Called back to the Ba

This week we continue the struggle to make something coherent from this Ba bird idea, and - I've changed my mind pretty comprehensively on how it should look.  I decided at the end of the last blog that the original is too big, the body too elongated, and that it must conform more to the proportions of a bird.  I said that I would base the bird body on that of an Egyptian wagtail, but now I've begun to doubt that choice.

There are all kinds of needless things that you can worry about with this sort of thing, and one of the worries I continually trouble myself with is ' is it authentic, is it accurate?'  In fact it doesn't matter at all, but now I began to ask, 'what kind of bird was it that the Egyptians really used?'

I think I mentioned last week that they used a variety of birds such as stalks and falcons, but I now found myself going back onto the internet to search through all the Egyptian images of the Ba bird available.  And the answer is that mostly they seem to be hawks - falcons in fact.  Some depict a very long legged bird that I took to be an Ibis, but the colour the Egyptians show the bird seems darker than that of the actual bird.  It might of course be one of those birds that change their plumage at different times of the year - and there you are, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

The basic shape of your basic Ba bird.

So I have gone back to the Egyptian work and trust the original source.  They worked out how to make this crazy idea make some visual sense and so I now accept that my Ba bird will have the appearance of a falcon, and I dutifully sourced some good photos of falcons that showed me not only the size and proportions but also the feather formation. But another problem is looming on the horizon, the arms.  I can see they're going to be awkward because of where they emerge from the body of the bird, but they are an important part of this characters appearance.

That struggle is yet to come however, as next I'll concentrate on the wings, using a reference as a guide for the size and shape of the feathers that change in size as they go down a bird's wing.  The wings of the peregrine  falcon are a bluish grey with soft almost metallic effect light grey edges to each feather so blending and softening the hard edges of the lines I use is important.
 

Starting the task of placing in the feathers.

 The feathers have almost a tessellated look to them which is important to get right at the start, so that the pattern can continue correctly.  Another minor problem is understanding how the wings of the bird fold together, but artists are past masters at faking this kind of thing, and if there's something they don't understand they put it in shadow or blend it into something near, but only when they judge that they can get away with it.

Most of the feathers in, and some of the black marks on the breast and legs.

It's in the blessed knowledge of my fellow human's ignorance that I can fake the way the wings actually come together at the end of the tail, and be happy with the percentage of bird mad experts who will spot the discrepancies right away.  And now I can start on the peculiar patterns the falcon has on its chest and legs, strange cross like striations of black that cover all the light parts.

The subject through it's different stages.  Click on the image to see it slightly bigger.

The downright 'oddness' of this subject is not lost on me, in fact it's one of the things that drew me to it but putting the elements of bird and human together in a more realistic way then any ancient Egyptian would have done has thrown up a lot of problems.  The slow progress has even underlined for me what a dull image I've made of it, without even a turn of the head in a dramatic posture to relieve the boredom.  I could have chosen something more dynamic to do with the wings for instance.   But you begin with an 'interior' vision of what you want and work towards it, and sometimes you become fixated on an idea without re-evaluating enough.

Next week - those dreaded arms!

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Sphinx 2

Yes I’m well aware that the title sounds like the sequel to a particularly bad movie, but this is part two.  A week has elapsed and the sphinx is finished, although I still have that feeling that always hovers over you at the end of any project – that it could be better, and just a little more work would put it right (or put it wrong). 

 I know that more work on something when it seems to have finished can go either way.  You might hit on that elusive thing that makes all the difference, or you will do something (and often you’re not even sure what it is) that ruins it for you completely.  And you’re the one that matters in the end, your opinion.  Others may not even see a difference in the work – but you’ll always know that you almost had it right, but then ruined it. 

The line work at the bottom is looking a bit rough compared with the head.  Also it doesn't look balanced.

 I mentioned last week that I thought the design was in danger of being top heavy in detail and this is still one of the vague problems that are still slightly nagging at me.  There’s a lot of line work involved in the hair and wings, coupled with the fact that the human eye will always go to the face first.  In comparison the rest of the body has little line work to help it along. 

Its another one of those remarkable things about the human brain, that we will see flat two dimensional lines as representative of solid three dimensional objects, and without them a flattish colour based design is in danger of receding, and losing form.   I could only try to mitigate the problem by giving the body more form using blocks of shade.  What line there was defining the body was also in need of some work.  My first attempt wasn’t that great, a bit awkward in fact, and I needed to adjust the angle and line of the body between the legs, and the angle of the line of the haunches just behind the wings.  (See above.)  This helped it conform better to my original conception of a square like design, which would fit into a frame.  

 

Detail of the wings - and all those little fibres.

Another thing they don’t often talk about with art or illustration is the tedious work that some of it involves.  And I’m talking about the wings here, as I had started to draw in the thin fibres of the feathers and had to complete the task for every feather.  It wasn’t too bad this time, but I have locked myself into one of those seemingly endless tasks in the past.   The Sci-Fi artist Jim Burns talks amusingly in his collection ‘Transluminal’  about a similar but more testing problem for his book cover for the novel ‘The Long Run’. 

Getting close, but still some shading to correct, and some more sculpting of form.

 Lastly I wanted to slightly adjust the grey border, to make it narrower and longer.  I had originally wanted the front leg of the Sphinx to cross over the border but the positioning of the main form was too central, so I shifted it over to the right and lengthened the borders.  I wanted to put a title with it and so saw the opportunity for a box for this text to be made with the border. 

 

The finished article.  Click the picture and see my website.

And here's the finished piece, complete with a title in a box.  I'm never really happy with anything I do, so there's room for future work.  Maybe I might feel it would look better as a longer shape at some time and so I'll begin to break it out of its box and give it a more supple and elegant shape.  Would it look better?  I'm sure you all have an opinion, but only I and the sphinx have the real answer to that riddle. 

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What colour is a crocodile?

 

Sobek, looking very RGB.

  So – what colour is a crocodile?  You know what a crocodile is don’t you?  A crocodile – sort of slung low to the ground, crawling on four legs –tail dragging behind.  Long snouty head, jaw full of teeth – twist you in half in a second.  That crocodile. 

If I asked what colour it is, you would probably say, a kind of dirty brown.  I’d agree, there may be a number of colours that make up that dirty brown (remember when you were a little kid in class, you mixed all the colours in the paint box together to see what colour they would make?  Brown – what a disappointment,) but generally its an olive greenish brown.

Go to child’s storybook though, and invariably a crocodile will be green.  In fact, all lizards and amphibians will be green regardless of whether they are or not.  It’s a convention of such material, probably to make sure the book is bright and cheerful for children, but also because it’s easier and cheaper to print one solid primary colour.And that brings me to the problems of print.  I can’t say I know much about this as I was never trained in graphic art and therefore never learnt much about how print works.  But I know that printers will print your art using the CMYK colour process, which stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key – Key being black.

 

Example of colour shift on green crocodile.  With hands!

What it means is that digitally you want to create your work in colours that most closely approximate the real world, or at least which look bright and clean – pleasing to the eye, and so use the digital RGB (Red, Blue Green) to produce your image.  This is fine if you just want it to stay on a computer screen, (although there’s often a certain discrepancy in the way different screens handle colours) but if it’s going to be printed anywhere you’re probably going to have to deal with colour shift.

I’ve not really thought about this much and I think it’s about time I started.  For all those bright clean colours I like will become a little bit duller when printed in CMYK.  So that crocodile in the children’s book you just produced will be a darker green than you want.  Ironically it will be a tiny little bit closer to the way crocodiles actually look.  Does that mean CMYK is a good thing after all?With a certain amount of experiment I’ve come to realise that I can live with most of the colour shift that will result from a conversion between RGB and CMYK.  The reddish orange and yellows look okay, and dark reds still work pretty well.  The bright greens darken a little, but are still acceptable.  The one colour that is really effected by CMYK conversion is blue.

And that’s a shame, as I always liked a nice strong sapphire blue.  When this is converted from RGB to CMYK the brightness disappears and you are left with a kind of bluish slate grey.  It actually doesn’t look that bad, when with the right combination of other colours, it just means you have to be aware of the fact of the change and design accordingly.

But, for instance, this design of Bast in black with a blue outline would mean that the outline now almost disappears because it’s gone so dark.  I’ve spent a little time re-colouring some of my designs because of this problem, concentrating on the red yellow side of things because I think there’s less shift.

RGB above, CMYK below. 

In this example above, the comparison shows RGB on the top, CMYK on the bottom, and its obvious the reddish colours hardly seem to be effected at all.  At the left the red outline still looks the same although Anubis’s green vase has dulled a little.  The lettering has gone that slate grey I mentioned but the yellow has been unaffected.  On the right, I must admit the bright sapphire blue I chose doesn’t go with that type of orange, it causes the blue to almost fluoresce.  The darkening of the blue caused by the conversion to CMYK has actually improved it slightly, and I think I would have darkened that blue anyway.  So, the design on my screen looks like the top images, and what you get when its printed are the bottom images.

In most respects the conversion doesn’t cause too much harm, I will just have to remember even though it makes me a little blue – no more blue.

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Gods and Monsters: Developing an idea 3.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/mharrsch/   Mary Harrsch – photo of Ba bird.

 Like politicians in some failing political party that is slightly past its ‘sell by’ date, the Egyptian gods were represented by some pretty odd and wacky characters.  Some, Frankenstein like, were made from bits and bobs of animals and humans like Ammit who I mentioned last week.  Go on, you know you’ve voted for someone like that in the past.

Looking pretty strange was an obvious occupational challenge for the rulers of the afterlife, and there were lots of mysterious denizens of the Egyptian pantheon that I could choose to illustrate.  There is Sobek, a crocodile headed god, and Horus a deity in the shape of a falcon.  There was a hippopotamus headed goddess named Taweret, the goddess of childbirth, and Bes, a distinctly weird looking gentleman – chunky in build, entirely blue and with a lion’s mane.

When an Egyptian died, a number of different spirits were supposedly released, among them the Ka, the Akh and the Ba.  They all have different powers and represent aspects of the deceased; the Akh for instance represented their immortality, while the Ka was their life force or genius.  The Ba represented their character, the things that made them what they were, and is represented by a human headed bird, with human arms.  In Book Of The Dead manuscripts these Ba birds along with the other spirits are seen present at a funeral hovering near the deceased while they carry through various duties, saying prayers and spells, worshipping, and waiting for their moment to re-enter the corpse.

Ba’s were also able to re-visit our world in a variety of forms.  Recalling Anubis and his weighing of the heart, the Ba was also the poor unfortunate that had to witness this important procedure, no doubt biting its nails (remember, its got hands) as to the result.  They look cool and elegant in the manuscripts, and I might have a try at illustrating one.

 

Bast scribbles.  Left Bast examines the world - right, Bast preying.

But using Bast as my first project, I wanted to do a larger study of the head and settle on another pleasing (to me anyway) position for the arms and hands.  First I used the previous approach, black with blue outline, which I was happy with, but then using the same drawing (always on a separate layer from everything else) I gave the image colour.

I felt that the colour range that I could use should be reflected by actual animals (So green was mostly out – after all it’s a cat I’m painting not a parrot) and blue outlines notwithstanding, a reddish yellow colour set seemed the most appropriate.

 

Bast scribbles.  Figuring out posture and positioning of limbs.

Using two or three colours allows for light and shade to be applied, and therefore modelling of the surface.  So the result is a more round and three-dimensional form, but it can still be kept straightforward and simple.  The strong highlights are blended together, but have been deliberately placed fairly roughly onto the figures for a sense of spontaneity.  I colour the eye separately as I have done with all the images up to now, as the eye is a focal point in the design, always an important object in the depiction of any face.

 

Finished designs with different body postures.

That might seem an obvious thing to say, as if I were going to then say that the nose or lips were not really that important and could be left out of any portrait to save time.  I suppose its part of the design stage; the artist decides how a feature is represented, from what angle it will be seen, and how well defined the feature is.  It is possible to paint a face and have the eye be the first thing anyone sees.  Design and composition can be complex.

Bast designs comparing colours.

 Next I take the character of Anubis, and carry through a similar process, a different position of head arms and hands, this time he his holding some small jars instead of scales.  I think this new position shows him of as a jackal better than my first, he has slightly bigger ears and a longer snout, his head being almost in profile.  I’ve also given him and Bast more realistic body shapes; here he has a neck, shoulders and a tapering waist, but, as with Bast, I’ve made the design decision to leave the arms fairly ‘boneless’ so they can make fluid curving shapes around the body. 

Anubis designs colour comparison.

Here are some more design scribbles for an image of Sobek the crocodile headed god I 

Sobek scribbles.  I chose the one on the right to develop further.

 mentioned above.  Next week I will talk about this design and also experiment with CYMK colour.  As all these designs will to be printed by the print on demand company Zazzle, then this colour type becomes important, as it can affect the colours put down digitally using a RGB palette.  And so, until next week.

Gods and Monsters: Developing an idea part 2

Flickr creative commons - by Mike Walker. https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikewalker82/

Imagine that you’re an ancient Egyptian, you really believe in the gods of old Egypt, and sadly you’re close to death.  The doctors have done all that is humanly possible for the time, and they’ve now consigned you to the priests so that they can give you the benefit of the correct rites, prayers and spells that will send you successfully on your way into the after life.

You’re drifting off, fading away from this world, and the world of the next life is visible in the hazy distance.  Only a little more journeying and that glorious paradise will be yours.  But then who should come galumphing over the horizon towards you but a big pointy-eared snouty-faced individual carrying a pair of scales.  Yes its Anubis, quite probably the most unpopular god you would ever wish to meet.

Anubis detail

And he’s here to weigh your heart against the truth.  The truth is symbolised by an ostrich feather.  Hearts (or souls for that’s what the heart represents) that weighed heavier than a feather were not worthy to go into the after life, and were instantly devoured by Ammit, a goddess spectacularly made from parts of a lion, a hippopotamus and a crocodile.  Of course you could always flash your ‘Pharaoh’s Express’ card at Anubis as a means of ensuring a place in the afterlife.  ‘That’ll do nicely sir’.

It must have been hard to like Anubis, especially if you’d been up to no good.  Hopefully my manic desire to depict him among other Egyptian gods for my Zazzle store won’t be deemed unworthy.  Last week I discussed the designs I did for the goddess Bast, a cat shaped divinity with protective powers, and this week I’ll discuss designs for Anubis.

I started sketches for these designs all together, trying out different characters and styles, and before I found the minimalist black fill blue outline look that I liked, I was open to a lot of different approaches.  Were the characters ‘cute’ or ‘cool’?  Here are a few of the scribbles I tried out to see what I needed. 

 

Cute, and  - not so cute.

 As you can see, it’s possible to vary the approach a great deal.  I dabbled with cute for a while, using a fennec fox as a model for the attempt on the left.  These little desert foxes have the big ears and tiny bodies that really are cute (though they’re quite ruthless predators) but they’re certainly not jackals or African dogs.  So I used those critters for the image on the left, still a cartoon, but with more truth about it.  After all, the early Egyptians originally chose the jackal as a god of the dead because they noted the prevalence of Jackals around gravesites.  The typical shallow graves of the period were an attraction to the animals that had no problem in disinterring corpses for food.  Maybe cuteness doesn’t fit.

Anubis needs that long dog snout, and his ribs showing.  He needs those glowing beady eyes and rough dust encrusted hide.  However I did want the designs to match, to fit together as a group so they all needed the same figure and stance, the same body.  The rough cartoon look of these scribbles doesn’t match with a clean line effect.

Those beady little eyes...

Some years ago I had tried to depict Anubis in a very slick minimalist style, less cartoon and with an emphasis on a glossy polished look, as if he were made from some highly polished dark stone or glass.   Here’s a detail.  It was okay, but I wasn’t happy at the time and didn’t completely finish it. 

Anubis detail

So I knew that the flat approach with no shading or paint effects and few lines was the way to go.  Head turned to the side, but what to do with the arms and hands?  Well, there's those scales I mentioned earlier, one in each hand.

So the finished article looks like this.

 

Anubis.  'Well, your heart goes in this one and...'

But I can take this all a few steps further by using the same approach to drawing the characters but using different positioning and colour work and getting a new and fresh result.

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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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