Some thoughts on recent posts and what I'm doing

 It's starting to hit me, what I'm doing here. I've been talking about this group of artists who were active starting in the 60s, when I was a kid, up through the 90s, when I stopped being interested in comic books. And I'm comparing and contrasting them with each other and with my own art, ferreting out the influences they've had on each other and on me. 

It's somewhat like doing master studies, where you pick an artist and copy a piece of his work. I've done a bunch of them for the Level Up course when I was on ConceptArt. Seems like a lifetime ago, it was about a decade I guess. Here's a few I did:

In each case the original is on the left with the artist's name under it, and my copy on the right. The goal was to do these fast. Jason said a really good artist would be able to do it in about half an hour, but of course we were struggling students, so we took longer. The Tiepolos I did were incredibly humbling! 

But what I'm doing now is much more focused. I'm looking specifically at this group of artists who so profoundly affected my own ideas about art as I was growing up. That's formative stuff! These guys plus a few more were it for me, well in the comics world. Then there were more of course. Right now I'm specifically looking at my comic influences. Not really sure why, it's an intuitive thing. I'm really drawn to it, and I suspect it's because they offer what I'm most missing in my work, those powerful shapes and colors and textures to bring some toughness aqnd personality to it. To pull my work out of blandsville and turbocharge it. Well, that plus of course I moved to comic figures to propel my anatomy studies. 

By looking at all of their work rather than just examining the work of one artist, and generally it's one who lived a century ago or more (not always), this gives me a very deep and broad understanding of certain things. I see the diffferences in how they approach things, and the similarities. That helps you to guage things to a much finer degree, to see things you would otherwise have missed. Simply because I looked at a bunch of Texeira and then a bunch of Jae Lee, and before both of them I did a stint on Bisley. Grabbing images and video to post made me begin to notice these similarities and differences, and drew my eye to trends that were developing or being refined in ther work as it evolved across the decades and through all of them and several other artists who were peripheral to their group (not that it was really a group, I just group them together as stylistic influences on each other). 

One thing I notice about all of them—They combine two things that don't frequently go together. Ultra-juvenile musclebound superhero fantasy with bulging biceps and sexy women, alongside some really sophisticated art techniques. It's always there, if you defocus on the bulging muscles and grimacing faces and sweat. Each one of them is a master in several techniques that most of their peers just didn't even come close to. Compared to the normal run of the mill comics artists, each of these guys were truly great artists. There's a solid character and personality in their figure work that's mostly lacking in the work of the general comics artist. I could do a post of a series of them comparing them with some of the weak-sauce artists of their time, but that seems counterproductive. And it would be a lot of mudslinging, what's the point of that? Oh, there were definitely some other great artists at the time, for sure! In very different ways from these powerful stylists I'm focused on. They were the superstar artists, and then you've got the lower-tier, the workmanlike artists who drew stiff figures that never really seemed solidly grounded in the scene, or just didn't have graceful gesture to them. 

Some of these guys have the same problems actually, but their style is so powerful and they're so bold in their choices that it doesn't matter. It's when the artist is also tentative or too timid in his choices that you notice those issues.