New adventures in painting

A few months ago my coworker B. asked if I would like to do some promo artwork for a short indie film he is acting in. They planned a Kickstarter fundraiser, and wanted some concept art to help get people interested: "some rough sketches of some of the visuals from the film, sort of like Ralph McQuarrie’s sketches for Star Wars: simple, like the silhouette of the bulk of the starship sinking in a lake in the foreground while one of the characters watches at a distance." Pro bono, of course.

I read a version of the script, an SF tale with a somewhat Twilight Zone twist. I wasn't sure I would be good at the type of image they were after... Though I've always been an SF fan, my extant work is more fantasy/ surrealist or historical; I had nothing in my portfolio remotely applicable. I was particularly unsure of my ability to depict a spaceship. But B. said these didn't need to be detailed, so I said I'd consider it.

In August I met with T. the scriptwriter/creator to get a clearer idea what he had in mind. I had done a few very rough sketches from the script, and he was surprisingly excited by them, so I felt I could probably do something that would work. As we kicked around various images, it emerged that what he really wanted was a movie poster image, a more substantial effort than I had expected, though he said it could be simple, graphic silhouettes, limited colors. I blanched a bit when he said typical poster size is 27"x40"... I typically work small, so that would be a major undertaking for me. I said I woud do it smaller and then we could enlarge it. I said I'd do some color sketches and we could decide which ones to develop more fully.

In for a penny, in for a pound. At first I hadn't planned to commit a lot of time and effort to this. But I recently watched some Weta Workshop documentaries, which renewed my longstanding ambition to do some movie concept design. So, here was an opportunity to get some practice, some exposure for my work, and hopefully add some examples to my portfolio... sure, it's a tiny low budget project, unpaid, but what better place to experiment? I decided to treat this as my first movie art assignment.

This isn't really a tutorial, because I blundered about far too much to suggest this is what the process should be. This was simply my process, including missteps and retrenchings...not so much a direct path towards the goal as tacking diagonally in sailboat fashion, sometimes as much sideways as forward.

The story starts with two men escaping a spaceship that has crashed into a frozen lake on a moon. One man drags the other away from the lake while clutching a salvaged communication device. I had done this crude sketch to show T.:


I thought it had the most initial potential of the images we'd discussed. T. wanted the figures smaller, the sense of being stranded in a vast, desolate snowy waste. In other scenes, there is a yellow gas giant with a thin ring in the sky; I considered combining those concepts.

Of course, the proper way to start would be to find the nearest guy (usually poor K), dress him in a bulky coat, pose him, and take some reference photos to get the figures and shadows right. But I wanted to get started without a lot of preliminaries.

I started a fresh sketch of the main figure, but it still looked stiff and off kilter. No one else was around to model, so I posed briefly in front of the mirror to see how arms and shoulders would be positioned, how the weight of the body would drag him back, but he would have his head down to focus on the footing, pushing stubbornly forward, his chest and shoulders somewhat foreshortened towards the viewer. I found that one's free hand tended to curl towards the chest, so I considered having his free arm bent up, clutching the device.

The lower left is the sketch I started without reference; the upper right is the sketch from life; you can see how it immediately got more dynamic and convincing.

To keep the right scale ratio, I decided to work at half poster size: 13.5 x 20. Even that seems huge to me! Since this was an unpaid project, I wanted to avoid spending money on materials. I happened to have a scavenged piece of museum board almost exactly the right size. I painted a layer of gesso, deliberately leaving some brushstroke texture to help the snow effect (I almost did more, but then remembered texture doesn't reproduce well). My selection of acrylic paints is a bit erratic, a combo of leftovers from older projects plus free samples from work, so I did have to buy 3 tubes of paint later.

My art tends towards detail and sharply defined edges; my favorite illustration god is Michael Whelan. But for this piece, I aimed to work a bit faster and looser than usual: they needed the image soon (and I didn't want it to take ages), and I wanted to create something evocative but not too specific, since the movie hasn't been shot and the script is still in revisions. I was thinking of a style more like the work of Greg Manchess: loose, gestural, yet completely vivid and effective. While it's not my target style in general, I hugely admire how he is able to carry it off with such panache. (Granted, for that effect it helps that he's working in oils.) But despite my best intentions, I did veer more towards detail as I proceeded.

These pix were taken under differing non-ideal lighting conditions, hence some variation in color.

I pencilled a minimal layout on the board, with both arm options. I was torn on whether to make the background all blowing snow, to emphasize the aloneness and desolation, or to show the gas giant in the sky and the crashed ship in the frozen lake. The former would have an effective simplicity, and leave more mystery, but the latter would immediately establish this as SF and give a quick grasp of the premise: marooned on an alien world. I sketched in the latter, figuring I could always paint it out later.

I made myself start with much larger brushes than I would normally choose. The snowy setting would create cold shadows, so I did a very quick, minimal underpainting with phthalocyanine blue. Belatedly I realized I shouldn't do that on the second figure, since I planned his jumpsuit to be yellow. (T. had requested the uniforms be "brightly colored, red and/or yellow, and different from each other.")

Next I roughly filled in the standing figure with naphthol red. The phthalo still shows through in the shadow areas, as intended. The character is a young man, thrust into a situation he's not well prepared to deal with. I didn't want him to look too heroic and triumphant, rather to emphasize the struggle and determination, so I went with the arm down and deliberately made the pose a little less dynamic than I might have.

I gave the dragged body a base coat of cadmium yellow medium. I wasn't as happy with the pose/ shape of it, and the phthalo error was showing through as green. I could see I was going to need to buy a few paint colors.

(I realize this image is not completely logical. He would certainly have tried to carry the body over his shoulder, or at least put the object in his pocket and drag with both hands. But I preferred the look of this, so I went with it... I figure he could have changed position several times.)

To start toning down the snowy field, I glazed over the background phthalo with zinc (translucent) white, then switched to gesso because the zinc didn't cover enough. I sketched in the clouds with payne's grey (a blue-toned grey) and the planet with yellow, again working very crude and gestural.


I painted over the grey with gesso to tone it down. I painted the sky cerulean blue, but I worried that such a bright blue + the yellow planet might be too much color, competing with the foreground.



That was my first night's work--not much to look at yet, but a start. It felt pretty alien to how I normally begin a painting, but at the same time, that felt intriguing.

Painting, part 2: groundwork

8/16 Second painting session: definite progress! But man, acrylics remain the very devil. Thanks to my job and recent years' exploration, I know so much more about them than I ever did before, their properties, their pigments, and yet I sometimes still feel completely at sea in rendering with them. Definitely a love-hate relationship at this point.

This time I kept inadvertantly smudging the white surface: opened a container that spattered dark green, then got red paint on my hand and tracked it onto the snow... next time I do a mostly white image, maybe I should mask out the whole background area! Argh!

I wanted to start with the central figure, because if I couldn't make that work, the picture wouldn't work, and I might as well find out at the outset. I did another layer of naphthol red to solidify coverage, then started rendering him with alizarin and then a dark mix of alizarin, phthalo, and a touch of cadmium yellow (mixed black is generally more interesting and lively than black from a tube). Then I used glazes of alizarin to bridge between darks and lights. I made a small adjustment to his right hand position. I started to introduce the concept of backlighting from the planet (which I hadn't considered in the initial phase), but naphthol red light was too weak for highlights; I needed the intense punch of cadmium orange...a regrettably expensive color.

I felt good about the red figure, the overall sense of effort and determination. I had a lot more problems with the other body. Tried various yellows: cadmium, diarylide, indian yellow, a bit of burnt sienna for shadows... dunno, I’m not feeling it yet, either the color or the contours; it looks pallid and unsubstantial.

Pencil is definitely not the best thing for underdrawing; it shows through far too much, especially on the yellow areas...but I’m not sure what to use instead. On the left is my red smudge, which I'll have to sand out later; white paint won't eradicate it.

We'd discussed putting various details on the uniforms: reflective patches, piping, pockets, insignia, etc. But once I had painted the man in red, it seemed like that would just clutter up the vivid, graphic figure, so I left it off. Besides, since no costumes exist yet, I didn't want to specify the look in a way that might later contradict the footage too much.

I added some stark figure shadows with a thin layer of phthalo, which gave it more graphic punch. But I may need to set up some mannequins to figure out the shadows’ exact shape.

I added back a little blue outlining in the snow, but mostly I continued to glaze with white (using gesso, which covers better than titanium white paint) over the snow and clouds. I decided to make the hill lines sharper towards the lake, where the clouds open, then fuzzing out where the snow is blowing more, obscuring edges. Now I wished I hadn’t done those big phthalo lines, when the field needs to be mostly stark and plain: phthalo is somewhat ineradicable. And being more comfortable with lines than paint, I had once again made the error of outline mentality: putting the strong color on the edge of the ridges, when it should be in the depths behind the ridges, with the edge being the brightest part. It took a lot of layers of white to reverse that error.


I used a template to trace a more exact circle for the yellow planet, but was pleased to find I had free-handed it almost perfectly! I fiddled around with various yellow/white/brown blends for the planet's surface; I at last found a use for the grainer brush, a weird novelty brush that creates thin parallel stripes. The planet still looks messy, but at least I have an inkling. I think I’ll try Open (slow drying) acrylics for that, so I can get softer gaseous blending. I discarded my earlier thoughts of a pure white background; this just looked too cool to pass up.



Next step: make the snow/cloud background start to work. And buy some cadmium orange and cadmium yellow deep.