Done.
(The difference a halfway-decent photo, varnish, and some Photoshop post-work makes is... notable.)
 |
| The hasty first photo, pre-varnish, with no Photoshop.) |
Showing posts with label imc 2012. Show all posts
Showing posts with label imc 2012. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Tristan and Isolde
Done.
(The difference a halfway-decent photo, varnish, and some Photoshop post-work makes is... notable.)
Thursday, June 21, 2012
IMC 2012
The IMC ended almost a week ago, and apart from a Facebook status or two, I've not really talked about it publicly. There's a good reason it's taken this long: I had no idea where to start.
A lot of that had to do with it being too big for words. I was, and in a large part still am, overwhelmed by how incredible it was in every way I can think of - the individuals, the inspiration, the community, the improvement, the encouragement, the fun - and come on, I got to meet, learn from, and hang out with these guys:
...not to mention all of my incredible classmates.
But it was more than that which kept me tongue-tied, and which in all honesty rendered me somewhat of an emotional mess on and off for the larger part of the class week. It was that same thing which made it impossible to talk about (or type up, or sometimes even think about) certain parts without choking up or even crying for the two days after I got back home - and while I am a sap, that's over the top even for me.
It took a while to realize the cause of all this. (The intense learning and realizations came so thick and fast during the IMC I wasn't able to process them as they came, let alone address any foggy ideas lurking in the background.) With some distance, however, I've figured out the main reason I wound up as shell-shocked as I did:
Turns out, there's a real reaction when one gets stripped of artistic self-worth issues one wasn't even consciously aware of having internalized.
Yeah.
For those who missed it, I had a rough junior year in art school, a fact that I'm still figuring out. I was working hard but not smart; I was trying to learn how to use oils while simultaneously trying to execute an ambitious series of oil paintings without much technical guidance; I was constantly and consistently frustrated with/furious at my lack of progress; my main professor was of the school of thought that motivation comes from just being pushed harder; and I spent a lot of time dipping in and out of what I now suspect might have been depression.
What I took away from that year was that I was ambitious but mediocre - "not as good as [I] think [I] am," to quote one memorable critique.
I really wasn't aware at the time of how deeply this affected me, though in hindsight I can clearly see the results. On the one hand, it drove me to work harder - my summer of painting being one direct result - but also meant that I literally could not think of myself as anything more than 'okay', and certainly couldn't picture myself as part of the industry I was working so hard trying to join. I even nearly dropped one of my strongest pieces from my portfolio because I liked it so much that I "couldn't see the things that had to be wrong with it" given that it was one of my older pieces.
This is a blog post I wrote less than two months ago, still in the thick of it. If I use a conservative estimate, by then I'd been making consistently good art for two or three months, and receiving steady praise and acknowledgement from people I respected. But as you can read I was still clearly uncomfortable, and though I dance around it a bit in that post, I didn't actually know why.
Now I do, because I spent a week at the IMC doing the best work of my life and getting feedback from a huge portion of the genre illustration community, and then spent a couple of days thinking.
What happened is really nothing more complicated than I worked hard, my work was good, and people responded. In that regard, it was no different than those last few months of school - except that the scale and intensity of the IMC is exponentially larger, and concentrated into a fraction of the time, with all the real life distractions removed.
And you know what? It's hard to hold on to gnawing insecurity when almost everyone who stopped by my easel told me that the value and color of my figures against the light was spot on. It's hard to shrug it off when Iain McCaig tells me my drawing is perfect. It's hard to ignore Boris Vallejo when he says, "This is great, what you're doing - keep going!" It's hard not to be moved when peers several steps up the ladder are remarking on my improvement and encouraging me onward.
It's also hard to ignore the existence of something that made my reaction to all of the above incidents (and all those not mentioned) fairly pure bewilderment.
The reaction itself wasn't new - I'd spent an entire evening at the Illustration/Cartooning Open Studios being bewildered at people's compliments a month earlier. What was new was how I'd bounce from that to either a growing sense of confidence or an urge to cry.
There wasn't actually enough time to even be self-aware at that point. For extra fun, in the middle of this another intense realization of conscious incompetence occurred, which always sends me reeling. It was invigorating, but also more than a little vertiginous, and clouded the heart of the issue more. Not that I'd have been able to reflect upon my state even without it, but, you know.
I'm not sure where I was planning on going with this. It's clearly less an IMC 2012 post-mortem than a probably incomprehensible rambling on my own personal issues. Good things happened - amazing things happened - and they were important! But my memories are now almost two weeks old in parts, and I'm not sure if hazily trying to recollect exactly what happened when Greg Manchess and Scott Fischer sat down and painted on the wrong side of a board together is worth more than trying to work through a stumbling block in my head.
I'll be taking my impressions and lessons forward with me. What I gained isn't only concrete - a painting I can hold in my hands - but is also casting ripples that I'm already feeling. I took notes during the lectures and jotted down the critique I couldn't implement immediately, and others documented the shenanigans. What's left is to start processing what happened, then, and that's up to me.
A lot of that had to do with it being too big for words. I was, and in a large part still am, overwhelmed by how incredible it was in every way I can think of - the individuals, the inspiration, the community, the improvement, the encouragement, the fun - and come on, I got to meet, learn from, and hang out with these guys:
L to R, alternating bottom and top rows: Irene Gallo, Iain McCaig, Scott Fischer, James Gurney, Doug Alexander, Donato, Brom, Dan Dos Santos, Rebecca Guay, Greg Manchess, Julie Bell and Boris Vallejo
...not to mention all of my incredible classmates.
But it was more than that which kept me tongue-tied, and which in all honesty rendered me somewhat of an emotional mess on and off for the larger part of the class week. It was that same thing which made it impossible to talk about (or type up, or sometimes even think about) certain parts without choking up or even crying for the two days after I got back home - and while I am a sap, that's over the top even for me.
It took a while to realize the cause of all this. (The intense learning and realizations came so thick and fast during the IMC I wasn't able to process them as they came, let alone address any foggy ideas lurking in the background.) With some distance, however, I've figured out the main reason I wound up as shell-shocked as I did:
Turns out, there's a real reaction when one gets stripped of artistic self-worth issues one wasn't even consciously aware of having internalized.
Yeah.
For those who missed it, I had a rough junior year in art school, a fact that I'm still figuring out. I was working hard but not smart; I was trying to learn how to use oils while simultaneously trying to execute an ambitious series of oil paintings without much technical guidance; I was constantly and consistently frustrated with/furious at my lack of progress; my main professor was of the school of thought that motivation comes from just being pushed harder; and I spent a lot of time dipping in and out of what I now suspect might have been depression.
What I took away from that year was that I was ambitious but mediocre - "not as good as [I] think [I] am," to quote one memorable critique.
I really wasn't aware at the time of how deeply this affected me, though in hindsight I can clearly see the results. On the one hand, it drove me to work harder - my summer of painting being one direct result - but also meant that I literally could not think of myself as anything more than 'okay', and certainly couldn't picture myself as part of the industry I was working so hard trying to join. I even nearly dropped one of my strongest pieces from my portfolio because I liked it so much that I "couldn't see the things that had to be wrong with it" given that it was one of my older pieces.
This is a blog post I wrote less than two months ago, still in the thick of it. If I use a conservative estimate, by then I'd been making consistently good art for two or three months, and receiving steady praise and acknowledgement from people I respected. But as you can read I was still clearly uncomfortable, and though I dance around it a bit in that post, I didn't actually know why.
Now I do, because I spent a week at the IMC doing the best work of my life and getting feedback from a huge portion of the genre illustration community, and then spent a couple of days thinking.
What happened is really nothing more complicated than I worked hard, my work was good, and people responded. In that regard, it was no different than those last few months of school - except that the scale and intensity of the IMC is exponentially larger, and concentrated into a fraction of the time, with all the real life distractions removed.
And you know what? It's hard to hold on to gnawing insecurity when almost everyone who stopped by my easel told me that the value and color of my figures against the light was spot on. It's hard to shrug it off when Iain McCaig tells me my drawing is perfect. It's hard to ignore Boris Vallejo when he says, "This is great, what you're doing - keep going!" It's hard not to be moved when peers several steps up the ladder are remarking on my improvement and encouraging me onward.
It's also hard to ignore the existence of something that made my reaction to all of the above incidents (and all those not mentioned) fairly pure bewilderment.
The reaction itself wasn't new - I'd spent an entire evening at the Illustration/Cartooning Open Studios being bewildered at people's compliments a month earlier. What was new was how I'd bounce from that to either a growing sense of confidence or an urge to cry.
There wasn't actually enough time to even be self-aware at that point. For extra fun, in the middle of this another intense realization of conscious incompetence occurred, which always sends me reeling. It was invigorating, but also more than a little vertiginous, and clouded the heart of the issue more. Not that I'd have been able to reflect upon my state even without it, but, you know.
I'm not sure where I was planning on going with this. It's clearly less an IMC 2012 post-mortem than a probably incomprehensible rambling on my own personal issues. Good things happened - amazing things happened - and they were important! But my memories are now almost two weeks old in parts, and I'm not sure if hazily trying to recollect exactly what happened when Greg Manchess and Scott Fischer sat down and painted on the wrong side of a board together is worth more than trying to work through a stumbling block in my head.
I'll be taking my impressions and lessons forward with me. What I gained isn't only concrete - a painting I can hold in my hands - but is also casting ripples that I'm already feeling. I took notes during the lectures and jotted down the critique I couldn't implement immediately, and others documented the shenanigans. What's left is to start processing what happened, then, and that's up to me.
 |
| That is, in fact, James Gurney. |
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Trisan and Isolde progress shots
In my last post, I showed my drawing after two days of intense work and critique. There was a day after that which I spent transferring the drawing to the board and toning it, during which I took no photos until the end.
Also worth noting, between my 'finishing' the drawing and getting it on the board, Boris [Vallejo] and Donato came by and gave me two pieces of critique - Boris said that the middleground shadow should extend more toward the figures, and Donato suggested that instead of an incoming shadow, I make King Mark into a small figure in the background. I implemented these crits while working on the transfer!
So, at the end of the 11th, Monday:
Sometime toward the end of the 12th, Tuesday:
How I started working on the face on the 13th, Wednesday:
Which, by the end of the day (4am), had grown to this:
And here's the end of the 14th, Thursday (5am):
So, in total, I spent three days working on the painting portion of this illustration, for a grand total of a complete first pass. I have a lot of work left to do (aaahaha that environment) but this painting as-is is better than any previous piece of mine by an order of magnitude.
And that's what I did at the 2012 IMC.
(I'm working on an actual writeup, actually, but that... is going to take some time.)
Also worth noting, between my 'finishing' the drawing and getting it on the board, Boris [Vallejo] and Donato came by and gave me two pieces of critique - Boris said that the middleground shadow should extend more toward the figures, and Donato suggested that instead of an incoming shadow, I make King Mark into a small figure in the background. I implemented these crits while working on the transfer!
So, at the end of the 11th, Monday:
 |
| The brown is acrylic; the blue is oil. |
 |
| I could have gotten more done, but the bright slash of green freaked me out and made me drag my heels. |
 |
| can has skintone in deep shadow against bright light? |
Which, by the end of the day (4am), had grown to this:
 |
| Yes! CAN has skintone in deep shadow against bright light! |
And here's the end of the 14th, Thursday (5am):
So, in total, I spent three days working on the painting portion of this illustration, for a grand total of a complete first pass. I have a lot of work left to do (aaahaha that environment) but this painting as-is is better than any previous piece of mine by an order of magnitude.
And that's what I did at the 2012 IMC.
(I'm working on an actual writeup, actually, but that... is going to take some time.)
Monday, June 11, 2012
Tristan and Isolde Drawing
This is after two days of rolling crits and a couple of rounds of new ref photoshoots. If you recall, it came from this:
Monday, May 28, 2012
IMC 2012 Assignment Prep 2
Because I suppose it's making me anxious not to have the photoshoot done, I sat down and did some studies for Tristan and Isolde.
The 'clothing studies' are mostly notes and doodles of borders and trims, because until I have my reference in hand I don't really know how the clothes are going to need to be built - and because doing anything super solid before The Critique seems somewhat silly.
In the end, the clothing itself isn't going to be complicated. Big dramatic drapey dresses would be incredibly fun to draw, but a) they'd take more careful referencing than I'm able to do at current; b) even assuming I had the reference, it would take more time to paint than I really have; and c) in the end, the feel I want from this illustration wouldn't actually support a design like that. What I'm concentrating on are the characters and the emotion of the story and scene, and having really ambitious clothing would pull focus from that (whether because it would overpower the subtle things I'm going for or because it would just be that badly painted is up for discussion...). Simple clothing - an understated tunic and hose for him, a plain white dress for her - makes my job a lot easier, and means that a little will go a long way in terms of decoration.
I wound up only doing a couple of color studies. I knew what I wanted basically from the get-go, leaving only a question of whether I wanted to go low-contrast and low-chroma, or higher-contrast and -chroma. I've decided on the latter, because although I love me some dreamy, neutral scenes, this is not the illustration for it. The bright warm light will play off of the cool shadows in a really lovely way, if I manage pull it off...
The 'clothing studies' are mostly notes and doodles of borders and trims, because until I have my reference in hand I don't really know how the clothes are going to need to be built - and because doing anything super solid before The Critique seems somewhat silly.
In the end, the clothing itself isn't going to be complicated. Big dramatic drapey dresses would be incredibly fun to draw, but a) they'd take more careful referencing than I'm able to do at current; b) even assuming I had the reference, it would take more time to paint than I really have; and c) in the end, the feel I want from this illustration wouldn't actually support a design like that. What I'm concentrating on are the characters and the emotion of the story and scene, and having really ambitious clothing would pull focus from that (whether because it would overpower the subtle things I'm going for or because it would just be that badly painted is up for discussion...). Simple clothing - an understated tunic and hose for him, a plain white dress for her - makes my job a lot easier, and means that a little will go a long way in terms of decoration.
I wound up only doing a couple of color studies. I knew what I wanted basically from the get-go, leaving only a question of whether I wanted to go low-contrast and low-chroma, or higher-contrast and -chroma. I've decided on the latter, because although I love me some dreamy, neutral scenes, this is not the illustration for it. The bright warm light will play off of the cool shadows in a really lovely way, if I manage pull it off...
Saturday, May 26, 2012
IMC 2012 Assignment Prep
The assignment list for the 2012 Illustration Master Class came in a couple of weeks ago, and for the record I'm really glad no one was in the room when I saw that Tristan and Isolde was one of them. I mean, the other assignments are cool and all, and I can't wait to see what my IMC classmates do with them, but oh man a courtly romance story that predated and then was integrated into Arthuriana? Yes.
I did a little bit of research before I started thumbing, but I made the decision not to read any specific tellings of it. What I wanted wasn't to show a specific scene or grand moment: instead, I wanted to look at the characters as individuals, and frame them in the context of the central pillar of the story - the adulterous affair. This is what interested me, this relationship the three of them had, because the heart of it is that both Tristan and Isolde love Mark, and they carry on their relationship in spite of knowing full well they are betraying him. (This seems to be a theme: the same can be said of Arthur and Gwenivere and Lancelot.)
The first spread up there shows my blank-mind oh-god-how-do-I-draw thumbs, which I used to get out of my initial deer in the headlights reaction. That freed me up for the next set, where I started working out what gesture I wanted, how I was going to build the image, what shape I wanted to work with, etc etc. I usually don't write so many notes, but I was working out my thought process as I went, and it turned out to be really helpful - enough so that I might be doing more of that in my future thumbs.
The one I wound up going with - the third from the top - went through two or three changes before I was satisfied. Instead of taking each right move and making a new thumb to further it (as I started to do and then gave up on) I did my editing on the thumb itself.
I scanned it in, scaled it up, printed it out, and transferred it. This rough is 7"x4.25". (I'll be scaling it up to 10.5"x6.625" for the drawing, and 21"x13.25" for the painting.)
Usually at this point I'd be preparing to start the final drawing, but although I have a reference photoshoot set up, all I'll actually be doing in the next two weeks are some clothing designs and probably a color study or two. There's no real halfway for me between a rough like this and a really tight drawing, and given that there are going to be a whole bunch of very talented professionals telling me to redraw/recompose/fix everything, rendering everything up now would be an exercise in futility.
Up next: those clothing and color studies I mentioned.
I did a little bit of research before I started thumbing, but I made the decision not to read any specific tellings of it. What I wanted wasn't to show a specific scene or grand moment: instead, I wanted to look at the characters as individuals, and frame them in the context of the central pillar of the story - the adulterous affair. This is what interested me, this relationship the three of them had, because the heart of it is that both Tristan and Isolde love Mark, and they carry on their relationship in spite of knowing full well they are betraying him. (This seems to be a theme: the same can be said of Arthur and Gwenivere and Lancelot.)
 |
| First step: getting the crap and bald cliché out of my system. I figured out I wanted the garden pretty early. |
 |
| Next step: feel out gesture, picture shape, etc. |
The one I wound up going with - the third from the top - went through two or three changes before I was satisfied. Instead of taking each right move and making a new thumb to further it (as I started to do and then gave up on) I did my editing on the thumb itself.
I scanned it in, scaled it up, printed it out, and transferred it. This rough is 7"x4.25". (I'll be scaling it up to 10.5"x6.625" for the drawing, and 21"x13.25" for the painting.)
Usually at this point I'd be preparing to start the final drawing, but although I have a reference photoshoot set up, all I'll actually be doing in the next two weeks are some clothing designs and probably a color study or two. There's no real halfway for me between a rough like this and a really tight drawing, and given that there are going to be a whole bunch of very talented professionals telling me to redraw/recompose/fix everything, rendering everything up now would be an exercise in futility.
Up next: those clothing and color studies I mentioned.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)