The Leering Man

I had a lot of trouble with the third guy in line, namely that he appeared to be leering at the gal in front of him.

This might be appropriate to a pulp fiction story, but he was intended to be just lusting after chili like the rest of them.  But no matter how I worked over it, trying to control his eye direction and everything, the strong impression remained that he was thinking about young women, not chili.

The original pencil sketch was somehow not so obviously lecherous.  As intended, this guy is just crazed with chili envy, or so it seems to me.  But I couldn't seem to translate this into color.

My solution?  I changed him into this: a man with a pathetic look, rather like the preacher from the HBO series Deadwood.  But at least the girl is out of danger!

Next:  Getting To The Final

Part 3: Painting Continues

The next stage shows rendering continuing, with a lot of work on the bridge detail, the green hand and the foreground figure:

So far, so good.  It is a tricky thing making the stonework not look too linear.  But as I now add contrast the the first guy in line, I see that the coloring of the other figures is way too washed out by comparison.

Here was the next stage:

 

I  have now darkened all the robes, and the chains, and I have sketched in all the necessary linear detail from the drawing layer onto a paint layer.  But I see that my goal of a high contrast illustration is getting away from me again,  so...

 

...here I opened a brand new layer in the Photoshop file and sketched in the values and colors I wanted to arrive at, but in a careless and slapdash fashion, all very rough;  now I find myself much closer to where I want to be.  Note that none of this layer will actually appear in the final, but the layer will guide me to the values and saturation I want.

However, the above screen shot does include some detail work on figures two and three in line, the young woman and the leering man.

Next: The Problem of the Leering Man

From Black and White to Color

Now to the Photoshop document with the tight pencil as a layer, I begin adding color based on the scheme in the rough comp shown in the last post.  On a new layer, of course, I block in the basic flat colors, as seen here in two versions:

Here it is with the pencil layer turned off...

And this is with the pencil layer turned on.

Right now it looks maybe like a comic book page, with hard outlines and mostly flat colors.  But some gradients have been applied: 1)The red robes lose saturation and grow paler as we move into the distance; 2) The side of the bridge becomes lighter where it turns to catch the light coming through the archway, and 3) complex gradients have been applied to the marble pillars and to the inside and outside of the cauldron in the right foreground.

The one thing rendered at this stage is the chili itself, based on personal photos of my own actual chili batches over the years.  Yum!

Then of course most of the stone structure of the bridge has been copied from the pencil rendering, since the detail of the stone shapes and mortar is essentially a linear rather than tonal problem.

But if you look back at the upper image here, it is clear that the value range within the figures is not yet defined, not to mention the detail.  Remember: the goal is to eventually make the pencil rendering layer redundant by putting all its information into the painting itself, and to do that mainly by tonal and textural means rather than in a linear way.

Next: Bringing It All Home

The Detailed Drawing

I took a couple of days over this detailed pencil drawing, getting everything as right as I could and trying, for once, to delineate everthing that could be described in line, not excluding some interior contours.  I mentioned with regard to my crazy animator painting that I tended to be sketchy and vague about background and architectural detail at this stage, but I recognize that that can ruin an otherwise impressive piece.

I had almost no reference material that I could work with.  For example, a Google search for vaulted stone chambers got me nothing that I could use.  The walkway, however, is patterned after the structure of Roman aquaducts; I just reduced the scale. The entry archway at the back is the only architectural feature that ended up changed in the final painting.

As we will see, there were very few major deviations of any kind from the drawing.  Besides the arch, the other significant example is the face of the fellow third in line.  I will talk about that when we get to it.

Of the faces, all but one are imaginary, including the guy in front  who turned out looking like Lex Luthor as drawn by Wayne Boring, a major DC Superman artist of the '50's.  (Boring's characters were drawn rather stiffly and with a narrow range of expression, and his Lex was allowed to be chunky and a little sweaty, as compared to the sleek and stylish creature which has now evolved.)

The exception is the face of the young woman second in line.  Though imaginary also, she is, as nearly as I could make her, an H.J. Ward girl, which is almost to say she is to pulp art what the Gibson Girl was to Edwardian illustration.   Here are a couple of H.J. Ward cover details to illustrate:

Disclaimer needed here?  As these examples illustrate,  pulp magazine covers of many genres, including weird, detective, adventure, western and science fiction, involved the depiction of people threatened, people in fear, especially women.  It was seldom that the stories fulfilled the titillating promise of the covers, but  the covers sold the magazines, and that was what mattered.  By today's politically correct standards they were outrageous, but I do not apologize for them; they are what they were.

Next: Adding Color

A Real Faux Pulp Magazine Cover!

If you have been paying attention, you already know how fond I am of pulp fiction cover art.  So when I saw a chance to do one as an invitation for an annual chili party that my wife and I throw, I couldn't resist. 

For an authentic look, there are a number of known parameters.  I will comment on these as we come to them.  First, on your illustration you leave the top quarter of the page clear of any important detail, and also preferably very dark, because that is where you know the magazine title and other publishing information will go.  Seeing original pulp cover paintings is sometimes startling because without the masthead logo they look out of balance, but of course they were not meant to ever be seen in this way.  And if you design your composition without bearing this typographic component in mind, you will come to grief.

For inspiration I referred to the very fine book Pulp Culture: the Art of Fiction Magazines, by Frank M. Robinson and Lawrence Davidson.   The internet also offers a number of good dedicated websites with hundreds of cover scans among them.

I thought it would be fun to show a cult of people fatally enslaved to the chili I make, so my cover ostensibly illustrates a story called "Slaves of the Cauldron."  Chains, people in hooded robes, a cavernous stone chamber, the cliché of the sinister green hand, and a look of mad ecstasy on the face of the man receiving his chili.

Here is the first rough sketch:

 

This includes a blocking in of the title logo, Chili Detective Magazine, (in faint blue line) and also a blocking of the mock story titles that always have to be included, because I want the final illustration to have the look of a cover as it might actually appear on a newsstand.

And since I will be having this printed by a copy service on standard letter size paper, I proportion it to just fit inside the printable area, with the idea of hand trimming the white border off with a paper cutter, giving the result its appropriate full-bleed effect. [That is, the printing would extend clear to the cut edge of the paper.]

To further prove the composition, now in Photoshop I paint in the full value range in black and white.

This step can be quite helpful for anyone tending to be timid about high contrast.  Also, going straight into color, one can fail to realize that two vividly contrasting colors juxtaposed with one another might still be very close in value. You put black where there is no light and bright highlights wherever that is appropriate, plus a good range of grays inbetween.

There is no need to get overly detailed at this stage, however.

Next, I add some color on a new layer to establish my palette, and I lay in placeholders for most of the typographic elements:

This typography was done in Photoshop, but the final will be done in Illustrator, where I have greater control and more options for effects.

Next:  The Detailed Pencil Drawing

After the Final

In terms strictly of painting, of adjusting individual pixels, I was done.  But I couldn't resist fooling around a bit with Photoshop filters and modes, just to see what might occur.

Here is what happened when I simply increased the contrast (under Image/Adjust/Brightness-Contrast) to 100%:

(Click on pictures for larger view.)

What I got here was a hot rendition--not only high in contrast but apparently high in saturation as well.  Compare this with the relatively subdued image in the previous post.  By comparison, this is like a pulp magazine cover.  And incidentally, if you are unfamiliar with illustration for print, this much variation is well within the sort of color rendition you might expect on different press runs of the same picture without someone doing press checks.

And you know?  I like it better.  The high contrast  suits the mood of madness implied by the animator's expression.

I then tried one more thing--I wanted to see how the image would look without color. So: Image/Adjust/Black and White.  This give you a popup panel with sliders not only for yellows, magentas and cyans, but also greens, reds and blues.  I tried pushing the Yellow slider almost all the way to the right, and it naturally brightened the whole area where the light is radiating up from the animation board.

Final Painting

(Click twice on the picture to view larger versions.)

Differences between this and the last version are few and subtle but worth doing.  I did more on the shirt, working some on the shadows of the folds and brightening the highlight on the back.  The wristwatch is more detailed, and I darkened the shadowed area of the chair back.  In a light gray I added suggestions of calibration markings to the black peg bars of the drawing disk.

On a new layer I then airbrushed a dark cool tone over everything except the figure and the desktop, which has the effect of bringing up the glow of the papers and their light source still more.  As a last touch on yet another new layer, I added a mist of gold emanating from the drawing surface and reaching to the face, like light on tiny motes of airborne dust.

A few posts back, I mentioned that I had the pencil drawing layer always available in the Photoshop layer stack, above all the painting layers.  I could turn it on and off to check detail, perspective, and anything else I had first deliniated in pencil.  Just for fun, here is how the final painting looks with that layer turned on:

Final with pencil drawing overlay turned on.  Click on picture for larger view.

As you can see, this layer, useful as it was, now adds nothing to the painting except a degree of darkness and loss of saturation.  Everything I wanted from it I have transferred into the painting, which was my intention from the start.

And so it's finished, I thought.  And yet...

Next:  Beyond Final