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!

See my website

See my Zazzle store

Called to the Ba.

No, that isn't a typo in the title smarty-pants;  it refers to a type of exotic and mythical creature, part of ancient Egyptian religious beliefs.  I mentioned the Ba bird a few blogs ago, and stated that I'd like to have a go at illustrating it.  You may know, or remember from the last blog that the Ba was one of three spiritual entities believed by the Egyptians to inhabit the tomb of a deceased person after the tomb was sealed.

The Ba represented the character of the deceased, the thing that made them who they were.  Oh and did I mention that they're birds with human heads and arms, so, ideal for the average bird watchers notepad.  Ba's could travel around in the real world in any shape if they needed to, possibly putting right the misdeeds of the dead person, or seeing to last minute problems. (was that life insurance policy up to date?)  But they had to return to the tomb to witness the weighing of their masters soul before re-entering the body of the deceased.  A workload like that would ruffle anybodies feathers.

As usual with this digital illustration thing, I start to draw on a layer with a slate grey line as large as I want because I will shrink the drawing down, as I need more room.  This time round I decided to use a layer for a very rough sketch and brought the opacity down to three of four percent so the lines were barely visible.  I then put another layer above and drew the actual lines on this.  It helps you judge better where you really want the lines and the faint lines don't detract from a change of mind.

Beginning of the drawing with paint additions

I began with the head, as most artists do, and if it's a full face I start my line almost always at the point where the bridge of the nose slides into the furthest eye socket.  It's a good point to start, because its very easy to then judge where the tip of the nose and nostril should be, and from that you can then easily judge how much of the furthest side of the face should be visible.  Easier said than done I hear you say?  Well, maybe, it all depends how far down the road you are.  

Close up of the paint, showing the way shadows are placed.

  I probably show all the traits of lack of patience, as I want to start painting at once, and so begin to apply a yellowish base colour onto the same layer as the drawing.  I place in a slightly darker yellow for the first indications of shadows, and a yellowish grey for darker shadows, at all times avoiding true black.  The hair or wig will be a very dark reddish brown.  I use a grey brown and work it around the eyes, covering the eyelids, and fill in the spaces where the eyes will be with the yellow of the skin.

Grey shadows defining the nose, neck and eyes.  The spaces of the eyes are also filled with yellow.

The dark wig will have long trailing pieces hanging down each shoulder, across which the arms will cut.  I have placed a little light on the face, on the nose and cheekbone and around the mouth, but I'm keeping it low for the time being.  Here I have to admit that I'm not sure how the whole picture will look.  This is the basis of many of my failures over the years; I have a vague idea of what I want, but then try to make it up as I go.  However gradually I am getting a clearer idea, I want an image of the full Ba bird, holding a scroll of papyrus, as if showing it to the viewer.

Faint grey lines used to work out positioning of the arms and scroll.

This means showing the whole bird body, with its tail feathers and long legs.  I wondered at this stage how the Egyptians themselves depicted the particular birds they used in their drawings and sculptures of the Ba.  Were they one definite bird, and was that bird still around, or had it gone extinct, as I believe some of the animals of ancient Egypt have?   I was curious, as I wanted a guide for the feathers of the bird.  The Egyptians seemed to depict the birds in many different ways, sometimes as hawks, sometimes as stalks or cranes.  I looked online and found a common Egyptian bird that I liked and which seemed to resemble some of the ancient depictions - a yellow wagtail.  I'm less worried that this isn't authentic than I'm happy to have something to use as a reference. 

But I now see something more worrying than a bad choice of Egyptian bird.  The figure is becoming unbalanced, too elongated.  I need to concentrate on making the body smaller.  To make this work the bird should have a big head and a petite little bird body, with quite long legs and arms.  It's going wrong, but when that happens you have to fight it until it goes right.

Lets see what we have next week.

See my Zazzle page.

See my Website

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. 

Zazzle 

Flickr

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.