Ideas Made of Light

Posts Tagged ‘storytelling’

#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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#36: The Archer of the Rose by Donato Giancola

As I recently said on Facebook, “How have I not been aware of Donato Giancola before now?” This one stopped me as I was going through Spectrum 16, and I’ve kept coming back to it. The Archer of the Rose is the cover for Kathleen Bryan’s The Last Paladin by Tor books. We’ll look at the picture’s development and its use as a cover. Giancola likes to start with strong abstract compositions as the base and then work toward strong realism. We’ll look at the abstract patterns he uses and how they guide the eye, and we’ll also look at some of his finely detailed rendering. Finally, we’ll look at the thought and research that went into the narrative and characterization. For example, Persian manuscript covers inspired the patterns on the shields, yet the armor styles are more western European. What does this tell us about the events in the scene, and how does it contribute to mood and theme?

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#22: Genies in the Golden Age

These days we share a defined idea of what a genie looks like. The visual language is fairly set. During the golden age of American illustration though they didn’t necessarily have those preconceptions. Below we’ll look at how Will and Frances Brundage, RenĂ© Bull, Edmund Dulac, Charles Folkard, H.J. Ford, and Maxfield Parrish conceived of and presented the same scene from the Arabian Nights.

All they really had to work with was the text of the stories, and possibly the knowledge that according to Islam God created genies (djinn) from fire as he similarly created humans from the clay of the earth.

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#19: I Have Been Reserved for This, by Howard Pyle

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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#17: Tuesday, by David Wiesner

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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#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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#2: The Last Castle, by James Jean

This is the cover for the issue of Fables titled “The Last Castle,” a prestige issue that tells the story of Boy Blue’s last stand against the forces of the Adversary as the fables were driven out of the Homelands. Fables is a great comic that uses characters from classic fairy tales. Shown here are Boy Blue (grown up from the Little Boy Blue nursery rhyme) and Red Riding Hood on the horse. The goblins are the army of the Adversary.

I picked this image partly because it’s a nice example of a conceptual illustration. It’s not showing just one specific scene but rather combines three scenes to give an overall sense of story. That’s a technique I’d like to work on and improve.

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