Digital Painting demo, with Whit Brachna

Concept artist and Matte painter Whit Brachna is an incredible draughtsman and artist, who is equally adept at traditional and digital media. His pencil sketches have a confident line and a solid understanding of value.

That's why I made the plunge and purchased his full length Photoshop painting tutorial (available for purchase here). He also generously includes a set of Photoshop brushes he developed. This short video clip gives you a sample of his technique and style:



I love watching the slow transition from nebulous pixels into something tangible and 'real'. I especially like his use of Google Sketchup as an initial 3D thumbnail step when dealing with interiors and built environments. He quickly renders his design in Sketchup, a super simple 3D drawing program, in order to rapidly work out perspective issues, and then uses them as background templates upon which to layer his painting.

I'm all for taking advantage of automated processes to speed the painting along, and this was an approach I hadn't seen before checking out some of his other drawing tutorials.

In the full video, Brachna runs through of the process he used to develop this landscape (below), while dealing with some of the foundations of creating a painting including the use of value, shape, texture, color and other design principles. Although in this case he's dealing with a Photoshop painting, his principles are sound and can be applied to any medium.

Preferring to start work from a darker canvas [Brachna feels that starting from white tends to push us towards lighter values overall] he quickly lays in blocks of color with the digital equivalent of a house-painting brush.

It's super easy to create your own Photoshop brushes, and they can be a vast improvement on the standard presets available. Brachna's approach to developing brushes is to actually create the brush tip by painting it, as opposed to what I've done where I create a mark with a traditional brush and ink set-up, then scan it in and use that.

You can tell that he's really sensitive to subtle hues present in nature, where 'grey' doesn't really exist, and establishes blocks of color early-on in order to ensure that his finished work doesn't appear flat and dead. Though he works very roughly at first, there is also an awareness of the interplay between hard and soft edges in a landscapes and how they create depth.

I've posted before about how painters such as Carravaggio are masters of suggestion. They reserve tight detail for a relatively small area of the canvas, preferring to let the rest of the canvas sit like a painterly puff of smoke. You know something's there without having to see it delineated expressly. Especially in areas of dark value, there is no more than a suggestion of form. This reliance on suggestion is what separates painting from photography.

Nevertheless, it can be easy to think of shadows as an after-thought; to save your concentration for the highlight and/or focal point. Close study of great painting reveals that although shadows can be vague with regard to detail, they are not vague regarding form (or color for that matter). Objects in low light appear distilled to an essence of form, but are still very clearly there. Don't neglect those shadows!

I have mentioned before on this blog not to pick up the small brush until you're done with the big one. Usually, even when you think you're done with the big brush, you're not. Brachna echoes something of this sentiment when he evidently resists the urge to zoom in to his painting until absolutely necessary, knowing that the temptation would be too great to resist fussing around with tiny brushes, and then losing the big picture.

Anyway; I gotta go!

Check out his work.

Liu Bolin

Trompe l'oeil has traditionally been concerned with creating the painted illusion that something exists in three dimensions. But what do we call it's opposite; painting on top of a three dimensional object so that it appears invisible?

Artist Liu Bolin has been disappearing, ghost-like, into the background since 2005, as he systematically paints himself out of reality. His series, Hiding in the City, recently came to Soho in New York where he performed a disappearing act in the Eli Klein gallery that was described as "mesmerizing".

Bolin began this series as a political commentary on the tensions between the Chinese government and their people. Speaking in an interview with Yatzer, Bolin expanded on his motivation:

"After graduating from school, for a long time I had no family, no job and no love in my life. During those four years without love and income, I felt I had been dumped by this society and that I had no position within it.  I was meaningless in this environment. This is the emotional reason for starting the series. The fuse of the work was ignited on the November the 16th in 2005 at Suojia Village, which was the biggest living area for artists in Asia and it was forced to demolition by the government. I was there at that time, so I started the series i opposition to the government’s atrocity. I wanted to use my work to show that artists’ state in society and their living places had not been protected"

As a painter, I am of course interested in his process. You can get some sense of it in this video from his NY trip. Using student quality acrylics, and what appears to be a handful of assistants gathered locally, you see right away that it's not just the process that interests Bolin; it would all be meaningless without that final photograph.

Along similar lines, I always felt that the meditative aspect of Andy Goldsworthy's work, where he spends countless hours alone in the wild, is somehow undermined by the insistent intrusion of the camera. (There are some striking similarities between their work, specifically in the case of the Shadow pieces, below). Although I am a huge fan of both artists, I have the hollow feeling sometimes that the work is created solely for the camera lens. In a way, it's less about the performance process than it is about creating a gallery-worthy commodity.

I admit to holding onto a ridiculous Romantic notion of the Artist as some sort of Aesthete laboring alone in a garret, compelled by an inner fire, with no egoism, conscious thought or hopes of praise or reward. Boy is my face red.

Liu Bolin, Left, and Andy Goldsworthy, Right

Questions of authorship [who actually is the artist here? the photographer who clicks the shutter, the assistants who do the painting, or the man himself who stands still for hours? Does it matter?] can be neatly side-stepped in his political thesis: this is a comment on the nature of the individual in Chinese Culture, after all.



According to The Wall Street Journal, Bolin "was the fourth most searched among contemporary and modern artists on the site Artnet, beating Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. (The American photographer Sally Mann came in first.)"

His rise in popularity is reflected in the cost of his work. "The photos are sold in limited editions for $6,000 to $12,000—about 30% higher than a few years ago, according to gallery owner Eli Klein."

Liu Bolin will be exhibiting at Eli Klein Fine Art  in New York from June 29 - September 28, 2011

Liu Bolin created this piece for a UNICEF campaign in China

l'Art Arabe, by Prisse d’Avennes

You know, I've held this post as a draft for ages now. I was hoping to be able to add something to the text copy, but I'm not going to. I'm just going to show you the images and let you see for yourself their jaw-dropping beauty and technicality.

I had an opportunity to study this set of immaculate original lithographs from 1877, entitled L’Art Arabe d’apres les monuments du Kaire, by Emile Prisse d'Avennes. It's hard to describe the effect of handling original prints that are centuries old. The artist's hand feel so intimately close that they feel as if they are alive.

These gorgeous prints are from the hand of "an artist of consummate skill" according to Mary Norton, writing for Aramco (which is incidentally the Saudi-Arabian Oil Company who's website is an incredible resource of excellent writing),  Emile Prisse d’Avennes. He was also "a writer, scientist, scholar, engineer and linguist, a genius who spent much of his life among the illiterate." I like this guy!

Ms. Norton goes on: "Of the hundreds of 19th-century Orientalists – those Western artists, scholars and writers who gravitated to the Islamic world following Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 – few possessed so prodigious an intellect, such a trove of talents, so insatiable a curiosity or so passionate a commitment to record the historical and artistic patrimony of ancient Egypt and medieval Islam."

Taschen has recently re-published l'Art Arabe, as this new article in World of Interiors explains.

The World of Interiors magazine, June 2011

These next few are small fragments of the full page lithos, but they give you an excellent sense of the detail and artistry. Stencil designs, anyone?

A Brief Lesson in Simplicity from a Master of Illustration: H.M. Bateman

Illustration No. 1

Two things immediately jumped out at me when I received a beautiful collection of caricatures by H.M. Bateman called Suburbia. Firstly; things have changed a lot in Suburbia since 1922! The dress code's slipped a bit for a start, spats and top-hats replaced by elasticated jean shorts and flip-flops. I'll wager there are no more piano-tuners or candle-stick makers down at your local strip-mall either.

The second thing that struck me was the wonderful simplicity of his calligraphic line, and just how sparing he is with it. He's distilled each element to it's absolute essence. Cartoonists have always been masters of minimalism and exaggeration, making the most out of the barest of means; simple blocks of color and a thin black line.

Nowhere is this skill more evident than in the backgrounds of these illustrations. Wishing to focus our attention on his simple yet elegant figure drawings he reduced the background detail to little more than an illustrative puff of smoke, yet it's here that we see just how talented he was.

Illustration No. 2

In Every Other Sunday [Ill. #1], we can clearly picture the quiet tranquility of the scene he's painted for us. Smoke lazily curling out of the chimney on a sunny mid-day (see those shadows?), and nobody on the streets. We can easily imagine that long back yard full of flowers and tall, overgrown shrubs that she just came through, sneaking out the back gate and into the arms of her lover.

In An Introduction to the Richest People in the Neighbourhood [Ill. #2], he dispensed with any detail whatsoever except for a shine on the floor. With those few scratched marks we know for certain that this is a pretty fancy interior; the highly polished floors are sparkling. He didn't need to draw the chandelier or the boiserie because we can already see them in our minds.

Illustration No.3

With no more than five black lines, The Mysteries [Ill. #3] sets the scene for us of the neighborhood promenade passing alongside a high brick wall, the details of the landscape all but obscured except for some high cumulus clouds. Our perspective on the scene is high, almost level with the top of the wall; Bateman has us looking down on the scene. Perhaps we too are rubber-necking and gossiping, staring at the couple from the window of a passing carriage.

Illustration No.4

Off Duty [Ill. #4] dispenses with background altogether! But at this point it's not even necessary. We already know the scene, because he masterfully placed it in our heads before we even turned the page.

"Art belongs to Humanity": The Nazi Looting of Western Art

"Art belongs to humanity. Without this we are animals. 

We just fight, we live, we die. Art is what makes us human".

- Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director, Hermitage Museum 

Piotrovsky's quote from The Rape of Europa really struck a chord with me. Haldane McFall once said that "that man who is without the Arts is little above the beasts of the field." It seemed to me at the time like glib hyperbole. That is until one considers how so many people gave everything of themselves to protect Art from the hands of those who would destroy it.

"All of this accumulated Beauty had been stolen by the most

murderous thieves that ever existed on the face of the Earth.

How they could retain the nicety of appreciation of great Art

and be exterminating millions of people nearby in concentration camps,

I couldn't understand then and I can't understand today."

Dr. Leonard Malamut, 11th Armored Division

Though it's true that both Art and War are as old as mankind, and that the victors have always taken the spoils, the plundering of great Art during World War II was on a scale never before seen.

For the period from 1941-45, Poland (alone) estimates 600,000 lost or un-recovered works of art. Indeed, "so great were the number of precious paintings, sketches, sculptures, and objets d’art looted and confiscated by the Nazis from all over Europe - Göering alone amassed more than 1,000 works of art - that whatever Hitler, Göering, and buyers at auction did not want was destroyed."

"(The Nazis) committed an outrage on the memory, on the ashes, on all that is holy in our country. 

Sacred sites like Leo Tolstoy's country estate, Pushkin's estate

- sacred not just for us, but to the whole world - all were violated."

Nikolai Gubenko, Soviet Minister of Culture, 1989-1991

In the desperate struggle to win, fighting troops were destroying town after town. Though each advance was a small victory for the Allies, the price was often the destruction of historic monuments.

It might initially seem reckless to a generation raised beyond the blight of world-wide war that the Allies would even consider crushing Europe's greatest treasures under tank tracks, yet they had a war to win: The Nazis were doing it; why can't we? Each side cared little about how it was done, they just wanted it done. It might even have struck some of the artists themselves as bizarre that such a huge effort was soon to be made on their behalf. I can certainly picture Carravaggio scratching his head.

Yet, six months into the Allied invasion of Italy, and in deference to reports of razed Italian towns, Eisenhower put into effect a doctrine that would prove fateful: as far as was possible in War, Allied troops were to "endeavor to protect all Italian monuments." Eisenhower's order was soon to be sorely tried, however, when Allied troops surrounded Germans holed up in the Italian medieval hilltop monastery of Monte Cassino. The battle over control of the monastery became a bloody stalemate, with Allied commanders arguing over the order not to fire upon the ancient monument. In America and Britain, parents protested that they did not want their children dying to protect a town.

Since 529AD, the monastery had been home to the order of Benedictine monks. It was a national treasure. 2,000 Italians hid in it's stone vaults, convinced that the Allies would never bomb it.

Allied commanders, tired of the stalemate, finally sent a massive firestorm against the monastery. It was the most bombers they had ever sent against a single building. Survivors spoke of the sky filled with planes, and the very air being sucked from their lungs. The building was devastated, but in a massive miscalculation, not one enemy soldier was killed: they had been dug-in around the monastery, not in it. In the end, over 50,000 soldiers and civilians died before the Allies broke through the line. It was a crushing blow to Eisenhower's attempts to protect the native heritage of lands in which they were mired in war.

Of course, and despite sacking and plundering all of Europe, the Germans wasted no time decrying the Allies as "desecrators of European culture". Ignoring incredibly accurate bombing campaigns in Florence and Rome, Propaganda Pamphlets describing the Allied "War Against Art" were widely distributed by Mussolini's War Department.

In response to events like the Monte Cassino devastation, and out of growing concern for the protection of Western culture, a group called The Monuments Men was put together. A division of only around four hundred men, they were charged with no less than the preservation of Art and Culture in the operational theater of World War II.

Captain Deane Keller, a portrait and landscape painter, was one of the first experts sent to oversee the advancing Fifth Army. Battle-hardened troops initially tended to resist Keller's efforts, and he struggled to gain the cooperation of soldiers as well as townspeople. Alone with scarce resources, and aware of the massive burden upon his shoulders, Keller begged, borrowed and stole what he needed to get his job done. He followed GIs through booby-trapped ruins to determine damage to important artworks and structures.

The Camposanto in Pisa had been reduced to a fire-blackened shell. Firestorms had caused the lead roof to drip down onto some of the most important objects of western culture. Gathering thousands of fresco fragments from the floor, he had a temporary roof built to protect his work. To this day, restoration work begun by Deane Keller continues the effort to rebuild the incredible frescoes. Given the destruction during and in the wake of the war, it is incredible that anything survived at all.

High in the Italian Alps, Deane Keller found the treasures of Florence hidden in a small town jail. Keller escorted the trains that brought the Michelangelos, Botticellis, and Raphaels back to Florence. The waybill listed the value of the shipment at $500 million. Monuments officer Deane Keller did not live to see his work completed in the Camposanto, but after his death in 1992, he was honored with a floor plaque commemorating his efforts.

The artworks of Florence were triumphantly returned. People young and old lined the streets to celebrate the return of their cultural heritage, calling it a "victory of beauty over horror."

Reading the words of the Monuments Men, now in their nineties, and listening to their testimony, one is struck by the passion still in their voices. They understood that there was no way to undo what had been done by the Nazis. Yet, sixty-odd years after the fact, the understanding that their sacrifice meant something still resonates within them; that the responsibility for the restoration of the darkened heart of Europe somehow rested with them. There is nothing good about any war, we can just hope that some brave people care enough to let something survive.

Amazing Bird Photos from Taiwan

Audubon and Edward Lear just don't quite cut it when you're researching birds for that Chinoiserie mural you've been asked to paint. Yeah, those guys could paint, but they're just not exotic enough. Here are hundreds of amazing photographs of native Taiwanese birds that are perfect reference material for that De Gournay hand-painted wallpaper you're working on, or just for some trippy blown-out Photoshop fun.

Painting with Pixels

Khang Le

Hollywood has been snapping up the best and brightest talent as Concept Artists for years. Their work is some of the most creative, thought-provoking and imaginative work out there. Long having adapted to the 21st Century tool-kit of a Wacom tablet and painting software, the best Concept Artists display a deft lightness of hand, a fearless use of color and a true artist's eye, seamlessly moving from traditional to digital media and back again.

Michael Kutsche

Michael Kutsche

At the advent of digital painting, there was perhaps the temptation to try and mimic the look of the brushwork of traditional artists such as Frank Frazetta, but digital artists quickly swept aside criticism of the "digital look" of their art and embraced the technology, being perfectly at home in the new world of pixels and light. The quick-fire pace of creating commercial artwork for Gaming and Hollywood was perhaps a key factor in the development of the new style of digital painting, lending itself as it does to on-a-dime changes and rapid turnaround.

Paul Lasaine

Paul Lasaine, Art Director for Lord of the Rings, writes a fantastic blog, with lots of artwork and Photoshop tutorials, as does Feng Zhu. I love that each of these incredible artists is so willing to share their knowledge.

Perfectly suited for adaptation as Children's murals, book illustrations, or just worthy due to their jaw-dropping beauty and technical artistry, I love to stare at these and marvel at the staggering talent of these artists.

Feng Zhu

Feng Zhu

Feng Zhu

Feng Zhu

 I love the NC Wyeth coloring of this scene by artist Dermot Power 

Dermot Power