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

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.

My Website 

My Flickr page. 

See, that's how you do that.

I'm sometimes asked by people who see a drawing of mine, 'how do you do that?'  And the probable answer of anyone with some skill is likely to be the same as mine  'I don't know.'

But of course we do know, we've spent a long time doing this stuff, but we can't explain, because we're not teachers.  The internet has allowed artists to film a drawing as it proceeds and put it on youtube so that it can be studied by others.  I'm not completely sure how useful that might be as I've always felt you learn mainly by doing and only a little by watching but maybe... maybe I could be a teacher too?

I don't have any fancy cameras to film my drawings, so I thought it still might be useful to break down a work in to handy bite sized chunks - little pictures of the work in progress and see if there's anything useful at the end.

For a while now I've been producing my 'classical' range of decorative designs, merely drawn from ancient sculpted reliefs so there's not much original work in them, but I don't trace them (which would be so easy with a computer,) I attempt to  freehand draw a version of the relief which I then colour with a rough stone effect.

In this blog I thought it might be interesting to show one of these designs as it progresses through various stages, and for this project I've chosen a cavalry soldier from Trajan's column.  This image is found near the top of the column, representing the culmination of Trajan's Dacian campaign, where a number of Roman cavalry caught up with the fleeing Dacian king Decebalus, and the king commits suicide by cutting his throat with a knife.

The death of Decebalus, from Trajan's column.  Conrad Cichorius.
If it's too small for you, click on it.  You may get a bigger image.

This picture is actually a painting, that appeared in a standard work on the Column by German historian Conrad Cichorius, published in 1896.  It's out of copyright so I can use it, however I was disappointed that there were no 'commons' images of this part of the frieze available.  Oh well.  I have used other images for reference, but more of that later.

I have mentioned before that with a digital image  made with software it is usually possible to design the work on layers which 'float' above one another, allowing elements of a design to be separate and to be worked on separately.  This is similar to painting lines on sheets of glass placed one over the other.

With this one, however, rather than fragment the drawing I've kept it simple so that the complete drawing is on one layer, with colour layers floating below.

So to begin.  I'll be drawing the horseman on the extreme left foreground of the scene.

I begin drawing the head.

I usually draw an object as big as possible; on a sheet of paper for instance, you have to be careful of scale, always watching that all elements are going to fit as you progress, with a digital file I make the file pretty big, and then scale the elements.  So if the head is huge and filling the 'paper', then I can scale it down and fit more on to it as I go along.

A comparison.

There will be a lot of changes as I go along no doubt, as a digital approach allows for very easy editing.  If you use computers to write then you'll know how easy it is to make corrections and shuffle text about on a page, when in the past a lot more tinkering about would have been required.
 

Head and upper torso drapery.  The image is scaled down so it can be added to.

Digitally its possible to cut into a drawing, rotate parts, scale them distort and skew lines and generally make an image plastic and changeable. Now as I go on I'm really looking hard at the painting, with it blown up on my computer screen, looking at the drapery, measuring angles and looking for positioning points.  I'm also trying to interpret odd looking things within the image such as the odd structure just behind the soldiers neck, hanging down from the helmet.  What is it?  I don't really know, possibly something used as a helmet liner - it looks like a tassel but I'm not sure.  All I can do is draw it as it appears.

The image continues to be scaled down.   If the start file is big enough, say 8000 x 8000 pixels it shouldn't lose too much resolution.

Earlier I said there would be mistakes, and all artists make them, no matter how good - I suppose its the frequency of them that matters!  But it was about this stage that I begin to see a few problems.  It seems to me that the figure is too short in the torso, he has no stomach area, so I need to lengthen  it by cutting the drawing in half and moving the lower half down - which will obviously leave a gap.

The image seems too short, so a break is made in the middle figure and the gap redrawn.

The whole process is made up of continual readjustments and tweaks to the image, so many in fact I ought to use them to host one of those 'spot the difference' contests.  But there's plenty more to do, as I've still got to do the horse, and the complex drapery of the saddlecloth.

Beginning the horse.  The actual horse looks a bit odd in the sculpture itself.  A bit too small, perhaps?

The horse will raise a few issues, as I may be accused of not drawing it very well.  But I think its reasonably close to the actual horse in the sculpture which is a bit short in the body, (I'm hoping you'll agree).  The figures on Trajan's column vary in quality, probably there were a number of sculptors working on them, and they could have had different subjects to work on.  Some would have been good at some things and not others.

Short - but I think its accurate.

The front legs of this horse are visible but not the back legs, and this throws up a little problem, as I wanted the full horse.  The sculptor must have been thinking of the ploy my father discovered as a child - if you don't know how to draw something, then hide it behind a tree.

I did say earlier that I had other references that I could use, and one off these is another of Conrad Cichorius' beautiful painted scenes.  Here I found another horse and grafted its back legs on to my own horse.  Like so.

Not exactly finished but the whole figure of horse and rider is there.  Now I'm darkening the outlines and putting in colour.

So in conclusion, and after reflection on my own feeble tutoring skills what do I make of  the question 'how do you do that?'  I'm put in mind of a joke I heard the US comedian Steven Wright tell -   and I paraphrase -

A man decides to throw himself off the top of a giant skyscaper in New York.  He plummets and is caught by the wind which throws him back against the building.  He hits the awning over a window and he bounces off - is caught by the wind and thrown clear across the street, tumbling and somersaulting through the air.

He falls down through a number of awnings, slowing down at each window, until he is caught by the wind again and pitched back across the street, accomplishing double someraults as he flies.  He falls lower and lower until he hits a giant awning near the foot of the building bounces off, does a double - triple - quadruple somersault, and lands safely on his feet on the sidewalk.

Nearby a little cat turns to another little cat and says 'you see, that's how you do that.'

And so, my friends - that'd how you do that.

 My webpage

My Flickr page