A Very Small Wizard

A Very Small Wizard

Whom I offended when I met him on a path in the old forest.

I kicked a stone at him and said, "stay out of my way! I'm a very important person with no time for little people who run about in their pajamas."

He ducked the flying stone and then mumbled a wild curse, and disappeared among the leaves.

When I got home I had a terrible case of poison ivy.

TLC Workshop: Materials List

For those of you who have signed up for the Seattle TLC Workshop on March 30 - April 1st, here is a preview of what we will be up to.
If you haven't signed up and would still like to, the sign-ups are still open and there are still a few spots available. Visit the TLCworkshop site for more info!


The Project: 
For the course, choose a character from either Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island or Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. 
We are going to be designing and illustrating a character from one of these stories. 
BUT… 
We are going to be re-envisioning our character as an animal. 


Before You Arrive: 

READ: You must read the book.
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson. If you cannot or refuse to read, you can either listen to the audiobook or watch the 1990 Treasure Island which had the absolutely OUTSTANDING cast of Charlton Heston, Christian Bale, Oliver Reed, Christopher Lee, Julian Glover and Pete Postlewaite. If you watch any other version you will almost certainly fail the course. Also, Muppet Treasure Island is wonderful. But it doesn't count.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Again, if you cannot, or simply refuse to read, you can either listen to the audiobook or watch one of the films on it.

As you read, choose a character that interests you and that you think you would like to focus on for this project.

IMAGINE: Spend time thinking about the character before you draw anything. If they were an animal, (or combination of animals) what would they be?

DRAW: Put together some rough thumbnails of your ideas. They can be stick figure or Da Vinci portraits, it doesn't matter. But spend a few minutes after you have read and imagined, and put your ideas down in rough thumbnails. Bring these, and all your notes and ideas with you to the class. After You Arrive: We will be going over our ideas, looking at our reference and then we will be spending the rest of the time working to take those ideas to the most successful designs they can be.

Materials:
We will be focusing heavily on drawing and character design in this course. We will not be painting in this course, but if you are more comfortable drawing or designing in paint feel free to bring that or any other extra materials to suit your needs.

For the following list, all of the materials can be found at dickblick.com if you need to order any.
Please bring the following materials or something similar to each:

Pencils:
Prismacolor Pencils:
Black, White

General's Kimblerly Drawing Pencils:
2H, HB, 2B, Layout,
General's Charcoal White

1 Soft Pastel Stick (any dark color will work)
Kneaded eraser
Small hand-held pencil sharpener

Paper:
1 pad of tracing paper
Strathmore Tracing (which is a very light, cheap paper)
OR
Canson Vidalon Vellum (which is a heavier paper)

At least 3 sheets of neutral mid-toned paper at least 12 x 16 in size.
Canson Mi-Teintes is an excellent choice. Flannel Grey and Pearl are excellent tones in this line.  Anything that is neutral and lighter toned in nature will work.
Heavyweight Vellum Bristol (or any heavy, smooth, white paper) (at least 11x14 in size)

Basic drawing paper for rough sketching. (Good printer copy paper will work fine.)

Reference: Bring as much reference as you can of the animal that you choose, and of outfits that fit the period and motif. Find good, high-resolution images of the animal(s), both in repose and in action and from a variety of angles.

 If you are bringing a laptop, you can have your reference on there. If you are not, you will need to print them all out. Even if you do have a laptop, you might consider printing out some of your more vital reference shots. We may not have printers available, so make sure to print them out before you come.

Recommended Reading: 
These are not required, but you will benefit more from the course if you have had a chance to go through them:
Classical Drawing Atelier by Juliette Aristides
Lessons in Classical Drawing by Juliette Aristides
Drawing Course by Charles Bargue (hard to find, may be easier to read through at a local library) Bridgeman's Life Drawing by George Bridgeman
Drawing Animals by Victor Ambrus

Visit the TLCWorkshop site for more information.

A Rather Sinister Individual

I am currently in the middle of a brawl with a troop of apes disguised as TSA agents at the airport. They are after my beard.

So today's post is going to be a quickie...

The above is a tiny 4"x4"oil painting on linen I finished recently WHICH DIDN'T KILL ME.  

This is exciting because many of my previous adventures in oil have ended badly. I would paint, my body would have some terrible reaction to the materials, I would grow fangs, claws and unsightly hair, and then try to eat my neighbors.  

After the restraining order I did a lot of research into studio safety. From this I found a number of solutions THAT ACTUALLY WORKED and allowed me to finish a painting in oil without any of the usual side effects. So next week, after I have escaped the clutches of these baboons with all their wands and plastic gloves, I plan to share this with everyone. 

The Forest Troll: Digital Trickery

I am working in Adobe Photoshop CS5 for the digital final for this painting. (You don't always need the latest and greatest in software, but CS5 is amazingly stable by comparison to CS4 or CS3, both of which would crash regularly based on alignment of certain stars and lunar cycles. And on Tuesdays. And really just any time that they felt like crashing.)

  

Up until the halfway point I work in only multiply layers.  I am using these layers very much like thin transparent watercolor or acrylic washes.  

Digital Work In Progress: Midway Point

After the midway point I will switch into other layer modes, like screen and color dodge for highlighting. And some normal layers for opaque details. 

Final Digital 

You will notice that I added a few elements to the image at this stage, like the extra foreground foliage. These were decisions made after letting the painting sit for a few days and then coming back to it with a fresh pair of eyes.  It can be a risky business to always be going back and correcting an image.  Sometimes it is better to just leave your first ideas alone and move on to work on new projects. (You hear me Lucas?)  I will only do it if I feel I absolutely have to.   In this case, I had lost some of the forest-ness of the scene, and wanted to recapture a bit of it.

Troll Detail

Dwarf Detail

Thank you everyone for all the support and really helpful feedback!  You guys are awesome.

March 30th Workshop

This year I will be teaching at TLC Workshop's 2012 Professional Art Series. 

These workshops are located in the Seattle area, and focus on one-on-one interaction and instruction from a working professional artist.  See all the details at TLCWorkshops.blogspot.com. 

The illustration workshops offered this year are:

Beyond Reference: How to Imbue your Characters with Character with Justin Gerard, Fri-Sun, March 30-April 1. $375.

Idealized Realism and the Human Figure with Terese Nielsen, Fri-Sun, August 24-26. $500.

Self-Promotion: the Portfolio and Beyond with Jon Schindehette (Senior Creative Director at Wizards of the Coast. Blog here), Sat-Sun, Sept 15-16. $300.

Planning Great Images, From the Ground Up with Greg Manchess, Fri-Sun, Nov 9-11. $500.

To inquire about availability, ask questions or to reserve your spot, contact Tara Chang:TLCWorkshops1@gmail.com

The Forest Troll Part VII: Watercolor

13" x 21" 

Watercolor and Pencil on Heavyweight Bristol

Next: Digital Trickery

The Forest Troll Part VI: Tight Pencil Drawing

I am much happier with the composition this time around. Starting over from scratch generally involves an entire day of suicidal behavior and all-time-lows.  So it's always a good feeling to know that it was the right choice.
The trees do what I had hoped that they would do and the image is a lot more comfortable to look at now.

(Well... unless giant trolls with clubs make you uncomfortable. In which case there may be no hope for the image.)

Next: Watercolor

The Forest Troll Part V: Bungling It

Sometimes, in spite of all the precautions and idiot-proofing, I still manage to bungle things.

 In this case, I got halfway through the initial washes of the watercolor before realizing that I had screwed up the composition and it was really hurting the image. Since I wasn't under any particular deadline for the piece and I hadn't gone that far yet, I decided to start over. Under other circumstances I would have tried to fix it by painting in the corrections or reworking it digitally. Since I had the time though, I decided to repaint it.

Here is why it was bad:

THE TRIANGLE OF DEATH

A triangle of death is an area of the image where the composition allows the viewer to get trapped and leaves part of the image as dead space. In this case, the foreground branches at the top left lead down to the troll's face, which then points down to the boars and the helmet. This would be ok except that the sharp verticals in the background trees pull us back up into those branches, creating a self-contained compositional form that splits the image, leaving the dwarves, who are a main narrative element, as a separate dead space.

The strong red arrow in the middle shows the line where the image gets split. This can still work if you have text that goes in your image, or if this image were to be intended for a wrap-around book cover. Since my goal was a stand alone poster image, this compositional dead space was a failure.

How to solve this?
I didn't want to monkey with the characters, because I really like their arrangement and relation to one another. So I decided to employ a classical solution that has been used by artists for centuries: When in doubt, add more trees. 

Reworked Composition

 By placing this organic tree shape over the boars I am able to break the Triangle of Death and keep the composition moving, while at the same time adding more interest to the image itself.

Next: Tight Pencil Drawing

The Forest Troll Part IV: Color Comp and Drawing

The color comp is done as fast as possible. I don't want to get bogged down in the details here. This is all about the mood and atmosphere.

Color Comp

The main goals of the color comp are:

#1 Nail down the lighting.
(Sources, direction, strength. etc.)

#2 Nail down the value relations.
For instance, the tree behind the dwarves: is it more attractive as darker than the background or lighter? By exploring and solving this in the color comp I will be more confident when I tackle it in the final image.

 #3 Nail down the color theory.
This image will be confined to a warmer spectrum, one that you might find at midday in an old growth forest with patches of sunlight breaking through the canopy. I wanted to make most of the tones fall in a rather narrow color gamut, and then choose a bright color outside this gamut as an accent. In this case, it was mostly golds and browns accented with a bright green.
In the color comp I just want to make sure this theme will work for my image. I go through this on almost all of my pieces because my brain is incapable of solving value/color mixtures on the fly, so I need a cheat sheet. The color comp helps me idiot-proof my image so I don't bungle it in the final.

Tight Drawing

The Forest Troll Part III: Troll Studies

As some of you may remember I did several studies for our Forest Troll's bloodhound boars in a previous post.  Check them out here.

Next: Color Comp and Composite Drawing

The Forest Troll Part II: Dwarf Studies

Next: Troll Studies

The Forest Troll Part I: Thumbnails

One of the great things about the worlds that Tolkien creates are the half-mentioned places and events that are going on in the background of Middle Earth. By hinting at them and leaving them a bit mysterious, Tolkien gives the reader a chance to use their imagination and place themselves inside the world and explore it for themselves.

 Many of us, when we read stories like these, like to imagine ourselves there in the background as clever, dangerous warriors, or as powerful wizards and the like. We don't ever just place ourselves in there as hapless serfs who get ordered around a lot and eventually eaten. Or as complete bunglers for that matter.

 Which led me to an idea for a painting that I plan to share with you over the next few weeks as it develops. Here's an initial thumbnail:

 Makes sense right?

 Let me explain: A few months ago, I went mountain biking with a few of my friends. At the beginning of the trail ride my friend Asher listed off the names of the trails we would be on which would lead to which, and I sort of heard, but mostly didn't. We started riding and things were going well until I got myself into a spectacular wreck that involved several roots, 2 large trees, a stream and possibly a rabid squirrel.
 I had been in the rear of our caravan, and my friends hadn't witnessed my mishap (thankfully). While I was glad to be spared the embarrassment of having them see me wipe-out and then ask me if I needed training wheels or a squirrel-proof suit, I was dismayed to realize that I had lost them completely. I put myself back together and kept biking in hopes of eventually catching up with them, but it was no good. They were all experienced master Jedi mountain bikers and I was but a padawan learner. After a while I came to a fork in the trail, but the trail names were unfamiliar. Was it Firetower or Pipsissewa? I know he had said it was one of these trails, but I couldn't remember which one. So I took one at random and got myself randomly lost. 

It occurred to me, while I was out there bewildered and lost, that if this were war, I would probably have just gotten us all killed. Had I gone to war, I would probably have fought very hard, and then died very fast because of something really stupid, like mishearing the coordinates on a map, and getting myself caught by friendly mortar fire.

This image was a result of that. If I were wandering around in the background of Tolkien's world, I'd probably have been a dwarf. Not a legendary warrior, or a powerful orc chieftain or a wizard, but A dwarf whose helmet hadn't been tied quite right, and who got himself and his band into a lot of trouble.

 When I got back from the trail ride, I scribbled this thumbnail down:

This is often what my thumbnails look like, with little notes pointing out important narrative details.

 Over the next few weeks I will be posting up the progress and development of the rest of the piece.  And we'll see if our dwarf can make it out of the mess he has gotten himself into.
Stay tuned.