Recent Project: St. George

I have recently been working on series of paintings for a show at Gallery Nucleus in L.A. They are based loosely around the St. George and the Dragon legend. It's a project I have wanted to work on for a long time and it's been great fun so far.

The following is some of the early rough work for the first painting for the project.

Character Development work

Pencil on Vellum

Character Development work

Digital

Early Watercolor Stages

Strathmore Bristol

Thumbnail/Color Comp

Digital

Illustration Process: Digital Trickery

Original Watercolor

In the last post, I focused on the traditional aspects of my process for watercolor and digital. This week, we focus on the digital hocus pocus used to complete these pieces.

My digital process is mainly derived from the Dutch-Flemish indirect manner of working.  If I travelled back in time and gave the Dutch-Flemish painters an Imac with Adobe Photoshop CS5 on it and a Intuos 4, they might have promptly thrown it all in the lake and then painted an unflattering picture of me as a fruit basket. But then again, they might decide that their methods work well regardless of what medium they are executed in and they would go on to make some awesome work with the new tools.

The process I follow mainly involves first laying in the shadows transparently, and then working in the highlights opaquely on top of them. This is then followed by adjusting the colors and details.

Color Adjustment

I have an ancient Epson flatbed scanner, one that primitive man invented sometime after fire, but before the wheel. Like most stone-age equipment, it is quite reliable, but it does tend to get its colors off just slightly. The image always seems lifeless and dead to me after it has been scanned.

This first stage is just to get the image back to what it looks like to the naked eye in soft light.

Shadows

I work purely in multiply layers to establish the dark areas and shadow details. I work this up to slowly to kind of explore the nuances of the lighting in the image. This chance to explore the lighting is one of my favorite aspects of working digitally.

I use multiply (set to zero black) to add the color. You can use any of the other modes to achieve color, (color, soft light, hard light etc.) I just prefer multiply because it behaves a little more predictably and because it tends to look a little more natural over a traditionally painted image.

Highlights

After working up the shadows to a satisfactory level of darkness, I work highlights in to slowly refine the shapes and give them more dimension. As in the Dutch-Flemish manner, I tend to work opaquely at this point, and generally stick to the areas that are being lit.

Color Adjustments & Final Details

For the final details I work with normal layers to sharpen up details and focal points. I try not to overwork the whole image at this point though. This is both a blessing and a curse with digital. Since you can essentially zoom in forever, you could feasibly spend the rest of your existence refining every little hair. At some point you need to make decisions about what needs to be refined and what can be left a little vague.

Original post on Muddy Colors

Illustration Process: Traditional Work

For this post and the next I will take a break from shameless self-promotions to share some process work.  

Over the years, my process has mutated from the clear and straightforward approach of my early childhood:

Step 1: Tear page from coloring book.

Step 2: Turn page over and apply crayon directly to back of paper.

..And turned into an overly-complex and technically absurd mess that it involves hundreds of extra steps and expensive, new-fangled products.

So, I will break this into 2 parts to keep things more manageable.

Today's post is the traditional side, the place where I begin most of my work, and my next post will focus on the digital side, the place where I end most of my work.

Thumbnail

Ink on napkin

The conceptual stages are generally just exploring ideas to help find a compositional arrangement that seems pleasing. The tools used for this change from image to image. For concept-work I go with whatever works.

Rough Drawing

#7 pencil on copy paper

Once I establish a rough drawing that I like I do studies of most of the faces and figures. I will try to really nail the expressions that I am after. I always consider this one of the most important elements of the image. As Rockwell pointed out, "if you get the face and hands right, they'll forgive you for the rest." So if I have a face in the image, I try to make sure I have it established in a study somewhere.

And if it hasn't already been determined, these studies will help me to decide which lighting arrangement will be the most advantageous for the characters.

Study

General's HB Pencil on Strathmore Vellum

Tight Drawing

Pencil on Strathmore Bristol

For the watercolor stage I stick very close a process laid out by Peter De Seve in his excellent Step-by-Step Graphics article (Vol.10, no. 6) about his technique. (I highly recommend it if you can find it.)

De Seve's overall method in the article carries a great emphasis on preserving the drawing, which is one of the most alluring aspects of it for me. You can see from his work how well it allows him to play up his characters expressions and designs.

I will sometimes (and this is one of those times) apply workable fixative to the drawing before starting the watercolor. Fixative will leave the surface a little less workable for the watercolor, (the surface tends to be less absorbent) but will keep the drawing much more intact. Since I weep bitter tears to see the drawing slowly disintegrate, I am generally willing to risk it.

Watercolor over Pencil

The watercolor process begins with washes of earth colors to tone the paper, applied wet into wet. Then after this has dried color and value are slowly worked up with about ten thousand tiny washes applied wet into wet or wet into damp.

One of the nice things about this approach is that it allows folks like me, who have a foggy command of color at best, to experiment a lot as they work. If a color doesn't look right it is really easy to adjust.

After this I panic and then throw all the old illustrator tricks at the piece in a last desperate effort to save it.

These tricks include, but are not necessarily limited to: Ink, pencil, acrylic, markers, badgers, lawsuits, incantations, harsh language, oaths, gouache, threats and even blows.

Final Traditional Painting

Next Post: Digital Trickery

Imagine FX Issues #66 & #67

I recently contributed a series of drawing tutorials to Imagine FX. The purpose of these articles is primarily to continue to fool the world into thinking that I actually know what I am doing. But secondly it is to pass along what information I have gleaned from other artists who actually did know what they were doing.

In issue #66 we focus on theory,

and in issue #67 on practice.

Find out more at www.imaginefx.com.

The Most Mind-Blowing Images I Have Seen in My Life: Part II

On a trip in 2009, I had a chance to see the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. While there I beheld one of the most impressive sculptures created in the last 200 years. It was the Saint Marc, by a little known sculptor named Jean Baptiste Gustave Deloye.

Why is it awesome and how comes it to be on a list of the most earth-shatteringly awesome art I have ever seen? Because it is of a dude who who has wrestled down a Winged Lion. And he did it wearing nothing but a tea cozy. The lion looks plainly furious, while Saint Marc looks like he is lost in abstraction, his mind already having moved on from the fact that he just mastered a winged lion. He might be thinking, "I wonder if McRib is back?" Or, "I wonder what happened in the last season of Lost?" But he isn't very concerned about the lion or the fact that he is wearing nothing but a tea cozy.

Note: Some stone-throwers will no doubt cry out that art like this promotes a spirit of senseless cruelty to animals. To that I will say that savage, winged-lions can generally be expected to take care of themselves against unarmed and stark-naked men.

Now the learned among you will say that I may have misinterpreted this particular piece because I couldn't read the placard, and yes, my Parle vous Francais isn't what it used to be.

However, I do have a vague recollection of the winged lion being St. Marc's symbol and that the imagery has something to do with his preaching, (or one of the other apostle's preaching) being "like that of a roaring lion." The artist here has skillfully maneuvered around any appearance of stiff oration, and cut more deeply into the impression and sense of what the impact might be like to listen to a truly masterful and compelling orator contending for what he believes.

Judging from what I see in contemporary examples of sculptures of mighty orators, I can't help thinking that if this concept were to have been attempted in the last few decades, we would either have a dull, square man in a dull, square suit, with a disgruntled finger jabbed in the air, or else we might have a loose collection of junk welded together to give the impression of a loose collection of junk welded together. Given the choice of the three, I am always going to listen to the guy who has mastered a mythical creature, even if he is naked. And most people will generally prefer the place somewhere between pure representation and pure abstraction.

This skillful communication of the idea of a mighty orator, an orator whose voice sounded like that of a roaring lion, is so also interesting to me because it can be misinterpreted. Consider that without the title below: "Evangile St. Marc," we might not know exactly who or what this was. (Though we couldn't help but be impressed.) But given the title and a general understanding behind it, it encourages a rethinking of the viewer's world, and his seeing everyday ideas with new eyes.

The artist may have undertook to make this sculpture simply for the pursuit of excellence in art. He might have done it for the money. Or he may have done this out of a sincere appreciation for a man who believed in something so strongly that he had to shout about it. Who knows? But I derive such pleasure from this sculpture.

Inspiration

Every now and then I get asked what I do for inspiration. Some mistakenly believe that I torment my sister's cat for inspiration. Others believe that I methodically hunt down and destroy endangered species. And still others suspect that I build giant robots and plan an invasion of Mars.

I assure you this is not true. I like good music and fine literature.

But even more than music and literature, I find that camping trips provide some of the best inspiration.

Some might say; yes, but don't you spend most of a camping trip fighting mosquitos, rain, fires that won't start, and equipment failure all while being completely lost? And don't you spend most of your mental energy panicking about wether you will even survive this day because you have not exercised in a month and have been living on chic-fil-a?

And well yes, this is all true. But there are brief moments on these trips that make the whole experience worth the overall misery of it. When it is all said and done, I tend to forget how terrible it was, and how we almost killed each other that time the campstove broke, and I am left only with the impression of the spectacular views and the warmth of sun after being freezing and the taste of food after being starving.

Apart from being inspired by the raw beauty of the planet, hiking gives a person a chance to be alone with their thoughts in a place where they cannot help but feel small and cannot help but appreciate what they have. There is something about being freezing, and having to wrestle with building a fire and putting up a tent in the snow that suddenly turns a simple, everyday thing like a warm shower into one of the greatest technological wonders of all time.

I always bring a hardback sketchbook with me on these trips, and try to have easy access to it. Every time I come back from one of these trips I have hundreds of new thumbnails a ideas for new projects I want to undertake. The odd scribbles and tiny thumbnails made on the trail may get turned into something larger and they may not, but the impression of it all never quite leaves me. It will always be somewhere in the back of my head, waiting for a chance to find its way onto paper.

Articles

Today's Muddy Colors Post is on Drawing and why it is important. (Especially if aliens come to visit earth.)

Also, I recently did an interview for the Innsmouth Free Press. You can read it here.

The Most Mind-Blowing Images I Have Seen in My Life: Part I

What you see before you is the cover of Petar Meseldzija's Book, The Legend of Steel Bashaw. It is one of the most exceptional paintings I have seen in my lifetime. Like many of you, I first saw this image in Spectrum 9 where it dropped a nuclear bomb on my brain. Never before had I seen an image that so clearly articulated every feeling that I had ever hoped to communicate in art. And never had I seen one executed with such earth-shattering beauty. It was flawless, riveting, and the more I looked at it, the more I was drawn into it.

Now you will say, "Justin, calm down, it's just a picture. Its a dude, and he's on a horse. You're getting carried away." But this is more than a dude on a horse. It is a diatribe against mediocrity and an air raid call to the pursuit of excellence in art. When I saw this painting it gave me the same desire it has given many other artists who see Petar's work, it made me want to change everything. Not only did it instill in me a fervent desire to learn how to paint, but to make images that were worth meditating on, and not disposable imagery destined to be lost in the vast sea of imagery we exist in.

For a long time I had believed that it was essentially hopeless. The attention span for visuals shrinks as digital photography and digital displays increase and lead to a greater proliferation of imagery. In this new digital world the best images are those that are the most clear and the most brief. People are conditioned away from lingering for very long on a single image in the marketplace. There are so many other ideas out there, so many other things to see that it becomes almost morally wrong to create something that demands a person dwell on it in instead of moving directly on to the next idea. Meditating on a single idea becomes an anathema. Even movies find that in order to keep up with the shrinking attention span, they must make scene changes faster and faster to keep audience interest. But in the pursuit of communicating a quantity of ideas we seem to lose the ability to meditate on the quality of a single idea. This image was one I got lost in and never quite made it back out of. It defied the technology-perscribed cultural direction that I sensed was to be the inevitable demise of narrative illustration. After seeing this image I knew that I wanted to make images that were mediations on ideas, and not just flashcards of them.

On top of being a artistic philosophical turning point for me, it was also a technical one. If you haven't already noticed, this painting is a city-crushing, Godzilla vs. MechaGodzilla of technical achievement. It is at once extremely precise, with profoundest care taken in the focal points, such as the horses thrusting hoof, which focuses the action there for a brief moment as the eye moves through the composition. And then in the areas that are not meant to fight with the focal points, such as the body of the tree and the rocks beneath, there is an elegance and economy of brushstrokes that show a care in execution that borders on perfection. These subtleties are gorgeous upon examination but slip passively into the background when any of the focal points are examined.

One might perhaps think that the success of this painting is the result of chance, that these are not mortar bombardments of awesome-ness but are rather just a few lucky strokes or the result of some secret medium that he mixes on the panel before applying the paint. The truth is more devastating.

I had a chance to visit Petar in 2009, and while there he took the time to show me some of his drawings. I had always considered myself to have a passable drawing ability and felt that I knew a thing or two about the craft. I was a professional after all. When he pulled out his preliminary drawings that he did for his paintings, I saw the greatest drawings I had ever seen in my life and I blacked out. And while I was blacked out, I had a vision. It was judgement day, and I was giving an accounting of myself before the angels and saints. My art was being brought out and passed around. I learned that it was to be compared against Petar's art, which someone had decided was to be the standard by which all drawings from the era were to be judged. The saints and angels wore grim, unimpressed expressions as they shuffled through my pages of scribblings. Then they started watching the recordings of me playing video games instead of working on my drawings and I woke in a panic. I smelled coffee. (Petar makes a turkish coffee so strong that the mere smell of it would wake a hibernating bear who was frozen in a block of ice under 40 feet of snow and had just taken 12 Ambiens and was listening to Blue Danube by Strauss.) He handed me a cup and asked if I was OK.

As we looked through the rest of his drawings I realized that his paintings are not just the result of an excellence in the ability to apply paint, but that they are also the result of rigorous practice in drawing and extremely meticulous planning in the draft stages where he seeks to resolve the visual problems in his image. I realized that Petar is a genius. I felt like I was looking at the blueprints for the invasion of Normandy. While I could not expect to ever be so flawless in my approach I realized that if I was serious about this I would have to take drawing to an entirely new level that I had never even considered before.

If you have not already, check out his book, The Legend of Steel Bashaw from Flesk. In the back are included some of the drawings for the project. If they don't nuke your brain, they will at least knock your socks off. It is one of the most valuable books for the practicing artist to come out in years. Check out the rest of his work on his website here and his new blog here.

Muddy Colors

I was recently invited by Dan Dos Santos to be a contributer to Muddy Colors, an illustration blog featuring articles by many of today's most influential illustrators. Many of these illustrators have impacted my own work a great deal, (Manchess, Donato and Jon Foster among them) and I look forward to their posts tremendously.

My own posts will focus on some of the topics and discussions that have gone on previously at Quickhidehere, such as the digital vs. traditional articles, as well as some new topics, which I lay out in the first post. If you have any special requests for articles or demos that you think might be interesting, let me know in the comments. I'm still coming up with my list of posts for the next few months, and I'd love to hear what you think.

Today marks my first contribution to the blog.

Check it out at MuddyColors.blogspot.com

Lovecraft Show: Oil

Lovecraft in Innsmouth

9 x 12

Oil on Panel

Lovecraft Show: Oil Underpainting

This is still wet (hence the pencils protecting the scanner glass). The underpainting was done in Holbien Duo water miscible oils with Raw Umber and Ceramic White on panel.

Lovecraft Show

I was recently asked by Gallery Nucleus to contribute to a show based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft called At the Mountains of Madness.

Lovecraft's writing is generally themed around a character's mind slowly descending into madness as they learns too much about the truth of existence. This usually involves sleeping, malevolent, primordeal terrors who dwell forgotten in the depths of the sea, but who will one day rise again to destroy their planet. Lovecraft is wonderful for his use of this imagery in these stories. He has a nack for catching the horror of the deeps and the darkness and the unknown.

There was a wealth of really great, dark and horrific visuals to pull from for this project, so it is perhaps odd that I chose to go with the image that I did for this, which isn't really all that dark or horrific on the surface.

As always, I began with a dozen or so thumbnails of various ideas. Primordeal terrors, leviathans, dead fish walking the streets, giant-tentacled-schoolbusses-of-doom, that sort of thing.

But in the end, I found the thumbnail above to have the most personality.

From this crude thumbnail I went straight on to the digital comp below.

I work on comps like this one as fast as possible in Photoshop. The above image took about an hour or so and I worked from the tiny obscure thumbnail at the top. The point is to get down the basic composition and mood that is in my head as fast as possible. I want to catch the image in my head before its gone, or before some new disaster strikes and I am pulled from the studio by air raid sirens. I also don't want to get caught up in the details here. I hate to retread the same ground twice and would rather save those details for the final execution of the image.