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.

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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