These things have been making the rounds all over the online artist communities and I am being fashionably late.  These are just the ones freshest in my mind as I am definetely forgetting at least 100-200 of my other biggest influences.  It’s odd what influences me. Sometimes it’s only one painting an artist does that really strikes a chord in me.  I’ll go search out the artist only to find I don’t really care for anything else they’ve done.  The biggest things that draw my attention are brushstrokes, emotional impact, and color harmonies.  Really good foundational drawing always perks me up too.  There are a lot of guys and gals I like that I wish would never finish a piece because the beginning has so much more interest.

Anybody who can name all the squares will receive either 500 dollars (in monopoly money) or a free sketch, my choice.

Every year at the Heroes comic book convention I wait in the weeds like a tiger stalking his prey for that one small moment when Superstar artist Brian Stelfreeze is alone.  Or at least a time when I can fight my way through the deluge of comic nerds, er, fans.  The man is the single best purveyor of wisdom in comic artdom.  This year I was on my way out Sunday, after the convention was over, when I spotted Brian packing up.  Ha ha!  Gotcha!

I ended up picking his brain for a good 20 minutes.  The bits of knowledge I squeezed from him would probably cost you about a semester’s worth of dough at your local art college.  Sometimes, Brian just really points home something I already knew but didn’t really take to heart and sometimes he blows me out of the water with something that 6 years of art college and 9 years as a freelancer has failed to instill in me.

My big thing this year and for the last few months as been edges.  To paraphrase Brian said edges are anywhere a value shape ends or begins.  That can be the side of an arm, the edge where a dark shadow becomes light, where the red blotch of a cheek turns to a more peachy tone.  If you can see the edge clearly, it’s a sharp edge.  If you can’t see it at all it’s a lost edge.  Intermediate edges are just regular edges.  Soft edges are just that, soft.  Paintings are really just a puzzle of these value shapes and how they interact is your edges.

There are two ways to soften an edge.  Sweep your brush through the two adjacent colors or (and this is what really stuck out for me), put a transition color between the two.  For instance in that example I mention with the red cheek and the peach skin.  To soften that transition without blending you could put a plug of reddish peach in between the two.  Awesome!

The other big thing Brian put to me is the skinny on color temperature.  I know the warm light = cool shadows and cool light = warm shadows.  It’s one of the closest things to gospel in painting.  But I still tend to confuse myself.  What about reflected light, secondary light sources, or just keeping which one I’m doing straight.  Forget all that, Brian says you can’t stray from the chick you brought to the party cause the party won’t end well.  (That’s my analogy, not Brian’s)  A useful way to keep your commitment is to lay all your shadows in at the beginning in that cool or warm color.  That way when your brain turns into mush, better know as rendering mode, you won’t be able to just blindly put down the wrong color temperature!

Brian also said I was awesome and DC should give me some Batman covers.

I did mention I was paraphrasing?  Didn’t I?

I appreciate all those who came out and said Hi or bought anything from me.  Even that one really weird guy.  Yea, I’m talking about you.

Can’t wait until next year.

The Heroes Con is this weekend!!!  I know, it always seems to take forever to get here and then, BAM, here is it is.  You’ve probably putting the finishing touches on your Spider-man or Ghost Busters costume.  You may be like a friend of mind who at one Heroes convention where Jim Lee was a guest brought every single comic book Mr. Lee had every done.  Not to get signed, just to prove to Mr. Lee what a fan he was.

In all this excitement don’t forget to come by my booth now firmly located at SP-22.  I’ll have tons of prints, mini-books of my work and more.  There is always “and more!”  I’ll be doing sketches, paintings, sketchcards and whatever else I can think of.

Here’s a few maps to help you along the way.  Heroes con isn’t middle earth but it can still get pretty confusing when you’re trying to find your way around.  Just think of me as Mount Doom and you’re bringing the precious!

<—Click there for a full map of the convention floor.

June 4-6 I’ll be at the Heroes Comic Convention here in Charlotte.  I’m not sure what space I’ll be in as the great folks at Heroes haven’t quite got all that worked out yet.  I’ll be sure and update my fan as soon as the information become available.  It’s a great convention and I love going every year.  Stop by my table and say Hi, you’ll be glad you did.

Frank Frazetta – February 9, 1928  May 10, 2010

I used to have a copy of this great Frazetta painting above my bedroom door as a teenager.  What’s to say?  This guy was a legend and his passing is felt throughout the art community.  He defined fantasy art more than any other artist.  I’ve linked to a trailer for his DVD “Fire and Ice” about his life and work.

I start as usual doing some quick sketches which I didn’t show because basically I think I may be the only person on the planet who can interpret the things.  They just look like a mass of lines.  I then get my reference but in this case since the contest supplies the reference I already had it.  I did look over the reference before I started sketching because I needed to use some of the supplied reference.  I usually look at reference until I’ve got my sketch going because I don’t the reference to become overbearing in my image.

I then get a tighter sketch going, throw some tones on it in Photoshop and start playing around with a color palette.  I ended up going with a gold and purple basic color scheme.  Lotta cremes.  I think it gives off a mystical quality like the scene in Gladiator where the women is walking through the wheat fields.

I also may need to add some monkeys. Everybody loves monkeys.

The beautiful model supplied by Artorder is the talented Veronika Kotlajic.

Details on the contest can be found HERE.

Here are three that I penciled last night whilst watching the telly.  I’ll ink and color them shortly.  I actually kinda really like the Spider-man one.

I went over the whole image with some texture brushes with some red to get rid of all the white.  I choose red because it’s green’s compliment so it’ll make the Hulk pop.  After that I began to block in the Hulk.  Block in is simply filling in area as shadow, half tone, and light.  This defines your basic form and is a sound structure for my next layer.  I’ve already done it but what’s the fun if I post everything at one time.

Right now, I’ve been updating my portfolio to target Wizards of the Coast and Marvel Comics.  With the Incredible Hulk being so incredible (and my favorite character) I thought a nice trading card type illustration would be a groovy thing.  Yes, I still like the word groovy even though it’s popularity was well before my time.

To begin an illustration I usually do some thumbnails or if there’s a minimal background, I just start sketching to see what grabs me.  I ended up with this to start with.

Looks OK.  I like the pose and the expression on his face.  It’s time to refine it a bit and add some spot blacks.  I’ve also decided that it needs somewhat of a proper background.  What could be better for the Hulk than a big mushroom cloud?  Fun to paint and that will allow me to add some abstract qualities to it that I like when painting.  I also changed the size to 10×16 over all just because.    Here’s where we are now.

Now, in general I’m pretty good at just drawing out of my head but good reference will always take your work to a higher quality.  You don’t know what you don’t know and reference will give you the information that you don’t know.  Man, that was a sentence and a half.  I think my brain just started smoking.

Here is my reference.  I’ll probably take some photography later for specific parts like the face and anything that looks off after I get going that needs some attention.

This first one is Kitty Pryde of the X-men.  She’s always been one of my favorite characters.  Excalibur was one of my first comics back when you could buy them from 7-11.  I’m working on much more of a painterly style.  To that end I’ve discovered Corel Painter (actually rediscovered).  I’ve been so used to Photoshop all these years and Painter is a bit of a different animal.  I love squishy paint.

Thanks for looking and have a great day!

He-man was a big influence on my artwork and love of fantasy.  He was my first and biggest exposure to the genre so when I recently had the chance to do some c0mmission work for a He-fan, I jumped at the chance.  It didn’t hurt that I did it for some hard to find He-man toys.  Man, I love me some horse trading.  He wanted a Merman piece which suited me just fine but there is one thing I hate about Merman.  That character is one of the hardest to pull off without making him look like a total goof.  I couldn’t exactly redesign his face although I really wanted to so I just sketched his face over and over until I was reasonably happy.  So know, it’s done.  Now, the only problem is I want to do some more He-man artwork.

They hold the class once a month and I can’t wait to go back again.  Here are a few of the drawings I did.

I was hanging out with a friend a few months ago during a sketch group.  My friend asked me to draw a certain pose.  I looked at the blank page and started to put together, in my mind, how the pose would go.  What foot is the weight on?  Where is the elbow is relation to the rib cage?  How many heads tall should I make this figure?  Structure?  Angles?  Depth? Lighting?  OK, you’ve got the chest connected to the arm this way, connected to the neck at this angle, etc., etc., etc.

After a couple of minutes my friend asks what was wrong and why I was taking so long.  I know you can draw, he said, and you should be able to knock this single pose out in seconds.  You’ve drawn it dozens of times.  I was a little taken aback.  I’m not the fastest artist I countered.  I told him about my thought process.  He picks up the pad and draws the sketch quickly, going boom, boom, boom.  There.  Done.

At the time I just thought my brain didn’t work like his.  He was self taught.  I was more classically trained.  I had a process.  He just drew.

I now understand and realize that you don’t drive a car by thinking about the individual parts.  Micheal Jordon does think cross-over, spin, put the ball in my right hand, then my left, and stick out my tongue before he dunks a basketball.  It’s a gestalt thing.  A left brain holistic thinking thing that my natural logical right brain tendencies try to overrule.  It’s hard to remember all the details of a person’s pose to draw but it’s very easy to remember the gesture of the person’s pose.

The really, really cool thing too is the gesture is what our brain recognizes most as the pose.  Like my earlier example from part 1 of this post on Gesture the image in your head of a man with his foot on the chair got much clearer and sharper in your mind when I added the context of him being sad.  It’s the same way you can remember hundreds of different faces of people you’ve meet.  When you see a person you recognize you don’t see the nose, add the eyes, the ears, the width and height of the face and then know who the person is.  You see the gesture.

So, do some gesture drawing every day to warm yourself up and after a while that looseness and life will begin to seep into your regular work.  Drawing will become easier and a lot more fun!

Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.  After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I’ve understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.

- Bruce Lee

Throughout my entire life as an artist I’ve always had a consistent problem with being too stiff, of staying loose and keeping my drawings loose.  I’ve discovered a number of methods and tools over the years to help with this but it’s only been recently that I’ve rediscovered something that helps dramatically.

Gesture drawing!

Most artists have fond (yes, this is sarcasm) memories of beginning figure drawing classes doing these scribble like drawings.   A gesture drawing is where an artist attempts to capture the “gesture” or “essence” of a pose or subject.  It’s usually done it very small window of time such as 10 seconds to 60 seconds.  The object isn’t to draw the actual pose but to get down that thing that represents the rhythm of the pose.  In the book, “The Natural Way to Draw“, artist and teacher, Kimon Nicolaides describes it like this.  I’m paraphrasing here.

Imagine that I describe to you a pose to draw of a man facing a chair with one foot on the chair.  He is leaning forward and his arm is resting on his knee.  His hand supports his head.  You could draw that fairly well.  But what changes if I add to the description that the man is sad.  Suddenly the pose is much more alive and defined in your mind.  This is where the gesture comes from.

In good drawing and painting most see composition or design as the key thing that makes or breaks a piece.  I’d put gesture right up there because this is the thing that conveys the “genesis” of what the viewer is relating to.  It’s what makes a drawing look alive.  It’s what causes a line to be a LINE and then just a line again.

(More to come in part 2)

]]> http://www.bfowler.com/wordpress/archives/826/feed 0 http://www.bfowler.com/wordpress/archives/818 http://www.bfowler.com/wordpress/archives/818#comments Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:10:05 +0000 Bryan Fowler http://www.bfowler.com/wordpress/?p=818 I recently received permission to post this piece I did last year for Destiny Games Publishing. Photoshop and painter. I’m starting to use Painter I lot more than I used to as I’ve finally began to devote some time to it’s brush engine, which is fantastic.

Last week I had the great opportunity to take a live online class with fantasy artist Jon Foster through Conceptart.org.  It’s still available for purchase, streaming, on demand here for anyone wants to spend 6 hours with Jon Foster.  Foster has always been one of my favorite artists and the class focused on doing a “Young Adult Book Cover from Start to Finish.”  The class was $95 dollars which isn’t really that much at all considering how much workshops with artists can cost.  The streaming technology was very good and my 4 year old Dell with a broadband connection had no problems.  Jon was a wealth of knowledge, sharing his methods and process and answering numerous questions on everything from how to break into the industry to how to use reference to how to use value correctly in your painting.  To make the session even more enjoyable, fabulous artist George Pratt hung our in the accompanying chat the entire time.   When Jon was busy painting a demo you could learn a thing or two from George if you could tear your eyes away from Jon’s beautiful work in progress.

The software for the online streaming displayed a large window that was linked to Jon’s computer.  To the side was a live chat and it was also possible to talk to Jon via microphone which some took advantage of.  Jon began with a slide show and talked about his process taking us through the process of one of his painting (the one at the beginning of this article, in fact).  We began with the script and went from Jon’s sketchbook to tight drawing to reference to black and white to color.  He showed us tons of images illustrating his decision making process and how and why he made the choices he did to end up with a successful illustration.

Foster is a very good teacher and seems to be incredibly humble.  Without question he’s got a lot of talent but from his methods you can see that the reason for his success his how hard he works and his attention to every single part of the illustration.  Jon was often asked how long it takes it to do an illustration.  His response was, “as long as it takes.”  That may seem like a canned response but after spending an afternoon with him it’s very true.  When most would think an illustration finished Jon is only halfway done.  That next 50% is what takes his work to that, “holy crap, that’s awesome” category.  He’s not overworking a piece, he’s just not settling for less when he as the ability to do better.

It was a wonderful class and I’d do it all over again in an instant.  One of the pluses to the class is that I am able to re watch it on demand any time I want for 30 days after the live class.  I’ve already watched it a second time and gotten a few nuggets I missed the first time around.  Conceptart.org is a real asset doing these classes and getting the very cream of the crop in the field to share their knowledge.  A big thank you also goes out to Jon for doing this class.  I’ll leave you with one of my favorite Foster pieces below.  Wow, is that not awesome or what!

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