Menu
sketchblog
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!
I showed a digital concept illustration this past summer called Moon Wytch Gardens. I created this concept of a caretaker for young magical creatures and monsters. I wanted to develop an environment that centered around an old tree, with a water source, and lots of hanging orchids and plants. I wanted to play with a day-for-night look and I had a quick mood study that I painted awhile back that seemed like it could be a fun place to start. I created lists of all my ideas of what type of place this would be and what it could contain, and I created a really rough model in SketchUp. Then I started color-correcting towards the look I had achieved in the study. I rotated my SketchUp model until it was framed up like my chosen thumbnail, then I did a clean up drawing traced over the model in Photoshop. A quick color rough that I was working towards: pairing cyan and violet light with red and green local colors. I had this painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner in mind as well. I saw this painting at PAFA back in 2012 or so and I think this was one of the first times that I started to want to make paintings with theatrical lighting and shadows as a main compositional element. And this still from Cartoon Saloon's Puffin Rock was part of my design inspiration as well. I was looking for ways to cheat a strictly observational depiction of nighttime lighting. So I started out with architecture and developing custom brushes as I went to paint moss, flowers, tree bark, whatever I needed. I also laid in photo textures at this point. Lawrence Alma Tadema's A Reading From Homer was an obvious major influence. I love these paintings so I thought I'd hang around in this visual space for awhile. This is where it's at so far. I am working on the character of the Moon Wytch as well as the monsters, or beasties, as I like to refer to them. I'd like to finally get to the point of adding them to this piece as well as move on to other paintings to further develop this idea. I am working on a piece that focuses more in on the gates to the garden as well as a character portrait to get closer to who this character is.
I like to collect paintings that I can learn from by doing studies. I'll give myself a set amount of time, usually 30 minutes (although for this Doré I certainly took longer than that). For these I use a chalk brush to try to stay loose and focused on shape, tone, and color. I don't use the color-picker on the source image that I'm studying, for my purposes that would be defeating the challenge! I try to develop my eye for understanding color in the digital space and where to find it. Looking at it now, I can still see more to do, but the point is not to recreate the original. Rather I want to understand and absorb the architecture that holds the picture together.
Incidentally, this was also my first experience painting on a Wacom Cintique tablet. It was much more comfortable than I would have imagined and at times I forgot I was in Photoshop at all, I just was thinking about color and tone and shape. I'll have to keeping practicing with the Cintique. |
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
Categories
All
|