“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.
The iPad Photo Roll vs. Your Digital Art
I did some testing this weekend to confirm something I’d long suspected: exporting digital art from an iPad painting app to the iPad’s built-in Photos app introduces an unacceptable degradation in quality.
In general, I find that the artwork I create on my iPad 1 using the Brushes app doesn’t look as good when I transfer it over to my Macbook Pro. When a painting is in progress, and I am sending over test images, I general just send a copy to the iPad’s Photo roll, and then use Dropbox to transfer that to my laptop. I find the images to look somewhat duller and flatter, although my laptop is barely 2-months old.
My first suspicion was the Photo roll, and I was right.
I can usually correct the dullness somewhat by bumping up the saturation a bit in Photoshop, but I also began to notice artifacts in the art when I examined it closely (I spend a lot of time zoomed in tight on my paintings, so I get a good sense of how an area should look). My first suspicion was the Photo roll, and I was right.
I have some issues with the Photo roll in general, and the near-total lack of control involved, but I’ve always assumed that the built-in iPad apps would tend to become more robust as time went by, so I try not to let it annoy me. I think that the Photo roll largely does what it was intended to do – which isn’t much. Unfortunately, many developers of painting apps are using it as their sole conduit for image export, thereby adding the shortcomings of the Photo roll to their own app.
Steve Sprang did something different with Brushes, adding a desktop component called the Brushes Viewer. Due to the way Brushes records all actions used to create an image, Brushes Viewer can take the Actions file from the iPad and generate up to a 6x TIFF version of the artwork, as well as Quicktime movies of the entire process at various rates of speed. It’s an incredibly powerful tool, especially if an artist plans to take their iPad artwork to print, as I sometimes do. The downside for Sprang is that he doesn’t yet have a Windows component (there’s talk of making it browser-based to ameliorate this).
I used Brushes Viewer on my Mac to recreate a painting I have in progress as a 1x TIFF (1024×768), and matched that to the same image exported to the iPad Photo roll as a JPEG (1024×768). Both images are zoomed in to 265% in Photoshop. Upon viewing the image below at full size, one can clearly see that the Photo roll (on the left) is introducing some truly nasty artifacts.
(It also clearly shows that I need to fix her chin, but that’s beside the point right now)
Obviously, JPEGs are compressed by nature and TIFF is the right choice of the two for quality – but how many apps give one that choice? There is more than one way to get acceptable output (like the Photoshop integration of Sketchbook Pro), but the Photo roll is simply too weak for the task at present – and in fact, it’s actively detrimental to your artwork.
To me, the question of whether or not the iPad is a valid platform for art production is long moot – I’ve been happily using it as my main production tool for nearly a year now. Whenever I take a look at a new painting app for the iPad, I check to see how images are exported, and I’m always disappointed if I read that the Photo roll is the only conduit out of the app. I’m using my iPad professionally, and the Photo roll is not currently giving professional-level results.
Digital artists (and app developers!) should be aware of this situation and bear it firmly in mind when choosing the tools and methods to achieve the highest quality artwork output from our iPads.
“Éowyn and the Nazgûl” Art Order Challenge
Petar Meseldžija’s dramatic new painting “Éowyn and the Lord of the Nazgûl” caused a lot of excitement on the Muddy Colors collaborative blog a few weeks back, and that posting led to a retrospective of different depictions of the famous scene by a slew of famous artists. The Art Order was inspired to come up with an open challenge to depict the famous scene from Tolkien, and the Muddy Colors folks are going to participate with critiques, judging and prizes.
I decided to create a submission for the challenge, and started in with my usual researching and pondering. Surprisingly, I’ve ended up with not just one, but three paintings on the go. I’ll likely enter just one, but it’s been very interesting and rewarding to come at the same brief in a variety of ways.
I’ll post more thoughts on all of this, but for now here is a peek at the latest work in progress for my main submission candidate, approximately 70% complete:
Open croquis 110329
I ended up with a few nice sketches from the weekly life drawing croquis at Konstnärshuset. I was somewhat nonplussed at the start because for some reason the model decided to pose partially clothed, which made things a bit awkward. I was mentally trying to erase the garments, which is a hassle when one only has two minutes to draw the pose. It also changes the lines of the body, which is what I was there to practice drawing.
I go to two other weekly drawing sessions where the models are clothed, so this one has importance as the only chance to specifically draw the body itself, rather than just the poses. It’s been a great and very helpful event up to this point, so I hope they get back on track.
I bought some Copic pastel brush pens, and started experimenting with them. They react nicely with the black ink brush pen, yet on their own they are much lighter than I expected them to be. Interesting results… I plan to work with them more tonight…
Open croquis at Dansmuseet
A few of my ink sketches from the very interesting live sketch event at Stockholm’s Dance Museum, March 16th. Obviously, the models are dancers, and most poses are 1-2 minutes – at 1.5 hours, it’s a real workout!
Tools: a simple MUJI roller-tip and a Copic Brush-M ink brush on a Canson sketch block.
iOS client image post test
This is an image post test direct from the WordPress iOS client using a Brushes sketch I made on the iPad.
