All posts by msanborn

Arctic Fox Christmas Painting Complete

The painting of the arctic fox for my annual holiday card came together with a little work. The dress color kept changing. I began with a bright red fabric but found it overpowering and so dialed it back to a warm yellow-orange with hints of reds and a red accent sash. As with many of my paintings, I would I had to keep pushing more and more white to make it feel properly illuminated. I also pushed the contrast in the foreground chair. It helped to add a little space. The atmospheric perspective in the room is pretty negligible but just that little bit helped. The texture proved to be a bit of a challenge in the face. The mouth was particularly tricky, getting that right with the heavy texture fighting me. Still, all in all, I feel like I captured the feeling I wanted. As with the other holiday cards, I wrote a little hint fiction. This one went over the 50-word count I was trying to keep to. I expect the count is more in keeping with the spirit of brevity and surgical word and information choice so going a bit over felt okay.

Warm Meat Pies and Apples
Charity always delighted in the first snow of the season. Delicate crystals drifted from the heavens, frosting windows and collecting in soft mounds. The world’s fresh linens draped over the contents of the summer den. The sight conjured visions of her days as a cub, frolicking in the crisp air with her sisters. Soon they would arrive with warm meat pies and apples, driving away the silence and filling her home with lively conversation and cheer.

I don’t have any expectations of including Charity in my book but that might change once I get deeper into the writing. I am enjoying the back and forth play between the small bits of character building in the writing. I love how they emerge from the imagery and, afterward, help influence the interpretation of the imagery right back. These characters start to take on a life in my mind, playing out tiny vignettes. Hopefully, I will find the opportunity to do them all justice and write flash fiction for each of the paintings. With each new painting, their world grows more complex.

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Arctic Fox Christmas Painting Charcoal Values Complete

I finished the charcoal value pass for our arctic fox Christmas card. This one was a challenge due to the fact that I decided to work fairly small and didn’t take the time to sand down my gesso as much as I could have. The gesso application on the canvas was a little thick and the horizontal brush texture posed some issues achieving a finer level of detail in a few spots. Next time I’ll have to make sure my smaller canvases are sanded down more. There are times when I really appreciate the added texture but not so much on the smaller works. It took a little more time but I was able to get the base values refined to a point where I was comfortable moving forward. Once I spray-fixed the charcoal, I did go in after with a white and black colored pencil to push in a little more refinement.

I decided to go with the arctic fox for the Christmas painting this year. I did an exhaustive search of winter animals and the fox jumped out at me. I’m currently rolling around a bit of flash fiction in my head to accompany the piece. I’m thinking of her likening the snow on the ground with fresh linens covering the furniture of the summer home, protecting it until the spring. I’m not sure if I will include her in my final novel dealing with the animals but you never know. I generally complete the paintings and then let them speak to me, telling me about who the character is. If it fits in the story, I’ll work it in.

You might be wondering why, if I end working in colored pencil now, why not just work in colored pencil or graphite instead of charcoal. I have found that charcoal has some really excellent properties, particularly in showcasing lighting effects and gradual shifts in value. I also like how easy it is to tone a large canvas with a compressed charcoal stick. The work I do in colored pencil is pretty minimal at the end anyway. I expect that, for me, it will always be charcoal.

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Basilisk Video

I’ve been sitting on this video for a little while now and figured it might be time to post it finally. This is a recording of a digital creature design for a basilisk. You can see some of the techniques and process I employ in my digital design work here including collection and examination of reference images, block-outs, application of contrapposto, building up of value, application of texture and applying and pushing light and shadow, and the use of Photoshop tools like free transform, warp, dodge, and burn tools. The original recording took somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 hours but I have time-compressed the final video to make it a little more accessible. I apologize for all the rotation of the canvas. In future videos, I’ll try to keep that to a minimum. I was watching it myself and felt like I might start to swoon.

Screenwriting Book Illustration

I recently took a few days to help out one of my MFA screenwriting instructors with an illustration. Professor Michael Tabb is currently wrapping up a new book on screenwriting entitled Prewriting Your Screenplay: A Step-By-Step Guide to Generating Stories published by Focal Press. If you are interested in his book, you can sign up for an e-mail alert when it hits bookshelves at his website http://MichaelTabbWGA.com. He asked for an illustration showcasing three act structure with evolutions and escalations as a game board. Below are the initial sketch and the inked version. You can see a little of the feedback and revision process between the two. The ink work was done with Sakura Pigma Micron pens. I like working with the 005s, a .20mm point size, as it gives me more control to gradually build up the line work and capture the line quality the way I want. Most of the lines, save for the hatching and cross-hatching are the result of several passes over a single line. Maybe it is time for me to film a little line work and post that.

When I’m working on my animals book, I am hoping he’ll give me some guidance and critical feedback. I have been around the block enough to know that good, critical feedback on writing and artwork is hard to come by and one couldn’t hope for better than Professor Tabb. I haven’t read the book yet but if the instruction he gifted me with is any indication as to the quality of the book, it will be top notch!

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New Cat Painting Completed

As expected, the painting of the cat piece took about a day. The time frame for these smaller pieces runs pretty consistent. It will take me about an hour or two to mock up the work in Photoshop which doesn’t count looking for reference images that will work together with respect to lighting and angles. The charcoal base layer takes about 7-8 hours. Sometimes, if I am working up a more complicated background than a simple blank wall studio environment, it will take another couple of hours to complete that. After the charcoal, I spray fix the heck out of the thing to seal it. The sealant will darken the work a bit so I’ve now taken to going in and pushing the lighter areas a bit with white colored pencil once everything is dry. After that, I use a heavy gel medium for texture which dries clear. That is usually ready to go in a few hours. After that, I apply acrylic washes, unifying the base colors and shadow colors. On top of that, I start working thicker and drier as I go, picking up more and more of the texture as the piece progresses. Sometimes it can be a little challenging working around the heavy texture to capture details but I think I’m getting better at it. All things being equal, I can bang out one of these smaller works in 48 hours using that process.

I haven’t come up with a name for this little lady yet. I might have to hold off on that until I start work on the novel in earnest. Once I finish Miranda and the Men from Mars, I’ll nail down my premise, probably do a workup on my key characters, lay out a solid three-act structure, and break the story. Outlines seemed to help the last few short scripts I wrote so I might take some time to put that together first. I expect writing the novel will be considerably different from writing for screen but I think the brevity and focus on action and strong visual writing will serve my writing well. Guess we’ll all see. If you’re interested to check out my writing, feel free to check out my writer’s website at https://msanborn.wordpress.com.

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New Cat Painting Underway

In honor of my birth-mother’s up-coming birthday, I decided to jump back into my animal paintings and work up another cat. It is great to be back painting after almost a year away. Completing my Master’s in Creative Writing was fantastic and, while I’m now much better prepared to write Miranda’s children’s book and the novel dealing with the animals I’ve been painting, I did miss working in charcoal and paint. Here is the charcoal value pass on canvas and I hope to complete the painting in another day or so. It took a little while to get the feel for the charcoal again after not working with it for a bit. Before, this probably would have taken me maybe 4-5 hours. This time, I spent 2 days. I’ve been known to rush things and I didn’t want my return to the medium to be sloppy, especially since this one is going to my mother.

The size of this painting is roughly 6″ by 8″.  I am finding some variation in the canvas sizes I buy from what they are labelled. The differences aren’t huge, but the actual scale can vary by 1/4 of an inch or so. I should start bringing a ruler with me to the art supply store. I’m going to keep these works fairly small as that seems to be the size that moves locally and I would love to have more of these on other people’s walls as opposed to my own.

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Beaver Painting Complete

I’m really happy that my taking part in the creative writing master’s program still allowed me enough time to complete my annual holiday card. This year I took a break from the usual panel of the Franklin and Nunu book and decided to go with one of my animal paintings. I’ve pretty much maintained my pace on the smaller paintings, even with the increased focus on the environments. This beaver took me a day to pull the reference images, piece together the Photoshop mockup, complete the charcoal base values, and apply the gel medium. The next day I finished about 90 percent of the washes and drybrushing. I did take a little extra time the following day to push the lighting further (thanks to Nicholas Boyd for the critique) but overall, two days of work seems to be fairly consistent.

On this painting I decided I wanted to depart from my usual cool blue and teal shadows and push a warmer deep red tone to unify the piece. I thought, with the candle light, it would make for a warmer, cozier environment and would pop well against the cool white backlighting from the window.

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Squirrel Painting Complete

I’m getting back to my animal paintings again. This is one of the benefits of having a few projects going on at once. I get to cycle through projects maintaining good interest and energy. When I start to burn out a bit I can shift my attentions onto a different project. This squirrel has been sitting around my studio for months begging me to finish the painting stage. I finished the charcoal on canvas stage a while ago, spray-fixed the work, applied my textured heavy gel and layered on a blue wash as my base. The actual painting was fairly quick, only a few hours, where I washed in more base color and then pushed in more detail and texture with some heavier paint application, dry-brushing a bit to push the peaks of the gel texture.

Now comes the really hard part, figuring out the name of this fellow and how he fits in with the artist’s narrative. I’m starting to get energized about the book again and hopefully, I can find time to devote to it over the next year while I pursue my Masters in Creative Writing. Not sure if it will be possible but we’ll have to see.

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Cult Member Digital Illustration

Finished another illustration of a cult member for my game. I wanted to get this one done for a game session that is coming up quick. Unfortunately, I don’t know if this one will prove useful as an illustration for the game book but at least I got it done pretty quick. I wanted a creepy feel to this one and felt like the smiling mask is a fairly unnerving look. Seems like I’m in a creepy mood lately. Must be Halloween coming up.

I worked this one up from one of my silhouettes, tweaking the proportions and pose as I went. I built up from grayscale, applying lighting where I needed it based on where I determined my light source to be. I built out the cowl as part of the base form but worked in the rest of the cloak as a layer behind the form. That gave me some flexibility to still work with the form and easily push edge lighting with the dodge tool. It wasn’t entirely accurate with respect to the light source but I felt like I needed a bit of additional definition there. I applied a burlap texture in places to the cloak using a semi-transparent multiply layer to make that vary a little from the rest of the clothes.

The shadow I painted out, darkening closer to the feet, and ran a motion blur filter over it to soften the edges then I burnt in right at the base of the feet for some additional contact shadow.

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Basilisk Digital Illustration

I decided to try some new techniques on this creature and I recorded a video of it start to finish.  In the upcoming days, I hope to complete a voice over for the video so, hopefully, someone can benefit from some of my processes.  I started this basilisk by going to the source, or as close to the source as I could. I pulled up the Wikipedia page on basilisks and read as much as I could regarding the basilisk in literature, pulling any visual references to the look of the creature. There was a fair amount of variation in the written look of the creature but most agreed it was some amalgam of a rooster and a lizard or snake.

I pulled a lot of reference for various types of lizards and roosters and thought back to my description of the creature. In the legends, the creature was able to kill with its gaze but I opted for a more plausible explanation for its powers. I attributed its legendary ability to a coiling, serpentine movement that induces a sensation of vertigo in those viewing it, causing some to be so overcome that they are rendered unconscious. To this end, I decided to give the creature a long thin body with multiple legs and a coiling tail. In designing the creature look for my game, I also opted for a front view so the illustration could also serve as a standing card in game-play.

I started the illustration by sketching out the form, thinking of the dimensions of the creature and drawing from the reference I had collected. Once I had the form pretty well blocked in, I built out a silhouette and determined my light direction. I then began applying light to the form, building up the dimensionality that way. As I went, I selected parts of the form that needed tweaking and used the free transform and warp tool to adjust what I had to make it more to my liking.

Once I got to a place where I was happy with the way the form was looking, I tried a new technique I pieced together from examining other artists works and videos using overlays of photo texture to build out the details of the form a little further. I kept the images light and overlaid the layers as a multiply to keep them building up on top of the values I already had there. I think it turned out pretty well. Initially, I only wanted to apply it in a few places but ended up pushing it in probably more than I ordinarily would have. I might still go back and paint over it in places but, in the interest of time, I’m going to call it as is right now.

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