Posts Tagged ‘contrast’
So I’m finally back after the hiatus. I’ve been antsy about the time off, so I’m glad to get to this one. I first ran into Charles Vess’ work in the Sandman comics and his association with Neil Gaiman (Stardust, The Blueberry Girl, etc.). I find it easy to pick out his art based on style alone, and I also think it draws heavily on golden age illustrators like Rackham and Dulac. (I just picked up a good book on Dulac, so I’ll be doing one of his soon).
Vess’ book Drawing Down the Moon is a great overview of his work. (Great production values too – the chapter division pages are really cool.) I picked The White Goddess because it’s a rare opportunity to see two finished versions of the same piece – one in color and one in black and white. What decisions does Vess make differently based on the choice of medium? We’ll look at several examples, plus we’ll check out the overall composition.
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What a difficult choice! There are a lot of great illustrations in the Dover book, and it was hard to decide which one to look at for an analysis. If you’re a fan of golden age illustration, you should definitely check this one out. I chose this one in the end for a few reasons. For one, we get a clear sense of character – to me this seems like more than just your generic old woman. She’s been through a lot. Also, Rackham gives us lots of texture and line work that is fun to get lost in. The recent analysis of Dürer was an example of highly precise, controlled linework. This drawing, though, shows linework that is loose and flowing, yet still controlled. Rackham’s picture has clearly separated foreground, midground, and background elements, and it also has an effective silhouette and composition.
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On November 14, 1960 federal marshals escorted Ruby Hall to her first day of kindergarten. She was the only black child to attend the school, and after entering the building she and her mother went to the principal’s office while the white parents entered the school and took their children out. Thereafter she was the only student in her class. You can read more about the story at her entry in Wikipedia.
Norman Rockwell painted this picture for Look magazine. Though J. C. Leyendecker did more covers for the Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell is best known for his long run with them. Their art direction and editorial guidelines constrained his work, however, and after his last painting for them in 1963 he moved in a more socially outspoken direction, and Look was buying. In this analysis I’ll go over what makes this very simple painting so powerful.
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This painting is… awesome. It’s a great example from the collection of the Museum of Bad Art. It fills me with wonder. Among other things I wonder what on earth the artist was thinking. Because I certainly can’t tell from the painting. It’s horrific. Yet… you can’t look away. Like many good pieces of art, this image poses more questions than it answers. It’s a visual train accident that spins our heads on their rubber necks. Somehow mixed metaphors seem appropriate. As its source implies, this is one bad painting, and I’ll go into why below. But you know what? I’m glad somebody made it.
That “somebody,” according to MoBA is K. Koch. The museum got it at a yard sale in 2007, and that’s all I really know about the painting itself. Well, OK, it also says that it’s oil on canvas and 2 feet by 1.5 feet. We know in our gut that it’s a bad painting the moment we see it. But why is it bad? What about it is so bad that it qualifies for the MoBA collection? Let’s see.
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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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Analysis / Modern
Tags: character, color, composition, contrast, eye guidance, golden rectangle, linework, saturation, silhouette, values
January 18, 2010
Brian Bolland was one of a wave of artists from the U.K. who crossed the pond and made a name for himself in the comics industry. He’s best known (to me) for his work on Judge Dredd, creating several iconic characters including Judge Death. I picked up his book The Art of Brian Bolland recently, and of all the great artwork in there this was the piece that jumped out at me. I’m not even a particular fan of Prince’s music, but this is just one cool portrait. It’s in a comic style, but a quite realistic and detailed one compared to most superhero rags. For this analysis I’ll focus on the composition of the portrait, the colors and values, and the linework.
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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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This illustration is for a story in McClure’s magazine in 1906 called “The Hanging of Mary Dyer.” There was an actual Mary Dyer who was an early Quaker martyr. She was executed for repeatedly returning to Massachusetts to preach Quakerism after having been banned from the colony. Pyle himself was Quaker, so the illustrations for this story likely had an extra dimension for him. Also, though it may not be apparent from the picture, this is the very act that led to Mary Dyer’s execution, so it’s a key moment of the story.
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I came across David Wiesner’s book Tuesday in my illustration class about a year ago. I loved the book and have since gotten it for a number of kids in the family, including me. It won the Caldecott award for children’s illustrated books in 1992 from the American Library Association.
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I suppose I’m dating myself, but I first saw a version of Le blanc-seing (The Blank Check) as the cover for the Styx album “The Grand Illusion” years before I read Understanding Comics. For this picture Magritte is playing with perception and the techniques we use all the time as illustrators. It’s a classic case of knowing the rules of perception well enough to know just how to break them. The two principles he plays with the most are occlusion and closure. (See the Leyendecker analysis for more on closure.)
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