Valentine Evolution Gif

Fellow artist, friend and all around awesome guy, Ben Thompson (not to be confused with the author of the same name), saved me the horror of having to conjure anything too deep to say today (and saved you from having to read it) by being generous enough to generate an animated gif of Valentine.  Unsolicited, Ben sent along the fruit of his efforts via electronic mail just moments after I'd first mentioned the idea, yesterday. Were I a wealthy man, I'd provide Ben with some recompense for his efforts.  A small yacht, perhaps.  As I am not a wealthy man, I can only give him my profuse thanks and offer to buy him a drink the next time we meet, which I'm hoping isn't too far down the road.

Anyway, without further ado, here's the gif:

So, there you go.  Thanks again, Ben!

Valentine Final

Here's the final image.  It took a while to dry, almost a full day to scan, retouch, and color correct, and at the moment seems like it took forever to complete.  But, it's done, and I'm well into the next couple jobs I have due.  This painting will be one of several pieces making their debut at Spectrum Live in May, and will hopefully help fill the walls nicely.  Hopefully.

So, as usual it's oil on paper on hardboard.  It measures 16" x 20" and palette-wise is one of the lighter pieces I've worked on in quite some time.  Can't exactly say that about its tone, though.

What would be cool is if I went back and created an animated gif of the painting coming together.  Yeah — all twelve steps in one image.  That would be sweet.  But right now that's just not going to happen.  I've got too much on my plate.  Instead, you'll just have to flip through the dozen previous posts really quickly and pretend.  Sorry.

You know, not having this piece to talk about will be a bit of a letdown now.  I'm going to have to dig a bit deeper than I've had to the last couple weeks to provide content.  Hopefully whatever ends up filling the void will be worthwhile content, but who's to say?

Anyway, I should get back to work.  I've still got 9 out of 11 pieces to go, all due at the end of the month, and as much as I'd like them to, they won't finish themselves... which is why I need a helper monkey.  Unfortunately, said monkey would probably just throw stuff around and make a mess.  I doubt a whole lot would actually get done as the monkey would obviously be hurling things about while I chased after it, cleaning up as I went.  No painting or drawing getting done there.  So I guess a helper monkey is a bad idea.  At the very least, it's certain that I'd have virtually no time to babble on like this.  I mean, even if it worked out just think how long it would take to train the monkey.  I'm sure it would come partially trained, but I'd have to teach it the nuances of how I work, and such.  Even were the monkey a patient one, I'm sure I'd stretch that patience to its very limits (as I often due with humans) and I'm pretty sure that that would still end with me wiping the walls and scrubbing the carpet.  So yeah.  I need to just accept the helper monkey thing as being ill advised and move forward with getting the work done, myself.

Right.  On with it then.

Valentine: Day 12

A dozen days into the festivities, I found myself at the very end.  My major decisions had all been made and it was time to cover what ground remained.  The laundry list looked like this:

1. The birds.  They were just vaguely blocked in and needed to be finalized.
2. The background.  I needed to decide on the intensity of those colors once and for all.
3. The weeds.  One more pass to solidify them.
4. The sword.  It needed another look in order to make sure I didn't lose the edge against the busyness of the worm.

One by one, I checked the items off.

I have an annoying habit of actually resting my hand on the painting's surface from time to time.  When I work on canvas, I do this rarely as the give of the fabric reminds me not to, but the firm surface of paper on hardboard allows my often absent mind to have its way.  I know that maul sticks exist for this purpose, and on larger pieces I use one, but I've always found them to be too unwieldy for smaller work.  So, I've kind of just accepted that it's going to happen, and all I can do is mitigate the damage done.  In order to do this, and because I'm left-handed, I often work from right to left whenever possible.  And so, the birds were completed in keeping with that as you can see in the progress shot below.

I continued in this fashion until I reached the sword.  At that point, I went ahead and dealt with the blade as necessary then returned to painting the birds.  In order to break up the monotony, of painting bird after bird, I did some more work on the weeds.  Once I'd managed to burn through that, I dutifully went back to painting birds until there were none left to paint.

At this point, I walked away from the piece.  I needed a bit of a breather and wanted to train my eyes on something else for a little while in order to come back to the painting with a fresher eye.  I watched a bit of television while doing thumbnail sketches for another job and pretended Valentine didn't exist for a stretch.  When I finally came back to the painting, I looked it over and quickly decided to gamble a bit with the sky color and boost its vibrancy.  I went with a glaze that consisted primarily of Indian Yellow and Magenta, with the thinking that if I didn't like it I could simply wipe it off.  Turns out I liked it, so it got to stay.

I photographed the piece, and emailed it to my cabal of illustrators to get their impressions.  I had the luxury of one more day and wanted their feedback.  I already had Amy's.  She felt the ill-advised bird in the upper left hand corner was... well, ill-advised.  You'll note when seeing the final that it is no longer there.  Happily, the other critiques came quickly thereafter and were either minor enough to address or ignore as necessary.  I agreed with all of the nits my friends chose to pick but only had time to address a few of them effectively given the issues of drying and the proximity of the deadline.  That's when I wrote yesterday's post.  And while the fifteen minutes of work I suggested it would take to complete the painting turned out to take a half hour, it was still completed and Valentine currently drying quietly in the corner.

As soon as the piece is scanned, color corrected, etc., I'll have it up here.  In the meantime, I'm going to get back to my scribbling.

Valentine: Days 10 and 11

Three days of silence.  Days, believe it or not, that were pretty full of work.  Hence the silence.  One can always tell how under the gun I am by how communicative I happen to be, and how unshaven I've become.  The closer to the end of a job, the more slovenly my appearance becomes.  An obsession with completing the job begins to well up within me, and a chant begins inside my head that has been known to escape my lips: I can't wait until this job is done.

Mind you, it's not the kind of obsession I grew up around — my mother, a consummate cleaner and champion of order, used to follow me around with the vacuum cleaner, and was more than ready to wipe down every doorknob and light switch I touched in my travels.  She could not rest until everything was cleaned to her satisfaction.  As there were three children in the house, as well as three cats, and a dog who occasionally found himself inside (much to his chagrin), my mother did not rest often.

No, it's not an all consuming obsession.  I suppose it's more of a mild preoccupation that repeatedly bubbles up to the surface.  With the end of the job in sight, a sense that it's time to move on takes hold and quickly evolves into anticipation for the next project.

And so, over the weekend, I toiled away at the piece in an effort to put it to bed.  Though I wasn't completely successful, I got it to within easy striking distance and am now but fifteen minute's worth of work from it's completion.

Day 10 found me tightening the worm a bit more, while darkening the overall value and killing the blue of the maw a bit.  I did another pass on the background and did some more work on the snow being plowed.  I also began to flip-flop on whether or not I wanted to keep the edge of the snowbank Valentine is leaning into all the way to the edge of the painting.  Day 9's post shows the edge disappearing, and I brought it back on Day 10.  I ended up thinking it was better on Day 9.

Day 10 wrapped up with me realizing that I had once again avoided making some major decisions.  How much of the worm's interior structure should I show?  How detailed should the worm's surface be?  The best way to answer these things was to fuss around with the piece in Photoshop.  I decided to take that task on the next morning.

Day 11 began with me sitting down at the computer to do some digital painting.  As I was about to plug in my tablet, I received an email from another illustrator about the piece.  Attached to the email was a digital paint over he'd done that addressed the very issues I was about to tackle.

Now, over the years, I have been reticent to show my work to my peers in progress or even to get crits from them after the fact.  I drifted in and out of several small clutches of illustrators with whom I shared my work, and always felt an unease about it.  I think the root of the problem was self-esteem related.  While I was brutally honest during critiques in college, and could take as good as I gave, there was a security blanket there in that it was okay to fail.  There were no real repercussions to falling short at something.  You just did better the next time.

After becoming a professional, I became more guarded.  For whatever reason, failure was something I began to fear.  I didn't like the idea that the lesser pieces were out there for all to see, and the last thing I wanted was to have one of my peers point them out to me.  In retrospect, I can see how I got to that thinking, but the fallacy of it is pretty obvious.  While there are some out there who will gloat about the work that came up short, for the most part my fellow illustrators were more than willing to help me.  And so, over the last year things have changed.  I have found a group of folks who I respect and trust and have somehow managed to keep pretty tight with them.  There was never some dramatic moment where we sat down around a table writing up bylaws and making formal declarations.  We just started consulting one another.  I'm not sure if it's made my work better or not but it's a pretty awesome security blanket, and the fact that one of them took it upon themselves to do a digital paint over on the Valentine piece for my benefit makes it clear how fortunate I am.

Paint over in hand, I began to systematically finish the painting.  I added the vaguest indication of the worm's throat, began to give form to the worm's skin, and added some saliva for good measure.  I made another pass on the sword, threw in some additional rocks, and finally started painting in the weeds poking through the snow.  The plowed snow, too, got another pass, all of the final steps became clear.  I just needed to commit and do them.

A note about the photographs.  Despite my attempts to color correct them, they've consistently skewed the painting's palette.  The blues all appear much grayer than in real life.  Part of this is to do with the light in the room, and part of this is to do with how I've got the camera set.  I suspect that once the piece is scanned it will be a bit of a surprise to some of you.  Or not.

I think I've got one more post left about the process, and then should have the finished piece for you all shortly thereafter.  In the meantime, I'm going to put the last 15 minutes into this thing, then get on to the next project.

Valentine: Day 9

The second maquette I built for the worm was less elaborate.  The first one was a thing of beauty.  Oh, you should have seen it.  Articulated teeth, nice texture.  It was almost perfect.  But then it got crushed before I could photograph it.  Brings a tear to my eye.  The second?  Well, it's nothing special.  It was quicker and dirtier, and done in frustration.  Nevertheless, it had all the things necessary for me to move forward on the worm with more confidence.  Let's take a look, shall we?

The worm's design is based on the drawings inside the comic.  If you want to take a look at those, I highly recommend you flip through the comic (the worm is probably best seen in #5).  There are a couple really nice drawings from several different angles and I did my best to be in keeping with that design.  I then placed it in the same location around the same time of day as the reference of me in costume, and got about the same light as a result.

While I agree it's kind of an artistic travesty, the maquette does help inform me of where light falls.  I know how much light gets to the right side of the jaw.  I know how much light the underside of the upper lip gets.  I even get an idea of how much light passes down the back of the throat.  For my purposes, the planes are fairly well defined, and I have an idea of the structure and shapes I need to start bringing into the painting.

Now, maquettes are something I spoke briefly about in a series of posts I wrote a while back about reference.  I even included a picture of a few others I've sculpted.  They're not always brilliant, they're not always beautiful, and they're almost always supplemented with photo reference.  While this seems like a lot to wrap your head around, to me it's always better to have too much information than not enough.  You can always ignore what you don't need.

For the most part, my maquettes are usually constructed using Sculpy, paper, cardboard, and tape.  Sometimes a little hot glue if I'm feeling saucy.  Rare is it that I end up baking the maquettes to harden them, as I prefer to be able to scrap them and build new ones as necessary.  Some I've kept over the years.  Others I immediately flattened upon the jobs completion.  But whatever their lifespan, I've found them to be really useful for certain things.  Sometimes they're good for architecture, sometimes for bizarre creatures, and sometimes they're good for really nailing a character's likeness (something that is particularly useful if you have to depict said character more than once).  The point is, even a weak sculpture like this worm, lit properly, provides more information than nothing, and it can really help the believability of a piece, as well as the illusion of three-dimensionality.

So, worm maquette built, lit and photographed, I proceeded to take on the biggest blank space in the piece.  Finally, structure and form were added to the worm.  It's only a first pass, but it's finally taking shape.  There are certainly concerns.  I don't buy the blue of the worm's shadows, for example.  I don't buy its value structure.  I'm also thinking I need to skew the worm's angle more than I have.  It feels like it's gotten more upright.  Still, the addition of real structure to the piece is beginning to give it a more finished feel.

Anyway, it's about time for me to climb back into the old painting chair and commence the day's work.  With a little luck, the worm will progress nicely, and I'll be able to push a few other things further along.  Perhaps I'll begin throwing in the weeds sticking out of the snow in the foreground or some such.  We shall see.

Valentine: Day 8

Another day, another pass over the piece.  Once more, I've gone back into the background, I've done another pass over the figure and fiddled with some details, I've blocked the sword in and begun to add some rocks in the foreground, and, I've gone ahead and made the correction suggested by Daarken, which I mentioned yesterday.

The change to the sword arm was a bit tricky.  As soon as I added a more solidified blade, and that line cut across the arm so sharply, the problem called attention to itself immediately.  I pushed the forearm this way and that in order to keep the upper arm from feeling too long.  I'd get it to the point where it felt about right, only to realize that I'd made the upper arm too short, then I'd revisit it only to over correct and make it feel too long again.  Eventually, I think I managed it (though I'm sure Daarken will speak up if he disagrees).

For some reason, I decided on pine tree silhouettes in the background.  I have since rejected this idea as I think leafless deciduous trees are clearly the way to go as they are far more stark and moody.  It doesn't hurt that it's also in keeping with what is depicted within the story itself.  So, those will need to change.

Still present is the color in the sky.  In fact, I've added to it and I think I'm warming to its presence, but I still feel that the worm may impact the final decision.  Speaking of the worm, the mushy, complete lack of definition has now reached critical mass.  The maquette needs to be completed (for the second time — the first one having been crushed by the weight of the board it was stuck to after falling off the table), and photographed.

Leaving such a large element of the composition so undefined for so long is something I don't recommend and is probably a mistake on my part.  Waiting to paint until I'd gathered ALL of my necessary reference would definitely have cut down on the painting time and would have been far more efficient.  Typically, I would have done a lot more preparation on the front end, and I really have no excuse or explanation as to why I've dealt with this painting in such a piecemeal way.  The only upside seems to be that I have more steps and thus more blog posts to show for it.  To be sure, with 11 paintings due over the next five weeks, my efficiency is about to skyrocket.

Despite being really close to completion, I've noticed a detail on the figure that I will need to correct: the bands on the portion of the fur-lined jacket to our right should not be stretched taught, but rather be flapping freely as they are what is secured around the buttons in order to close the jacket.  A very minor thing — especially given the bigger problems I'm facing with the structureless background worm — but something I can easily correct and will do so.

To be sure, the worm is the key to moving forward, and that is what I will concentrate on.  The sword and the ravens need another pass, which likely won't happen until the worm is done.  The more distant background elements need another pass as well, but again — worm first!  Outside of that, a few foreground elements remain to be added, the snow being plowed needs some additional definition, and then I get to do one of my favorite parts of any painting: push and pull.  Push elements back as necessary with a glaze or two; pull elements forward by increasing contrast, popping highlights, etc.  These are the finishing touches, and they'll be here before I know it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  First: the worm.

Valentine: Day 7

Chiseling away at the uniform has been pretty interesting and a bit time consuming, but it's finally coming to a close.  Since I started working in the fantasy genre, I've seen all manor of uniforms and outfits represented in the various worlds I've gotten to play in, and it's pretty rare that they are more outlandish than some of those actually worn by real people throughout history.  Truth be told, this particular uniform is pretty tame.  While there's a lot going on in it, there's still some that I've not included.  Take the hat for example, which is tall, resembles a bucket with a brim, and features a fair bit of ornamentation, a puffball, and a very tall plume.  The uniform feels on some level like it would be quite at home in many fantasy worlds out there.  It's familiar, yet somehow alien.  At the very least, it's a far cry from anything we see today... Well, anything we see today outside of Fashion Week.

I can't say that I'm too upset that the hat's inclusion wasn't requested, as the challenge of pulling it off might be beyond my skills.  But hats are hard in general.  Unless it's a fedora.  Everyone looks cool in a fedora.  Someone really ought to bring those back...

Okay, back to the painting.

I've made some clear progress on the uniform, done some tweaks on the face and head as per the author's notes, blocked in the hands, and started figuring out the sword.  Also new to the scene are the ravens, and believe it or not I've done another quick pass on the background.

The color in the far background is something I added for the heck of it.  I wanted to see if it would work, and if it added anything to the piece.  It was inspired by the sky I saw one morning last week as I drove my wife to the train station.  There was a shocking slash of pink that was extremely finite and graphic due to a storm front passing over.  I'm still not completely sold on it in the painting, but I don't think it's a bad way to go.  I like the color it adds to the piece, but I'm a little afraid that it kills the mood.  I'll toy with it a bit more, but will likely not make up my mind until the worm is closer to completion.

Adding things to a piece or subtracting them is something I'll often do.  I like experimenting a bit as i go.  The key to doing this successfully is to make sure that the elements being toyed with serve the piece as a whole and do not cause the piece to veer too far from the sketch approved by the client.  It's also extremely important to not be too married to the experimentation.  While these whims may pay off big, they can just as easily blow up in my face, and I have to be honest with myself about that.  For, just as a surgeon may have to amputate a leg to save a person, I might be forced to paint over or wipe away those elements I've been fiddling with.

In the case of this painting, I am tossing color around primarily to keep the piece from feeling to bland.  Despite all the color in the snow, the uniform, and what will eventually be the worm, there's a part of my brain that worries that the piece as a whole is getting too dull.  Personally, I like extremely limited color palettes, and were there no commercial aspect to this piece my instincts would drive it to a point that would make Saving Private Ryan's palette look like that of the Wizard of Oz.  While there are times I get to let those instincts run wild, a book cover is not really the appropriate place for that.  A series of gray and brown smears doesn't exactly jump off the shelf, and is hardly appropriate for Valentine.  And so, I'll be experimenting with the piece on some level until the very end.  All the while, I'll be striving to achieve a point where the color and tonal aspects of the piece are in balance with the overall intended mood, and are in keeping with the book itself and the client's wishes.

Yesterday, Daarken was nice enough to give me a quick crit on the image.  He pointed something out that I happened to be working on at the time, which is that the upper part of the sword arm feels a bit long.  What you should see is how I've changed things.  But, you won't until tomorrow.  As I write this, I'm a day ahead of what I'm posting.  Due to the likelihood that I will get nothing accomplished tomorrow, I figured I'd pad the posts by a day so as to maintain a regular schedule of things.  Come Friday, I will be in sync with my actual progress.

Tomorrow, I'll be giving another update on the piece and will be adding my thoughts and any other bits of cheese as necessary.  Friday, I'll chat a bit about maquettes and show you the one I did for this piece.  It's really not special, I assure you, but it's part of the process so I guess it's worth mentioning.  Hopefully you will see the payoff for making the maquette, and with a little luck, the piece will quickly come to a close over the weekend (though it's likely I'll skip the weekend posts so as to give myself some extra time to do things like my taxes and such).

For now, I'm off to paint.