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This dagger is based on a longer sword shape called an Ottoman yatagan. I like how focused the entire design is on the sleekness of the shape. To me, this brings all my attention to rest on the power of the blade, its use, and just makes it seem really mean. I wanted to create a blade made of a single piece of polished volcanic glass, wrapped with a leather handle. I imagine these daggers serving the same purpose as a wand for a wizard. They are a tool to focus the magical energy, so the materials become interesting and important for each character who uses the dagger. Where do they draw their energy from? There is also what I imagine to be a place of focus on each dagger, a place in the design that the user can touch or concentrate on while trying to focus their attention. For this one, the place of focus is the two round cutouts in the leather that expose the glass underneath.
This dagger is designed for a character I don’t really have a name for yet. I think of her as a feral person who lives on her own in a cave, or maybe a larger cavern and who doesn’t have everyday contact with others or with the sun. She found this dagger somewhere within her small world and has made it her own through use and binding it up with some wrapped fabric. This is an everyday tool for hunting and skinning small creatures and it shows. It is dirty and under-appreciated: there is history to this weapon and it wasn’t originally forged for skinning bats.
The mis-matched set of daggers for the Moon Wytch has arrived! This time I wanted to build the cross guard out of snakes made of gold. I pushed around the same ideas of snake imagery, wrapping the handle, ornate but contrasting materials, and carved stone elements, but wound up with a completely different, complementary design.
To create specific daggers for each character I started out with research. I was looking for interesting shapes, textures, and an overall gut feeling of what the dagger seemed to be used for or simply, emotionally, how it made me feel. I found a long and very sleek sword with no cross guard and very minimal decoration, all business and all pointy-end! It was mean looking, just very cold. From there I went looking for its opposite: beautiful, jeweled, and ceremonial. A dagger that was for someone with no real purpose for it. I found a nice range of daggers at a museum in London called the Wallace Collection. So I grabbed a few images and started my version of photo-bashing mixed with small messy painting sketches to generate some new versions of daggers. Mainly thinking at this point about silhouette and materials. The snake dagger reference is actually from the 1980s movie Conan the Barbarian, rather than being historic. I wanted to think about it, but be sure to create something separate and new for my story and character. I painted a carved jade center piece of the dagger that physically unites the handle and the blade. This dagger seemed far removed from the mean and more mission-focused daggers from my research. It’s something beautiful that could be from a museum, but it’s kept for sentimental reasons.
This is an environment design for an entryway section of the Moon Garden just inside the Gate. I wanted to see the Glasswing Luna Moths in their place in the world. They are prevalent in this garden and specifically this region where the Moon Wytch has power. The Garden Gate was designed as a bit of a thought experiment about crescent shapes, snakes, and either thorns or the horns of animals. How could I use those shapes to create an elegant, stone-carved entry gate that could signify an important place? This garden needs to feel like a contemplative destination, peaceful, soft and pretty, but still like a part of nature- not completely manicured. The sculpture niches with the candles add a presence of the characters who take care of this place, as well as a softly religious or meditative tone to the space. I looked at Italian rococo architectural forms to create a basis for the design in our collective, known culture, but then explore and add some new shapes and forms. For the overall environment I created different elements and textures using the crescent and rounded shapes in a variety of ways.
As the Garden Gate takes shape everything else that is in the image also needs to be designed. Textures and foliage are fun to experiment with and invent on the fly with brushes and scribbling and even some photo textures. But all of the more important props, the things that can create a rich story world, they have to come from design and research. I’ve realized that I really love the research part- I get to dig in and read history about the various fleeting ideas that had come into my head in the concept phase. Usually when I have an idea it is vague, sometimes even superficial and just based on how something could look- a shape or visual motif. Research helps to develop why it might look the way it does, to add rich details from life, and then, in a forward-looking way, to imagine how it will function and interact with the story. I added a niche to each side of the gate. I thought this could add visual complexity to an important part of the environment, it creates a visual link to the classical architecture of our world, and it serves as a place that has been touched by our characters- they will light the candles that are in front of each sculpture each night. The sculptures will need to be meaningful to this place, they will need to be beautiful- balanced, interesting, symbolic. So I started with snakes, obviously. I read about the architecture and the encoded symbolism of secret societies. The transformational work of these groups was repeatedly mentioned: members would enter as novices and devote themselves to a practice of transformation, sometimes called the great work, usually about a spiritual transformation towards some idea of higher character. The balanced duality of pairs of opposites found in nature was seen as a philosophical goal: how can we unite opposites? The journey from chaos to balance was symbolized through decorative elements of architecture including wrought iron posts and gates with the caduceus as a symbol for balance or unification of opposites.
This felt like a rich visual language that I could use to design sculptures for my niches. I wanted to create a transformation as well: a mixed pair instead of two of the same. My rough ideas are usually shape based and in the end, I essentially have a scribbled, tangled ball of snakes to represent the before chaos and a caduceus to represent balance- very 19th century. As part of building out the world of the Moon Wytch I’ve been designing some additional scenes of the garden and also the world beyond. My design for a view of the garden that includes the Glasswing Luna Moths is set up form a vantage point outside looking in through an arched passageway. The thumb is rough, as usual, so the first thing I have done is designed the archway. I pushed together crescent moon shapes and played with the silhouette until I had a mixture of pointy, horn-like spikes and coiled snakes. I am using snakes as characters and motifs in this story-world. Motif as part of prop designs and characters as part of the spiritual and historical bones of this society. The spiral wrapping shape of the snakes reminded me of some rococo Italian columns that had similar spirals. For this design I focused on the shapes and textures that make up this archway in a theoretical sense- for the painting I have designed in the thumbnail I am imagining that this archway is very old. So there will be some cracks or crumbling of the stone apparent as well as moss and some weathering discoloration. Those will come later in the final painting. This was originally sculpted a few generations back, so the snakes and the messenger role that they must have been playing in the culture at that time could have been more common or apparent in the past, and now it is something that is seen as a relic or only to those who are sensitive to it and are looking out for them. Story specifics don’t really exist at this point, I’m looking to put ideas together that create new thoughts and directions for story.
I've been digging in to thumbnailing lately. I’m just creating shapes in 2 or 3 values, focusing on design principles of balance and contrast at this point, rather than assigning content to the shapes. The shapes could be anything really, the only organizing principle is how the pattern of contrast and form is working together. This keeps the stakes really low and open- there is nothing to preserve or loose at this point. Success is as simple as coming up with something that feels fresh or surprising, like something I haven’t drawn before. Keep it quick, small, and move on. Inevitably, my mind warms up and I begin to think about whatever story or reference is on my mind. In this case I was looking at the painting on the left The Intruder by Andrew Wyeth. I was drawn to the break in the tree line that reveals the sky and to the splash of highlights that lead over the water’s surface, into the immediate foreground. I also was looking at this old picture of a conifer tree behind a large boulder. I like them together, one mostly light, one darker, together they seem to be separate moments of the same story.
I pushed the shapes around until I came up with this little environment thumbnail. It’s not much yet, but I see the potential and I trust it’s architecture already in this state. I assume that I’m seeing more than is actually there, or perhaps something different than what someone else might see in it, but that’s the point of keeping it vague-ish and open. There are more possibilities at this point than anything else. To create creatures for my Moon Garden I decided to create some mash-up ideas of combining multiple existing animals or combining an existing animal with a fantasy creature. I wanted to create a creature containing distinctive visual aspects of both a Luna Moth and a Glasswing Butterfly. Additionally, I added a lantern from a firefly so they could really stand out after dark and create a new, atmospheric light source. Next up is to paint these guys flying around in their new Moon Garden home.
Artist Jason Ward and I collaborate on ambitious projects under the name Hansen Ward and our most successful collaboration to date has just been published as part of Spectrum 25! Spectrum is an illustration annual that comes out each November to showcase contemporary fantasy illustration in all it's forms. Above is our piece called Triassic Hunters. it depicts two coelophysis dinosaurs coming down to the water for a drink. Mid-way through we realized there was too much uninterrupted division from one shoreline to the other. The all-water foreground seemed like maybe the viewer is in a boat, or safely isolated from the scene and the animals in it. I thought more tension could be created if we could develop more passages for the dinos to run from one side to the other. I immediately thought of dappled light and large-ish boulders to create a bridge from the left side to the right side of the painting. I drew something up in Photoshop, very much a rough-draft, just trying to visualize what some options could look like. After a conversation Jason took the sketch and painted his version into the piece. The painting was developed back and forth with both of us collaborating on the composition design. After it reached a stage where it was starting to look realized, but maybe not entirely finished we photographed the large 48" x 60" oil painting so we could continue on it in Photoshop. I used groups of colored lighting to further carve out the characters and really define the lighting from above and the bounced light off the water onto the rocks. These dinosaurs are meant to be camouflaged, but from a storytelling point of view I felt that they needed to pop more from the background to create an impact and so they didn't get lost. My solution was to use the blue lighting to further carve out and reinforce their three dimensional forms, as well as use warmer bounced light on the rocks behind them to create temperature contrast. Its so exciting to see our work in league with so many fantastic artists! We are grateful to have been included in Spectrum 25, and also very proud. It feels good to really work and struggle on something, have it come together in the end, and on top of that success for it to be recognized feels great! So thanks again to Spectrum, now we have to get finished on our projects for the next one!
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AuthorI'd like to share my process including research, designing an image, painting studies, and final painting techniques using both traditional media and digital tools. I am an artist and illustrator with diverse interests including concept art and children's illustration. Archives
March 2020
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