.

This is a detail from a Dark Eidolon reference photo, cropped to focus on one robed figure. Pencil on white bond paper is classic and convenient because I can work in my sketch book, which keeps the reference handy. Graphite can be erased and revised, always convenient when figuring out the details of a form. It's familiar, my default drawing medium. But this sketch is better at conveying line than blocks of tone, and I've pretty much lost the light&shadow information I'll need for the final piece.

Black and white Prismacolor on toned paper is faster and carries more information about light quickly, with less work building up tones. If the paper is sturdy and coarse and you don't lay down your strokes too firmly, you should even be able to erase a bit. Since this is reference art, not for resale, I'm working on a non-archival craft pad that's just a step better than a brown paper bag. The nice thing about cheap paper is that I can toss a sketch without guilt if it's not working. As for the Prismacolors? The best way to make them last is to use an electric pencil sharpener, and an extending handle for when they get short and stubby.

The best way to chose a method is to think about your final art, and what information you'll need. Me, I could use some more info about the late afternoon sunlight in the piece.

Dark Eidolon project continues...

2011-02-14T11:24:00.000-08:00

Human beings have a lot of ribs...

A quick oil study of the miniature anatomy known as Mr. Thrifty. This sketch took around 4 hours and is painted in T. white, burnt umber and ivory black, all low-fat pigments that dry quickly. I wanted to see how the bones of the arm and the rib cage look when viewed from a low vantage point; I'm taking photoreference for the giant skeletons, sure, but even the nicest model in the world can't take his skin off for me.

Dark Eidolon project; Orientalism and Others

2011-02-07T16:06:00.000-08:00

Examining "The Dark Eidolon" text for design clues, it's obvious that what inspired the author was not the socio-political history of the Arabian peninsula as it was in 1935 but a genre of fiction called "Orientalism." This was a genre of romantic escapist literature; there was science fiction, crime fiction, cowboy fiction and, yes, there was oriental fiction, all of it cranked out by hungry pulp writers who had no practical experience of anything they were writing, and illustrated the same way. Here are several covers for "Oriental Stories" magazine; a National Geographic-type devotion to historical accuracy was not required.

Carefully edited distant lands are a part of every romantic's day dreams; for example, the German fascination for America's wild west goes back to the 1920's at least and continues in cowboys & Indians cosplay today. But the term Orientalism now carries a ton of negative implications, because nobody wants to play the spear carrier in somebody else's day dream any more than they want to star in your slash fiction vampire epic as the glitteriest of all the shirtless vampires.

Instead of looking at historical costumes, I'm looking at western pop culture images of the east, especially those where the source material was most completely obscured by western fantasy. My rule was, if someone actually from the middle east could guess that their national costume was being referenced, it was still too close; the look could be summed up as art nouveau noire.

A book that proved unexpectedly helpful was Jo and Paul Richardson's "Peep Show Pinups; the Golden Era." (The concerned ethicist will be glad to know that orientalism is merely one tiny genre in the the vast oeuvre of naughty postcards.) The internet could have given me endless source material, surely, but googling "fantasy arabian costume" netted me a thousand pictures of Arabian horses wearing yards of ball fringe (who knew horses did cosplay?) and then some Disney "Aladdin" fan p0rn made my eyes bleed and I stopped.

Btw -- who made these ornate filigree/cloisonne bras? Did nice middle-class women make them at home instead of flower arranging or crocheting lampshades? Were they offered in the special secret show rooms of the better jewelry shops? Inquiring minds want to know!

Oddly I could not find a similar quantity of male Orientalist cos-play pinup material and wound up looking at some of Rembrandt's biblical paintings instead. Go figure...

Dark Eidolon continues, sketches 2B, 2C & 2D

2011-02-01T16:45:00.000-08:00

In the last entry I introduced first sketches for the Dark Eidolon project. This is a good point in a project to play around with ideas -- early on, before I've invested any real time or expense. Pixels are cheap, reshooting photo reference can be expensive. So at this point, having gotten some feed back from other artists on my first sketch, I'm trying a couple alternative set-ups for my piece.

One of the useful reminders was that I envisioned this project as a potential cover by James Allen St. John, which means that, if it truly is a cover, there should be room for the title block. Here I've used one from 1948, the earliest one I could find, to see how the art would work with actual size and letter forms. The big change for me was that I had to lower the horizon line, which shifted the perspective of the architecture so that we see more of the ceiling. Blessedly, J.A. St. John appears to have shared my disinclination to invest time in architectural details that will be obscured by text, so I plan to handle that space with a soft, general treatment.

Here's a similar revision in which the mummy in the left foreground is scaled up and cropped to make a more striking balance against the group in the middle ground. It makes an interesting composition, arguably more interesting the first version above it, but I have two reasons for rejecting it. One is that the composition looks out of period to me -- I don't recall seeing any J.A. St. John art with the foreground figure cropped like this, tho I've seen a fair number of very similar layouts on magazines from the 50's & 60's. The other is that the tall crown on the left-foreground mummy hates the letter "W" in the logo with a burning antipathy that no amount of tweaking on my part will assuage; I've tried making the crown taller, shorter, wider and rounder, and this is still the best of a poor lot.

This is a last minute-addition, thrown in for the sake of honesty. In my heart, I expect that this is probably the most like what St. John himself would have painted. The light tone of the giant skeletons would have been pushed up toward white and they would have become a textural but not distracting background for the logo. There would be one group of figures, centered and generally in one plane. JA St. John, like all pulp artists, was working fast for not enough money and, without our modern graphics programs and photocopiers to dink the sketches around, his priority would be getting a good, dynamic group pose down on the canvas and leaving lots of undefined area at the edges to fill with titles and writers' credits. (Yeah, this is the direction I'm planning for the mummies, btw.)
Actually, it's not bad; there's some unfortunate tangents happening at the face of the mummy on the far right, and the giant skeletons need more dynamic poses, but the central figures are large and immediately catch the attention. The big problem is mine -- I was taught that a good illustration should have action happening in 3 different planes; the foreground, the mid ground and the background. I'm afraid that this looks too flat. And yet...
What do you think?

Dark Eidolon continues, sketches 1 and 2

2011-01-28T16:46:00.000-08:00

Here's an initial study and second work up of pencils for the Dark Eidolon piece, a personal work based on a story by Clark Ashton Smith. Neither of these is something I'd show an art director, but they're important steps to a good final piece. Even a brilliant idea -- and there are few truly brilliant ideas -- needs to be seen with real eyes before it can be evaluated and debugged.

This first version is just a four-tone scribble, drawn in photoshop with a pencil tool to keep the tones distinct. A decade ago I'd have been scribbling on scratch paper with a black marker to lay out the bones of a piece, now I do it on screen, which at least saves a few trees somewhere. It also moves me straight into the tone structure, without going through a deceptive line-art phase. I went through half a dozen of these to get to this one, copying layers and revising until I had a structure that appealed to me.

This second draft is a pencil sketch with, again, the four tones superimposed. Actually it's an amalgam of pencil sketches; I'm playtesting visual ideas here, dropping in new figures on top of old to try to catch the feeling I liked in the initial scribble. Just quick sketches done without models or reference, but it's given me the key to a real preliminary sketch in the next phase of the project. It also gives me a clear sense of where my horizon line and my light source ought to be. And that the kingly mummies Need More Work.

One thing that's bothering me is that the pencil lines of the second drawing are darkening the overall tone of the high-middle gray, so I'm not getting that fine subtle tint in the background giant skeletons that I had in the initial rough. It should be the same tint, lifted from the actual scribble, but it doesn't look like it. Something to watch.

Has the piece become too complex? My personal pieces have a tendency to become packed with detail, and this one has certainly cranked itself up well beyond the James Allen St. John paintings which originally inspired it. My position is, if the piece is working as an illustration at this stage -- if it tells its story -- I'll move it forward. If at this point it only confuses the eye, I'll go back to the literal drawing board.

Dark Eidolon ideas continued

2011-01-24T15:14:00.000-08:00

The "Dark Eidolon" project is going to be a recurring subject here for a while, as I chew over my ideas and move the art along. Today, here's some penciled thoughts about those kingly mummies with golden crowns on their withered heads...

Hmm... I really like the Egyptian mummy in its obsessively neat wrappings, but not for this project. The bandages render the face expressionless, you can't see the withering, and you're not fitting a crown on that head under all that fabric. I suspect that the mummies will turn out more like those of the silk route than like those of Egypt. A bit ragged, maybe, as if the ghouls that dug them up weren't too careful where they put the claws.

The crowns are papal, Korean and Scythian respectively. I am particularly fond of the last, the Scythian crown with its metal leaves and feathers, but it's a bit busy and a bit too reminiscent of Vegas show girl headress I have seen.

Btw, I looked up "cerements," as in, "kingly cerements," and discovered that the precise definition is "waxed cloth typically used for wrapping a corpse" from the old english "cered cloth." This brings to my untidy mind two questions...
1. Who wraps their dead in wax? This is a mummy, not a gouda cheese.
2. What do you mean, "typically?" What else can you do with a big piece of waxed cloth that smells like dead people?

Krab Jab Barbarian sketch, & stuff

2011-01-21T11:43:00.000-08:00

This week's Krab Jab studio session sketch, with Eric Pope posing for us as a Barbarian.

This sketch is on 18"x24" drawing paper, pretty plain but it was big and it let me focus on the pencil. The pencil is 4b and the softer, dark lead means I've handled it a lot more like a paint brush than usual. I usually draw in 2b, so the work doesn't smudge in my sketchbook, but this was a big guy in a big character, and I wasn't drawing in a sketchbook that evening. The crude textures of the pencil feel like a good match for his furs and leathers.

Krab Jab studio is talking about doing a show later this year featuring and/or based on the work we've been doing in these session. I was thinking about working up paintings based on Webster's Divel and Lady Death, who hasn't appeared here, but maybe I'll have to run with this fine sketch and see where it leads me...

*****

Here's a handy device I ran into recently; the foam core hanger. Useful for hanging artwork in informal situations where a simple sheet of foam core can be substituted for the expense of a real frame. The little teeth are raked slightly upwards and when you press them into the center back of the foam core, they lock into place like tiny metal bulldogs. I used them in my Krab Jab show to hang a dozen quick oil studies mounted on black foam core, and can report that at around 3/$1 they are pretty darn nifty and useful things.

Front and back view of the foam core hanger

Foam core hanger in action, ready to hang foam core

I heard about them from another artist, and bought these at Northwest Art and Frame here in Seattle. They were sold loose from behind the counter, so you might not be able to find them prepackaged on the shelf. I don't know what they're used for by professional framers, but as a quick cheap way of hanging small artworks they beat all the hot glue and string in the all the convention art shows ever!

The Library at Isher and the Dark Eidolon

2011-01-18T13:49:00.000-08:00

This winter I inherited a collection of SF magazines. It wasn't a surprise -- I knew it existed, I learned to read on them a long time ago, but it's a bit strange having them here. I'm holding copies of Science Fantasy and Wonder and Astounding again, reading stories for the first time in 40 years. I'm calling it "The Library of Isher," and it's taken over my living room.

Just one shelf in the Library of Isher

So, being full of thoughts and fine old words, I'm starting a personal piece based on the Library of Isher. There's a lot of material here -- it seems likely to be the first project of several. This one is based on a Clark Ashton Smith short story, "The Dark Eidolon," which was first published in 1935 in Weird Tales Magazine. I've long been a fan of the illustrator J. Allen St. John, who was actually doing covers for that magazine around that time, so I intend my artwork to be informed by his work though not derived from it. I'll post WIP sketches and thoughts and share the design process as things develop. Here's the first one...

It's a concept sketch rather than a design thumbnail, but when you have a horde of giant skeletons attending a host of kingly mummies invading a decadent banquet hall full of fear-stricken nobles, there's a challenge to deciding what's going into the picture. At 18"x24" there's going to be some picking and choosing to do, especially if you're laying it out like a cover and need to leave dead space for text to go in.

Color Layout Thoughts

2011-01-12T12:02:00.000-08:00

On laying out colors... I've seen a couple of different digital color systems for digital painters -- mostly variants on the little squares or the cryptic triangle -- and I still haven't run into one that flows intuitively out of the traditional palette layout that I worked from in oils. In my studio, this is what the palette looks like when the paint goes on...

and this is what it looks like when I'm ready to start painting...

Ideally pigment comes out of the tube at the tone of its purest chroma, which is nifty but generally not what the painter needs. So a general-purpose color layout will have a little stack of paint spots for each pigment color.
   1. At the top, a dark tone of the basic hue, made by mixing in a touch of burnt umber if it's a warm color or one of the blacks if it's a cool color.
     2. The pigment out of the tube.
     3. The pigment with just a touch of Titanium white -- sometimes to raise the value, sometimes just to make a transparent pigment like Pthalo Blue or Burnt Sienna a bit more opaque.
     4. Closest to the mixing area at center, the color pushed up as high as it will go, and doctored with a smidge of cad. yellow and/or cad red to warm it up if it's a warm hue you're working on. Unless you're working with cad. red, in which case it will be all cad yellow and very little white at all.
   5. And a big blank spot for mixing in the lower right-hand corner, cleaned after each mix with a glass scraper.

So after years of working on this layout, I now automatically grope for my Pthalo Blue over here, and my T. White up here, and the Burnt Umber over there, and the little squares and triangles that have replaced them are not flowing intuitively into a positive UI experience, not yet, not at all.

Friday opening; Clouded Leopards at Krab Jab Studio

2011-01-10T09:54:00.000-08:00

Wow, what a great evening Friday night!

According to my friends at Krab Jab, last Friday night's opening brought in the largest number of art walk guests ever. Thank you, art lovers! It was wonderful to see people enjoying my work for the clouded leopard book project! Thanks also to the Seattle Weekly as well. A few days earlier the Weekly mentioned both my show at Krab Jab and the KrabJabbers' show at the restaurant across the street, which helped folks look for us in the dark of the Georgetown night.

I think my favorite moment was watching a family with several small children come into the studio and stand blinking in the light for a moment; one of the little girls shrieked "Kitties!" and and all the kids surged up to the paintings to look.

Krab Jab is a working studio and the monthly Art Walk is the only time to view the artwork without advance notice. But Krab Jab is full of friendly people, and visitors are almost always welcome to visit if they call first before stopping by. Contact KrabJabbian Julie Baroh to see my work through the month of January 2011!

The show centered about original artwork for the book “The Clouded Leopard’s Secret” that I illustrated for the Clouded Leopard Project. This was the first time I'd shown any of the artwork in public. The book explains conservation and introduces the clouded leopard and its world to children; it is given away for free in clouded leopard range areas of Thailand and Malaysia, in a dual-language format that makes it useful as a tool for learning English as a second language. Here in the US it’s sold at the Point Defiance Zoo and online at the Clouded Leopard Project. If you would like to buy the book, or to learn more about Clouded Leopards and big cat conservation, please visit the Clouded Leopard Project website at http://cloudedleopard.org/ for more information.

Cards and giclee’ prints of many of the paintings from "The Clouded Leopard's Secret" are available at my on-line store at http://fineartamerica.com/shop/heather-hudson.html , a part of Fine Art America online galleries.

Out of the Flat File; "My First Tome" sketch

2011-01-05T13:04:00.000-08:00

I was looking for something completely different the other day and ran into this old sketch from 2004 for the Magic the Gathering; Unhinged card "My First Tome." If you know the card, you see that it went through at least one major conceptual shift in its evolution. My first thought was that it was an interesting artifact and might be interesting to throw out on the table for discussion. My second thought was that, gadzooks, the thing could use some help. I've put a lot of work into my drawing since 2004.

I started working on Magic back when pencils were actually faxed in to art directors, and it took some prompting to start me sending things in via digitals with tone and color blocked in. This sketch means well, but it's not selling itself to a generation of art directors raised on the computer. It's also not funny, which is generally a good thing for Magic, but not for the Unhinged expansion which was supposed to be funny. (Hint-- needs more chickens.)

So, since I've only got a couple of other projects to work on this morning, I played around and came up with a revised sketch for the concept along with two different tone block-outs to give it visual context. I shooped the wizard's face to make it more cartoonish and made him smaller in relationship to the battle around him, so that the action in the background has more impact.

Of the two tone layouts, I like the light coming out of the book best. Light from the book keeps the picture tightly focused, it explains where the light is coming from and that the book is magical, and it put great hilights on the wizard's goofy little glasses.

Krab Jab sketch 2; Webster's Devil

2011-01-03T14:22:00.000-08:00

A sketch from the Krab Jab sessions of a woman in 16th C. Italian costume, who I've tagged as "Webster's Devil," or possibly "Divel."

The lighting at the KJ atrium space is strong and very dramatic. Last week I drew on white paper and complained that it would be more effective to work on a mid-tone with lights and darks, so this week I bought some gray pastel paper and worked in Prismacolor.

Valuable learning experience! Pastel paper is meant to be used with pastels, which deposit a heavy residue on the surface. Used with colored pencils, it looks like I've been drawing on paper towels. The size of the paper, 9" x 12", means that the texture is larger than details in the face and hands. Pastel paper has a right-side and a wrong side, tho, so I'll try again on the back of the sheet, which is smoother.

White Prismacolor pencil does not hide black prismacolor pencil, it makes an unfortunate bluish color. Prismacolor does not erase.

Note that the skirt is too short in comparison to the torso. The edge of the this sort of bodice dips below the natural waistline in front and rides up above it in back, so trying to block out the figure using the apparent waist is unhelpful. The best clue for figuring out the natural waist under a heavy costume is to look for the elbows, which line up with it. I forgot this helpful tip, and one of those arms is too long as a result.

Return of the Clouded Leopard!

2010-12-31T16:13:00.000-08:00

It's a show! And you're invited!

Krab Jab Studio is around the back of the building, somehow not connected to the main hallways of the old brewery (?) now facing a second life as an artists' colony. This is the evening of the Georgetown Art Attack, the neighborhood's monthly artwalk, so there will be many good shows to visit despite the dark and nippy night. Come around back and say hello, we'll have signs out and look forward to seeing you.

In related news, I've been framing things this week. Once again, I consider how helpful it would have been to have centered the camera art in a slightly larger painting that fit in a standard frame. Once again I realize there's no point sharing this with the next generation of artists because they all work digitally anyway. Helpful tips about fitting art to an off the rack frame are as current as tips on how to tie your shoes while wearing a hoop skirt.

Krab Jab Elf sketch

2010-12-28T10:25:00.000-08:00

Sketch of a live model in costume, drawn on the evening of 23 December down at friends' studio in Georgetown...

The sketch is a bit deceptive; the model was starkly lit and my note in the upper right hand corner says the background should be value "3" which is my way of telling myself a mid-dark gray, below a true medium gray but above black. More like this...

The focus of the Krab Jab sessions is to create illustration-type images from live poses, inspired by the sessions that Howard Pyle used to set up at the Brandywine School. I think a crucial step in that process is to create a narrative as part of the process and before you start drawing the image; I just enjoyed drawing the figure this time.
Btw -- you should know more about Howard Pyle, if you don't already. If you do know about him, did you know that Andrew Loomis reprints a couple of pages of notes from a Pyle lecture in "Creative Illustration?" Thing is, you need a pretty good grasp of the interrelationship of light, tone and hue to begin to follow them. Don't know if it's the complexity of the issue or just that students' notes can be a bit abbreviated...

More on Collage and Copyright

2010-12-22T15:23:00.000-08:00

A while back I wrote about the idea of incorporating collage into an illustration project currently in development at Studio Wondercabinet and the possibility of violating copyright by working with found images. I wondered how the growing collage community deals with copyright law when working for reproduction.

Recently I came across a fascinating review of the issue on Sarah Ovenall's site, funnystrange.com, under the sub head "copyright for collage artists." Thanks, Sarah, for investigating the subject so thoroughly and then taking time to post about it!

Having said this, what I've read makes it look bleak for the collage concept. Unless Dover has a vast stock of 1950's era images for reproduction, it may be time to fall back and strategize, strategize, strategize!

Father Solstice

2010-12-18T13:33:00.000-08:00

A quick piece of seasonal art for the last Art Order challenge of the year, this also goes by the working title, "Jolly Old St. Nicholas, the Early Years."

I'm fond of Terry Pratchett's book -- and character --"The Hogfather" and have been for years. I think some of that comes out in this piece.
As artwork, what sticks out is that both the drawing and the painting are looser than most of my digital paintings. Jon at Art Order pitched this as a quick, playful challenge with a lot of freedom and I took him at his word. (grin)

AO Dungeon Delve final art

2010-12-14T19:04:00.000-08:00

Back in November I posted a sketch of a piece, "Dungeon Delve", that I was doing for an Art Order challenge. The project description can be seen here.
Now here's the final art.

This piece was painted in Photoshop. I've become fond of setting up my art at 300 dpi, cleaning up my sketch and setting up my flats, then laying in the basic rude painting on a 70 dpi copy and dragging the painted layer over to the first file where it can be enlarged. This process lets me work quickly without too much thought on the first stage and leaves behind an interesting texture to build on.

Casino R'lyeh update; It's Available at Arkham Bazaar!

2010-12-08T13:43:00.000-08:00

I spent quite a lot of spring 2010 working on a Lovecraft-themed poker deck for Dagon Industries, in a dynamic art-duo team up with Daniel Gelon as art director and graphic designer. It sold pretty well to individual shops at the game fairs this summer but we never worked out a system for national distribution until now.

Now "Casino R'lyeh" is available at Arkham Bazaar! Now you can buy your very own full-color, gloriously illustrated Mythos poker deck, and I will no longer have to email around looking for retailers when folks try to buy it from me on-line. Huzzah huzzah!

And many thanks to John Struan at Super Punch for sharing pics with the universe!

Collage question...

2010-12-06T11:51:00.000-08:00

I've got a couple of projects I want to move forward today but neither of them is ready to show now so what I'm sharing is a sketchbook page from this September past, which suggests that last fall I was polishing my knowledge of dorsal anatomy and also, for some reason, elephants. Can't recall why...

One of the projects I'm working on today will probably involve collage. I have no previous projects incorporating this art form, but when I read the text and talked the writer, collage seemed like a valid tool for creating visual work for the project and reflecting its world.

I know the collage community is large and well connected via the web, and I'm wondering if it can throw out some thoughts on this issue... what are the elements that make a collage an original artwork for sale and reproduction, and what are the dangerous areas that could raise concerns of copyright infringement?

In other news, the Library of Congress has an online system for registering copyright, eCo, that is faster, cheaper and more efficient than snail mail; it will also give artists a whole new appreciation for friendly User-Interface design, which it lacks.

Out of the flat file; Kavu Glider

2010-12-01T12:21:00.000-08:00

Last week I mentioned game design among couple of reasons that commissioned illustration might not get used. From listening to game designers, I've picked up that game mechanics need to be in balance to make the game work and if one element throws off the balance of play, that element needs revision. Fine-tuning generally happens in the play-test stage. This can be difficult because by the time a game with a hard release date is finally play-tested, the artwork may already be turned in, and the art director's time and money all used up. Hmm, what to do...?

Here's a card from MtG; Apocalypse which released as "Kavu Glider," though the lizard-creature's head doesn't have that distinctive kavu look.

And here is the card as I painted it, back when it was called something like "gliding pyrosaur."

I'll guess that somewhere in testing it became clear that a flying, fire-breathing creature you could bring out for 2 mana was just a little too powerful and cheap to keep play balanced. Time to cut the "fire-breathing" mechanic! At this point the art director could either find or commission new art of a lizard without a fireball, or, because Wizards owned the art's copyright, he could do a little creative work in Photoshop.
Sometimes a little light shooping is all the budget will allow.

Note -- Card artwork on this page is © Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro, Inc 1993-2001, and is used with permission. Not too clear on the edited-out fireball, tho...

Drawing chainmail

2010-11-29T11:23:00.000-08:00

Here's a few thoughts from this morning's warmup sketch...

Chain mail sketching can be approached in several passes. This morning I drew from a photo of a medieval re-enactor, so I have a particular type of chain mail in mind as I write. Play around with your own reference -- each type of mail construction will look different on the page and your results will vary!

1. Sketch in the basic drapes and folds of the mail garment; think of it as very macho cloth.
2. Sketch in the horizontal ribbing that forms where the rows of links interlock-- the rows are equidistant and will run across the draping mail like horizontal corderoy.
3. Lightly indicate the location of the individual rings.
4. Block in the shadows that give form to the profile of each ring. This is where you can use a heavy pencil line, not on the basic shape where what you really need is a highlight of white paper.
5. Scumble the soft shadow along the bottom of each row that gives roundness to the chain rings.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

Still life study for Dungeon Delve

2010-11-24T16:34:00.000-08:00

So I'm warming up my brain to digitally paint the Dungeon Delve art. The sketch for this Art Order challenge can be seen here, mostly, though I've tweaked it a bit and made the bones smaller in relation to the unfortunate adventurer. (Note to self -- bones fit inside skin, are smaller than you'd think.)

Anyhow, I spent some time looking at actual objects and light before diving in to the digital paint.

Here we have bone, metal blades, something approximating the organic, and some low angle intense light all elements that make up the Dungeon Delve challenge piece. Let's see what I do with it...
By the way, I think this is probably a dog skull, altho it could be a coyote. The apple is fake, but it's a good fake and handy to have around.

Out of the flat file; unused CCG art

2010-11-24T14:51:00.000-08:00

I run into this piece occasionally while I'm looking for other early art. It's an unused piece from the first round of commissioning for the Unglued 2 Magic expansion, the set that was eventually released as MtG:Unhinged.

It is not unheard-of for card artwork to go unused, either because the art wasn't right for the project, it didn't come in on time, or because the card itself was shelved for some reason or other. In this case, the entire expansion went to the Phantom Zone for several years, and when it was reanimated in 2003, most of the cards had new titles, new mechanics, and of course new art. Usually Wizards holds on to unused art in case it can be used elsewhere, but in this case I got a letter explaining that, um, no, they thought I could really have all the Unhinged art back again... Amazingly, I have never found a place to use "Rutabaga of the Night." Go figure.

Rutabaga of the Night here was a friendly take on an actual card from one of the earliest Magic sets. it had no rutabagas itself; one of the themes of Unglued was "Vegetables are funny." If any one can figure out the title of the actual card, let me know Please? Four years went by between me getting the commission and the art coming back to the studio; not being able to remember the source magic card is like telling a long joke and forgetting the punchline.

My first sketchcrawl

2010-11-22T09:46:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to join in one of our local sketchcrawls for a while, and yesterday I finally got out and did it! I did it in pencil, upside-down and backwards, but I did it! Huzzah!

Sketchcrawls are a celebration of drawing outdoors, or at least in public, in your home urban environment. The local group meets up at a public site, splits up to draw for a couple of hours, then meets up again to share their work at the end of the session. Generally a coffee shop is involved.

This time we met at the Pike Place market and passed our sketchbooks around at the SBC in Post Alley.

Many of the folks I met yesterday seem to be architects, or in a related field where very clean line art is the order of the day. There was a general fondness for mechanical quill pens with hand-filled cartridges of water-proof ink, because the color, when used, is generally watercolor wash applied on site from adorable tiny paint boxes. If you've looked at this blog before, you know that ink is not my native visual language.

Yesterday I used a mechanical pencil with a number 2 lead, the sketching tool I always use. Here's the sketching I did in a couple of hours. Even with a discrete amount of cleanup in photoshop, a #2 lead will smudge with hard use -- I think it behooves me to find some kind of ink pen for my next whack at this game.

Yesterday's session gave me an insight into my own work; I still have a lot more facility at drawing things and people than places. It would be cool to change that...

AO Dungeon Delve sketch

2010-11-15T13:46:00.000-08:00

I posted a link to the ArtOrder "Dungeon Delve" challenge this morning, but there's an amazing amount of artwork and many artists involved, and the UI of Ning means you would slog through 85+ pages to find any specific name or image. So here's my sketch for a lost and forlorn adventurer in a most unfriendly dungeon...

Yes, my version of this piece is up there on the AO site, and it has a suggestion of tone and color (dark and blue, since you ask) but here I left it nearly monochrome to show off the drawing.

The Vegan and the Dead (and Life Drawing)

2010-11-09T10:58:00.000-08:00

Traditionally young artists learned their anatomy by dissecting corpses and drawing the bits. Alas, there don't seem to be as many corpses around as there used to be, at least not accessible ones. What I've seen in recent art classes are a teacher with a mounted skeleton (preferably a real one), picking out the start and stop points of muscles with colored modeling clay, and one or two very patient, very slender models.

If you are looking for slender models with clearly defined musculature, let me recommend vegans. For reasons I don't need to understand, they have no body fat. You can seen every serratus insertion point on the ribcage and all the places where the ribs tie into the sternum! Amazing!

For bonus points, go back to an old life drawing and work it over, drawing in the muscles as if the model has been flayed. It's a bit of a challenge, but it's good for you.

A lot of young fantasy artists use body building photos as reference but that can be a bit tricky. Bodybuilding muscles aren't just larger than normal, they tend to wind up out of place and proportion compared to human standard. Drawing them involves a fair bit of confusion as you try to figure out bits that aren't in the text books.

My favorite anatomy handbook is Richer & Hale's "Artistic Anatomy," (1889) now available quite cheaply from Dover.

digital still life; beetle in a bottle

2010-11-07T16:17:00.000-08:00

A couple of hours in Photoshop for the practice, studying an object found in my studio...

A gift from a friend. I think the note that came with it read, "Saw this, thought of you guys!'

Um, thanks...

Out of the Flat File; Ur-Golem's Eye

2010-11-03T14:13:00.000-07:00

I was going through the flat file, and I found a rejected sketch for a Magic card from a few years back, Ur-Golem's Eye. This, btw, is the card illustration in its final form.

The first version is obviously more ambitious, aka complex.

I think I recall a general sense of wanting to impress, and the result is a busy illustration in which the salient item -- the eye -- would have been reduced to a wee dot far from the center of the image. The rule of thumb which I learned back in the days of my youf was that you should be able to hold up the card across the room and make out the basics of the art at a glance; whether or not this rule is operative today, it is my rule and I'm sticking with it. I do not think this proposed version would have won in that department. So what did I intend to do here? I played around with it for a few minutes this morning, trying to figure something out.

So if I took it into color it would look maybe something like this?

The fun fun party guy holding the eye is a black-card creature (I think designed by Mark Tedin???) and is basically a swamp-dwelling bio-mechanoid diseased zombie scavenger, probably. Basic black card critter, really. It's been a long time since I looked at the reference material, but I'd bet I've taken the skin tone darker and greener than originally specc'd just to make the eye read against a darker background.

I also found this still-life study from the same period, which I think was done to test colors and reflections for the second version of the illustration, the one at the top of the page. I used colors from it in the color thumbnail, above.
If anyone out there is still working with real paint, heed my advice and write the date and subject of your study on the back of the sized paper before you start painting -- once you finish the piece, it's too wet and once it's dry you've moved on to other things.

Skull 2, take 1...

2010-10-27T15:50:00.000-07:00

Another day, another still life...

Most days I warm up my eye by drawing a face or a hand, or some other subject relating to the project du jour, but today I just tore on ahead, heh heh. I believe that the facial bones wound up lower on the skull than they should be, so that the chin is too small and the cranium is too large. These are the proportions of a child's skull. I've been drawing a lot of kids lately but this reinterpretation of an adult skull was not intended today.

I was at the Frye Art Museum here in Seattle the other day, looking at the current exhibition, and couldn't help but hear a docent talking about the Artist's Intent and the Implications of the Painting at which her tour was looking. (Believe me, I tried.) I am willing to believe that artists have intents and implications, but I suspect most of these are filtered through ability and human nature on their way to the canvas, and lack the initial capital letters.

Still life painting as playtest; Scrapbasket art

2010-10-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

Here's Scrapbasket, a piece of Magic; the Gathering art from the Shadowmoor expansion a few years ago. It's one of those interesting pieces that are specc'd with 4 or five contrasting light sources, none of them dominant. Traditionally this could be a bit of a puzzler; light dictates shadow, which dictates form, which tells you what you're seeing. Light also gives color, another important element in painting -- and this picture was lit with the 5 colors of Magic including black.

The glowing black element was a recurring challenge of illustration for Magic. Mostly it wound up a sort of violet, and it was always the favorite for being tragically unavoidably obscured behind other, more comprehensible elements of the picture.

In Scrapbasket, I decided that the multicolored Magic lights would light the interior of the wicker golem while being influenced by the color of the glass bottle that held them. This would pull the colors together for me so I could figure out a palette for the piece.

I think this study was done after the sketch was approved but before I put any paint on the mounted board. I was working in oils during this time, and the slowing drying time encouraged me to figure out my plans before I started laying down paint.

This little study measures roughly 6" square and took around 3 hours, not including setting out my colors. It's quick, crude thing but it gave me some helpful information on how light travels through glass and how to paint wicker.

Skull 1, take 1, again...

2010-10-14T15:32:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Jeffrey Lai, for painting still-life studies in photoshop and posting the results on your blog. You have put the zen boot up along side my head and reminded me that nothing improves one like practice, and that painting still life studies is Good for an artist in any medium. Even digital. So, of course, are push-ups and broccoli. So here is Study 1, take 1, the life-like plastic skull. More will follow.

We all have this plastic skull, don't we? Advertised as "Realistic model kit human skull Skilcraft Lindberg," it has the sliced-open cranium with the pegs that never hold the top on and eventually you just tape it together and stop seeing the opening at all. The teeth and the bridge of the nose are glued on by the buyer. The color is unnatural, the teeth oddly pink. We paint it one thousand times and it will never get old, because when you change the light and turn it around it's always new again.

Monster evolution; the Haunter of the Dark

2010-10-13T15:52:00.000-07:00

Here's a quick post on how a monster evolved for a recent Art Order challenge, now revised with decently sized art, and links to higher dpi's for the interested. Jon spec'd creature designs of a non-humanoid monster from the actual writings of H.P. Lovecraft, so before I started sketching my take on the Haunter of the Dark I reread that story 2 or 3 times.

1. Spontaneous pencil doodle in sketch book. Bigger?

2. Growing sense that I'm missing out on possibly more interesting concepts; retroactive thumbnailing of a dozen or so silhouettes.

3. Imagining several new thumbnails based on my favorite silhouettes. Bigger?

4. Feedback mixed with no clear favorite between two of the new silhouettes; I compromise by shooping my favorite elements of each sketch into a new sketch and work it up at the final scale in pencil. Bigger?

5. Transfer to Photoshop and paint, with smaller back view and human silhouette for scale. Bigger?

6. Realize I would have saved a step by sketching the silhouettes first; make a note to try this next time. To see all 81artists' final submissions together, check out Art Order, here.

Tone and Plein Air Painting, take 2

2010-10-09T12:01:00.000-07:00

Another article in my continuing and randomly timed rants on tone for the artist, posted for a second time in hopes of repairing some damage to the html code. Wondering what I'm talking about? You might want to have another look at Part1 and Part 2... it could help.

To paint representational images you have to work with tone, using the tones from lightest to darkest to fake the illusion of light and shade, and from this the world as we see it. A corollary is that to fake it, you need to be able to look at the world as critically as you look at your own artwork. The best way to develop this critical eye is to paint outdoors. This is called plein air painting.

A couple of suggestions for first-time plein air painters...
1.    Give yourself a block of several hours in the morning or the afternoon to work but don’t try to work through noon. You’ll find the changing length of shadows challenging enough without watching them change direction as well.

2.    If you’re working in oils, try laying out a simple set of
colors ahead of time so you aren’t wasting the sunlight once you get to your site. And you can use a limited number of pigments as long as you have a good basic set that can be pushed from light to dark appropriate to your subject.

3.    The world is a very large subject. Before you start painting, define it for yourself by framing your view with a hollow square of cardboard, or an empty slide frame (if they still exist) or just your own two hands. This way you can decide where the edges of your picture will hit the edges of your canvas (or paper, or whatever.)

4.    Helpful information can be found online at sites like http://painting.about.com/od/landscapes/a/plein_air_paint.htm and http://www.pleinairmuse.com/, and many more.

Later you can make quick studies from photographs to playtest specific elements you use in your work or paint still-life fruit bowls for practice, but you really can’t replace the real world for your study of naturalistic lighting.

Back from GP Portland!

2010-09-14T13:52:00.000-07:00

I had a great time at GP Portland last weekend, where I had a chance to meet MtG players and collectors who are enjoying my work for the game. I also drew pictures on cards, notebooks, APs and play mats. Since this is done with permanent laundry marker and I am not a natural-born inker, I warm up for signings by sketching in ink instead of pencil for several days in advance.

Drawing in ink commits the artist to laying down a confident line with each stroke, since there's no opportunity to erase and revise. This is said to be good for ya. Now my sketchbook has several pages of ink sketches in it, drawn in ball point at a scale similar to my familiar pencil but a bit delicate for con art. Here's a couple of my favorites.

Before my next signing, I'm going to get a roll of heavy craft paper and some full sized sharpies and supersize my inking warm-ups, see what happens.

Casino R'lyeh update; It's out!

2010-09-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

I just received my comp copies of Casino R'yleh, the Mythos-inspired poker deck I illustrated this spring. It seems to have done pretty well at the game conventions this summer, huzzah! It printed a little darker than we expect, which obscures some of the fiddling details while not actually fighting the theme of the art; the destruction of humanity by unspeakable forces from beyond the stars, it can carry a little saturation of pigments. And we can always pull back the color a smidge when we reprint.

My vision of the Mythos may not be your vision of the Mythos. There's more Venus of Willendorf than flying tentacled hemorrhoids in my artwork, and I've kept the vagina dentatas to a minimum. (Depends on how you interpret the Ace of Diamonds, really...) I have always believed that Lovecraft himself wrote with a deeply, archaically classical sensibility, and that a background of Bullfinch and Greek drama and the Golden Bough enhances the illustrator's chances of producing appropriate art for his work. The fact that I read all that stuff myself 20 years ago is completely coincidental...

Also, I'll be in Oregon this weekend, signing old cards and drawing with laundry markers at the Magic Grand Prix Portland. If you're at the event, stop by and say hi.

Beach Logs Kill! And stuff...

2010-09-03T14:36:00.000-07:00

A digital painting for Jon at Art Order, inspired by a sign in the Olympic Peninsula parks warning of the dangers of playing on and around beach logs.
This is more a monster beach log than a monster inspired by a beach log, but mostly it's me having fun in the new photoshop program.

Next weekend I'll go down to Portland, OR, to sign cards at the Magic; the Gathering grand prix. I don't sign cards through the mail any more, so attending the signing seemed like a courtesy to any folks who want an autographed "Warmonger" or to ask whether "Clergy En-Vec" is really performing an unnatural act right there on the card. (No. No he isn't. Next question...) Until then I'll keep working away on the next projects, hoping the cool weather keeps both me and my computer from overheating, lol.

Btw, big thanks to the folks in DCI who responded to my query, asking which of my cards are currently useful in play. It's a big help for me, as I get ready to make prints and warm up my sharpie drawing skills, to know what images the players want to see. I just make the pictures... you're the folks who use them.

1900 Study#5 -- Children and Poodles

2010-08-27T11:32:00.000-07:00

There are probably artists who can draw a model's face without trying to copy the expression in their own, but I am not one of them. By imitating the bunch and pull of the muscles we can see, perhaps we can feel what's happening with the bits we can't see well enough. It looks silly, of course, but there's not much I can do about that.

The child in this photo posed in her best winter coat and bonnet, one trimmed with angora goat or perhaps poodle, the other topped with a bow like a radar dish with ruffles. She stood in a dark hallway next to a painfully fancy chair, and waited as her parents coaxed her to smile for the camera. Grownups are so tall to someone her age, and that coat looks very warm for standing about indoors.

1900 study #4 -- At the Beach, pt.2!

2010-08-26T12:18:00.000-07:00

Harsh outdoor light can be tough to work with, especially when drawing children or pretty young people. Your subject naturally wants to squint, to protect their eyes from all that bright and bouncy light, at the same time that light brings out all the details of their drawn brows and heavily overshadowed eyesockets. Challenging!
In a larger portrait, bounce light can fill in the shadows. At a wee scale like this, I'll just keep practicing and trying to hit the elements in the expression that cue happiness instead of distress-- for example, the bulge of the outer lower eyelid that gives us the upwards scalloped shape of the happy eye.
Btw, this is the other kid from yesterday's photo, where she was a light clutter of lines. Reference photos are less obtrusive -- less stinky? -- if you try to draw the subject they depict rather than the photo itself.

1900 study #3 -- At the Beach!

2010-08-25T13:04:00.000-07:00

Well yes, sometimes the beach can be a bit chilly, what with the wind coming off the water and all.

(The moments you spend staring at 4 or five pixels on a screen and trying to figure out what on earth you're looking at, those are the moments when a good working knowledge of anatomy can be useful. For some reason, most really important reference material is usually one grainy photo taken a hundred years ago by a tourist with a bad case of the malarial shakes, and it's useful to be able to fill in the blanks yourself.)

1900 Reference sketch #2

2010-08-24T10:40:00.000-07:00

This kid has very little to do with the personal piece in question, but I liked his pose and I can use the practice on kids in general. If you don't nail the "kidness" just right, a badly rendered child can look not just wrong but creepy, what with the giant head and the unfamiliar proportions.

I've got to add, I'm impressed by how long a black turtleneck sweater and skinny leggings have lasted as a viable fashion statement. That's around 110 years of mopey practicality!