Ideas Made of Light

Posts Tagged ‘saturation’

#39: Flights of Fancy by James Gurney

Before I say anything else, if you’re an artist you should go buy both of James Gurney’s books about painting. If you like the approach this blog takes to analyzing paintings, you’ll love Gurney’s approach in these books. The one this painting is from is Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter, and his first one is Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist. (As a former technical writer I also like the presentation – each topic is a 2-page spread with a summary up-front, clear text, and a number of illustrations.) OK, plug over, but they’ve both helped me out tremendously.

This analysis is all about contrast. Not just contrast between values, but all sorts of contrast. If you want to create a focus – an area of interest – you need to set up some sort of pattern and then selectively break it. The contrast between the rest of the pattern and the special part draws the attention. That contrast can be values, but in this painting we’ll also look at contrast in lines of direction, saturation, and hue. In his book, Gurney uses this painting to illustrate several points about lighting conditions at dawn or dusk. The first thing that jumped out at me, though, was contrast in the direction of the edges.

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#37: Tanar of Pellucidar by Frank Frazetta

I’ve been wanting to do a Frank Frazetta analysis for quite a while, and finally it’s time. He was amazingly fast and produced many, many paintings. I thought about doing the iconic Death Dealer image, but picked this one instead because of its simplicity. I’ve been trying to learn more about silhouettes and values against a background, and this image makes good use of both concepts.

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#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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#32: Snake Women by Boris Vallejo

When I decided to do a Vallejo picture here I asked my Facebook friends list what kind of cheese they thought best represented his art. Answers were generally high-end or gourmet: Raclette, Manchego, Pont-l’Évêque, Gouda. Someone threw out “processed cheese food,” but I think I’d have to go with Havarti. I like Havarti. And the cheese enthusiast in me likes Vallejo. He’s the first artist I learned to identify based on style alone.

Unfortunately I can’t find a link, but I once saw a cartoon with a woman in a +5 chain mail bikini. She had half a dozen arrows stuck in the chinks on her bosom, and she was saying how glad she was she wore her armor. (I think it was in a Dragon magazine.) Anyway, Vallejo epitomizes that barely-there style of fantasy clothing. It failed in providing warmth or protection, but it would allow publishers to put naked babes and guys on book covers without being sued. I also think it dovetailed with Vallejo’s love of painting the ideal human form. This painting, Snake Women, is from his book Mirage. Here he dispenses with the chain mail bikini level entirely to create fantasy erotica.

Note: The image is Not Safe For Work.

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#31: The Problem We All Live With by Norman Rockwell

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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#29: THD by Ian Miller

Last week I told how Ian Miller pointed me to Albrecht Dürer. He had a table at the first Illuxcon and had some of his fantastic ink drawings on display. It was great to be able to get up close to see just what was going on, because unlike most comics inking you couldn’t really see the individual lines until you got up close. For example, I remember looking at Castles for quite a while.

I’d like to thank him for providing a high resolution version of THD for the analysis. I first saw it on his web site, and he was kind enough to send a version I could use to take detail images. THD is an ink drawing, but then he colored it, I’m guessing with watercolor. I’ll go into the color choices and linework, but I’ll also touch on the composition, concept, and ways he guides our eyes through the picture.

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#23: Prince, by Brian Bolland

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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#14: Strangers in Paradise #67, by Terry Moore

Strangers In Paradise is a long-running series, now complete, by Terry Moore. His artwork is among my favorite in comics, so it’s past time that that I get to one of his pieces. (I almost chose one of his Art Nouveau covers, but I picked this one instead since I did an analysis of Mucha so recently.)

Terry Moore did the inks, with colors by Brian Miller.

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#8: Starstruck, by Michael Wm. Kaluta and Lee Moyer

This is a page from an upcoming issue of Starstruck. There’s a lot of history to this story – see the Starstruck Wikipedia entry for more. Michael Kaluta did the pencils and inks. What I’m going to focus on here, though, is the recent color work by Lee Moyer.

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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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