Portraiture

by Donato

One of my favorite genres is the portrait.



When I look back at the art through history and assess the works that resonate with me today, one characteristic I find running through as a unifying thread is the portrayal of people, real people, engaged in tragedies, heroics or tasks which underscore their humanity. Gone are the caricatures, cliches, and excesses which speak to a turning fad. These popular art forms all have their place, certainly, as relevant commentary on events swirling about us in the here and now. But what I am interested in is how a work speaks to the future’s children - images, when isolated from artistic intent and cultural crutches, you can point to and state, 'That is a timeless work of art.'



It is no easy task to create such work, let along identify universal themes which constitute these images. But there is one aspect which has filtered these traits - time. And it is precisely for that reason I tap museums so often to study what went 'right' for those works of art found there. I am not fascinated by museum art purely for its age nor nostalgic quality, but rather why has it been revered for so long. Why this work of art and not another (besides surviving the wars, fires and deteriorations of time)? This comprehension and its subsequent reconfiguration it is one of the most difficult issues I address in my paintings.



How to tap into the humanistic undercurrent without reverting to cliches, historical mimicry, or creating a work too 'bland' and culturally and artistically irrelevant is an immense struggle. This proves a greater challenge especially when you are called upon to deliver timely, hip, and fad-like art for the commercial market place! It sets my head to spinning, but as always, I love the challenge.

It is not that I wish to make a piece 'timeless', but rather it is my desire to make a work of art which is not esoterically 'crutched' so that some arcane form of understanding is required for its enjoyment. Far to often we are call to read a ‘program’ to understand the content of a work of art. I rate this as a failing of the artist. How will someone outside this program come to understand the work, someone culturally different, speaking another language, or unknowing of the program’s references? I feel the work must address these issues by itself, contain its own internal truths, even if those truths lead to no certain conclusion. That is what makes art great for me- its ability to stand apart from nearly all references.



But how do you make a work of art seemingly stripped of all specific references? to resolve this conundrum, I twist the specificity from that of the details of the references into a focus upon the emotional content. By drawing upon emotion and human to human interactions I attempt to illuminate content which cuts through cultural barriers like a hot knife - sadness, joy, curiosity, friendship, mourning- these are experiences all humans have albeit cloaked in various cultural guises. The heart of my work at this stage in my career is driven by story and the internal motivations of my characters. Much like an actor playing a role, I want to know why my characters are making their decisions so that I can portray those motivations in the paintings. I do not want to just show who they are, but rather I want to reveal who they are from the inside out.



It is for this reason I prefer to let a commission's content sink in as long as possible before I generate sketches and ideas for its resolution. By reading the treatment for the commission, and then distancing myself from the details, I attempt to let the basic character and narrative traits emerge in the space between. This time lapse allows my own life experiences to infiltrate the story and sway the content towards my personalized view of the world. The content becomes part mine and part that of the clients. The longer I can stretch the treatment to sketch phase, the more the extraneous details (as I see them) get strained away, and the more the work becomes a project I get excited about.



My goal is to create paintings I could hang on the walls of my own home. If I have been successful in that pursuit, then I am a contented artist.

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Did you know?

Did you know you can view month's worth of old posts on Muddy Colors at a single glance, simply by using this url? http://muddycolors.blogspot.com/view/flipcard

See what you've been missing!

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Martin Wittfooth... TONIGHT

I know a lot of you will be in NYC for the New York Comic-Con this weekend. If you're one of those people, be sure to stop into Martin Wittfooth's solo show at The Lyons Weir gallery. It's guaranteed to be a show stopper. It's even walking distance from the con, so you have no excuse!



Normally, this is the part where I would go on and on, and tout all the things I love about Martin's work. How it's evocative, emotional, well painted, and how I couldn't do it even if I tried.

But I'm not going to do that... because I don't need to.

As you can see, the work speaks for itself.



Martin's show opens tonight; Thursday, October 13th, and runs from 6- 8pm.



"The Passions"

October 13 - November 12, 2011

Lyons Wier Gallery: 542 West 24th St (between 10th and 11th Aves)



For more info, visit the Lyons Wier Gallery at: www.lyonswiergallery.com

For more amazing art, check out Martin's personal site at: www.martinwittfooth.com

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Wizards

By Jesper Ejsing





This here is a follow up to the cover I showed 14 days ago with the werewolf and the female fighter. The theme in this one is wizards.



This painting is a little favourite of mine. Because it shows a scene that you would know, if you have played just a little bit of role-playing games. It is the scene where you step into a wizards private champers and gets to loot all the books. The ones you are not supposed to see, the ones with hidden secrets and easy power, the ones that makes you a Bad-Ass. Well; all that of cause is only the background of the painting. The front and focus are 2 cool looking characters posing for the fantasy-camera.



The sketch is a product of those very precious and rare moments where it all sort of falls into place very early and very easy. As always when the thumb/sketch is done I retrospectively impress myself at how much, is already there, at this very rough and unfinished stage. And I only say that so confident, because I remember screwing it up too.





What I do after the thumb is accepted by myself and then the art director, is I start sketching each figure separately. While sketching each figure I try to pull from the pose all I can while still keeping within the boundaries of the silhouette created in the thumb. I use references for hands and facial expressions and clothing catalogues for wrinkles and folds of dresses and costumes. When trying to capture the female – she is a vampire wizard – I went too far from the original pose. I went too far away from my first idea and ended up with a much less simple figure with too much costume messing up the clear pose and striking silhouette. And the face lost all coolness. So I threw it all away. Took my thumb to the copy machine and blew it up to the size it needed on the board and just transferred that. Then I refined the details in hand and shoulders and so on from looking at myself in the mirror that I have right in front of my desk. Well for the cleavage I was forced to get dressed and seek help in my outstanding selection of Playboy Book of Lingerie. Okay I did not undress for looking at myself in the mirror, I just rolled up my sleeves and I didn’t seek help in...well; lets just go on, Shall we?







I was looking in Broms art book trying to find out how he did those beautiful subtle skin tones when I saw how little contrast he had for creating shapes and differences in costumes. And I realised that almost all I needed was already there in my initial thumb. I more or less just divided the dress up into layers of armour/clothing and kept the silhouette of the gloves as they were. Only thing I found silly was the Dracula-like collar piece. So I changed that into long shoulder plates that would emphasise the direction of her arm and shoulders and adding details, and thereby focus, to the top of the figure. The face is myself and a desk lamp from the side. If you compare the thumb to the final I also used the very loose definition of the legs placement under the dress. To make it clear how the knee was turned, I showed some of her right leg and placed some armor.



Then on to the elf wizard. I sketched the head and hands but ran into hard trouble when defining his legs underneath the rope. The more I tried the more it looked like he was kneeling for a tough shitting. I couldn’t raise him up. That would take his frame into the arm of the girl. So I used a well known and not desirable solution: I covered it all up in folds and wrinkles and added a large book to cover up the crotch area that else would need to be defining his weight and pose. I am not proud of it. I usually wants to know where figures feet are resting and how they are standing and so on, but that day I let it slide. ( I actually became very happy with the way the book turned out, so it turned out for the better, even if it started as a lazy excuse)



The art description asked for a glowing orb, so I knew the room was going to be dark. But I still wanted to explore the version of a warm background as a contrast to the cool bluish skin of the female vampire. I made 2 colour themes, asked around at the studio knowing I was going to do the warm one. Most of the others agreed.



When I started painting I went farther with the skin tone colour of the girl than my rough was showing. I very cool blue like this would be a stronger contrast than lets say an Ultramarine. I deliberately chose to make the right side of the painting rather empty and not too busy to make a counter balance to the very detailed book shelf on the left site.





I masked the figures out using frisket-film and painted all of the background first. To make it easier for me to judge the painting I blotched in the blue of the girls skin and the red of the rope on top of the film. It would be peeled off when I removed the film, but until then it served as a counter weight to the background. If I didn’t do that I would fastly cover up the figure with paint on the film and loose track of how important they are, and I would get lost in rendering details in the background.



I resisted the temptation of hiding funny stuff in the bookshelf. I toyed with the idea of placing my own novel in there, but ended up with stuff that would only fit the universe of DnD. There is a Book on Bats and a book about Broken love. A bowl of blood and the tome lying on the reading stand has a dead mans hand print on it. “Told you. There is dangerous knowledge hidden in these books”.

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One Million!

I know it's peanuts compared to some blogs out there, but Muddy Colors just received it's 1,000,000th hit! Not too shabby for a blog that didn't even exist 12 months ago.

Thanks to all of you who check us daily, and a special thanks to those of you who regularly leave us comments. It means a lot to us. Maintaining a daily blog is a lot of work, and sometimes we have no idea if people are even watching. Your encouraging words and intelligent input are what keep us going.

So who said illustration is dead ?!

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Diablo III : Book of Cain

by Petar Meseldzija



A few months ago I was having my well-deserved vacation and enjoying the warm and relaxing South Europe summer, when I got an email from Blizzard Entertainment. They asked me whether I was available and willing to participate within a book project named Diablo III : Book of Cain. The group of artists who were already working on this project included such notables as Alan Lee, John Howe, James Gurney, Iain McCaig, Brom, Jean-Baptiste Monge, among  others. My job was to do 5 detailed drawings.  Great commission, no doubt, the only problem was a tight deadline. After I came back from vacation, I had only 7 days left to do these 5 drawings. It was an impossible task, especially because the subject matter was new to me. However, after a few emails we came to the conclusion that I should do 3 instead of 5 drawings.



After a week of hard work  I completed the assignment and I hit the deadline. The client was pleased with the results (well, after a few corrections) and I was pleased because they were pleased and because the work was done on time. Yet another commission with a happy end, although the end of it would be even happier if I had enough time to do all of 5 drawings. Well, perhaps next time I will be more lucky with the deadlines.

Diablo III : Book of Cain is published by Insight Editions and will be available in November 2011.

If you want to learn more about this book or to preorder it, please go HERE.



And the drawings…? Unfortunately I am not allowed to show them yet. As soon as the book is available for purchase I will post the drawings.



Cheers!

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Forged in Fire

-By Dan dos Santos

Here is a new piece I just finished up for Tor Books, for the novel 'Forged in Fire' by J.A. Pitts. This piece is the third painting in the 'Sarah Beauhall' series, the second of which I shared recently HERE on Muddy Colors.



With the exception of the dragon's eyes and the red smoke emanating from the sword, the piece is painted entirely in oils. Though, I expect now that I've figured out what looks good, I will probably go back into the painting and make these adjustments to the original as well. This is quite typical of the manner in which I work. I usually get to a certain stage in the painting where guesswork is really detrimental to my deadline. So instead, I take a photo of the painting, bring it into Photoshop, and figure it all out there. Once I find a solution to my problem, I go back into the original with a concise game-plan.



I submitted four different sketches for this job, a little more than my usual. Below is one of the alternate concepts that was unused.

The cover concept proved to be a little bit tricky. Despite being set in modern day, the heroine battles a dragon while clad in traditional chainmail garb. Meanwhile, druid-loooking henchmen with magical abilities battle all around her. Because there were no real modern cues in this scene, it threatened to make the cover look like a high fantasy novel, rather than urban fantasy. To avoid this, I opted to omit the druids from the painting, and instead insert the Ducati from the second cover. It may not be as accurate to the scene, but I do feel it better captured the flavor of the story as a whole.



Lastly, here is a detail of the painting. In it's entirety, the original art measures 18 x 27 inches.

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