Flight ready

I swore the arms would be done this week, and they are, just about.  All flight systems are on line and she's taxiing on to the runway - well, hopping would probably be a better description.  Hopping because she has legs and feet, as well as arms.  And as you can see from the picture at the top of the page, she has eyes as well.

As usual I began the arms on a separate layer, which was just as well as I've had to cut them up, and rotate them, and bits of them, and move them slightly back and forth over the shoulder region trying to decide what looked right.  And rub out parts of them and redraw and repaint gaps, and cut areas and generally curse and swear.  Was it worth it?  Hmmm, that's debatable.

As I said last week, I decided to have her holding a box instead of a scroll, because I thought that a scroll of the type I envisaged would be awkward and would obscure parts of the arms and chest of the bird.  And you have to be able to see that she's a bird with arms.  Both arms would also have to be pretty extended so I could show that she was unrolling a large scroll.  My sketches weren't promising.

Arms above the basic lines.  Note the gap at the right elbow where I cut it and rotated the forearm.

Above you can see the underlying lines with the arms placed over them.  They don't look right of course, and I've had to pay attention to the left arm, shortening it at the elbow and darkening it for shadow.  But the arms aren't to my liking.  I mess about with the shape of them, redrawing and colouring but I don't really improve them.  They look like a dolls arms, and even though this is an arch fantasy subject it should still look as real as that allows.

Seeing the arms with the rest of the colour layers.  Still no hands.

The box is now in place as well, and its position has migrated around the image by millimetres while I tried to finalise the arms placement.  I've also darkened the feathers just under the arms.  Then began to apply myself to the tricky problem of hands.  I didn't want to spend forever on the web looking for references, as that task can be endless.  You always think that if you look a bit harder you'll find the perfect image, and end up with masses, only to find when trying to use them that they don't really match with what you intended anyway.  But that means trying to 'busk' your way through it.

First hand in, and look at that box - it's slipped down the layer tree so its now under the hair!  I'll have to drag it up again.

Well, the first hand is in, and I'm not overwhelmed by the result, but soldier on anyway.  I manage to make a slightly better hand for the other arm that covers the box, but neither is brilliant.

The finished arms.  That box is a bit plain, it could do with some hieroglyphics or something.

And the legs, which I haven't really shown much of, are finished with scales toes and claws, and it's about this stage that I begin (in fact quite a while ago) to see how funny the thing is.  And that's the genius of those Egyptian painters that they could with a brush and some papyrus quickly and deftly depict this strange being and make it cool and attractive but not funny. 

The finished Ba bird - with added shadow.  Hah ha - sparrowlegs!

  And that's a lesson about approach and style more than anything else; those ancient artists needed images for a single well - defined purpose, to depict a mystic being in the papyruses of the Book of the Dead.  They needed to be quick, clean and easily identifiable.  They had the advantage of having to conform to a particular style, the flat side - on look of the Egyptians, and the images were small, so much so in fact that it's often difficult to see if it's male or female.  Simple, quick, clean.

So there it is.  The trouble with too many Ba birds is that the feathers get up your nose.  Something else for next week I think. 

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A head turner

Continuing the saga of the Ba bird, and I know that I promised arms last week, but a second thought is never a bad one.  Although I was quite happy with the colouring last week, I am still disappointed with the fairly dull manner with which the subject is presented.  Why didn't I do something with the wings?  Why is it so static?  But these are pretty familiar questions any artist will ask themselves, even when the work is actually better than they think.

However, I fear that this is worse than I think!  How to pep it up a bit?  What options might there be?  Well, changing the direction of the head is a good start.  We find it more pleasing when a figure is shown in full, if the head is turned in the opposite direction to that of the body.  This will apply even with a head to waist image.  It gives the body the illusion of motion and therefore life, and so adds more interest to a drawing or painting.  But we've got this far, is it worth turning back.  I think so, because you start a piece of work with a vision in your head of what you'd like it to be, and you have to struggle towards that.  If it means starting again or getting rid of a portion of the work then do it, because you almost certainly will do it better next time.  You've already gone through it once - look at the practice you've had!

The terrible deed is done - I sliced off her head and stuck it back on - brutal!

But I'll concede, starting again can be tricky, especially if you're painting on paper of canvas.  With this digital image there are certain things that make it easier.  She's floating on a layer, so I can cut her head off and flip it over.  Obviously there are some instances where this doesn't work, if the head is in an awkward position  for a reversal, but if its possible it's an easy thing to do.  Then you have the work of joining it all together again - that's what's putting you off isn't it?

In this case it's just a matter of hard slog, restructuring the neck to take account of the great tendon that shows when someone turns their neck (especially skinny people), the windpipe and the slight dip in the neck just above the collar bones.  Getting rid of the hair is easy enough, digitally sample the flesh colours near the gaps and begin to repaint. 

It looks a mess, but its all under control - no really - it is.

Then begin again on the feathers of the breast, so that they gradually blend into the skin.  Those pesky arms have got to fit onto the main torso as well, so whatever I do has to keep them in mind.  The fall of hair now on the left of the picture no longer has to move forward to go over the shoulder, and can hang straight, so this has to be corrected.

The neck now re-painted, with a few minor readjustments to the hair.

Now I'm forced to give some serious thought about the arms, because a. I need to know where I'm going to attach them to a structure pretty alien to human anatomy and b. because I'm a little worried about them, as my experiments along those lines haven't worked out very well.  The shoulders are the important starting points, where they are will dictate how the rest of the arms will look, so placing them in a convincing position is the next stage.

Just started to place the shoulders.

With this last picture you can see how I've approached that, and now hope to slowly build the arms up from this.  I originally said I would have her holding a manuscript - that's changed to a box.  So next week some arms, and maybe some eyes.

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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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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.

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A real case

Kindles are fun and convenient, and I own one that has a nice robust black leather case.  I suppose I could custom paint the case but I am content with it as it is.  What would I paint on it?  Which character would please me?  I could do it with someone else's case if I knew what was wanted and in fact various web sites have started up to accommodate the case market, and some very odd images they have on some of them too.  I immediately felt that a reader would want a character or location from a favourite novel on their case.

This would be easy with older books that were out of copyright, and I looked at some of these sites hoping to contribute.  But the one I thought I might have a go with either went out of business or stopped the 'artist designed case', and went down the DIY route.  Hmmm, slippery ground.  The work I had been doing for them is still on my hard drive.  Again, it's character driven and illustrates old novels.  I recently read 'The Pickwick Papers', not, I have to admit, expecting to enjoy it - but found it to be brilliant stuff, charming, amusing and inventive from beginning to end.  So I promptly did two designs based on this novel.

'Let me tell the defendant Pickwick, if he is in court, which I am informed that he is, that it would have been more decent, more becoming, and in better taste, if he had kept away!'

I had seen the very underrated British film based on the novel, made about 1952, and this may have helped my appreciation of the book.  This is rare of films that usually fall very short of the book, but as the film has high production values and relies on Dickens' dialogue for its script pretty extensively; the finished product reflects the book pretty dam well.  It cuts out a few characters, but this doesn't harm the story such as it is, because the plot is fairly trivial, its one of those books that rely on verve, wit and charm to power you through to a feel-good end. 

The film chooses the cast well, making sure they realy resemble George Cruikshanks illustrations, using costume, hairstyles and lighting to great effect.  Donald Wolfit, an actor much derided over the years, was born to play the lawyer Mr Sergeant Buzfuz, he does an excellent job, and I had him in mind when I drew the character, with some of Buzfuz' speech included.  This image was designed around a case template supplied by the company I mentioned, and its their 'box' shape I had to design within.  I'd like to show the case as well, but I'd better not.  I've drawn a line around the case so you can see where it is.

The other Pickwick design I drew was of Sam Weller, and I chose the moment that Pickwick and his companions first meet Sam outside a hotel, where he is blacking boots and shoes.  Again, I would include dialogue from the book.

'You're a wag aint you?' - 'My eldest brother was troubled with that complaint', said Sam, 'Maybe its catching, I used to sleep with him.'

Lastly, Dracula, everbody's favourite vampire, and I obviously wanted a dark and brooding look for the image.  I've always liked a passage early in the novel where Dracula is describing to Jonathan Harker just what incredibly great nobles his ancestors really are!  He goes through a speech where he refers to 'mushroom growths' like the Hapsburg's and Romonov's, and how the Dracula's make them all look dog rough.  Then he finishes with a brooding but almost self- pitying line - 'I like the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may.'

'I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may.'

But the image is the thing, and I suppose the dialogue could be changed a hundred times over.  Will I actually put these designs up at any time?  Maybe on Zazzle, but they were not designed for their range of cases and I don't think they do any for Kindle - I'll check of course but in the meantime I'll keep investigating.

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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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A ghost of an idea.

This blog I suppose is at the wrong end of the year, as it should coincide with Halloween, but this little poem, or limerick floated into my field of vision and I immediately thought ‘I could design something for that'.

Three little ghostesses,

Sitting on postesses,

Eating hot buttered toastesses,

Greasing their fistesses,

Right up to their wristesses,

Oh what beastesses,

To have such feastesses.

I’ve always liked that image, three ghosts sitting on posts eating toast.  What’s not to love?  It’s not exactly T.S.Elliot but it gets its message home in a clear and direct manner.  However there are some quite ambiguous things about the whole piece, for instance, that first line.  Three little ghost-esses?

What do ghosts look like?  This is the dreaded (and rather ridiculous) Smithfield Ghost.  The Welcome Trust.

 Does that imply that they are female?  But as ‘esses’ appears at the end of each line maybe not.  But it does raises the issue of what ghosts are supposed to look like anyway.  Before you draw anything, you have to know in a general way what it looks like.  This is what M. R. James thought about the ‘look’ of a ghost 

‘What first interested me in ghosts? This I can tell you quite definitely. In my childhood I chanced to see a toy Punch and Judy set, with figures cut out in cardboard. One of these was The Ghost. It was a tall figure habited in white with an unnaturally long and narrow head, also surrounded with white, and a dismal visage.

Upon this my conceptions of a ghost were based, and for years it permeated my dreams.’

 

M. R. James.  (1862 - 1936)  Wiki commons.

So that was James’ idea of their appearance, and as he was born in 1862 it was probably the prevalent nineteenth century conception.  Our modern idea of a ghost looks more like the ‘Caspar – the friendly ghost’ variety, but where did that come from?  I suppose he derives his appearance from the typical bed sheet with holes cut in for eyes.  I think those late 19^th century ghost fake photographs also informed our modern idea of a ghost – people dressed in long white robes, double exposures and all that stuff about ectoplasm.

 A little while ago I did these cartoons of ghosts in the modern style.  I think they derive something from the film ‘Ghostbusters’ in its realisation of ghosts as more coloured ectoplasm, the light gleaming and rippling on their surface, more bloated jelly than amorphous will ‘o the wisps.

 

My kind of ghost, chains, flaming torches, skulls and little Vandyke beards!

 There’s also a little of the past about them, traditionally ghosts are always supposed to cry ‘vengeance vengeance’ or ‘woe is me’, they clasp their hands in anguish and of course where is any self respecting ghost without a number of chains to rattle?   They also often carry torches, have ropes around their necks and might just possibly carry a club. 
 

A toast!  To toast.  I love toast

I've been doodling some tryouts for the nursery rhyme at the top of the page, and its a bit more difficult than I expected, so nothing finished yet, but here's the sketch.  It will become the basis for a design for my Zazzle shop, and in the meantime why not visit it by clicking on the photo.

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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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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