One Hundred Arrows
After searching for hours and hours on flickr for pictures of wolves for an upcoming project I am doing, I cam across an exhibit by Cai Guo-Qiang consisting of 100 life-sized wolves flying through the air into a glass wall:
Now, if you hadn't already of guessed this kind of thing is right up my alley. While I am not particularity into installation art, or really contemporary art in general, this guy's stuff really smacked me for a good one. Faux taxidermy, suspension, large numbers of dangerous animals, the works. And after looking through his website I came across a piece with life-sized tigers absolutely filled with arrows:
Since I have been trying to really bring brighter colors into my work, I thought that drawing a tiger would be something a little out of the ordinary for me and would give me a chance to experiment a little.
- Not being able to find the sort of reference I wanted, I ended up free-handing the tiger. I find freehanding animals with no ref a little hard sometimes because I tend to make them too muscular. This isn't really a problem with tigers and big cats because really the more muscles the better. I did light ink work, and then shaded and did the striped in graphite...a technique that I had messed around with a little in the last flop of a drawing I did.
- Due to a lengthy conversation with Mike Tucker the other day, instead of attempting to mimic brushtrokes with the white digitally like I normally would have done, I scanned in some dry-brush and laid it into the image as the white highlights.
- And instead of doing shadows and highlights with separate colors like I have in the past, I laid separate layers with different properties and different opacities to bring out a little depth. This worked a lot better than I thought it would have.
- Since the last "coloring test" I had, I have really learned to love many many layers of gradient. I think I added like 20 different gradient layers here, messing with the hue property to push the rear leg and tail into the distance.
- Messing with layers a little more and adding a background gradient. I'm not crazy about the blood, but it seemed to be lacking something when I took it out so I kept it.
- More messing with layers, and overall color saturation and hue. I have been really trying to make things look a little more organic, so I laid in a texture (a scan of powdered graphite on rough bristol).
- Cropped and finished. This image seems to be a little less saturated than the one above it, so I will probably mess around a little more before having the actual final image.
I think this is really what I have been looking for. A good mesh between cell shading and naturalistic "painting". Other than it being a kind of goofy drawing to begin with, I'm pretty pleased and will basically be doing things in this way from now on. The only thing I am going to try and do differently is do the inks and graphite shading on separate paper. Extracting the graphite shading digitally was way too time consuming. Who would have known that all this experimentation would have actually gotten me to a point where I am happy.
The other day I also bought a tutorial book on Illustrator. I have never really learned how to use Illustrator, and have stuck entirely to Photoshop. I'm hoping to pick it up pretty quickly, there are a lot of ideas I have that I just can't pull off with photoshop. I guess we'll just wait and see.
And now after looking at the amazing work of Josh Cochran, I have convinced myself that there is a better way to do my website. Pop-ups just aren't doing it for me anymore.
Now, if you hadn't already of guessed this kind of thing is right up my alley. While I am not particularity into installation art, or really contemporary art in general, this guy's stuff really smacked me for a good one. Faux taxidermy, suspension, large numbers of dangerous animals, the works. And after looking through his website I came across a piece with life-sized tigers absolutely filled with arrows:Since I have been trying to really bring brighter colors into my work, I thought that drawing a tiger would be something a little out of the ordinary for me and would give me a chance to experiment a little.
- Not being able to find the sort of reference I wanted, I ended up free-handing the tiger. I find freehanding animals with no ref a little hard sometimes because I tend to make them too muscular. This isn't really a problem with tigers and big cats because really the more muscles the better. I did light ink work, and then shaded and did the striped in graphite...a technique that I had messed around with a little in the last flop of a drawing I did.
- Due to a lengthy conversation with Mike Tucker the other day, instead of attempting to mimic brushtrokes with the white digitally like I normally would have done, I scanned in some dry-brush and laid it into the image as the white highlights.
- And instead of doing shadows and highlights with separate colors like I have in the past, I laid separate layers with different properties and different opacities to bring out a little depth. This worked a lot better than I thought it would have.
- Since the last "coloring test" I had, I have really learned to love many many layers of gradient. I think I added like 20 different gradient layers here, messing with the hue property to push the rear leg and tail into the distance.
- Messing with layers a little more and adding a background gradient. I'm not crazy about the blood, but it seemed to be lacking something when I took it out so I kept it.
- More messing with layers, and overall color saturation and hue. I have been really trying to make things look a little more organic, so I laid in a texture (a scan of powdered graphite on rough bristol).
- Cropped and finished. This image seems to be a little less saturated than the one above it, so I will probably mess around a little more before having the actual final image.I think this is really what I have been looking for. A good mesh between cell shading and naturalistic "painting". Other than it being a kind of goofy drawing to begin with, I'm pretty pleased and will basically be doing things in this way from now on. The only thing I am going to try and do differently is do the inks and graphite shading on separate paper. Extracting the graphite shading digitally was way too time consuming. Who would have known that all this experimentation would have actually gotten me to a point where I am happy.
The other day I also bought a tutorial book on Illustrator. I have never really learned how to use Illustrator, and have stuck entirely to Photoshop. I'm hoping to pick it up pretty quickly, there are a lot of ideas I have that I just can't pull off with photoshop. I guess we'll just wait and see.
And now after looking at the amazing work of Josh Cochran, I have convinced myself that there is a better way to do my website. Pop-ups just aren't doing it for me anymore.
posted by matthew at 10:04 PM
6 Comments:
i've always wondered how you construct your layers of cell shading. like in the third tiger image, when you give his muscles dimension. it seems like something done much easier using a brush rather than a mouse.
Great image, great blog. I found your work a looong time ago and admired it, then your site dropped off the web. It's great to see you've reappeared, with a blog this time.
i've been following your work for a long time. back when you were a part of deviant art. i still consider myself lucky to have seen your work at that one cafe on monroe in chicago. it's amazing to see the progress you've been through up to now. and i think your coloring technique with the layers is beautiful. i think i prefer the image right before you messed with the saturation. because it's like the tiger is emerging from the grey into color.
THAT'S WHAT I"M TALKING ABOUT. i like how you combined the styles great job man. i love to see more of these kinds of pieces and keep up the sweetness.
-Adam
I really really LOVE this art piece, congratulations man!, Im linking you... keep it up! =D
When I only had a mouse to work with, gradients were the best thing in Photoshop painting. I'm going to have re-explore them - nice work Matthew.
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