Monster Slayers

Hey everybody

I really loved Jon Fosters article the other day about thumbs. The whole composition element is something that I take more serious than any other thing in a painting. If my thumb works, I KNOW I can make the painting and the final work. If the basic compositional elements are unclear to me, every step from then on is uphill and the end result is so and so.

Seeing all Jons thumbs has made me muster courage to share my thumbs. I need courage, because I feel my thumbs are most sketchy and sometimes unreadable even too me. Well, it is because even thumbs gets abandoned halfway if they feel wrong.

I have collected all the thumbs I could find for a specific cover painting I did for Mirrorstone.

The art assignment was pretty simple: The antagonist, perhaps with friends, facing a Chimera in a cave.

So my sketching concentrated on 2 kind of images: One where the monster was attacking in an aggressive way and one where the monster was threatening the boy in…well, a threatening way.

In the end I fell in love with 2 thumbs: One where the Chimera is diving and about to land in front of the boy, one leg already at the ground. The other where the whole body of the monster was almost framing him, crouching onto him. I was most confident that I could make the framing thumb work the best. So that one I mailed to the art director Kate Irwin.

I marked the ones that I like and those could all have been nice paintings. It is difficult to say why none of the others were picked. All I can say is that to me it is a matter of feeling if I can see the finished painting when I look at the thumb.

On the other hand. If I am in a bad mood that day almost none of the thumbs I do appeal to me and I sketch and sketch without ever being able to hit something worth proceeding on. When I come back the next day, all happy from espresso, and look at the mess I did yesterday, I can see a whole bunch of them that would have been good. I might even go back to the first one. It is really sometimes a matter of a physiological glass half full or half empty.

I define the thumb a bit more before sending it on to Kate. I add grey-tones digitally to show light and values a bit better.

I sketched the boy on a separate piece of paper then stitched it together in Photoshop, move stuff around to avoid tangents and print it out. Then I transfer the sketch to board and ink it. After the inking I scan it again and print out a value version I use for a color rough.

I remember that after I did the background loosely and rough I got exited and wanted to do the figures, I felt bad about pulling the masking film off and starting on the figures before being completely satisfied with the background but thought “What the hell. I will just go back and refine cliffs afterwards”. But when I pulled it off, the rock shapes looked great and in the end I never touched them again.

The whole painting process was only three days, but the sketching and the transferring and all up until I dipped the first brush into color was about 6 days or so.

I used reference for the goat face and the lion.

This picture is going into spectrum 17.

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Dragon Magazine #393

-By Dan dos Santos



This cover just went public a few days ago on the Dungeons & Dragons site, so I figured it would be a good time to share it.

I believe I have only done about 3 or 4 professional digitally... this being one of them. For a long while, I was on the fence about whether or not to start working digitally. I was under the impression that it is much faster and much easier to achieve professional results. And though this may be the case for some... it is not for me.



I found myself repeatedly drawing the same stroke, over and over, trying to capture something that I could have done so easily in real paint. Conversely, there are things that take mere seconds in Photoshop (like dodging) that would take hours to do properly in oils. Ultimately, it seems that a blending of the two mediums reaps the best results.



The combination of my digital incompetence, as well as a severe shoulder strain from sitting at my tablet so long, has quickly convinced me that digital work is NOT for me. I think it's safe to say this is the last time you will see a 100% digital piece from me.



I am also including the original concept sketch which was rejected. It was rejected because the AD felt that it was too violent, and exceeded the magazine's PG-13 limitation for a cover. Personally, I find the original concept more comical than violent, and would actually go so far as to say that the accepted concept is more violent than this one. Though, the deciding factor seemed to be that it was simply implied violence in the new image, since nothing had actually taken place yet.



What do you think?

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Flipping the Switch

Every so often I get asked why I became an illustrator (or, more accurately these days, work in the arts and with artists). My answer is almost always the same: as a kid I was excited by—inspired by—other visual artists and somehow, some way I wanted to do what they were doing. Never mind that I never came remotely close to creating anything as arresting as the works by my heroes, they still inspire me. Their art—and the art by many, many others that have come along (or whom I've stumbled across) in the years since I stopped wearing short pants—still flips that switch in my head and electrifies my imagination. I am absolutely certain every other artist feels the same way and has their own heroes. As for some of the people that grabbed my adolescent attention and have never let go in the decades since? Well...

First there was Russ Heath and his war stories (including "the war that time forgot" that pitted WWII soldiers against dinosaurs) for DC Comics. Heath (who is now 84, I believe) had a meticulous style that I think was unmatched in comics (at least in the 1960s). I always appreciated the stories drawn by Joe Kubert and John Severin (and naturally loved the energy of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko), but Russ' work was always something that I avidly looked for.

Next was James Bama and his astonishing run of covers for the Doc Savage paperback series—60+ paintings. I always felt like Jimmy was showing me something real and that his characters could literally step off the book rack and beat my butt. Bama also painted the box art for a series of model kits based on the old Universal movie monsters that were also affecting (and which always looked much better than the actual models).

The third was the tag-team of Frank McCarthy and Robert McGinnis, who collaborated on the posters for Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. McCarthy (who also painted posters for The Dirty Dozen and The Train before moving on to become a Western artist—just as Bama did) handled the action scenes while McGinnis painted the vignettes featuring Bond surrounded by a bevy of beauties. I was a little young to understand why, exactly (was it the gadgets or the girls?), but looking at those movie posters made me want to be James Bond. Or, failing that, McCarthy or McGinnis.

Number four was, unsurprisingly, Frank Frazetta. I hadn't noticed his covers for the Ace Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks, but his paintings for the covers of Creepy and Eerie magazines and the Conan books hit me like a proverbial ton of bricks. Frank had an intuitive sense for capturing the perfect dramatic moment and, when combined with his cartoonist sensibility, was able to produce works that literally stuck in your head for keeps.

As I entered high school, then college, and finally the professional arena, there were other artists—past and present—that had powerful influences on me, but...you never forget your first love, no matter how much time passes. I'm always interested in finding out who (or what) inspired other artists to enter the field. A visit to a museum or gallery? A comic? A film or book cover or magazine or...?

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Clockwork Fairies

Last month, Tor.com explored the themes of steampunk for the second year with their Steampunk Fortnight, and this piece, Clockwork Fairies, was included as a short story. Irene Gallo asked me to illustrate it.

I started with a couple of thumbnail sketches to try to capture a formal portrait of the main character, a black woman mechanic-tinkerer. She’s built the tiny fairies in the story that flutter around house guests. They are made of intricate clock parts with glassine wings, and carry tiny swords.

Here are the only thumbnails. I drew the portrait first, then drew the fairies on a tissue overlay to test the composition.

And a page of mechanical fairy sketches.

I quickly captured the essence of the piece, but most of the fun would come in the paint.

The trick was figuring out how to paint around a squadron of fairies in front of the character’s face. Irene and I spent some time on the phone talking over the process. I hadn’t tried this before, but I knew that the only way to get a good face without having to paint around each fairy, and still have some freedom with painting the little machines, would be to paint the portrait first, let the paint dry, then paint over the top.

It worked fine, but there were changes. Irene needed to have her look more like a genteel woman, so I painted a grey vest over the top of her leather work vest. This softened the feeling.

After the fairies were dry, I knocked a few of them back in value with some glazing...something I hardly ever do, but it worked for this. Here's the sequence of the work.

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The Thumbnail!

-By Jon Foster

I am going to add on to Dan’s post.  Early in my career, I was under the impression that I should be able to sit down and create a beautiful piece of art from start to finish with no preparation…I thought all great artists did it that way.  The reality was that it was extremely frustrating to produce pieces of work that continually were below my own expectations for myself.  I thought, if I can see the image in my head why can’t I just translate it to the canvas?  My first inclination was that I just did not have the skills, the appropriate level of craft to make my visions come to life.  

While this was partly true on the craft side, the truth was that I did not realize the blood, sweat and tears that my favorite artists were putting into their work.  My expertise and imagination---or lack of these---were not the reason my images were falling flat. It was the fact that I was shortchanging them from the beginning by taking short cuts.  I didn’t realize that the vision an artist has is simply a starting point, a place of inspiration, but it is not the whole story or the complete truth.  Any color combination can work in your mind’s eye, any composition might seem perfect, but when they are committed to paper these ideas seem to lose their majesty and sometimes fall short in the execution.  This is not to say I was wrong, I was just partly right.  Ever have a dream where you solved the world’s problems by creating, say, the first working cold fusion reactor only to wake up and find that what you thought was ingenious in a dream would seem ridiculous in the light of day?  “Ummmmm, maybe a thousand hamsters running simultaneously on miniature treadmills actually can’t jump start cold fusion…” you think to yourself while drinking your morning coffee.  There might not be much to save from that dream, except,  perhaps, the image of an army of hamsters which might have some play left in it in another context. The point is that these dreams, real dreams and daydreams are initial ideas, starting points. Get some paper and quickly write, draw, or scratch them down.  Now turn them metaphorically on their sides, upside down---mix several together, shake it and let the pieces fall where they may.  What does it look like now? Can you let go of your original idea for something new, something possibly better? Does it still look the same?  Make word lists for your idea; often times the abstract of the word can help us see an image in a different and unique way.  For example, when you picture a car in your mind it might be the image that you just keep seeing in your minds eye, and you associate the car in your head with this image to the extent that it is hard to see other cars---or what a “car” can represent; but if you write down the word “car”, and then adjectives that might apply, such as old, big, retro, rusty, aggressive, friendly, sad, etc. you jump start your imaginative processes again.  Now, take all this and quickly make visual notes to with thumbnails. A thumbnail is a small sketch 1 to 3 inches high or wide for the most part, but that is not what is important. What IS important is getting your ideas down quickly and without over-thinking, thus the small size. It’s harder to get caught up in detail. I confess I have seem some beautiful thumbnails by students and the more info you can get in them in terms of shape and value, the better, but often my first attempts are just scratchy marks that only I can understand.  Now, do MORE, add in ideas to one from thumbnails you like and get rid of the ones that you don’t like (but don’t throw those ideas out---they could work for projects in the future).  Back to the pencil and paper and this time, refine a bit, put some love into it---not necessarily to finish, but just to bring it to a little sharper focus.  Hopefully you will have three or four thumbnails you really dig and one that just does not float your boat.  At this point I usually send my sketches (worked up thumbnails) to the art director, and… well, this can be for a later post.   

I want to add that sometimes when going through this process I, might just come up with nothing and in those moments I let the paper show me the possibilities.  It is a way of seeing shapes and compositions in abstract forms, from random marks made on paper. We all see things in nature and manmade objects, images in patterns; we are wired for it, the thought that some cloud looks like a bunny, or hey, that chip in the tile floor really resembles a honey bee.  This is partly due to the fact that the cloud or chip in the floor does look like a bunny or bee, but it is also because our subconscious leads us to those associations; in other words, your creative brain plays a role.  So when in doubt and frustrated, I try to let my subconscious help out. It has the great fortune of no running commentary from the left temporal lobe.  So, with a chunky piece of graphite, I make random marks on the page.  I twist, turn and drag to make various lines, gradations and textures.  I put this aside and do it again, then again, and again.  Then the fun part (and I really do love this part)---I go back to the first sketch and look at it, turn it to the side, upside down then back and let scenes, objects, and characters suggest themselves.  I do the same with the other sketches.  If I find a shape that suggests a person or scene or even just beautiful forms in an abstract composition, I draw into it with the narrative or feel of the project in mind. I pull out shapes, lose shapes, and combine shapes from the other pages (the computer and Photoshop are invaluable for this).  More often than not, this gives me a starting point, a way of seeing without following the same cognitive rut.  At this stage I may combine it with my other thumbnail ideas or it may stand on its own with further development.  Both of these above methods need YOU---you giving yourself room to think, create and change your mind so that you can come up with different or even better ideas.  Oh, and sometimes when I am all done, I end up with that first idea I dreamed of, but that’s OK. I still needed to go through the process to KNOW it was the right one.

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This Way or That?

For me, one of the hardest parts of any assignment is the sketch phase.



Early in my career, I alloted myself far too little time to do concept sketches, thinking that because they are so loose I can do them quickly. When in fact, they are the most important phase of an assignment, and often times demand more time than the final rendering. If I rush a concept, I frequently find myself rendering a piece for days on end, all the while knowing that it will never be successful because my plan was flawed from the start. Over the years, I have learned that lesson the hard way... repeatedly. Now, I try to spend a minimum of 2 full days sketching concepts. If it takes me 4 days before I come up with something good, so be it.



When I sketch, I am not only looking for an interesting image, but for something that really captures the flavor of the story. Of course, everyone's tastes are different, so what I find appropriate does not always work for someone else... most importantly, the Art Director.



Over the course of my career, a lot of sketches that I really loved have fallen by the wayside.

Either the AD felt they did not make as strong of a cover, or would not have been as good for sales, or maybe they just didn't leave enough space for type. Whatever the reason, they get rejected, pushed aside for an alternate concept that simply out-shined them on that particular day.



I always tell myself that I will revisit these ideas, but it is very rare that a new assignment comes along where a pre-existing sketch would actually be appropriate for it. So, instead, the sketches sit, as clumps of kilobytes, digital dust-bunnies hiding in some remote corner of my hard drive. For this post, I'd like to dig up some of those sketches, and share with you what some past covers might have been had the AD simply decided to go this way instead of that.



                                 

This is the final art and a companion sketch for a novel called 'Doppelgangster'. Both are rather campy and sexy, buy ultimately, I think it was the visual integration of the title that really sold the AD on the chosen concept.

                    

Here is an alternate sketch for 'Implied Spaces'. Since the novel deals a great deal with time travel, I feel the chosen concept definitely captures the story best. Though the mood in the unused concept is a lot more appealing to me and I still regret not getting a chance to paint it.

Lastly, here is a brand new piece for an upcoming Urban Fantasy anthology called 'Naked City'. Fans of Jim Butcher may recognize the guy on the back cover as Harry Dresden, a character which I've had the pleasure of painting 4 or 5 times now for various omnibuses. Below is an alternate concept for the wraparound which wasn't chosen. 

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Justin Gerard: Consider Yourself Warned

My name is Justin. I live in America, and I paint for a living. I have a particular interest in narrative-driven illustration and visual storytelling. I will be contributing a number of posts to Muddy Colors in the coming months and I hope that these articles will not bore you to the point where you want to light yourself on fire from sheer eye-numbing boredom. I have read some eye-numbing articles in my day. The kind that are like train wrecks that you can't look away from, but that your brain, in self-defense, just refuses to process.

I will be endeavoring to not put anyone through that, but I can't promise anything. To clarify what I will be going for instead, I have compiled the following short list of topics that you can expect to hear about in upcoming posts of mine:



1. Digital art vs. traditional Art 

2. Narrative-driven Illustration 

3. Mallard Bating 

4. Modern tank warfare 

5. The most mind-blowing images I have seen in my life and why they rock 

6. The practice of being awesome every single day 

7. A new process for taking a digital comp to finished oil painting 

8. A realistic plan for the invasion of Mars



 (Note: While, I am still rather new to #6, the other contributers here at Muddy Colors are not. They are all long-time veterans of it, and I hope to absorb by proximity some of what makes them and their work awesome every single day.)



 I have been involved in the last few years in an ongoing campaign to learn how to paint in oil. When I began working in illustration I worked exclusively in digital. (I was raised largely by video games and digital art is just a next logical next step.) The (digital) work I have done in the past has been featured in Spectrum and seemed well received. Clients were calling and I had plenty of work at the time. Sounds good right? So you may ask, why on earth would I go through the hassle of learning an entirely new medium when I had a perfectly good one right there? Am I deranged? Did I wreck into a tree once when I was a child and damage my brain? Well, maybe; I did hit the tree, and I did hit it with my head. But the truth is that I was after something in my work that I simply could not achieve working digitally. And as much as I enjoyed working digitally, (I love it actually) there was always something that was missing in the final product. And when I looked around at the people whose work I admired the most, (Many of which happen to be here on this blog) I realized that they were achieving this very missing element by working traditionally.



I realized that if I wanted to paint images like that, maybe I ought to stop trying to force digital to try to be something that it wasn't, and just learn how to paint traditionally.

Along the way I have stumbled on some good techniques and many terrible ones, and I learned a lot about the powerful effects possible when combining digital and traditional media to create an image. I also discovered what I feel to be the true strength of digital art and the best way to use it. I hope to share these things in later posts.

This campaign of trying to master oil will be the platform for the posts that I will be contributing to Muddy Colors. Hopefully this will result in something interesting for our readers and also helpful for illustrators who are also learning about the process of visual storytelling. And hopefully it will not drive anyone to self-immolation.

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