Sunday 28 February 2016

The Process Behind 'Descent From Möbius Wood' #1


I thought it was about time that I looked at the process behind my first painting in the 'Seven Gates' series: 'Descent From Möbius Wood'.

Unlike the others in the series, this image came to my mind fully formed. I had seen a tree that looked like a spider emerging from the ground in a local wood and knew that it would make a great subject. I just had to wait for some fog. And a sunny morning. It took a while...

Eventually I got the photo that I needed. After that I worked on it in Photoshop, making the central tree even more sinister. You can see the differences in these two photos:

 Before

 After

I also added in the trees at the outer edges to frame the painting and draw the viewer into the centre.

 
Before 

 After

I decided on the slightly unorthodox composition of putting the main subject in the centre because I wanted the main tree to be straight in front of the viewer, as if being drawn directly toward it.



When children paint pictures of trees, the trunks tend to be brown. But when stood in a forest concentrating on the colours present within a tree, purples, greens, greys etc. can all be seen. There is actually very little brown evident. So when I was processing my photo of the forest, I tweaked the saturation to bring out these natural colours. This helped me enormously when it came to adding subtle colour washes to the trees when I started painting.


In the next stage, I drew the forest image on my illustration board but I changed the central tree yet again. I was trying to balance the tree looking sinister with it not being spotted straight away but I couldn't resist adding more spiky bits and talon-like branches. That was the aspect that realy appealed to me, as you can probably tell from my other paintings. But even now it surprises me how many people just can't see anything other than a pleasant fairy tale forest. 

Next time, I'll go into the painting process and how I created depth in the image.  

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Sunday 21 February 2016

Signatures


I often get asked the question "Have you signed it?" or more commonly, "Why haven't you signed it?". In fact, I sign all of my original paintings. It's just that I sign them on the back. My paintings aren't exactly conventional so why should the way I sign my name be conventional?

Each of my paintings take me over 250 hours of work. I spend a fair while planning each one and a lot of time painting the numerous little details. I plan compositions that will lead the viewer's eye around the painting to show all of the delights (dark delights admittedly) it contains. I use panoramas because I think that they are immersive. My main aim is to bring the viewer into another world and keep them there.

Why would I want to add something to my paintings that would immediately break the illusion and bring the viewer crashing out of it? 

The succinct answer is that I wouldn't.


Just as the director of a film puts his or her name at the start of a film, I put my signature on the back so that everyone knows the painting is by me, but as soon as the painting is turned over and viewed it can be properly enjoyed as I intended. 

With the prints of my paintings, I add the edition number and my signature to the white border on the front that surrounds the print. Keeping the signature off the painting means that the viewer will see it subliminally and only look within the painting itself, just as an author's name being at the top of every page of a book is rarely noticed. It would be an odd book if the author's name was inserted somewhere in the text itself. That's how I feel about signing on my actual paintings.

Where an artist signs a piece of work is a personal matter so I'm not saying that everyone should use my method. But this way suits me just fine. I want people to experience my paintings in the best possible way and to me the key word is 'immersion'.


What do you think about signatures? Is it a convention that should be stuck to rigidly or something that can be done differently from artist to artist

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Saturday 13 February 2016

Creativity and Limitations


Stick with me on this one because I will get around to talking about painting. Eventually.


I am becoming increasingly tired of new films, in particular overblown, overcomplicated CGI fests. I am no longer interested in watching the extras on how these films were made. The magic has gone.


Compare this to the films of one of my heroes Ray Harryhausen, Jason and the Argonauts for example. The magic is still definitely there in abundance. There are moments that can be easily missed such as when a skeleton jumps over a fallen soldier. Think about that: a stop motion model jumping. Just how did Harryhausen do it? Or what about a moment from The Valley of Gwangi when Gwangi is captured by some cowboys lassooing him. The viewer can see the rope go from the hands of the live action cowboys, across the screen and around the neck of a stop motion model, that also moves around the screen. Again, how did he do it? It's the thrill that I get when I watch a good magic show. My brain is fully engaged in trying to work it all out.


Now, they just use a computer. And a big blue screen.


The limitations placed on Harryhausen forced him to be creative to get around problems. I'll admit there is a fair bit of creativity in the use of CGI but when you have the ability to do anything, things seem to turn out a little bland or even worse...


Let's take a film example again: compare R2-D2 (in the orignal trilogy) with Jar Jar Binks. One has stacks of character despite having hardly any articulation and is very well loved. The other, well... I wish I could erase him from my memory. With a scouring pad. George Lucas moans about the limitations he was made to work under but I think that it's those exact limitations that forced him to be creative and make something brilliant. Just because you can do something George, it doesn't mean that you should.



The world of music can also be helped by limitations. Now that we can record music on to a computer rather than tapes, we have the ability to change any of the elements at any time. It is often advocated in books on the subject that musicians should set things in stone as soon as possible. For example, mix all of the drums and bass together and lock them so they can't be changed. That way problems have to be sorted by being creative with the other instruments, possibly creating something that wasn't originally planned.

And I think that's the key. Limitations force us to do things that we wouldn't normally do. They push us out of our comfort zones to create something that we would never have thought of if we'd had free rein. The results seem to be fresher, more interesting and have that indefinable magic.



With this in mind, when I paint I give myself artificial limits. For example, in the series 'The Seven Gates' I have made myself compose my images in a panoramic frame. This has caused me a fair few headaches. In 'The Insidious Whisper' I would have liked some more height so that I could show the scale of the creature better. But I think in the finished picture the scale is absolutely fine and the cramped panoramic frame forces the creature into a pose that looks sinister and creepy, in fact, "insidious". 



I've written about it before but, in the same painting, the fact that I'd already painting the background meant that when I came up with the problem of the creature's head not working in the composition, I had to radically redesign it. That mask is something that I wouldn't have created without that limitation and I'm very happy with it.

Another rule that I've stuck to is using a limited palette. I use the three primary colours, white, plus Sepia and Prussian Blue to make a black. So that's six pots of paint and for the majority of the time I only use the primaries and white. There have been many occasions when I've come across a problem where I would have loved another colour just to differentiate between two areas. But I've had to solve those problems in different ways, either by changing the drawing or adapting the tones. Again this creates something that wouldn't exist without the limitations. Another upside of using a limited palette is that an artist can becoming very familiar with mixing those colours.


My love of limitations has possibly led to me using acrylics and painting traditionally rather than painting in Photoshop or Corel Painter. The use of layers in these apps means that any element can be changed at any time. I have used them to create full paintings, but I find my perfectionist tendencies become excessive and I spend far too long tweaking every little detail. My background in mathematics probably contributes to my love of problem solving also, so I'm going to stick with paint and its limitations for the foreseeable future.

So whatever you're doing, try giving yourself limitations and get that creativity flowing. I'll leave you with a final example from films, both from director Sam Raimi: The Evil Dead and Spiderman 3. Point made? 
 

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Tuesday 9 February 2016

Slight Setback


The fourth painting in the 'Seven Gates' series is very detailed. Imagine painting the image below - albeit in a slightly twisted manner - and you'll get the idea of just how much detail. 


I worked on it for the whole of last week and by Friday night my hand was killing me. All of the joints, especially in my thumb, were feeling very sore and I was struggling to make a fist. The problem has been having my hand in a cramped position all week, performing minute movements.


After a weekend of rest my hand was feeling a lot better but when I tried to paint on Monday morning the pain came back straight away. I think it may need more rest.  


So now I'm planning the fifth painting, making my free association lists, designing a creature and going out taking reference photos. And so far it's been the trickiest one to plan, but that's a story for another time. All of this means that the next two paintings will probably be finished at the same time in about two months. It's frustrating because I was only a month off finishing the fourth although it's probably best that I protect my hand.

For anyone else suffering with a similar complaint I was signposted to a couple of great links by the blog Nature's My Friend. I'll post them here too for ease:

http://ergocise.com/wrists.html 

 
This morning, I came up with a crafty plan to alleviate my hand issue. I thought I would paint in some of the slightly larger areas of the figures with my left hand. Turns out I'm not ambidextrous and they ended up looking more like this:


Next time I'll have a look at how limitations help with creativity. See you then.

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