Warrior Woman Close Up

It's only when you get up close and personal like this it starts to look like a painting. I actually like the way I handled the brush work on this quite a bit.

Ain't so bad - and moving toward subtlety

I was too harsh on my latest. It doesn't need to be just  like the more dynamic images - which are so dynamic largely because they're based on very dynamic photos. It's a full-body standing portrait, which has different demands from a snapshot where parts of the body are cropped out - those can be far more dynamic and more interesting compositions. It invites a much more close-upinspection, and it rewards it more than the others do. Though I think it would benefit powerfully from flattening all the layers and working on the image overall with some unifying lighting/shadow.

In fact I notice now that all my paintings are clumsy and crude. In terms of lighting and color mostly (or at least that's what I'm noticing now).

I spoent about an hour looking at PreRapahelite paintings, and amazed at how subtly the light and color flows across the image - the figures and the environments. Fugitive light - touching here and these with exquisite subtlety and vanishing before it's even noticed, but leaving a slight imprint.

Must do that dammit!

One Weak Warrior

^ Final version, slightly altered from the last image in the previous post.

The instant I got this uploaded on Flickr I saw it's weak weak weak!!! In terms of value contrast and color and pose and overall composition - everything really. Except I guess detail.

Here's one reason it ended up so weak - because I was designing the clothes at the same time I did the illustration. I did it paper-doll style, essentially I painted the figure and then started making bits of clothing on it piece by piece. This is something you should do BEFORE you start an illustration!! You should know the clothes and weaponry (if applicable) going in, so you can concentrate on the pose and composition, not end up with something that looks like a - well, a paper doll, just standing there showing off her clothes!!

But a few things I did pretty well I think - the way I applied paint near the end, which was starting to take on a certain semi loose quality like what I want, but looks much better than any of the loose techniques I tried on the photo ref pieces (MMA paintings etc). I was starting to bring in some stronger colors toward the end, but I should have been able to do that a lot earlier - in fact right from the beginning.

I really like the technique I use of progressive refinement. It allows me to start with a rough idea and then keep refining. One of the really cool things about digital. Love that liquify filter and transform tools!! And I'm really happy with how the figure eventually turned out - I only used reference for the head and looked at a few pics of supermodels for the shoulders and collarbones, plus a few female ab pics, but on those I really just winged it after looking at some pics.

I should have also started with a very strong idea for lighting - I really didn't even decide on lighting at all, just let it kind of happen, and ended up with a very diffuse light coming from vaguely upper image left somewhere. The 2 images to the left of it are so much stronger, because of the strong dark/light pattern, which also allowed me to use that one-color-for-dark one-color-for-light plan that I like so much. This one was almost monochromatic for much of its lifespan, but just toward the end I brought in some pretty strong yellows oranges and blues for lighting on the skin which spiced things up nicely if very subtlely.

Ah well - this is one of my first real attempts to do a painting from imagination (the Fafhrd/Mouser illos began life as oil paintings many years ago, though I did do the Mouser from imagination in both of them). I feel like I'm a lot more confident with starting from imagination now having done this one. I plan to just do a bunch of imagination figure sketches now in color - nothing detailed or time consuming, just playing around.

Warrior babe

Color complexity, the virtual palette, and painting vs airbrushing/drawing

Still riffing on the 2 pics from the last post.

Thumbnails serve a valuable purpose by letting you really compare and contrast images rather than get lost in the details. Like this you can really see certain differences - notably the fact that Frazetta's image probably uses terries rather than secondary colors (Hah!! I had tried to type tertieries, but it autocorrected to terries! I like it!) The yellow of the bright fleshtones is very greenish, while Bruce looks almost fluorescent pink overall. First of all I'm falling into the trap of thinking flesh needs to be pink or brown. Ok, so I visually mixed an orange and a purple to get that, but they're very simple and bright secondaries. Very warm, even hot colors. This also tends to emphasis a certain femininity (at least the choice of colors does).

I remember some time ago I was mixing all my colors on a virtual palette - when was I doing that? I don't remember which paintings it was. Need to skim through and find it (times like this I'm extremely glad I've been keeping this journal!)

I understood then that the colors coming from the picker are too simple and too primary/secondary, and that to get a complex palette (to borrow from wine tasting terminology) with subtle notes you need to mix them together across color families. Warms and cools blended, but with one dominating so you don't get mud.

EDIT -

Ok, looking quickly at my adjusted gallery again, it seems like I used the virtual palette concept or something very similar on most of the early paintings, the MMA fighters. Also I was using a PAINTING technique then - this latest one looks more like a cross between meticulous drawing and airbrushing. And that smooth airbrushed appearance also contributes to a feminine roundness. You know, I think it's time to start doing oil painting. There are certain inherent problems with digital painting, especially the way it lets you make endless changes and choose fluorescent colors and use that addictive soft round brush..

Frazetta's artistic shorthand, moving through realism and blocky vs rounded form

A comparison between my latest and the painting it was derived from. Mine is very labored, with much effort toward realism and surface smoothness/modeling. I also pushed the color saturation into very near the cartoon level (computer art allows this much more than oil painting does). Both are mostly secondary colors, though his involves strong primary reds.

One thing in particular I notice, that made his much easier and mine exceedingly difficult - mine is almost all transitions, while his is almost all strong darks and lights. In fact his is blocked in roughly from a deep understanding of the human form and anatomy (very Bridgemanic) and lit in such a way that it consists mostly of the light color and the deep shadow color struck in boldly, with very little transition in between.

A big part of Frazetta's strategy involves hard raking light with very little fill light - this largely eliminates the transitions and throws everything into solid darks and lights that define form very simply.

Of course I realize it's his experience and understanding that allowed him to do this - it'll be a while before I'm capable of such simple direct statements. It's through these labored paintings that I'm developing my visual library and my understanding not only of human form but also of how painting works. So, while my eventual goal is not complete realism but a dynamic stylized and simplified approach similar to Frazetta's blended with Williams, the way to get there is to continue to do these realistic and labored paintings.

I also need to do a lot more figure drawing - both referenced and invented, as it's a much faster way to develop the figure/anatomy library. In fact I need to move beyond that and start doing thumbnails for entire compositions.

I love the fact that this breakthrough painting for me is a combination of Williams' early primary subject (Bruce Lee) and Frazetta's simplified coloring system.

EDIT -

Looking at my Flickr page and another revelation. That Frazetta alpha male stands alone amid a gaggle of gently rounded feminine forms. Even my males, no matter how muscular, are built from graceful smooth curves. Much more Hogarth than Bridgeman. That blocky figure is like a brick in a basket of eggs. So powerful. Now I know. It's weird how you can go so long and never notice things like this about your own work.

EDITING THE EDIT -

I just realized that what I'm doing with this post is the exact same thing I did long ago on the old stopmotion board with a thread called "Things that work well and things that don't". That thread was also about ways to work simply and directly that result in a stronger finished product. A lot of animators go to a lot of extra work to weaken their animation - for example things like making puppets realistic rather than stylized and from foam latex or silicone rather than hard marionette style materials, doing lip sync or even having talking puppets (which makes it into a cartoon or an imitation of living actors), showing puppets always walking from here to there when in live action films this is often elided with a simple cut. As I recall, the only person on the board who really got it was Trickfx*, and from that point the thread turned into my introduction to Eastern European Puppetfilm, which embodies these ideas of simplified stylization and suggestion rather than explicit copying of reality. All the extra work it takes to make puppets and sets and stories "realistic", and all it really does is take the imagination out of the equation and force the telling of "realistic" stories rather than symbolic ones, which when done right are actually far more powerful.

* Nick also got it, even though in his own work he tends toward the labored and realistic.

Enter Bruce Lee

Working on anatomy of the back and using the same duotone approach from the Frazetta study.