Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts

The Art of Charles Vess

My first exposure to Charles Vess was through his collaboration with Neil Gaiman for "Stardust." Vess' work there particularly reminded me of the old fairytale books I read as a child*. Maybe because Stardust is a fairytale for adults, or maybe the period the story is set in. Aesthetically, his character's features are not my type, but I love the attention he gives to details, the color he uses and how each artwork evokes emotion.

Charles Vess at the 2004 Comic Con (Source)

Dark Horse Books has released "Drawing Down the Moon: The Art of Charles Vess," an compliation of Vess' works over the years. The beautiful illustrations are accompanied by comment from Charles Vess himself, describing his adventures as a painter, sculptor and publisher.


Aside from Neil Gaiman, Charles Vess has worked with writers like Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell) and George R.R. Martin. He is the recepient of such awards like The Will Eisner Comics Industry Award, World Fantasy Award, and Spectrum Annual Award.

*In the foreword, author Susanna Clarke mentions that there is something "unsettingly familiar" with Vess' works, and goes on to mention names of Edwardinian story-book illustrators like Authur Rackham, Charles Robinson and Kay Nielsen. I didn't recognize the names at first, but when I saw their work, I knew what Clarke was talking about. Those were the artists whose works I saw many years ago.

Random painting

Feeling odd today, but weirdly enough, I did quite a few things that made me feel a bit accomplished. :)

- Upped my Nanowrimo work to 6131 words. Some may say I should be way beyond the 15k mark by now, but given how lazy I am and how uninspired I am to write, that's an accomplishment. For some reason, even though I want to write, the idea of writing just for the number of words makes me want to not write. But this is good, even though the story is mostly made up of snippets and that I'm veering away from the supposed main characters.

- Painted on my bookshelf. I was just imagining what it would like to paint on my bookshelf until the urge got so strong that I just did.


Sketches


Base. I made a mistake and wet my brush, thus the thin layer


Black & white


Think.


At first I was irritated at the wobbly lines, but then I realized it looked great that way, smudges and all. With my leftover black paint, I dabbled on other parts of the bookshelf. Nothing much though. Sorry the pictures are blurry. :p

Painting experiment again

The recent storms have conked out my DSL and I couldn't even reach Globe's customer service line. I'm thankful that no DSL is my only trouble from that storm. Many people weren't so lucky. I just read in the newspaper that there was a man who literally lost everything: his home and his family. Please pray for him, and let's all do our part to help the victims.

Please also don't forget the people in the provinces. People in Botolan, Zambales are still inundated with floodwaters that have yet to subside since Typhoon Kiko. Let's pray for them.

Experiment



I always loved fantasy, and though in local folklore the "little people" aren't often seen on a positive light, this one's based more on the ones that reside in the United Kingdom. I grew up reading Enid Blyton's stories so I know about elves, fairies, pixies and gnomes.

This is the second in the "mushroom" works. The first I didn't like much because I made the mistake of outlining what I painted. This one, I tried to keep the paint from going over the other ares so there's a clear line.

My favorite part is the flower. The shadow over it is me, as I only took a picture. :)

Playing with acrylics

I finally decided to open the set of acrylic paints I bought some months ago. I mostly use watercolor and colored pencils, then digital paint for most of my works (which aren't enough *sigh*).

The first time I ever used acrylics was when I was about nine or ten, when my aunt gave me one of those "paint-by-number" kits. The paint was acrylic, and I remember this not because it was written on the box, but because I remember using the paint on other surfaces including eggshells* and they never washed off.

I didn't have any particular subject in mind, so I just chose the colors and dabbed them on the paper.



One of the first things I read about painting in general is making a wash, so I did that. I like how the blue and the green flow into each other. Everything else was random.



I'm trying to work on learning how to color people. Since my style is mainly manga/anime, that's the color style I'm using. However, I'm trying to work on doing realism, so I hope to veer away from doing anime style when using paint. Not that there's nothing bad about it, but I just want to try and develop a different style.

There's something wrong with this, I know. There's something wrong about the proportions, mostly. I didn't really intend for this to be anything but practice, so I don't mind that it looks bad. Room for improvement, ika nga. I used this as a reference for the pose.



One thing you must remember with acrylics is that unlike watercolor, you can't re-use acrylics once it's dry. With watercolor, just dab them with water and you're good to go. I read this in one of my painting course books but it didn't really register until I brought out my palette and tried to use the colors I already had on. Zilch. The paint was harder than glue left out for 24 hours.

Hence, this last er, work. I did it mainly because I didn't want to waste the paint. I had Burnt Sienna, Lemon Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Sap Green, Viridian, Ultra Blue and Black. The top scene was first done with dabs of Yellow Ochre, with no specific shape in mind. I just took the brush and used up all the paint until somehow, I ended up with that. I think it looks like mountains and field during sunset.

The black wiggly lines was done because I can't seem to fit the black anywhere in the top and bottom scene. The bottom's just random.

I want to buy some gum paint to experiment on next. Its like a mask you brush on your work so that particular part doesn't get any paint on it. When you're ready to work on that, you just peel the mask away.

More practice!

*Eggshells? Yes. I found a book that showed how you can remove the egg's contents without breaking the shell. After I did that, I painted the shell. Needless to say I ate a lot of scrambled eggs during the time I was in this art phase hehe.

Doodle: Steampunk



For some reason I wanted to do a steampunk themed drawing, so I went searching for various information and picture references about it. There's still plenty I don't know, and I need to practice more, but I like how this came about (though it's doesn't look very steampunk-y).

I did the sketch on in my drawing pad, then using a Sakura Micron 0.3 outlined the face and body. I used watercolor then added some accents with colored pencil. The hair intentionally has no outline.

He reminds me of a high school classmate of mine. :p

More practice! :D

LRT Art 2009

Commuters of the MRT and LRT line may have noticed some posters a few months ago calling for entries for the LRT Art contest. Filipino citizens age 18 and above were enjoined to participate in the contest with the theme “LRT at ang Buhay Pinoy”.

I don't know how many entries were there, as I wasn't able to find any press release or news item about the results. However, selected entries may be seen at the LRT Cubao station. I'm not sure if this is the formal exhibit, as there are ropes cordoning off the commuters from the paintings (although you can still see most of them).

Here a few of the entries. I even found one artist on DeviantArt, but I don't know what his work looks like.




I love this one. It's Pinoy superheroes heading home after a busy day.




This one feels like Grand Central Station


This one's really nice too. It looks like a photograph.



There were a lot of beautiful works there, some were very creative and thought provoking; some very avant-garde and imaginative (see the superheroes one), while some were very much traditional and realistic. There were two paintings there though, that looked so similar that it was obvious that both artists used the same reference picture (one that was used as an LRT publicity picture, methinks).

Head on over to the LRT Cubao station to take a look at these works. However, you have to get past the turnstiles for that. If in any case the exhibit would formally open, I suggest you wait for that.

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