Gods and Monsters: Developing an idea.

The world is split between dog and cat lovers.  I swing more in the cat direction myself, but only because they are mostly silent.  (I can’t stand all that barking!)  I accept that they are pretty self reliant, sometimes aloof and at times have some revolting habits, such as yakking up on the floor without warning and filling the litter tray just as you’re sitting down to eat.  But they are beautiful, and in the words of the great Flann O Brian, ‘...they have a lot of life in them when they are but juveniles’.

The ancient Egyptians knew this, their goddess Bast was depicted as a cat, and because of this the cat was sacred.  They made countless little statues of these cats, all symbolic of the goddess, and even mummified cats by the hundreds of thousands.

So, the start of an idea.  Lets follow it along its thread.  In 1922 Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamen and sparked a craze for all things ancient Egyptian.  And the style now know as Art Deco was also beginning to become very popular.

Howard Carter.  Public domain.

Now the thing with Art Deco is that it takes from everywhere and from every time.  If you look you’ll see influences from ancient Greece, China, Japan, India, Africa, from Russia the Aztecs, Assyrians and of course, very strongly from ancient Egypt.  That was Carter and Carnarvon’s unwitting and inadvertent contribution to Deco.

Art Deco therefore has a strong affinity with ancient Egypt.  And I’ve always liked Art Deco.  As a designer I felt I could put something together around the gods of Egypt that would be attractive, and which I could design in an Art Deco style.

I like a clean and spare approach, good strong lines and solid colour, and I wanted to reflect the actual Egyptian cat figurines which are small and usually a dark bronze or stone.  I chose black for the colour fill and a blue and gold for the lines.  But first I needed the image itself.

Here are some of the early working drawings (scribbles really) for my Bast design, and instead of showing Bast as just a cat; I thought she should have something of a human figure, especially with hands.  (Just think of the mischief most cats could accomplish if they had hands!)  I knew a real deco designer would go to town on the exotic eye make up, so that was an obvious area to accentuate. Some of the work behind a design of a figure is the posture that it will hold, what to do with the arms, what direction will the head face?  

Bast sketches.  Already looking for mischief.

All these things have an effect on the finished whole, and it can take more time than you might think to work this out and get a pleasing result at the end.  The Egyptian manner of depicting characters is more than the sideways walk-like-an-Egyptian style, its also to do with the angular position of arms and hands and heads usually seen in worship or mourning scenes.  I want to reflect a little of that as I go along. 

So Bast's hands could be together as if preying, her arms could be crossed over her body as we have seen in some mummies, her arms or hands might be moving to the left, while her head turns to the right.  This is part and parcel of the method of suggesting life and movement in drawn figures.

Working on body posture

Then as always you polish the design, work on the outline, because this particular image will practically be a silhouette and so it has to work as one.  When I first began, I didn't intend to give the figure a blue outline.  I tried combinations of black outline and dark blue grey, but I found the outline disappearing and the whole began to lose its strength.  I think I decided on blue by accident while I was trying to do the blue eye makeup.  It wasn't my natural choice, and I wasn't  sure for a while, but I saw over time that it was the only way it would work.

Bast detail.

There had to be a strong colour between the black and white to give it the extra lift.  Black and white work together well as generations of artists will tell you, but as I wanted the features that exist amongst the solid colour to be outlined, I felt they looked better when connected to a unifying outer line.   And I decided the eyes were more impressive if they were round like a real cats eyes appear, than with the traditional 'Egyptian eye' that I used in the above sketches.

So here's the finished thing. Some might object to the way I have depicted her, as most people think of cats as slinky thin little things, but some cats have a pleasant sturdiness about them that I wanted to express.  Some of them have stumpy little legs, and chunky bodies, but somehow are none the less attractive for it.

Finished Bast design.

I will continue this blog next week with some thoughts on my Image of the God Anubis.

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The Floating World.

A panel from a tryptyche of a printmakers shop, by Kunisada.  Public domain.

 I do like the occasional Japanese or Chinese print.  I’m certainly no expert, but it is fun to look and to trace the influence they have had on later European art.  The thing that fascinated Europeans was the flatness, and use of colour.  As early as 1800 the French artist J.A.D. Ingres was accused of being a ‘Chinese painter adrift in the ruins of Rome’ and while this seems almost absurd to anyone who knows his work today, it is indicative of the way they had of seeing in those times.

What they meant was they thought Ingres, an arch Neo Classicist trained by the grandee of the movement Jacques Louis David, had a (very slight) tendency to over lighten faces and eliminate shadows so that things seemed less rounded and three dimensional.  To some it was a shocking approach but French artists took it up with relish later in the century.

Not to mention British artists.  And I have mentioned Aubrey Beardsley in this blog before (all the usual suspects) and his work was profoundly influenced by both china and Japan.  He was given a book of erotic Japanese prints by his friend the artist William Rothenstein that Rothenstein was too embarrassed to keep.  Only Beardsley would have thought to cut the prints out of the book, frame them and put them on his wall.  Probably the only person in Britain in 1894 who would have done that.  But he studied every print he could get hold of, and as a lot of these prints were used as packaging material for other goods like porcelain they were comparatively easy to find in the 1880-90's.  

 

Beardsley illustration for Lucian's 'True Histories'  Easily shows Beardsley's Japanese influence.

The general term for the type of print I am mostly interested in is ukiyo-e or 'pictures of the floating world', which usually concerns the urban lives of the middle class of Japan, but can take in subjects like the yoshiwara or red light districts, various samurai encounters and the loose living of bandits and beggars.

And yes, you guessed it, as an artist interested in Japanese art I couldn't help but give it a try in some of my own large digital images.   

Detail of gouache painting entitled 'Red Glasses'.

I’ll start first with an actual painting, shown above, painted with Gouache on mounting board.  I liked the samurai with a sword in his mouth, which seems to be a pretty common theme to depict.  Often a samurai is shown opening a bag for some equipment, or adjusting clothing or applying a bandage while he grips the blade of his sword between his teeth.  I don’t know how that would play out in real life, I can imagine some pretty nasty cut mouths in the thick of battle, but what do artists know?  It makes a good picture.  

 I liked the ides of mixing different style approaches into images and so with these details of my next picture entitled 'phone' (which is digital) I wanted the face and hands of the man to be more realistic than the print behind him, but they were still to be obvious drawings, with lines crosshatchings and so on still visible.  His body and clothing however are flat and stylised, even more so than the Japanese print.
 

Details of 'Phone'

With the next image, called 'Bloody but unbowed' I made more of the man's face, it is painted more than drawn but still incorporates the overall flatness in the body.  Yes, I am tending to include dark glasses too much, and no I don't think its because I can't do eyes.  I think it's due to a wish to accentuate the anonymity of the face.  And I got that samurai with a sword between his teeth in again!

 

Details of 'Bloody But Unbowed'

I think I will try and explore this theme a little while yet, but I've also got some similar thoughts about medieval patterning and imagery, so I may come back to this again at a later date.

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Wings, teeth and claws Part 2.

Last week, I drew a dragon, as an exploration of the thought processes that go into creating an image of a mythical beast.  When an image is drawn using lots of cross-hatching and lines for shading, then an artist has to decide if they want the lines to be part of the finished image, or if they will act only as guide lines in the painting procedure.  With a water based medium such as watercolour or gouache, its possible to place a thin covering of paint over the lines, and if those lines are indelible such as ink then this works well.    

Even with a pencil its possible to do this as long as you don't overdo it.  You have to be careful though, and be aware of how these materials effect each other.  Charcoal for example will mix badly with paint and make the colours dirty, this can also happen with a soft pencil.

I have also noticed it affecting the colours of oils and acrylic when these paints are used thinly over soft and dirty lines.

Last week I showed an old drawing of a dragon from about five years ago, and here is the image as I finally finished it.  It's changed somewhat in position (I believe I actually laboriously redrew the dragon on paper which was large and in sections taped together!  I replaced sections that didn't work anymore.) and I took the decision to use solid colour which completely overpainted the original lines.  It was scanned and coloured digitally, and there are, just like real paints and drawing implements two ways to go with digital colour.  You can set individual layers with colour options that make the colours behave like those watercolours I mentioned earlier.  These options have different properties one of which is to allow lines to be seen through the colour.

Here the drawings lines show through the base yellow layer.

Different layers can be added on to this with different layer properties and a 'ink on paper' effect is achieved very like that seen in comic books.

The other option is to paint with solid colour and lose those lines.  Digitally this can be done exactly as an artist might do it with conventional material, they can just paint on to the lined surface with paint, but then you lose your guides immediately the paint goes on.  This was the way painters worked for centuries however, so it's not wrong, just skilled.

Even when I regularly painted with traditional media, for some reason I always favoured yellow ochre as a ground colour, and I still usually start off an image by flooding the whole drawing area in this colour.  Digitally it is possible to have your cake and eat it by placing a floating layer of paint over the drawing, and then by reducing the opacity of the paint, you are then able to see the drawing through the now semi-transparent paint.

Here the paint has been laid over the drawing, and is still at full strength.

As the image progresses the opacity can be brought back up to full strength so the effect of the work can be seen and understood, and so that colours can be chosen at their full strength, and then the opacity slider can be taken down again, so that the lines of the drawing are visible.


This takes place less and less as the picture nears its completion, and as most of the important lines are placed onto the paint layer.

Here the opacity of the paint layer has been reduced so that the lines beneath are visible.

This sounds as if it might be irritating or that it might slow down the painting process, but it's as easy as reaching for paint tubes or sharpening pencils.  Then the normal process of painting a picture comes to the fore, darkening and lightening areas, texture, tone and so on.

Comparison stages from painting in reduced opacity to paint with normal opacity.

I won't finish the full picture here, but have worked up the dragons head in the manner I would use for completion and so here it is.  As to whether I shall finish the complete image, I can't say - maybe.

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Wings, teeth and claws.

Everybody seems to like dragons.  Just think about it.  There are so many fantasy stories where someone rides a dragon, is helped by a dragon or ends up having to kill a dragon and of course the 'Dragon Riders Of Pern' stories by Anne McCaffrey have helped to popularise dragon riding as a theme.  Recently the film 'Avatar'  showed the same thing, it has to be said, pretty spectacularly in 3D animation.

A small dragon clutching a tree.

I was a big fan of the artist Roger Dean as a teenager, and when 'Avatar' appeared Dean sued its director James Cameron because of the close resemblance between the floating islands seen in the film and floating islands that appeared in some of Deans most famous poster images.  He subsequently lost that suit, because a parblind judge failed to see the resemblance.  In fact I think that the resemblance goes further than the floating islands, I think the dragons seen in that film also look pretty much like Dean's designs too.  Here's Dean's website

 I didn't really get on with Avatar as a film and I don't care too much for dragons in my reading material to tell the truth, it's not my kind of thing - but drawing dragons?  That's a different matter altogether. 

So how would you draw a dragon?  Well, that dragon at the left is an older image I did from about five years ago and I'll be using him as a reference, after all it's not as if I can use a photograph is it?

In fact I did use a photograph - of a Komodo dragon for the musculature of the torso, and I was very lucky to find one in just the right attitude and in just the right light.  The photograph helped but much of the dragon is imagination, because the trouble is that Komodo dragons just aren't that impressive (unless one is sitting on your chest biting your vitals out).  They look sort of boneless when relaxed, resting on their bellies with their rubbery legs bent up or lying in apparently limp loose heaps.

Here's a working image for the picture I intend to produce.

A dragon rider - in rough.  Ignore the heads, they're just on the same sheet.

 When I've got a working drawing like this, the next stage would be to polish it up a little, draw more detail and practice certain key areas so that they look as good as you can make them.  The head is a key area; I think people look at that more than any other part of such a drawing, but if the rest isn't thought through It'll be obvious.  To a certain extent that old drawing at the top of the page has got most of the body worked up to a good standard, enough to gather information from and I like the curly horns it has.  But horns like that do get in the way of other stuff, like the wings and the rider.  You just have to decide how much trouble you want to give yourself.

Part of the polishing up process, figuring out what the dragon in the working drawing would really look like.

 In the above drawing you can see I concentrate on the head and do a 'possible' rendition of it, not necessarily intending to stick to it however, the process of doing preparatory drawings is to try to see possibilities, and discover problems.

Here's my beginning drawing for the head.

All the above pictures were pencil on paper - this is digital.

This is drawn using a darkish grey, and I'm using a lot of cross hatching to accentuate the shape of the head, rather more than I usually use for this type of project.  I used to draw a lot of aircraft when I was a kid, (I stopped when I realised I wasn't that good) but to get an aircraft right you have to catch something of its bulk, its weight, and the minute changes in line that give it its character.

 Using the shrink and add on technique I'm now expanding the image using the working drawing as a guide.  I'm going to have to cut to the chase with the drawing or this blog will never end, but the drawing is now finished and so here it is.

I wasn't timing it, but I estimate that the finished drawing took about four hours.

 In part two I'll colour the image, and discuss a few of the problems that it throws up.  See you then.