Ideas Made of Light

Archive for the ‘Community’ Category

#33: Seven Handed Musician by Artur Sadlos

I added Seven Handed Musician to my favorites the day it was featured as a Daily Deviation on DeviantArt.com. I’d never seen anything like it. Here’s what Sadlos has to say about it in the image’s description:

Cover for new album of some multiinstrumentalist. The idea of giant creature, ancient and multihanded with different instruments is clients idea. Ive done all in photoshop using some textures of stones and trees. Hope You like it C&C most welcome.
Best Regards
Torturr

I’m particularly impressed by the sense of scale Sadlos gets into the picture. There’s no doubt that this guy is huge, but in the wilderness setting we don’t have normal geometric cues like vanishing points to help us. We’ll look at the image’s perspective, plus its lighting, colors, textures, and overall design. I’ll also point out a probable mistake and take a guess as to how it came about.

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#30: The Steampunk Harem by Aly Fell

The website ConceptArt.org has, among other things, an activity called “Character of the Week.” In November of 2009, one of the topics was “Steampunk Harem.”

Aly Fell (aka Poshspice) is a long-time participant in the Character of the Week activities and is one of the current moderators. This is the painting he did for the activity, and in addition to capturing the brief I think it’s a fine example of the classic pinup. For this analysis, I’ll look at several things, including what makes something a pinup, composition and rhythm, and the role of details in creating a finished piece.

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#24: Mind Machine, by Andrew Jones

I came across this piece at this thread on conceptart.org, which is well worth a look. Here’s a bigger look. You can also see an even larger, slightly earlier version of this painting here.I haven’t really written about a painting that has significant abstract elements before. The closest is a comic cover by another Jones, Erik Jones’ cover for The Unknown #6. In that case he used abstract versions of gun silhouettes, bullets, and targets. They were still recognizable as those thing, though, whereas Mind Machine uses abstract shapes for layering and textures that build up form on their own – to a point.

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#21: Welcome to Lovecraft #2, by Gabriel Rodríguez

It doesn’t happen often that I buy a comic based on the strength of a cover, but Locke & Key is an example of a comic that I knew nothing about before I saw it on the shelves of my local shop. I picked it up and flipped through it on the strength of this cover. I thought it looked interesting, but put it back on the shelf. A few weeks later, though, I noticed another cover that was just surreal and slightly disturbing without being overtly horror. Just my cup of tea. I picked it up again and saw that the guy crawling out of someone’s head was literal, not just metaphor. I’ve been reading it since. I decided to do this cover because it was the first one that did the job of making me notice the series.

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#18: Hymn, by Yigit Koroglu

Yigit Koroglu, an artist from Turkey, posted this painting just a few weeks ago. (Click here for a larger version.) I’d been planning to pick something from his gallery when he posted it, and one of the first things I noticed was the way he’d used textures to really sell the realism on a fundamentally bizarre creature. There’s also nice stuff going on with depth and composition, so I’ll touch on all of that in looking at how this picture works.

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#15: The Wall, by Henning Ludvigsen

This is a personal painting by Henning Ludvigsen. You can see a larger version of it here, as well as a step-by-step of its development at his web site. For this analysis I’ll talk about several things, including composition, eye guidance, values, process, and texture. The first question to ask about it, though, is what’s going on? What is the point of the illustration? While there is certainly information about character and hints at a story, my take is that the painting is most about setting a mood and presenting a concept: that of a bleeding wall.

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#12: Tears for Joy in the Garden of Giants, by Michaël Zancan

I saw Tears for Joy in the Garden of Giants because it was a Daily Deviation here on Deviant Art on January 18, 2009. It immediately stood out from the many fantasy paintings because it didn’t focus on scantily clad women (though they’re there, sort of), nor did it have a horrible monster, nor vicious violence. On his web site, Zancan explains what he was going for this way:

In the immense diversity of emotions one can feel, I choose to extract a striking and rare one and turn it to spectacle. This emotion is a joy so immense that it makes cry tears; smiling and weeping at the same time, the widest range of behaviors concentrated in one single emotion.

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#9: The Unknown #6, Cover A, by Erik Jones

While I’m not that familiar with the comic overall, I do know that the main character, Catherine Allingham, is a detective with only a few months to live. This cover doesn’t illustrate a specific scene but instead sets a tone and a mood. Its purpose is to catch the eye (stand out from the other covers) and give us a hint of the kind of story we might find inside the pages.

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#6: England Expects, by Morgan Penn

This is a portrait of members of the Millwall Bushwackers, one of the most violent football club hooligan groups in Britain. One of their regular chants is, “No one likes us, we don’t care!” According to Penn’s web site, this portrait was exhibited at the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in England in May of 2007.

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#3, The Ogre Bully, by Adam Danger Cook

I picked this one for several reasons, one of which is that I plan to analyze artwork from around DA in addition to other sources. Though I don’t plan to only do my friends I thought I’d start with one of Adam’s because he is a friend and because he’s helped me immensely with my own work. Mainly, though, I picked this one because it’s fun and made me laugh when I first saw it (for all the right reasons).

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