How I do things

The wonderful people at Cubicle 7 have been nice to put up an interview Iain Lowson did with me. I talk about  making of the cover for the Dark Harvest anthology. (that Frankenstein monster with a train)

http://www.cubicle7.co.uk/2013/01/tales-of-promethea-author-spotlight2/

I know I described my process in the previous blog post in more detail, but this might be of interest to some as well. Maybe. Who knows? I don't. I hint at a secret exciting project too!

CAKE!

It's alive!

It's alive and well.

What is? The Creature of course!

Recently I've had the wonderful opportunity to paint a new one for me - the Frankenstein monster!

The most generous and busy Jon Hodgson passed me this opportunity - to work with Iain Lowson on a cover image for his Dark Harvest anthology.

http://www.darkharvest-legacyoffrankenstein.com/

What if Frankenstein got it right? What if Victor Frankenstein had embraced his discoveries rather than seeking to destroy them?...

Dark Harvest: Legacy of Frankenstein is a detailed, fascinating game setting, a terrifyingly plausible alternative history and a fiction anthology; a gothic horror fantasy that will appeal to gamers and the general public alike. 

 The brief I got asked for the Creature watching a Promethean train (the flaming hand logo included and illuminating the rail tracks) from across Danube (over the Iron Gates gorge), looking grim and powerful.

Which is quite the compositional puzzle. Here's what I sent Iain along with the sketch.

The image as described in the brief gave me quite a headache. There's a compositional issue as well as a narrative one - how to show both the train and the creature (and their interaction in the story), as they're important elements, clearly at the same time?  

At first I did a more of a landscape shot and angle - behind the creature's shoulder, silhouetting him against the moonlit gorge with a rather tiny train going along in the distance. That felt a bit boring, as there wasn't much motion in the train, we couldn't see the design, Promethean logo and all that. Nor could we see the creature's face with his "grim look".

I looked at the previous covers and was intrigued by the first one - the idea to combine different shots into one image and create a collage. I've never done this as the kind of illustration I do isn't suitable for this approach. But here it seemed like it might work.

Trying to tie it even more into the existing material, I used a similar angle for the train bit as it appears in the comicbook page I have as reference. I put the creature on a rocky slope, actually climbing, or hanging off the rock. (hoping to put some latent strength and implied force in his pose)

The sketch was approved and I went from there. The Creature turned out to be a joy (!) to paint. The face (which is a part I always spend the most time on) was done in about half an hour! 

The train on the hand took a while. I haven't painted a train before, and even this one is more of an idea of a train, rather than something actually functional. Steam implying speed and movement and the train's lights also proved a bit tricky to paint.

Iain liked the final result, but felt we needed to make it more obvious the Creature isn't massive and dangling right above the train. To do that I lightened up the seams between the two parts of the image, putting more distance between them. I also added a colour shift, from a greenish moonlit side of the gorge to a colder blue one where the train is going.

Here's the final cover! (as always, painted from scratch in ArtRage Studio Pro)

Thanks for watching!

Grapes of Wrath

I don't get to do personal pieces these days. I don't have the time to draw or paint everytime I think of something cool, in fact it's mostly not worth it.

But some ideas stick with me, crawling in the back of my skull. Some of them scratch their names on the wall and I can't get rid of them in any other way.

I have to paint them.

Many of these are quite silly, or strange, like this one. A painting idea is like a minibus full of stray thoughts, hopping on and off before and even during the painting itself.

Guardian of the Grapes

• I've watched the "Somebody I Used to Know" music video by Gotye, as everyone on the planet has, only I was a bit late to the party and it was old news already. I was fascinated by Kimbra's voice and more importantly by De Backer's makeup. The pale paint leaving only his (rather fascinating as well. Those teeth!) mouth gaping open and almost obscenely red. It reminded me of how red wine dyes the mouth and lips blue or purple. 

          If you're the last person on Earth who hasn't seen the video:  

                 

                      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UVNT4wvIGY 

• I've been reading books by Gregory Keyes, and most notably "Waterborn" influenced me quite a bit. I won't go into detail about the plot, you can read that on Wikipedia:

                      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_Keyes

   

          The world full of gods and people interacting with them in a very common and regular manner appealed to            me.  

• About a year ago I realized I actually liked red wine. So I read up on wine-making a bit, looked at photographs of vineyards.

For some reason, an image of the singer in makeup, but warped into inhuman form with dark godly eyes emerged in my mind. And so did the words - "guardian of the grapes".

And I knew who he was. A lesser guardian god, protecting a sacred grove of olive trees, among which wild grapevines grow. 

He's scary at first, hulking large, with knobbed joints and clumsy limbs. His eyes are beyond the point where large pupils are cute, they're already quite creepy and alien. He's not evil though, he doesn't hurt people. He just wants to be left alone. If only those pesky humans didn't like his grapes so much!

And that's it. I knew exactly what he was, what the situation was - a group of girls tried to pick grapes in the grove without performing an appeasing offering first. The guardian is blasting out of the bushes, vines tangled around his arms, smashing everything in sight and trying to scare them away.

I painted this in the past two months, not having time for proper painting (yay for university! :)), doing ten to twenty minutes here and there. Today I felt it was finally there. I may tweak it some more, but that's the good thing about personal pieces. It only needs my approval right now. ;)

(painted entirely in ArtRage Studio Pro as always)