A Wizard of Earthsea

Yikes, its been awhile since I've posted anything! So I guess I'll jump right in. I have been working on a new project. I am doing the visual development for A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K. Le Guin. It is based on a truly amazing book, and I think I have read it seven times now. ("read" is a bit of a misnomer, I have it on mp3) So here is some of the sketch work I have been doing.

Since I had time to kill while I was listening to the book, I got an interesting opportunity. I have noticed that I get an idea for a project, and have trouble pulling myself away from it. This time I decided to design the characters and environments as I saw them (Not designed for appeal, just honestly how I see them.)

 I figured once I had put down the ideas that I was connected to, I would have a little more freedom afterwards. (This experiment is still in progress, I'll let you know how it turns out.)

Often times, random strangers become the unwitting victims of my design process. This person walked by a coffee shop I was in--he didn't even stop to get a drink. I had just enough time to put down a blind drawing of him before he walked on.

 This fellow was sitting right next to me. Something about his mood reminded me of a character in the book. I was mortally afraid he would notice my occasional glances in his direction and realize he had become my model.

This was simply a blind drawing from my imagination. I find that I can get my drawings to have a bit more character if I momentarily remove my eyes from the process.

One of the characters I have had particular fund designing is the character of a beautiful female enchantress.

She has gone through a number of iterations, but these were the ones I based my paintings on.

 

This is my first gouache painting in over a year, and my second gouache painting ever. I figured since I spend so much time with the undo key at my disposal, I should try a medium that is known for being temperamental and permanent.

Here she is in photoshop form.

The main character is a goat herder who becomes a wizard. I have yet to figure out his exact design, but I decided to do a quick sketch of him as a goat herder to get a feeling for him.

Here he is again. This time I wanted to pay particular attention to his facial tattoos.

Every once in a while I get a bit obsessive about reference. Usually it comes in the form of researching some little thing for hours and hours, but this time it came in getting the correct facial expression. 

I now have 170 photos of myself treating a bottle of ibuprofen as if it were a small cuddly pet.

In stark contrast, every once in a while I find the need to test my creative thinking process on the fly. I don't allow myself any reference or thumbnails, and I just see how my brain deals with it. This image above was where the painting started. The only parameter that I gave myself was that it had to exist in the world of the book I'm reading. 

This was the product an hour later.

This one appeared using much the same process, but this time I was trying for a specific location and point in the book. 

Well, my stomach is telling me that photoshop and the internet are not good forms of nutrition.

(This is how my stomach feels)

I hope you all have a lovely day!

Now for breakfast =)

A Week in the Life

Hello fine folk of the interwebs. I have been meaning to put up process drawings for some time now, and to answer a number of other questions I just decided to upload everything I painted in the past seven days. Here goes....

To introduce myself to the project, I did a quick painting to feel the mood of the movie. This is very artsy sounding, but then again, you are reading the blog of an artist =)

The current visual development project is to design a scene from the Fifth Element that wasn't in the movie.

My process usually starts with thumbnails (very small and quick versions of the final painting) to get the feel for the shot.

With this assignment I decided to design a fertility shrine on the pleasure planet Floston Paradise.

What peaked my interest was just how amazing a planet would have to be to motivate someone to travel, outside of the solar system for a short vacation. This place would need to make Hawaii look like a dump.

I realized that if water and rocks could float, the environment would seem completely magical. I decided that some of the sand was made of a superconducting silt. Of course, problems arose with that idea.

If the water is so low density that it can float, swimming in it would be similar to swimming in a cloud..... it wouldn't work well.

Furthermore, the water would be highly conductive.... as would everything else. This, by the way, is my first attempt at animating straight away in color. It's a total blast. I did a couple other short animations this week, but they weren't quite as interesting so I left them out.

Of course local plant life, like these giant flying lily-pads, would gain oddly gravity defying traits.

I find that sometimes, my personal work ends up influencing my decisions. For example, this speed painting made me realize that a fertility shrine would likely have some sort of guardian statue.

These thumbnails were a result of that caustically colored painting.

After thumbnails and idea sketches, the line drawing is the next step. I put in some value for a little added clarity.

Of course then it struck me that this still has to feel like it belongs in the fifth element. So now I have to go back to thumbnails. Ah well.... such is the process.

This is just a fun little painting I did to show the location as it would be seen on a tourist pamphlet. The rest of my paintings are personal.

This was a three hour painting from a model. As with most of my personal work, it is both a study and a time for relaxation. The rest are all speed paintings between ten minutes to an hour each.

Some seem to work pretty well.

Others don't work quite as well.

And just like a sketchbook, odd themes start to come up. For example, red eyes...

...and the relationship between this small creature and its captors.

Every once in a while, you need something to make you think outside of your normal process. I was in Cafe Frascati today with my dear friend Steven Celiceo and we decided to give ourselves a challenge. We decided that we would do one hour speed paintings based on words that someone else gave us. We asked for two random words and a random color.

The words were "Fart" and "Knockers" and the color was "Green."

Yikes! That was a very long post, and it is now nearly 4 o'clock in the morning. I hope you all are having a totally splendid day! Now for bed =)

Getting into the Element

So, I haven't posted in forever. I don't have a lot of time to wax philosophic. I am working on a Fifth Element themed Visual Development project. I didn't have a feeling for the environment, so i decided to make an animatic for myself yesterday. This is what I came up with. It's a bit rough, but it was absolutely a blast to make. The first frame is a screencap from the film, the rest is all painted in photoshop.

Have a lovely evening, fine folk of the interwebs =)

Communication

-the act of conveying Meaningful Information.

After four years of art school, I am very used to technical critiques of my work. Perspective, values, edges, colors, and ultimately those are all critiques that prepare us to produce work that is worth the time it takes to give a painting a true critique. By that I mean that I am not learning how to paint so that I can make pretty pictures. I want to use painting as a means of communication. Value, color, edges, rendering, perspective, etc are all the basics of communication - as verbs, nouns, adjectives, punctuation, etc are the basics of communication in linguistics. As anyone who has studied a language understands, these things barely allow a person to ask where the bathroom is. It takes a great deal of developing these skills before any true communication can come about. The same is true in the world of illustration.


As artists, we are striving to have a conversation through images. The viewer asks "what is going on?" Ideally the piece says a bit. The one above says "I'm a kitchen." Inherently we look for other cues that can tell us about what we are looking at. Unfortunately, no matter how many questions can be answered by a painting like this, it is ultimately a conversation without a point. Since it is just a kitchen, there is no reason to care about it.

After a mess of grammatical changes, I decided to place a character in the scene. Now there is a new level of conversation. We still understand that it is a kitchen, but there is now a kid standing ridged with something in his hand. If we can see that he is holding a pair of scissors, the next question is why. Without further corrections, there is no way that the viewer can answer that question. I will update this when I have corrections to this particular story.

Each of the following pairs of paintings is another story I am trying to tell.







These were all quick sketches to help me determine exactly what story I wanted to tell. I ultimately settled on the following story.



Unfotunately, this particular assignment is to tell a story about a tree fort--not about the kids who built it. So, Instead of making corrections to these two paintings, I have started new paintings that better fit the assignment. It's all the maddening and fascinating process of learning a new language. Some days I feel like I can put a sentence or even a small dialogue together, but most of the time, I still feel like I am waving my arms, pointing, and drawing stick figures in the dirt.

I hope ya'll have a fantastic Friday =)