Hello again. I’m using this blog primarily as a way to supplement my teaching. So this time I’ll post just a few of my own influences here, and then talk a bit about how I incorporated one into a personal piece. I’ll also mention a couple of Painter related technical things not covered in the previous lengthy tutorial.
Today, the Internet makes researching fast and easy. There are dozens of sites where artists blog about influences as well as their own work. Current students are lucky to have such a wealth of riches at their disposal, although some don’t take enough advantage and do research as often or as well as they should. Successful artists know you have to look beyond the limitations of your own vision and ability.
Of course you also need to guard against just stealing directly – this is a big temptation that the huge number of images instantly available now can make all too easy. Digital artists are especially vulnerable to “sampling” the work of others without proper attribution or really making it their own in a fair and legal way. Students are often confused about what’s right and wrong. Even the law is unclear and ever changing regarding these things. Ultimately I think you have to look to your own conscience.
It is clear why I love monsters and cartoons – I grew up watching them on television and reading monster magazines and comics. They were the pop-culture soup I was born in. Wanting to capture these things in the days before home video led me to drawing and making models. Most kids do this, but a few of us, for better or worse, stick with it.
When I went to art school, I initially felt ashamed of my juvenile interests and pursued more “realistic” imagery. I have no regrets, because the training made me much better technically. But eventually I realized that you have to do what you love as an artist to really grow. So even though I’ve done lots of styles and subjects as a commercial illustrator, as I’ve gotten older I indulge my youthful interests whenever I can.
Just as today, lots of merchandise was sold to go with the television content of my youth, including books, many of them from Western Publishing in Racine, Wisconsin. They held licenses for many cartoon characters and published the Golden Books.
I loved Woody Woodpecker and Huckleberry Hound in particular. The EASY WAY TO DRAW BOOK was a big influence on me as I tried to make my own comic books out of folded up notebook paper.
Aurora Plastics put out a line of model kits based on Universal Pictures monster characters that were appearing on TV in the late 50’s and early 60’s. I loved these kits, and the box art in particular was wonderfully vivid. Imagine my delight when years later I learned that the artist who painted these, James Bama, went to school in New York with my college illustration professor.
When I was in high school, my aunt, an elementary art teacher, gave me an old college book of hers, 40 ILLUSTRATORS AND HOW THEY WORK, published in 1946. In it was the work of Boris Artzybasheff, one of the greatest “anthropormorphizers” of all time. I loved his carefully rendered bizarre characters. In graduate school I got to see many of his beautifully painted gouache originals.
It would be years later in art school that I actually learned many of these artist’s names by asking and reading. As I said, today it’s pretty easy to look these folks up. One book I had for years was this HUCKLEBERRY HOUND GIANT STORY BOOK. A little internet search revealed another surprise - the artists who did this, uncredited in the edition I have, were the same pair that did the EASY WAY book, Frank McSavage and Norm McGary.
As it turns out, these guys, as well as several others who often worked for Western such as Hawley Pratt, also worked in the animation business, so they were naturals at translating the flatter animated cartoon style into more rendered, dimensional versions for these books, especially for the covers. I loved them then, and I love them now!
For this latest monster, I was again trying to make a scene from my own cartoon. This one was a rejected sketch for a commercial job, but I liked the design and decided to have him walking a dog late at night, something I sometimes do. As I was playing around with a background environment to put him in, I remembered a favorite Huckleberry Hound cartoon with a giant monster wiener and mad scientist. This one was depicted in the story book, so I got my old copy out and found this image, probably drawn by McSavage.
I clearly “borrowed” it for my setting. (Also notice the similarity of the lightning to the electricity on the Bama BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN box.) I just sketched it in directly in Painter behind my scanned creature sketch until I had a layout I liked. Is this plagiarism? I like to think of it as a tribute. For one thing, I’m not trying to hide the source. For another, I did it for fun, not profit. I just wanted to make my own little story set in a world I fondly remember from my childhood.
Obviously my drawing style is derived from all these great cartoonists of the past. Hundreds of artists working today can say the same – other bloggers around my age mention the EASY WAY TO DRAW BOOK as an influence. All of us should have influences and heroes, but hopefully we’ll be able to add our own touches as we learn and grow.
I was also influenced by the painting style of the rendered Western covers. I still worked basically the same way as I always do, but specifically in the sky, I went for a more stroke- oriented approach and tried to get a slightly more “painterly” look instead of the airbrushed, uniform one on the previous piece. I find Painter did a pretty good job of getting this look, a kind of direct gouache style that uses dry-brush and textures to give richness to the cartoon form.
After I had my sketch, I began as always by working back to front, that is putting in the environment first. One different brush category I used here was the Digital Watercolor. This is another of my favorite Painter brushes – I like it better than the “regular” Watercolor brush because it’s faster. I also like the fact that it stays “wet” until you dry it, and the diffusion effect option that makes soft organic edges on strokes.
I have my own custom Variant that I made by “capturing” a brush tip. This is an easy way to make a shaped dab – one thing I don’t like about a lot of the Digital Watercolor Variants are their overly mechanical round tips. So I just drew a more organic shape and used the CAPTURE DAB command from the menu on the Brush Selector bar. The variant I started with was Diffuse Water. Using the SAVE VARIANT command from the same palette, I renamed my new one DIFFUSE WATER CAPTURED. The result is a more random, textured looking stroke.
I used this in the sky, as well as some of the Acrylic variants for linear strokes.
I continued along painting the various elements on their own layers, such as the castle and tree.
At one point, I tried making a custom “leaf brush” using the capture method, but I found the results too repetitive for the look I was after here – sometimes you have to edit yourself. Remember, often “it’s not what it does, it’s what it UNDOES”.
I used lots of different textures as I created the various objects, always trying to get that “fresh” look that the Western covers had – if something started to look over worked, I just deleted it and took another shot at it. Here’s a detail from another Golden Book cover, LIPPY THE LION by Pratt and McGary. Pratt probably drew this and McGary painted it. You can see the use of dry-brush texture.
One thing I did differently from their style was try to put more light and shadow into my piece – this is my favorite thing to do as an artist, along with creating mood through color. I wanted this to be very dark and atmospheric, so I went with a much cooler color scheme than in the telephone-pole piece.
Here the work is nearing completion, but as you can see it’s still lighter and lacking cast shadows. I love the way Artzybasheff rendered forms with a great sense of volume, and I tried to do that here. As I mentioned before, I use GEL layers to build up transparent values in a kind of glazing technique to bring the work to its final form.
The finished piece - I call it MIDNIGHT CONSTITUTIONAL.
I hope someone finds these tips useful, and I’ll post again when I think I have something worthwhile to share.