More Shameless Self Promotion!

 Yes, having no promotional champagne or distribution, I've been very blessed to have gotten some much appreciated reviews!

Surprisingly, Abatu and Empusa, two mirror spirits, and Odie the bear have made some subtle endorsements for my book "Shakira: the Witch in the White Tower.  Please take this under consideration, and the book also makes a great doorstop too!   You can find it here on Amazon Books:  https://a.co/d/dwug5b9
 

Possible Villains for The New Bremen Town Musicians

 I'm playing with the idea of getting the band back together, as if they ever were, and was thinking of possible villains they might confront.

Here's some ideas...

Owl & Pussycat

 This is a work in progress.  It's a digital sketch for a painting that will be done using acrylics.  These are original character designs of mine for an Illustration for The Owl and the Pussycat from the poem by Edward Lear.  I've started working color, design and compositions digitally before committing to canvas these days.

Happy Birthday!...

 I don't keep this blog up consistency, but thought I would include the painting I did for my granddaughters birthday.  She's just turning 11 and is into aquatic life, so I did a painting for her room to celebrate her birthday with an aquatic theme.  It's a bunch of reference material from the internet composed in Photoshop which I transferred to canvas and then painted using acrylic paint.

I'm still getting used to acrylics and approaching it like watercolors. I blocked off the critters using a latex matte and then did a wet wash for the background in blue, then added the critters after removing the mask or matte.  Hope she like it!

Heinz Edelmann, a Brief Review

I hope you all had a splendid start to your new year. With sometime till things kick in for me, I thought I would write about one of my favorite artists: Heinz Edelmann. There are many good reviews of his life and history so mine will be more about his range as an artist and the impact of his work shaping an era.

So much of the 60's was about 'change', and I think much of it led to very positive changes that are now being challenged again. I'd better stop there before going into a full blown rant on politics, but it was within this environment of experimentation and change that Edelmann influenced a generation or two with his work.

Any cursory viewing of his paintings and illustrations immediately show a diverse understanding of drawing and color, and a multiplicity of styles. Edelmann was a chameleon, always changing media and design. His commercial works show a playful and radical departure from the normal conventions in composition and layout which suited the radical changing times these publications were trying to address. This spilled over to his book illustrations which look just as fresh and exciting today, if only a little nostalgic.

It's not surprising that Heinz would be contacted by other prominent artists wanting to make an impact: The Beatles. Heinz singlehandedly created the look of Pepperland and all its residence, including monsters and mop-tops for "Yellow Submarine". It was such an arduous task that it almost killed him and he hated to talk about the experience in later years. A little taste of his discontent can be seen in the picture showing Ringo's head served on a platter, and the people of Pepperland tearing the flesh, and drinking the brains of the Blue Meanies! 

Because he was influenced by innovators and was an innovator, Heinz work became lost in the psychedelic haze of the times. Other people with louder voices started putting their stamp on the 'groovy' look and even his work on "Yellow Submarine" was for many years thought to have been done by imitator, Peter Max.

Heinz went on to teach a new generation of artists to think in radical terms.  His wide ranging abilities show a draftsman of great imagination.  Heinz Edelmann was no one trick pony, and I'm glad he left a body of work that attests to that fact.

Harry Beckhoff

 I've been over to one of my favorite sites, ILLUSTRATION ART, and came across these astounding thumbnail sketches by Harry Beckhoff who passed away in 1979.

A fuller article about Harry can be found at my other favorite site, TODAY'S INSPIRATION: http://todaysinspiration.blogspot.com/2010/02/harry-beckhoff-illustrator-you-should.html

Beckhoff's sketches weren't much bigger than a penny, but they are marvelous little jewels.  They served as comprehensive blueprints for  finished illustrations that were ten times larger.

CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE

Cintiq vs the Other Guys

There are other posts on this site about my hunt for a good drawing tablet that would be an alternative to the expensive Cintiq.  Well, it's finally happened, I was forced to make a decision.  I had a job that required detailed drawing and clean up, and needed something fast.  I was playing with the idea of a Chinese model or one from Africa, of all places, but the reviews were really fixed and it sounded like for every happy camper there were more people having regrets.  I had even considered something like a Surface Pro laptop but the drawing space would have been too small and the menus unreadable, although I loved the idea of having another system and not just a drawing device.  After a lot of online digging, I decided on a 13"HD Cintiq.  Now wouldn't that limit my drawing size, you may ask?  The beauty of it is I can use a second monitor and drag all my menus, graphs, tools and reference onto it freeing up my Cintiq just for drawing.  Being HD I can zoom in tight and scroll around for details.  Being so small allows me to pick it up and rotate it around on my lap, which I could never do with a 24".  I think I made a good choice and it does

Cintiq turned on it's side with palettes and graphs on second monitor.

the job!

Mouse Mouse House by Joel Brinkerhoff

Well, here's a book I did and almost sold.  The deal fell through after they decided they couldn't endorse housing fraud.  Oh well, I hope you enjoy it and can find the humor non threatening.

Ride the Dino

My grand kids and I visited the Walking with Dinosaurs exhibit at Omsi.  My grand-son wanted me to do a picture of him riding one.  Hope he likes it.

 

The Scribble Game

Here's a little game I would play with my kids when they were old enough to scribble.  My sister and I would play it when we were young and we evolved some rules along the way.  We would take turns with the first person making a scribble.  The second person had to make something out of it that included the entire scribble or as much as one could to make a picture from it.  You could turn the scribble around for a better angle and you could add lines but it was preferred to use the scribble as is.

These are some samples I did just for fun.

Poor Mans Cintiq Continued....

If you have read this blog for anytime you know of my desire for a Cintiq but the price even for a used one is too much to justify.  I had hoped they would become more affordable as time went by but not so.  Well, now the universe is conspiring to make it a feasibility to draw digitally with the quality and interface  I would like.  A relatively new, at least to me, South African company has the Bosto Kingtee which looks very attractive and inexpensive.  I've got my eye on the 22HD.  I'll let you know what I decide.

In the meantime  check out these vids and their site: http://www.bosto.co/products



Update: I just heard from Toon Boom that they have never tested Harmony on these tablets because they use only Wacom technologly.  This could be a big problem if the driver don't work right.!

Update:  I just heard from Bosto Kingtee and the 22HD has been updated with new drivers and chipset! Oh boy!

Seeing Things

Where do ideas come from?  I've noticed creative people say ideas just sometime come to them like a gift from a muse.  That would be nice but I seem to need a trigger.

We are hard wired to interpret information and make sense of it.  This is why we see pictures in clouds and random patterns.  I have the same experiences with things in our house.  I can make out a lovely lion head in the grain of our bathroom door and a cool dragon in one of our towels.

For years I have seen this little character flying in a winged ship on our table cloth and only recently decided to act upon developing a story for it.

I can't tell you anything about the story yet as it's going to be either a film or more probably a book idea, but I can introduce the main characters.  If you click on the artwork it should enlarge well enough to read the bios.  There is also a picture of the original table cloth design and you can see it wasn't too much of a leap.

Like all work in progress, there may be changes. 

Photoshop Fairy

I have the most beautiful grand kids,(seven of them, but who's counting?), and my two youngest are just too adorable. My young grandson is a pleasant and good-natured fellow with a winning smile that reminds me of one of my favorite people, Oliver Hardy. So it was not my intention to play favorites by eliminating my grandson from this group picture taken at Halloween. In fact I think he makes a very good lemur. But just look at my granddaughter. What a beauty, how could I resist not taking this image further? She too was the model for "The Pumpkin Queen" featured repeatedly elsewhere on this blog.

Don't worry, young grandson, your time is coming!

R. Crumb and Genesis

One of the more curious things I've run across is "The Book of Genesis" illustrated by Robert Crumb. An interesting interview by The Paris Review tells us what motivated Crumb and how he spent four years making the book. It also goes into other interesting things about Crumb and the whole article in it's entirety can be found here:

 http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6017/the-art-of-comics-no-1-r-crumb

What I found interesting is something Crumb wrote in his Genesis book end commentary.  During his research he found these stories were never buried and then rediscovered later,  that they are the oldest texts in continuous use in Western civilization, and that peoples belief in these stories being the word of God has preserved them for millennia while the stories of the gods and heroes of Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria were buried and forgotten along with these mighty empires.

What I also found compelling is that Crumb had initially wanted to do a comic set up of Genesis but changed his mind and did a very faithful translation with no comedy.  The only thing remotely done in a comic fashion that I found was the depiction of Noah"s sons who bare more than a passing resemblance to the Three Stooges.

I don't know what it means for a subversive underground cartoonist famous for depictions of sexual perversions to do a labor of love like this book.  I doubt if Crumb were having a religious conversion, but all things are possible.  I will close this out with just a portion of the Paris Review article that I also found curious.

   

INTERVIEWER

Let’s begin with Genesis. Where did this book come from?

R. CRUMB

Well, the truth is kind of dumb, actually. I did it for the money and I quickly began to regret it. It was an enormous amount of work—four years of work and barely worth it. I was too compulsive about the detail. With comics, you’ve got to develop some kind of shorthand. You can’t make every drawing look like a detailed etching. The average reader actually doesn’t want all that detail, it interferes with the flow of the reading process. But I just can’t help myself—obsessive-compulsive disorder.

INTERVIEWER

Was the act of drawing a God figure a challenge? You have had panels in the past where God is speaking to someone.

CRUMB

Mr. Natural. But I also saw God in a dream in the year 2000.

INTERVIEWER

What did he look like?

CRUMB

He had features almost like Mel Gibson or Charlton Heston, very severe but at the same time sort of anguished looking. And he was warning me about something, very briefly, warning me about this destructive force that was getting stronger, and since He loved Earth or this reality or whatever you want to call it, He was enlisting me to be one of the people to protect this reality from this destructive force. When I was trying to figure out how to draw God I remembered that image, which I could look at only for a split second, it was painful to look at this face, it was so severe and yet so anguished.