Gandalf Oil

A little while back I did a quick sketch of Gandalf in anticipation of the opening of The Hobbit. At the request of a collector I did a finished oil version of it and wanted to share it.

 Oil on panel 

11" x 14"

A little side note for anyone who has followed along with my misadventures in oil these past few years: You have probably heard me complain many times before that I couldn't seem to work in oil without using solvents, but that if did use solvents, that I would always end up having this allergic reaction where I would grow fangs, claws, and an unruly beehive haircut. I would then of course go roaming about the neighborhood howling at the moon, ravening for meat-flavored things.  

This oil was done without the use of any solvents whatsoever. It was done using only walnut alkyd oil, and using only oil pigments that tend to dry faster. (siennas, umbers, pthalos, etc.) So far I haven't grown a single beehive haircut, which is pretty exciting.  

Early sketch on toned paper

So.... Anyone else excited about The Hobbit this week?

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.

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.

The Hobbit: Time to Head Back to the Shire

I'd like to take a post to thank everyone for all the great feedback you have contributed and for following along as I have posted the progress of the Hobbit project! It has been a lot of fun and it has turned out to be everything I had hoped it would be. I feel like I have learned a great deal in working through all these and from all of the great feedback. I really appreciate it.

I had originally intended to do just 6 images from the story. Now that I have finished the original 6 and am here in the series, I find that there are still 2 others that I would still need to take a shot at.  (sketches coming soon)

These Hobbit pieces have taken a long time to finish, mainly because of how difficult it has proven to try and fit them in between commissions and other client work. Recently, this has gotten worse because client work has picked up pretty heavily (a great problem to have, considering the plummeting economic situation.) And so I am going to have to put the remaining pieces on hold for a little while until things cool down again. I plan to do these 2 last images from the Hobbit sometime before Del Toro and Jackson start throwing their bombs into my head. But it may take me a little while...

In the meantime, I have posted a Hobbit gallery of this work on the Justingerard.com website that will hopefully be a little easier to navigate through than the blog. Thanks again for following along and for all the great feedback.  

The Battle of Five Armies: Final

The Battle of Five Armies: Beorne

Other than Gandalf, Beorne has always been the most memorable character from the Hobbit for me. Yes, even more than Biblo. Sadly, as a child my understanding of the Hobbit was essentially that long ago, a wizard and a number of short people went looking for gold and got mixed up in some bad business with a dragon. 

Bilbo actually got lost in the dwarves for me until I reread the story later on in life. And while the host of characters in the story were vague from when I first read it long ago, the big hairy guy who got so angry that he turned into a giant bear and killed everyone was pretty unforgettable for me. It blew my childhood mind. Later on I would read it again, and by then having read some history and read about berserkers, I found that his character made more sense and became even more fascinating.

It was exciting for me that, in the darkest moment of the Battle of Five Armies, when it seemed that the goblins were sure to be victorious, Beorne shows up in a rage and destroys everything. But that he then rescues the body of Thorin and carries him back to safety before returning to destroy the goblin hosts is absolutely wonderful.
Tolkien said that he loved the moment in the battle when Biblo cries, "The Eagles! The Eagles are coming!" But for me, it has always been this moment, where Beorne crushes the goblins in a fury and rescues Thorin.

The Battle of Five Armies: Digital Steps

This week, I have begun working on the digital stage of the Battle of Five Armies. I was not as pleased with the overall results of the watercolor painting and have begun using the digital tools more than I had originally intended. 

"Blaggard! Gerard, you foul villain! You said we wouldn't be digital this time!"

Now, I know that earlier I may have implied that this piece might be rendered more traditional than digital, and so some of you may cry foul at seeing the amount of digital painting that I fear may make its way into the final piece. While I think that some of you will appreciate the results, others of you may not find them as quite as charming...

"I WANT HIS HEAD!"

And some of you will think, "it's all a sham," and "why couldn't he just leave well enough alone and stop monkeying with everything on the computer." 

This new method that I used on this piece has offered some really interesting accidents, but overall I think I prefer the method that I have used on the previous Hobbit pieces.

To elaborate on the difference of the 2 methods, the previous illustrations utilized the watercolor stage only as an underpainting, which meant that the pieces would be incomplete without the digital stage where I would do the final rendering. I found this offered greater control and played to the strengths of both mediums, while minimizing their weaknesses. The other method, which I used here, was a straightforward attempt to render the entire piece as a watercolor, avoiding any digital work altogether. 

Unfortunately, this did not work out. In the end I couldn't help myself and after rendering the whole piece to final, I found that I had to use a lot of the digital tools to fix problems in the painting anyway. The digital tools offer so much versatility and save so much time (for me) that it seems almost absurd handicap to try and work without them. At this point, it may be too late for me to go back to working in watercolor alone. I would value your feedback on the matter.

"Gibblegrok Gnok!... 

Throw us down his computer, so that we may eat it!"  

The Battle of Five Armies: Process, Day 4

The Battle of Five Armies: Process, Day 3

I don't usually work in this method of object by object execution.  But I am taking a lot of notes from some other artists to try and learn something new on this one. I prefer to work in broader washes of color and tone and then work backwards from larger swaths of paint to smaller. 

The Hobbit: Reference Hunting and the Mad Dwarf Workshop

Earlier this week I went through the exhausting process of hunting down reference for this piece. (By that I mean that I sat on my couch and watched Kingdom of Heaven on mute and ate a very rare steak.) The people who worked on the costumes and weapons for Kingdom of Heaven literally could have invaded China with the manpower and resources they devoted to trying to keep everything historical and real. I really admire Ridley Scott's fantastic attention to detail in this film and I hope to learn from his example. 

One great source that I am using for reference on this piece is from a few really amazing swordsmiths I know who also have a penchant for detail. For the Lord of the Rings fans out there who are not familiar with them, let me introduce you to The Mad Dwarf Workshop.  Comprised mainly of the phenomenal talent of Andy Davis and David DelaGardelle, the Workshop hand-makes epic-inspired weapons with a phenomenal attention to detail. They also recreate historic examples from Viking and Celtic history. I really love to see artists really dedicated to their craft in this way.  

Their talent with Viking and Dwarvish weapons is really inspiring. I asked David if they ever made any goblin weapons, I was really curious what real swordsmiths might come up with if they were to put their efforts into the crooked weapons the goblins might have used.  He sent me the following image from a performance of the Hobbit that the Workshop was involved with. 

You can check out more of their work on their flickr gallery.

the Battle of Five Armies: Process, Day 2

The Battle of Five Armies: Process, Day 1

So it begins....