Spaceman

A6 sketchbook doodle.

Legend of the One cover process

I have painted the cover for Elena Kasyan's ☞ The Legend of the One, and it is published!

Subscribe to my Patreon ☞ or my Facebook page ☞!

I have also painted both endpapers, and also did the typesetting, assembly and most of preprint.

African dreams

A teaser for a new exciting project in the works. This is the style, color and texture test.

Stay tuned!

A street scene somewhere in the east continent of the focco home world.

Pastel, 50 by 70 cm. Way too many working hours.

Enjoy.

August 9, 2014

P. L. Travers and Tove Jansson had been both born on this day.

April 12, 1961

Dancers

A housewarming gift for a dancer we know locally.

Ink (Kuretake brush and Micron technical pen) on Strathmore drawing paper.

Old books: Manual of Graphic Techniques

I have a number of old (and sometimes odd) books in my library.

Now, my library is heavily skewed towards books on art, picture books for children, art manuals and reference material. And I love used book shops, so I have accumulated a few old and mostly forgotten specimens of treatises on how to make art.

One of these is the Manual of Graphic Techniques for Architects, Graphic Designers, and Artists by Tom Porter, Bob Greenstreet and Sue Goodman. I had first encountered it in a friend's collection, and knew I had to find one of my own.

The Manual is not a single book, but rather a set of four numbered volumes. It was published in 1978.

This is probably the single most disorganized art manual I had ever seen. Its volumes are not thematic; it jumps from topic to topic like a wild antelope, covering bits and pieces on everything from what kinds of pen nibs there are and how to construct the quick-and-dirty perspective plots from an elevation to fine points of silk-screen printing and mixing plaster of Paris. Then it starts all over again, discussing other ways to do perspective plots, page layout for print, using a modelscope and ways to simulate halftone in ink drawings. And so on. Some topics (like silkscreening) are presented only once, but some (like perspective) get sections in several volumes. It is organized somewhat thematically (most of presentation technique is concentrated toward the end, most of the drawing toward the beginning), but is still haphazard enough to make finding something for quick reference a bit difficult.

But what it lacks in organization of material, it makes up in thoroughness.  It covers topics from abstract composition and type design to marbling paper, etching glass and tips on working with glue when making models.

There is little wonder that the contents are heavily leaning towards architect's interests - I was not able to locate Tom Porter with certainty, but Robert Greenstreet teaches at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of Wisconsin. But there is a lot of general drawing, plotting and presentation techniques. Not everything here is of use to an artist, but nearly every artist could find something of interest in this book.
Speaking of presentation, the book itself is beautifully designed. It forgoes long text for short, clear snippets with relevant illustrations, arranged in almost comic-book panel layout. The graphics are more reminiscent of technical manuals than of art books, all crisp black and white, relenting for only a few pages to color. Even the typeface the text is set in is reminiscent of a typewriter: each page feels like an architect's presentation. And the condensed but very readable layout matches the very practical content. This is not a theoretical book; it is hands-on and focused on you getting the job done.

Of course, any art manual dating from before the personal computer revolution inevitably reads a little like a history of forgotten techniques. There are a lot of pages in the Manual dedicated to methods which are no longer used or fallen into disfavor. But for me, it only adds to the charm. And just like knowing how to do calculations in one's head or on paper is slower than using an electronic calculator, but gives you a ground on which to base your intuitive grasp of arithmetic and predictive skill, knowing how to plot a perspective by hand greatly enhances your intuitive grasp of its laws. History is not dead; the past still influences the present with tradition, terminology, context.

That's why I love old books.

I used to be an adventurer like you

You have to join the Guard now. It's the rule.

Re-ti: creature design for Helpful Bear contest

Helpful Bear is a company at which Terryl Whitlatch works as creature designer. I have admired her work for years, so when they have announced a creature design contest, I decided to take part.

I know that I say I never participate in contests; but this one was not the sort where a company tries to get a lot of designs for a nominal prize. This was a contest by artists for artists, the reward was PR, and it was a chance for creature artists to get together. Just participating in such a contest is already good PR; I went through the complete list of submissions, and the amount of highly skilled and talented artists was impressive.

So I had decided to design something fresh for this contest, a creature that would be "readable" by us human beings but be completely alien in its anatomy, apart from the obvious biomechanics.  The  Re-ti was the result. 

 It may seem almost Earthly, but if you look closer, few things are what they seem at the first sight. Its "head" is not the actual head, its "hooves/suckers" are neither hooves nor suckers, its muscles can lock up in contracted position which enables it to use hydraulics for "pushing muscles" along with the more conventional pulling muscles, it communicates in two-voice tonal song, its hands were originally copulatory organs, it is neither biped nor a quadruped, in fact it is not even a vertebrate. Even its real name is unpronounceable for humans: it is a musical note D7, followed by sustained combination of D7 and B7 (hence the short-cut solfege designation of Re/Ti).

But it is still something we hominins could relate to. 

This creature is built on specific design logic, an imaginary Bauplan, if you like. I believe that  thinking of evolution of anatomy rather than inventing it straight away, offers more freedom for truly alien creatures than tweaking existing animals or combining their pieces. 

It is no paradox; nature always has to work with constraints, base its designs on prior designs, and reassign existing structures to novel tasks. If you set constraints for your creature and try to work with and around them, the result will be more natural, more believable, and in fact more creative than if you begin with unlimited possibilities.

Because this creature was developed with a body plan in mind, it is easy to design more creatures of the same phylum, which would be as diverse as fish, tigers, crocodiles, and birds. Here is a small sampling I generated in less than an hour:

The concept was planned on Dec 25, 2013 during a three-hour car trip to an airport. Most ideas that went into the creature had been devised at that time. Developed between Dec 27 - 29, rendered mostly on Dec 30 and 31, between other tasks.

The development sketches and high-resolution files can be found at http://chiseledrocks.com/main/concepts/reti . The contest submission is here.

Literalism surrealism

Sometimes, there's nothing like injecting a little literalism into your interpretation to make it surreal.


But with fairy tales, literalism is guaranteed to make your interpretation surreal, as Ursula Vernon discovered for herself.


I am sure this was not the way Andersen imagined it when he borrowed the three round-eyed dogs for his version of The Tinderbox... but then Heiri ("Heinrich") Strub comes along and interprets the "eyes as big as the Round Tower" literally and blows everyone's brain up:

Ah, literalism... I love you.


(via 50watts)

The Dark Art of Pricing

In a very rare example of a professional illustrator explaining the pricing process, Jessica Hische, who gave us shouldiworkforfree.com, discusses The Dark Art of Pricing.

She explains why the hourly rate pricing can be detrimental, and discusses pricing for lease of rights (something which, in my experience, a lot of smaller employers aren't versed in — not just illustrators.) She also gives a compelling argument against speculative work, and mentions the "presentation only" pricing (which is another thing that smaller clients and illustrators often are unaware of).

Required reading for any up-and-coming freelance illustrator.

http://www.jessicahische.is/obsessedwiththeinternet/andhelpingyougetpaid/the-dark-art-of-pricing