Spectrum Time!
It’s that time again – the deadline for submitting artwork for the Spectrum 19 jury is January 27th! Last year, I didn’t feel I had anything really worthy to submit (although I sent in two pieces anyway). This year, I have several that I’d feel good about sending – it’s deciding which ones to send that is tough…
I took the website’s advice and printed out all my top candidates, and laid them out on a table. I was surprised at how that changed my opinion of certain pieces.
The winnowing process continues, but Éowyn and Lady Macbeth are definitely going:
Visualising Vance, Pt. 2
The Pelgrane
Here’s a painting that has been lurking in the back of my mind for several years. It’s a scene from one of the short stories in Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth (1950). The story is called T’sais, and here we see the titular character and a hooded man named Etarr on Modavna Moor at sunset, as they try to avoid being spotted by three saurian flying pelgrane. I took a first go at it last year, and while I think I got the sense of place right, the figures were barely there. There was mood, but no action:
At the end of this summer, I revisited it, and tried several new variations. I was trying get the hurried sense of Etarr suddenly pulling T’sais down into the furze as he spots the predator:
Although I love the pelgrane crop in this one, it’s not quite right as a whole, so try again:
This one felt like the figures in the foreground were passing by on their way to some other painting.
Finally, I get on the right track:
There was some good body language, and more connection between the whole group. I took this back to vertical format, and lightened everything up in the foreground. I was reading a lot of commentary from Harvey Dunn, so I was working with the figures first as silhouettes, and then tried to sculpt out detail with more and more value. I did a bit of self-posed photography to work out trickier bits on Etarr.
I was also inspired by a WWII-era illustration by Mead Schaeffer in how I handled the foreground/background. I’m glad I managed to get sense of true distance, and I was lucky enough to get a few sunsets with exactly this lighting effect outside our studio windows while I working on this.
Overall, I am pleased with this, and despite a few nitpick areas, I’m nearly ready to call it done. It’s not quite the vague, saturated red image I had in my head, but I think it works as a good illustration for the story. I could easily see it as a facing plate in an old hardbound edition, which is what I was after.
There’s another illustration coming from this same story – look for it here soon!
“The Nautilus and the Devilfish” WIP
I’ve been re-reading Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas lately, and have been sketching out possible Captain Nemo portraits. More on that to come, but I’ve also been thinking about trying a “crowd scene”, and the Devilfish attack seemed a perfect candidate. I sat down with the iPad to sketch out some little colour scenes. I went a bit over the top at first, I think, with a really ambitious, wide-screen battle scene:
Nemo is in there, and Ned Land lining up a harpoon cast… still, it seemed a bit messy to me – which I supposed a giant squid attack can be. I decided to crop in closer to clean up the tentacle chaos, and to open up a highlighting area of light behind Nemo:
It’s a bit better, but I still felt removed from the people. I finally decided to really zoom in, and get some faces visible, and I ended up here:
Ned isn’t in this group, and the brave Nautilus crew are the focus. After sketching it out, I posed for the various figures. I researched the possible look of their clothing, what boarding axes of the period looked like, and the possible look of the deck of the Nautilus. It’s fairly murky at the moment, which is a typical issue when producing on the iPad – the device screen is very bright and sharp, and images typically look much duller when I bring them to the desktop.
I’ll keep working on this piece, and post the final when I get it sorted.
“Éowyn and the Nazgûl” Alternate Ideas
In the middle of last May’s “Éowyn and the Nazgûl” challenge at The Art Order, I was still playing around with alternate setups for the scene. I took two of these ideas to color comps, and I felt that they were interesting in their own ways – even if I ended up staying with my original setup:
My friend Annica kindly helped me by modeling in partial costume, including a real chain mail shirt, and a full cloak. I had bought several other props to help things along. The prop shield was real wood and metal, and was quite heavy. I think the true weight helped with the poses.
The first alternate approach was to portray the scene from Merry’s point of view. The more I re-read the scene, the more I came to believe that it was actually his scene. From the moment Merry and Éowyn are thrown from their horse, the entire scene is told from Merry’s point of view. Éowyn desires to die in battle, and is truly about to do so. It’s Merry’s brave act that saves her, and gives her the chance to defeat the Witch King (note that after the battle, Éowyn is still depressed that she survived). Without Merry’s finding of his courage, the whole thing would go pear-shaped.
With this in mind, I made a comp from Merry’s point of view, down on the grass of the field. Annica modeled two of these poses. There were some aspects of this setup that I really liked, but I kept thinking “Giant Hobbit threatens Gondor”, so ultimately I decided against using it.
The other alternate idea was to use a less unconventional composition and get up more in Éowyn’s face, and to only show the Witch King as a reflection in the boss of her shield. Again, an interesting approach, but it didn’t quite have the drama – or perhaps I didn’t know how to invest it with that drama. Several things I liked: the large swath of relatively empty space in the picture, and that I managed to get a feeling of weight to the chail mail. Having a model right there actually wearing a mail shirt really gave me a sense of how mail acts, how it drapes. It’s an example of how good reference material can really bolster a painting idea.
Finally, here’s a peek at one of the reference shots we did. I used bits and pieces from several shots, but this shows what we were up to. I don’t really have a proper setup to do this kind of thing, so we just made do with the conditions in the studio that afternoon and shot with an iPhone camera. I used these photos mainly to check things like the draping of fabrics. Annica was a lot of fun to work with, and had good ideas of her own.
I hope you enjoyed this look at some of the unseen work behind my challenge entry. I had a great time with the challenge, and want to thank Kate, Annica and Rasmus for their support, advice and help!
Visualising Vance
I was going through some of my kroki sketches last night, looking at several of a male model that we had several weeks back. He was a very tall man with dreadlocks, and he had a striking, unusual face – looking a bit like Ron Perlman. There was something about the flat expanse over his mouth, his facial bone structure and the intensity of his gaze under a deep brow – “saurian” was the term that kept coming to my mind.
At any rate, I’ve been wanting to try a rendering of a Dirdir – one of the four alien races from Jack Vance’s Tschai series – and I kept going back to these sketches. So, with apologies to this poor chap, I’ve used him as the basis for one of the pale, lizard-like Dirdir:
In the novel “The Dirdir”, there are also dirdirmen – humans who believe (or wish) that they are genetically related to the Dirdir, and who use prosthetics and body modification to emulate Dirdir appearance (The Dirdir, on the other hand, don’t seem to spend much time thinking about the Dirdirmen at all). With that in mind, I wanted the Dirdir to look roughly human in form and facial configuration, but to become stranger and more reptilian the closer one looks. The long antennae-like bits are called “effulgences”, and can glow or change orientation based on the emotions of the Dirdir.
Shaun Tan in Stockholm for ALMA
Oscar-winning illustrator/author Shaun Tan was in Stockholm last week to accept the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award - from Crown Princess Victoria, no less! Posters were up along the streets, and when I was at Hötorget monday, I snapped this shot of the banners draping the front of Konserthuset, where the award ceremony took place. Unfortunately, I had to miss the book signing at Sciencefictionbokhandeln.
The statue in the foreground is Orfeusgruppen by Carl Milles.
“Éowyn and the Nazgûl” Final Judging
The final judging for the “Éowyn and the Nazgûl” art challenge has been posted over at The Art Order, and I am fairly staggered to find that I placed fourth in the results:
“Craig J. Spearing was our top winner, receiving recommendations from 10 judges
Nick Deligaris came in number two with nods from 6 judges
Allen Douglas came in number three – fighting tooth and nail for 6 judges as well
David Brasgalla came in number 4 with votes from 5 judges
Andrew Ryan came in number 5 with thumbs-up from 5 judges as well – just barely nudging out
Cory Godbey as the honorable mention”
The judges were:
John Jude Palencar, Justin Gerard, Matt Stewart, Arnie Fenner, Gregory Manchess, Donato Giancola, Eric Fortune, Don Dos Santos, Greg Hildebrandt, Jesper Ejsing, Petar Meseldzija and John Howe.
No pressure, right?
Congratulations to Craig for the well-deserved win, and to the other finalists! A sincere thanks to Jon Schindehette and all of the judges for a huge effort in making this happen – I can hardly express how motivating it is to have their vote of approval for my work, as well as the insightful and helpful critique that was offered during the painting process.
I’m going to put together a post about painting my submission, and try to get that up in a day or so… when my head stops spinning…
The Art Order “Eowyn and the Nazgul” Challenge Final Judging
View my portfolio at: Pixelhuset
“Éowyn and the Nazgûl” Final Lineup Posted
The final submissions for the “Éowyn and the Nazgûl” art challenge have been posted over at The Art Order – all 160 of them! I don’t envy the judges such a difficult task. The quality of work is very high, and there’s just so much of it.
It will be very exciting to see what the judges’ reactions to the pieces are. All are giants in the field of illustration, and several are undeniable Tolkien experts in their own right. That’s daunting in itself.
Greg Hildebrandt’s work with his brother Tim was a major inspiration to me when I was a fledgling artist in the 70′s, and the 1977 Ballantine Books Tolkien calendar was one of my bibles at the time. It’s surreal to me that he will now be looking at my Tolkien art, nearly 40 years later. I hope I managed to learn something in the interim…
No matter how the judging goes, this challenge has already been a huge personal success for me, and I am heading into the summer on a real art high. Best of luck to everyone, and thanks to The Art Order and all the judges for taking the time to sponsor such a inspiring and galvanising event!
Here is my final submission. Special thanks to Annica and Rasmus Strand for modeling help and the loan of chainmail, respectively.
Open croquis 110510
I had a nice sketch come out of the latest open life-drawing session at Konstnärshuset on Tuesday. I can really feel the difference that attending these sessions weekly has made. If you have the means, I highly recommend going to something like this.
Here is my favorite of the evening, from a five-minute pose:
I switched from the black Copic Brush-M pen I have been using to a “Jajayo” YY101 brush pen. I had put off using this pen after I picked up a handful at Jordi Konstnärshandel, because I thought it looked a little cheap and possibly gimmicky, but that’s my loss – it’s amazing! It has a much more brushlike feel than the Copic (which is a good pen), and one can easily get all sorts of strokes and textures out of it. I found myself using it for fine lines as well as the heavier areas. One can apparently also dip it in some water for more varied effects. It’s really a pleasure to use.
