'For you have supped your last Grendal...'

The words of the title of this blog were written by Eleanor Farjeon, and it comes from a book she wrote in two volumes for children in the 1920’s called ‘Mighty Men’.  The book is an introduction to the stories of the great heroes of history and legend, the first in the second volume being the story of Beowulf, which Farjeon entitles ‘Grendal the Monster’.

Eleanor Farjeon.  1881 - 1965    Public domain.

 In this story Farjeon gives a simplified retelling and ends as with all the other stories in the book with a short poem, which sums up all that has previously been told.

The last verse:

Grendal fled from Heorot
With golden splinters strewn,
But the fair hall stood without a blot
Before the next night’s moon.
Now clear and strong rose sounds of song
Instead of sounds of wrath -

“For you have supped your last, Grendal!”
Said Beowulf the Goth.

Thrilling stuff when you’re six or seven years old.  In the book there were illustrations by an artist unknown to me named Huge Chesterman, and the one showing Grendal seriously put the frighteners on me when I was small.  I remember I used to turn two pages over to avoid seeing it.  Here it is in all its scary glory.

 

Drawing by Hugh Chesterman.  Public domain.

 Well, as an adult I’ve stopped trembling now and can look at it in a more subjective way as a picture and an illustration.  It was certainly effective on children, but now I don’t think it’s a particularly good image of Grendal.  Why?

Well its too Greek for one start, too classic.  Grendal is shown as a satyr or Pan like figure which has nothing to do with the norse tradition, and he looks altogether too spindly, as if a strong wind would knock him over.  (I felt the same thing about the 2007 animated films depiction of the monster – too flimsy.)  Also, the background of Chesterman’s picture is reminiscent of a Greek or Roman setting with its classical temple buildings and tall cypress trees.

In the poem Grendal is obviously huge.  I quote from Michael Alexander’s 1973 translation of the poem: 

‘…he grasped on their pallets

thirty warriors…’ 

and these are not ‘take aways’, he doesn’t charter a bus to take them back to his home to eat, he eats them there and then.  Respect.  I vote Grendal top monster.

And later as Beowulf waits to ambush Grendal – Grendal bursts into the hall, snatching up a warrior and immediately eats him; the poem states that he chews on the bone joints, sucks on the veins, swallows huge gobbets of flesh and completely consumes the man – hands and feet.Now that’s what I call a monster.

You knew this was leading up to something, and yes, it’s my chance to show off – showcase is what I meant to say, work I’ve been doing on the theme of Beowulf.  I picture the hero in a sort of ‘selfie’ moment, posing near the door of an outhouse where the head of Grendal is being displayed to the people.  Its digital, and one of my more finished images, the original drawing was made large on paper with pencil and scanned before being digitally coloured.

 

Development of the Grendal head from drawing on extreme left to overlays of colour in middle to full colour.

The background needs a complete rethink (that's why there isn't any) as you start off thinking you have a plan, and then you change your mind.  The main figures are okay so I'll leave them, but I need to better think out interior details, and other figures that I had initially intended to put in. 

Beowulf drawing details.

 
 Yes, I accept it’s a work in progress, and the background is almost non-existent, and the sword is only a place saver for want of a better one.  But it gives me incentive, if I undertake to show the more finished work – to actually do that work at some time in the future.

Work so far.  The wood in the background is just to give him something to pose against.

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Gigantic proportions.

Over the last few weeks these blogs have been very ancient Egyptian –centric and so today we will finally be leaving Egypt behind and moving on to new territory.  A bit of a relief actually, I’ve been coughing up mummy dust and tripping over sarcophagi for weeks.  There’s old bandages everywhere!  This time round, I’ll be saying a bit about a project I’m working on that has Nuremberg style medieval buildings, flying machines and curious literate giants.

I did this particular design a while back of two curious giant characters examining a storybook medieval castle.  Using those old buildings you see in Germany, Austria and Belgium as a starting point, with their high sloping roofs and patterned tiles I designed a pleasing and compact little fortification to sit in the middle of the picture.

'You blow down one of the chimneys, and when he pops out of this door I'll whack him!'

What are they looking for?  Is the castle an elaborate model they’ve constructed?   Or is it real  and they’re waiting for those inside to come out so they can either negotiate some business, or flatten them with the smack of a giant palm.  Or maybe they could just stamp the castle to rubble.  The drawing is simple and I think effective, and the colour is minimal, a little shading but mostly blocks of solid colour.  It’s essentially a child’s picture book image, but the inspiration for it and others in this blog is a little more adult. 

 I got to thinking about giants after remembering reading H. G. Well’s 1904 novel ‘The Food of the Gods’, a superb read very badly served by film and media in general.  It starts cleverly as a lighthearted fantasy-comedy, and develops along more serious lines until it ends as a high-flown drama about the limits of human endeavour.  Try doing that successfully in the average sized novel.  However Wells pulls it off without a hitch.

 

H. G. Wells. (1866 - 1946)

The main premise is that two scientists develop a powder like chemical food that they hope will help nourish the world and make people develop as strong healthy individuals, however the food produces gigantism.  Part of the theme is the ‘genie in the bottle’, (think global warming); when released the problem causes vast change and upheavals – giant changes in fact, but its nature is such that you can never return it to the bottle.  So you are forced to learn to live with it, to wholeheartedly take up the challenge and go forward no matter what, even when going further hurts you even more.  The little people are forced to learn to live with the new giant world, and the newly grown giants have to learn to fight the prejudice they receive for their size, the numerous laws suddenly brought into being to hedge them in and limit their lives, but at the same time also begin to realise the huge strength potential they now wield over everyone else.

Reading giant sketch.

One of the most striking characters in the novel was the spark for this next image.  In the novel a number of children from different backgrounds are given courses of this new chemical food named Herakleophorbia III (the ‘Food of the Gods’ of the title).  This substance has the ability to make plants and animals grow to gigantic sizes, if they are fed with it from birth.  A number of middle class children are given the food on purpose, but through a lack of care and planning, a baby from a poor farm family also gets regular doses. The middle class giants have very committed parents (one of them is part of the team who invented the food) they have a good education with special school rooms built for them, they learn about science and art, all the things we would expect from a decent education.  The farm boy however is left to rot with his ignorant family, distrusted by everybody, curious and wanting to know about the world, but merely succeeding in irritating and angering everybody he meets.  He is put to work in a quarry under the stewardship of the local gentry, who use him as cheap labour and scold him from time to time when they think he needs it.  Which is all the time.

But this boy has a brain and is curious by nature, he decides at last after being told what he can and cannot do just once too often, to leave the quarry and go to London, because he’s heard all about the city and wants to see it for himself.  So he goes, but doesn’t know there are laws controlling giant access in the city.  He walks to the city, slowing traffic along the roads, which begins to back up chaotically as he approaches the centre of the metropolis.  Being about thirty feet tall he brings London to a standstill.  Eventually the little people panic at the problem he’s causing and send in the army, and the boy is shot dead.

 

Bookish giant.

My simple picture represents the giant with a book, a way out of his problems.  He’s more of a traditional storybook giant, but he’s still being badgered by the little people who are in the airship floating nearby, but this giant is calmer, cooler, better informed and like his middleclass contemporaries can take it all in his stride.

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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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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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