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Visualising Ragged Claws in 3D

Posted on November 3, 2013 by John Guy Collick

The first draft of my next novel and sequel to Thumb, Ragged Claws, is now finished and tucked safely in a drawer for a month. It’s hard not to keep re-reading and tinkering, but I know from experience that if you’re not careful you end up reading what’s in your head, not what’s in the manuscript itself. So to keep myself occupied I’m spending the next few weeks creating the artwork and for that I’ll be using the 3D animation software Houdini 13, which was released last week. Normally a full licence for this would cost anywhere up to $9,000. That’s if you are one of the big studios who uses it for movies like Thor: The Dark World or Gravity. For people like me there’s the ‘starving artist’ edition which is a mere $99, which is incredible really because it’s no different to the full version. The only difference is if you use this on your Hollywood blockbuster, SideFX’s lawyers will pull your toenails out.

Many many years ago (1974) BBC 2 did a series called ‘The Do-it Yourself Film Animation Show‘ which showed people how to make their own cartoons, with the help of famous animators like Terry Gilliam of Monty Python, and Bob Godfrey who was responsible for the hysterical he’s-eaten-too-many-jelly-tots cartoon Roobarb. In those days the technology stretched to cut out bits of paper, felt pen and biro (which gave Roobarb it’s unmistakeable psychedelic vibe) and for the really ambitious, acrylic paint on acetate (Disney). I built myself a rostrum with bits of wood and paint cans, bought a second hand ex-Wermacht (probably) Standard 8 cine camera and made a few films. It was great and I fell in love with animation.

A couple of Vipers I built using the 3D package Lightwave.

I saw Tron in 1982 and like every other geek on the planet my jaw hit the floor with a loud clang. Even though the actual animation in the film is under 20 minutes, the potential it had for creating entirely believable fantasy and science fiction worlds captured my imagination. Over the next thirty years I tinkered on and off with different 3D computer packages, creating landscapes in Bryce 3D with its ground-breaking terrain generators, and learning how to build Battlestar Galactica Vipers in Lightwave which, for a short while, was the program of choice for budding 3D animators. The special effects in Babylon 5 and the rebooted Battlestar Galactica were both done in Lightwave.

There are essentially three levels of 3D software for those interested in having a go. At the bottom end Daz3D and Poser are used by many to populate Uncanny Valley with thousands of unfeasibly-breasted fantasy mannequins. These programs operate a bit like an Action Man or Barbie set – get a standard human figure, pull it about a bit to turn it into a character, dress it up and plonk it in a pre-designed landscape. Bingo, Thongar the Barbarian rescues Princess Mammaria from a giant Steampunk Robot. You can actually get very good results if you put in the time and effort, though it’s pretty easy to spot artwork from this end of the spectrum because of the doll-like sameness of a lot of the images (and the slightly, er, adolescent subject matter).

Houdini demo reel

There’s not as much available mid-level any more, although the wonderful free program Blender is still around. This is because 3D animation has now reached such a level of sophistication that in order to achieve the quality expected by most production houses you have to go for one of the high end professional packages. In the past these cost an arm and a leg. A lot of companies realised that this was counterproductive if they wanted to make sure that each new generation of artists were adequately skilled in their software. So they started making student editions available, which is great news for the rest of us who baulk at stumping up $9000 a licence. The professional 3D animation world is dominated by Autodesk’s Maya, and Houdini, which is odd because you will very rarely hear about the latter in 3D forums, despite being used on just about every major movie. Opening credits to Skyfall? Big splashy whale in Life of Pi? All done in Houdini. The problem is that the software uses a completely different paradigm to all the other packages, which makes it both incredibly powerful but also a bit of a challenge to learn. Once the penny drops, though, it’s fantastic to work with.

At the moment I’m working on the back cover for the book. Without giving too much away I wanted to show some strange vehicles making their way over a weird blocky landscape in an empty universe. As I mentioned before, the overall aesthetic I wanted to aim for was somewhere between the art of the German Expressionists, and the very early SF covers of the 1930s, especially those of Frank R. Paul and Wesso. I didn’t want to make it look like a super realistic vision of the future – partly because I see too much of that in movies, and partly because it takes huge teams of software engineers months to make it look good.

Test render of the strange Expressionist caravan.

So here is the strange vehicle. It had to look sinister, and slightly distorted, like a child’s toy that’s gone a bit grotesquely mad. Without going into too much technical detail, Houdini uses a procedural system that allows you to work at any stage of a model build so you can revisit earlier parts and make fundamental changes without impacting on the details you add later. In this case I decided to fatten up the wheels and angle them a bit more, to make them look reminiscent of a bug’s legs.

An early test render for the mysterious vehicles.

The next thing I wanted to create was the landscape. It’s the skin of a man-made mannequin five hundred thousand miles long, built from debris and scrap brought from the distant past. Up close it’s a wilderness of blocks, shapes and lights flung together. I’ve built a routine in Houdini that allows me to randomly generate huge swathes of this landscape. Here’s an initial render of the landscape to allow me to check the geometry of the scene.

Test render of the surface of the titan’s skin. High above the atmosphere.

At this point it’s worth stating the number 1 Golden Rule of 3D.

THE MOST IMPORTANT FACTOR IN A 3D IMAGE IS THE LIGHT

It’s also the bit that’s often ignored. After spending months building, rigging and texturing a model a lot of artists just bung in a couple of lights and end up with the kind of unmotivated and flat illumination that plagues many 3D images. Obviously with the scene set in the eternal night at the end of the universe I’ve got to get the balance right between showing a landscape plunged into darkness, lit here and there with a few guttering lamps or mystic light sources, and making sure enough of the scene is visible and recognisable. Here’s a draft of the final image, with the vehicles added to the landscape.

The whole thing needs a lot more work, but as a first pass I’m quite happy with the results.

Pards and Manticores – A Medieval Bestiary

Posted on October 17, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Manticore from a 13th Century Bestiary. Check out that cool hat.

Herodotus the father of history divided knowledge into three types. Things he saw with his own eyes, information people told him which he could verify as true, and things he couldn’t verify and might easily be completely made up. He visited Egypt, and so when he writes about its manners and customs we can be assured that his descriptions are more or less accurate, if a bit quirky. Gold-hoarding giant furry ants living in India were clearly the deranged invention of someone he met in a pub

Medieval monks faced the same problems but magnified. Herodotus got about a bit. Your average Brother in 13th century Lindisfarne rarely ventured further than the monastery herb garden, and so their understanding of nature follows the same pattern as Herodotus’s writings. They can confidently talk about dogs, cats, mice and jackdaws but once they’re asked to describe creatures a bit further away they struggle. Lions, camels and elephants they can just about manage – after all Biblical tradition is full of those – but they rapidly come unstuck with Rhinocerii, Chameleons, Manticores and other fabulous creatures. This didn’t stop them having a go, especially in England where we have a unique tradition of beautiful illustrated catalogues of medieval creatures. One of my favourite books is the Folio edition of a Medieval Bestiary from the Bodlean Library in Oxford. It dates from round about the thirteenth century (the time of King Edward I) and is full of wonderful illuminated miniatures of the animals it describes. Bestiaries are a fantastic window onto the medieval mind.

Pages from a medieval bestiary.

To understand why they came up with stuff that seems ludicrous to us now, it’s useful to know some of the basic principles of medieval alchemy. To begin with everything had a secret name that concealed its true nature. When Adam named the animals he used the original language of Eden, which monks thought to be the language of God. This was lost when God destroyed the Tower of Babel and mixed all the languages up. If an alchemist could rediscover the true names of things he would have power over them. Bestiaries go to great lengths to determine the etymology of animal names – even if they’re clearly making stuff up again (“The name mule comes from the Greek, because the beast is yoked by the miller to the heavy millstone”).

Secondly medieval learning was founded on reasoning through association. If objects appeared similar in the great scheme of things, it was because they had real relationships that could be manipulated. To give a simple example – the sun is the greatest celestial object, the king is the most powerful man, the lion the strongest animal and gold the noblest metal. Therefore these four items are linked through mystical relationships that, if discovered, can allow them to be controlled. It’s all complete nonsense of course, but it was central to the medieval mindset.

Gryphon eating a pig, or dancing with it.

Finally knowledge came from ancient books, not from reality. Plato and Aristotle received their wisdom more or less from God, even if they were pagans and it came to them in a slightly roundabout way (involving the Egyptian God Thoth, and Moses). So what they said was divine truth. If a monk looked out of the window and saw something different (e.g. a bear giving birth to something obviously a little bear, instead of an amorphous lump that it subsequently licked into shape) then nature had probably got it wrong, which was understandable because it was corrupt, sinful and messy, whereas God’s wisdom as described by Aristotle was eternal and true.

Bestiaries were essentially religious books. Medieval scholars would often misread animal behaviour by awarding it moral qualities. Thus if an ape “bears twins, she will love one and hate the other. If she happens to be pursued by hunters she will clasp the one she loves in front of her and carry the one she hates on her back.” Nearly every animal echoes a lesson from Scripture. The basilisk, which can kill a man by looking at him “signifies the devil, who openly kills the heedless sinner with his venom”. Often the desire to force an analogy leads to the good brothers dispensing misleading, if not fatal, advice. The lion, we are told, represents Jesus and is therefore filled with mercy and kindness. This is “confirmed by numerous examples: they will spare men lying on the ground, and will lead captives whom they meet to their home.” They also have sex face to face, as do the lynx, camel, elephant and rhinoceros – so perhaps the Can You Feel The Love Tonight bit in Disney’s The Lion King wasn’t so wide of the mark.

Because Lions are like Jesus they won’t attack pilgrims who lie down. Honest.

The Bodleian Library Bestiary cheerfully wanders all over the known world in a fairly random fashion. Ethiopia gets mentioned a lot, probably because it hosted one of the earliest Christian churches and so there were well-established lines of communication between it and rest of Christendom (by medieval standards anyway). The common language of Latin united religious communities in a wide-ranging network of information exchange, even if the information itself was often muddle-headed, apocryphal or just plain wrong. Outside the known world we are firmly in the realm of Bored Monks Making Stuff Up. The chameleon looks like a one-eyed multicoloured deer. The amphisbaena “is so called because it has two heads, one in the right place, the other on its tail. It goes in the direction of both heads, and its body forms a circle” and the manticore is bright red with a human face and three rows of teeth.

You have to admire the imagination of the monks, not least for the stunning illustrations, and we have them to thank for considerable chunks of the D&D Monster Manual. It’s a shame that manticores don’t exist, and that lions are a slightly less accommodating than their cuddly medieval counterparts. On the other hand there’s less chance of an unwary traveller being eaten because he lay down in front of a enormous hungry African carnivore hoping it would be all meek and mild like Jesus

Phoenix (Hi no Tori) – Osamu Tezuka

Posted on July 16, 2013 by John Guy Collick

The phoenix

Following on from Jim Barker’s post about the need to take comics seriously I thought I’d write about an artist who is recognised as one of the greatest comic book writers of all time, Osamu Tezuka and his finest creation, the twelve volume Phoenix series (Hi no Tori), first published in Japan between 1967 and 1988.

In the West Japanese cartoons are tainted by association with violent porn aimed at adolescents, or Pokemon. Think anime and images of big robots slugging it away, irritating creatures incessantly droning ‘Jiggly Puff’ or monsters doing unpleasant things to schoolgirls pop into the mind. Once a year a Miyazaki Hayao Studio Ghibli film is released, a door opens and we get a brief glimpse of intelligence, beauty and a stunning grasp of narrative, then it slams shut and Transformers and green fifteen-foot willies take over once again.

Problems of perception from Volume 5 of Phoenix

The second problem, which has prevented Osamu Tezuka getting the international audience he deserves, is the one that Jim Barker so eloquently described in his post. In the UK especially, comics are for kids. Even if the artwork is stunning, the story lines adult and you call it a Graphic Novel, it’s still a comic for kids. If your drawings look like they were aimed at seven year olds (which is the case with a lot of Tezuka’s artwork) then you are completely buggered, even if you write a twelve-volume masterpiece on redemption and forgiveness that spans humanity from the dawn of time to the distant future.

Which brings me on to Phoenix. This is perhaps Osamu Tezuka’s finest work, a long sprawling saga covering millions of years of history, all revolving around the mythical firebird. The blood of this legendary creature bestows eternal youth on whoever drinks it and so some of the many tales in the epic concern those deluded enough to try and kill the bird and guarantee their own immortality. Other stories focus on doomed love, the search for glory and power, and the bigotry and cruelty this engenders. In these stories, some of which are traditional tales set in medieval Japan, others science fiction stories set in far-flung corners of galactic empires, the phoenix appears as moral commentator and guide. Throughout the cycle the same characters pop up again and again, the searcher for forbidden knowledge, the warrior thug obsessed with wealth and power (his inner turmoil signified by an enormous noise covered in boils), the tragic lovers etc. All of them end up suffering heartache and tragedy, partly through circumstance and partly as a result of their own ungoverned desires. It’s an incredibly complex and imaginative saga that needs to be read many times before all the parts of the puzzle click into place.

Another tormented soul trapped on the endless wheel of Karma

To understand Phoenix you need to know a little bit about the principles of Mahayana Buddhism which inform Tezuka’s work. In a nutshell, life is characterised by suffering caused by excessive personal attachment to things that are transient. We constantly torment ourselves by striving for illusory goals, either chasing the rainbow or clinging desperately on to stuff that eventually slips from our grasp, because of the mutable nature of the universe. Greed, jealousy, hatred and cruelty are the products of this attachment and the aim of Buddhism is to free every living thing from this cycle of illusion and disappointment. One interesting consequence of this moral framework is that there is no absolute evil, merely bad deeds done by ignorant and tormented souls. Everyone has a chance of redemption given enough time and guidance, even Hitler. Reincarnation is a fundamental component of this process, if you do bad things you tend to be reincarnated further down the scale (with hungry ghosts and the denizens of hell at the bottom – though even hell is still only a way-station and not a permanent abode). Humans are unique in that they have the conscious mind capable of grasping the system, but they are at greatest risk from their own inevitable greed and stupidity. In this context the phoenix itself is essentially a Bodhisattva, a being that has attained enlightenment but who chooses to remain in this universe to help others do the same.

The bandit Gao and the mysterious woman Hayame from the anime version of Volume 4

The story of Gao in volume four is a perfect example of Tezuka’s belief in Buddhist redemption. Set in the eighth century during the construction of the Todai-ji temple and its massive statue of Buddha, it tells of two characters, the vagabond thief Gao and the sculptor Akanemaru. Gao starts the tale as a complete villain – a murderer and rapist who thinks nothing of killing a child in front of its mother. One day, hunted through the fields, he impulsively allows a ladybird that has crawled on to his arm to live. Later he meets a beautiful white-haired woman in the forest who treats him with kindness no matter how cruel he is to her and others. He begins to fall in love with this enigmatic creature but is betrayed into murdering her. Overcome with remorse he wanders the world as a beggar before he discovers he has a penchant for carving exquisitely hideous faces channeled from his own inner torment. He ends up being commissioned to carve the demons that are put on roofs of Buddhist temples to frighten away evil spirits. At this point he bumps into Akanemaru who is obsessed with his own quest for perfection, a self-destructive pursuit of the impossible that causes him to visit cruelty on others, including the reformed Gao. It’s a stunning, complex tale that contains within it most of the themes of the entire series. Tezuka has an uncanny knack of interweaving a tale of intense drama and tragedy with moral lessons that are never preachy, and some genuine instances of laugh-out loud humour. It’s also fascinating for anyone interested in early Japanese history (the era is that of Charlemagne and the first Viking invasions of Britain). For people interested in the series it’s a good place to start.

Osamu Tezuka, 1928 – 1989

The other books in the series move from the stone age through to the distant future. Tezuka loved science fiction, and was a fan of, among others, Isaac Asimov. Several tales pose the question what it is to be human, and whether our moral duty to fellow creatures extends to artificial intelligence. One particular story in volume five is a direct tribute to the first short story in Asimov’s collection I, Robot (1950), ‘Robbie‘ in which a little girl has a robot teacher/playmate. Be warned, though, Tezuka’s version comes to a far grimmer conclusion. Indeed, throughout the series there is a constant tragic thread that, at times, is quite hard on the reader and his or her favourite characters (think George R. R. Martin). This fits in with the peculiarly Japanese concept of the tragic, hopeless hero who no matter what they say or do, end up perishing in some god-forsaken wasteland having achieved very little. To be fair though, the overall message is one of eventual redemption as all the tormented souls weaved into Tezuka’s massive tapestry end up being led by the phoenix to enlightenment.

Viz Media (not related to the UK comic Viz, thank god) have released English translations of all twelve books and they are available from Amazon.

The Art of Ian Miller

Posted on July 5, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones can often look a bit silly. Not this one – this would give any Shoggoth a run for its money.

The early 1970s saw a renaissance in Science Fiction and Fantasy cover art in the UK, led by New English Library and Panther. If you compare the drab covers of the 60s with what came after the difference is striking. Gone are the clumsy Pop Art/Op Art photo collages and instead the shelves of W. H. Smiths were filled with the gorgeous colours of Bruce Pennington, the meticulous figure work of Jim Burns, Foss’s vast spaceships and the insane acid dreams of Bob Haberfield‘s covers to Mayflower’s Moorcock books. As the decade progressed, and each artist spawned their own imitators (particularly Foss) then a certain feeling of sameness started to creep in, which only made the illustrator with a unique style stand out even more.

One such artist was Ian Miller, whose incredibly detailed and frenetic drawings started to appear on the covers of fantasy and science fiction novels from 1973 onwards. By the time Science Fiction Monthly interviewed him in 1975 he’d produced a small but startling selection of illustrations for Panther (Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and The Haunter of the Dark) and Pan (including Ray Bradbury’s S is for Space). His art was about as far away from the brightly coloured planets and spaceships of his contemporaries as you could get. Instead he produced incredibly detailed almost monochrome images that were reminiscent of the work of renaissance artists like Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528) and Hieronymous Bosch (1450 – 1516).

Winter

The first impression on looking at Ian Miller’s work is that these are the nightmares of someone who has gone completely mad. In his pictures disturbing machine/insect/plant hybrids loom over human figures, set against monochrome or flat colour landscapes devoid of any real perspective. The humans often wear landsknecht armour, and have the same childishly vacant expressions you see on early Renaissance saints or Russian icons. The demons and monsters are truly hideous creatures straight out of Bosch. Often Miller drops in a musical box or a rocking horse or two into his apocalyptic scenes, where they take on a sinister, grotesque power. As is often the case with Grotesque and Symbolist art, you get the impression they are supposed to represent something else, but god knows what, and that makes them all the more frightening. Interestingly in his interview in SFM Miller suggested an interest in Jungian theories of archetypal symbols popping up throughout human consciousness over the ages, but where a rocking horse fits into that I’ve no idea. You get the sense that he and the interviewer are over-egging the pudding a bit, and that Miller just puts stuff like this into his pictures because it looks very scary and weird.

Miller's wonderfully dark take on Lord of the Rings for the Tolkein Bestiary

Miller’s wonderfully dark take on The Lord of the Rings for the Tolkein Bestiary

Despite trying to move into SF covers, Miller’s work was clearly a far better fit for Science Fantasy and Horror. He really came into his own working on Games Workshop’s Warhammer series, and did some truly wonderful illustrations for the Warhammer role-playing game book and supplements published in the 1980s. In many ways his art outshone the game itself, capturing the atmosphere of a darkly insane parallel Renaissance world to a far greater extent than the often childish content.

From the graphic novel The City. King’s Cross underground marginally different from what it is today.

He also produced a graphic novel with James Herbert, The City, (1993), which portrayed a journey into a post-apocalyptic London dominated by mutant rats. The story is a bit predictable, but the artwork is both utterly absorbing and creepy – not the kind of comic you want to read late at night on your own.

The Hall of Bright Carvings from Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan

Ian Miller is still going strong as an artist, and he’s now producing some wonderfully minimalist, and just as disturbing, images for his blog. You can also browse his portfolio of earlier works, and buy prints, including some of his fantastic illustrations to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy.

In the Night. From Ian Miller’s blog.

Frank Frazetta

Posted on June 14, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Conan the Barbarian

I’m still waiting for Conan. The first Arnold Schwarzenegger film was kind of OK, and had one or two impressive moments. The second was dire and I still can’t bring myself to watch the remake with Jason Momoa (despite the fact that his Khal Drogo is as close to Conan as anyone – though Rory McCann’s Hound comes a close second). The problem is that for me Conan is Frazetta’s Conan, an ugly vicious bugger with a face like Les Dawson’s Cissie Braithwaite. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jason Momoa are simply too clean and pretty, like cosplay fans oiled up and tanned for the next fantasy con. Conan’s world is, to my mind, the world of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Valhalla Rising, all cryptic utterances, bleak moors and your own innards falling into your lap – and only Frank Frazetta comes anywhere close to the capturing the visceral darkness of Robert E. Howard’s original tales. Everyone else seems a wee bit feeble in comparison.

This week I downloaded the documentary Frazetta: Painting with Fire (2003) from iTunes. Like many documentaries coming out of the U.S. it leans towards simplistic hagiography, but once you get past the ‘Frank was the most wonderful person in the entire cosmos ever’ comments that bookend each chapter of the film the contents are eye-opening. On the outside Frazetta looked like another example of that peculiarly American phenomenon, the cowboy artist. Ruggedly good-looking with an easy smile, dressed in Levis playing baseball, he resembles Jackson Pollock – an icon of US artistic freedom encouraged by the CIA to counteract Soviet culture (if you think I’m being ridiculous here, the CIA funded the New York Museum of Modern Art in the 1950s as part of their propaganda war against communism).

Conan fighting Frost Giants

One thing the documentary does bring home is the revolutionary nature of his paintings. More than any other fantasy artist, he had the uncanny knack of capturing a perfect instant of pure action and emotion. Some of the remarkable claims to emerge from the documentary are that he didn’t really have a formal art training, which is very hard to believe looking at his figure work, and that he worked at incredible speed entirely from his own imagination. Once the image lodged itself in his head then he would crank it out in eight to fifteen hours.

It’s clear that the dynamic action shots that dominate his paintings come from his apprenticeship working as a ghost artist for comics like Tarzan of the Apes and Li’l Abner, and that his figure work is in the tradition of artists like Burne Hogarth (who produced wonderful textbooks on dynamic anatomy that are invaluable for illustrators and animators alike). The documentary argues that his intuitive grasp of anatomy in a state of extreme exertion also came from his own love of sports, including baseball and karate. What sets Frazetta’s fantasy art apart from the work of, say, Boris Vallejo and Chris Achilleos, is that it very rarely looks posed.

Sacrifice

A painting like Sacrifice, for example, shows his ability to capture an instant with all its drama and emotion. Yet even though the first response of many is that his technique is photographic, it actually isn’t. He is essentially an Impressionist, working at speed (especially in oils) to give his pictures a loose, sometimes even abstract quality, and I think that is where the emotional power comes from. His compositions are often quite narrow (dictated by the aspect ratio of a paperback cover), frequently use a pyramid composition where everything piles up to a dramatic figure in the centre (often top-lit so that the features and lower body dissolve into shadow). Then, very rapidly, the imagery bleeds out into a patchwork of shadows and menacing figures half-glimpsed in the background, which might be real or just phantoms. It’s a very powerful combination that other commercial artists have found hard to match.

Admittedly his paintings of women are less assured than those of the men, his females are usually draped over scenery like large plumped-up cushions. While most of his men are clearly self-portraits (especially John Carter) his women often look like someone’s stuck the head of a twelve-year old girl on top of a stripper. Having said that, they are refreshingly chunky-looking, unlike the anodyne aerobics instructors of later imitators , and occasionally his action shots of heroines matched those of his heroes. Dejah Thoris’s bum in this painting of John Carter fighting the apes of Mars is a stroke of compositional genius.

John Carter, Tars Tarkas, a load of Apes and a bit of Dejah Thoris

Thirty years of post-modern cynicism, and thousands of inferior imitators, have sadly led to both Frazetta and Conan being relegated to the realms of amusing kitsch. As T. S. Eliot famously said, between the conception and the creation falls the shadow. In the documentary John Milius proudly states that the orgy scene in Conan the Barbarian was directly influenced by Frazetta. Cut to half a dozen surfer dudes and babes in faux classical costumes rolling around in a cheap set with totally unmotivated lighting. Chaining a topless girl to a pillar does not a Frazetta image make, and yet Sword and Sorcery is now wedded to images of Arnie running round soft porn sets in furry underpants, and Frazetta’s wonderful paintings suffer by association.

Self Portrait

Frank Frazetta was an amazing artist by any standards, and despite his own aw-shucks self-deprecation, a surprisingly dedicated and focussed craftsman. After a series of debilitating strokes he taught himself to paint and draw with his left hand, and while he never matched the brilliance of his work in the 60s he managed to produce some pretty impressive watercolours. Perhaps one day someone will have the courage to bring his Conan to life in a serious reboot.

German Expressionist Flyer

Posted on April 5, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Ruth’s flying machine from Thumb

I’ve been working on some art/visualisation pieces for Thumb. As I mentioned before I wanted to capture the feel of the German Expressionist artists and films of the 1920s and 1930s. The movement grew out of a desire to overturn the established order of nineteenth century Europe, whose triumphalist and Imperial certainties had been completely destroyed by the horrors of World War One. Expressionism was characterised by bold colours and lines, and distortion based on the emotions of the writer, painter or film maker. It was Impressionism in reverse. Instead of recreating the impression of the world on the eye, Expressionism expressed inner feelings, often focussing on madness and dreams.

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari film poster

A still from the film, note the distorted set.

German Expressionist Cinema was a sub-genre of the movement, and produced some of the most striking movies ever made. The most famous, and most typical of the style, is The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), the tale of a murderous somnambulist set in a crazily distorted world. Other classics include Murnau’s Faust (1926) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Here are some sample film posters of the period:

Poster from Paul Wegener’s 1915 film Der Golem.

Murnau’s Head of Janus, 1920

And finally, a magnificent poster of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

If I wanted to sum up Thumb in four words it would “Indiana Jones does Kafka”. While there are Steampunk elements in the novel, I’m more interested in capturing the fin-de-siecle absurdities of the early twentieth century, and the atmosphere of Kafka and the German Expressionists. The artwork and trailer I’m doing for Thumb is therefore based on these styles, although I’ve toned down the frantic distortions a bit (mainly because I’m nowhere near as good an artist as those painters and designers of the original movement). Interestingly enough, someone said that the picture of the house in the Wasteland reminds them of Tim Burton’s style, which is great because Burton is also heavily influenced by films like Caligari

The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke – Richard Dadd

Posted on April 2, 2013 by John Guy Collick

Detail from Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards British painting bore little resemblance to its European counterpart. While the French Impressionists forged ahead with their bold experiments in light and composition, English painters headed off into the realms of Genre and Narrative art. For them and their audiences the content of a picture became more important than how it was executed. A good painting was defined as one that told a story, preferably with an improving moral. Naturally this favoured realism above all else, with art often imitating the theatre by showing box-shaped scenes filled with portentous drama. The first work in Augustus Egg’s trilogy Past and Present is a perfect example. The execution is pretty dire but that’s not the point, the painting is intended to demonstrate the evils of Fallen Women so not only do we see Mother prostrated by the Discovery of her Infidelity, but the rest of the canvas is filled with Symbols to drive home the point (half-eaten apple on the carpet – original sin, geddit? Falling house of cards etc…).

Augustus Egg, Past and Present 1. Mother’s Sordid Goings-On Revealed!

Narrative art wasn’t all about petit bourgeois moralising. History paintings were popular, especially accurate depictions of Great Scenes from English History. Shakespeare also became a rich source of ideas, largely because of the demand for illustrated editions of his works so people could look at the pictures rather than struggle through the verse.

Come Unto These Yellow Sands. Richard Dadd's fairly normal illustration from The Tempest.

Come Unto These Yellow Sands. Richard Dadd’s relatively normal illustration from The Tempest.

Fairy paintings made up one small and rather odd sub-genre of Victorian Narrative art. A lot of the time this was part of the overspill from Shakespeare pictures, with artists portraying scenes and characters from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest. The birth of a market in children’s books also awakened an interest in folklore and legends from England’s past, a fascination that culminated in the Cottingley Fairies incident in 1917 when two little girls photographed themselves with cut-out fairy figures and claimed they were real. To anyone with half a brain the pictures are obviously fake, and yet minds as fine as Arthur Conan Doyle’s proclaimed them genuine.

The Cottingley Fairies. Arthur Conan Doyle thought these were real, the muppet!

Of all the fairy painters of the mid to late nineteenth century by far the oddest was Richard Dadd, whose most famous work The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke (1855-65), is a incredibly detailed tableaux showing a tiny workman cracking a hazelnut with a hammer while a crowd of odd creatures look on. Richard Dadd was insane, possibly a paranoid schizophrenic, and was imprisoned in Bethlem, and later Broadmoor, psychiatric prisons after he murdered his father in 1843. He was encouraged to continue painting as part of his treatment and produced a number of canvases, of which The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke is his most famous and fascinating.

The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke by Richard Dadd.

The picture is filled with almost microscopic, painstaking detail. The observation of the flowers and insects is meticulous. The characters watching the Fairy Feller are a curious mixture of pantomime Kings, Queens and pirates, mixed up with people who could have stepped off a mid-Victorian street. Many of the characters have distorted heads, a symptom of schizophrenia whereby the part of the brain that processes faces is affected by the disease.

Detail from The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke. Spot the tiny figures behind the two women.

Perspective is almost non-existent, and wherever you look more details (and tinier figures) pop out at you. It’s a painting that is as fascinating and beautiful as it is disturbing, and is certainly a million miles away from the more conventional pixies and elves of Arthur Rackham and other fantasy illustrators of the late 19th and early 20th century. It’s the kind of picture my Grandfather would spend hours poring over with a magnifying glass because he was a bit strange that way.

The best online reproduction is on the website of the Tate Gallery here.

I’ve uploaded a large resolution version of the entire picture here so you can revel in the detail.

Photograph of Richard Dadd

Cartoonophobia by Jim Barker

Posted on March 2, 2013 by John Guy Collick

I wanted to give this blog post over to a friend of mine who is a brilliant independent cartoonist; Jim Barker of Jim Barker Cartoons and Graphics. Having lived in Japan for ten years, I can entirely sympathise with this. For the Japanese, manga are a narrative art form to be taken as seriously as any other form of art. They are used not only for entertainment, but to educate as well. Similarly in France, Bande dessinée have reached astonishing levels of sophistication. Unfortunately in the UK, cultural snobbery has meant that the real potential of cartoons and comics as an art form and a medium for expression has yet to be fully realised. For those readers not familiar with the difference between UK comic traditions and those elsewhere I’ve added three examples from France, the UK and Japan so you can see the difference.

Over to Jim…

Cartoonophobia by Jim Barker

I blame The Beano.

In other parts of the world – Europe, America, Japan – cartoons and comic strips are regarded as a legitimate and serious art form. In the UK, however, thanks to generations of cheaply produced comics, they are still seen as simply ‘kids stuff’. It’s amazing how sniffy people can be about cartoons. I’ll meet a marketing’n’PR person at a networking event and the minute I say I draw cartoons, you can see the eyes glaze over, barriers going up and they’re looking over my shoulder searching for the next meeja person to talk to.

Japan – Tezuka Osama’s wonderfully sophisticated Life of Buddha.

Happily there ARE people who realize how useful cartoons and humour can be as communications tools. No one can deny that in presentations, pictures are much more efficient at telling a story than wodges and wodges of words. Equally, using humor, the points are easier to make, the message is better understood, and the audience will pay closer attention to details or points you want to get across.

The average person will remember about 70% of a verbal presentation three hours later and as little as 10% three days later. With a visual presentation 85% is remembered three hours later and up to 20% after three days.

But primarily the purpose of a cartoon to make people smile. And that’s something we all need these days. It is a fact that laughter releases endorphins that make people feel relaxed and overall happy. Visuals… humour… visual humour… not rocket science, is it?

Cartoon characters have been used for years to personify companies. Tony the Tiger, for example. Or the Tetley Tea Folk. The BBC used a cartoon animation to publicise their Olympic coverage. And there’s hardly a football team in the UK that doesn’t have their own cartoon mascot.

Cartoons are very effective in Health and Safety matters where they can easily depict subject matter impossible to do using other methods. I once had to draw a poster about diarrhoea and swimming pools which would have been very unpleasant using photographs. Or the brochure which featured several STDs as animated characters. Or the poster which showed the consequences of putting a hand too near a band saw…

France – Enki Bilal’s Immortals.

They are also very useful in training – showing the consequences of following/not following a procedure. Or dealing with sales and Customer relations. Or simply as a way of motivating a sales team.

UK – The Beano. Spot the difference?

Having been in the graphics and illustration business for … well, more years than I care to think about… I firmly believe that cartoons – whether it’s a single illustration to brighten up a newsletter, a presentation caricature as gift for a client or member of staff… or a full scale corporate strategy involving mascots, merchandising and promotional material – are a major weapon in anyone’s marketing, promotions and communications arsenal.

All I have to do now is convince everyone else.

Jim Barker – Jim Barker Cartoons and Graphics

Jim Barker

Life Before Man

Posted on February 21, 2013 by John Guy Collick

On my last trip up to Yorkshire I found one of my favourite childhood books, Life Before Man, by Zdenek Burian (pictures) and Zdenek V. Spinar (text), published in 1972 by Thames and Hudson. I bought this when it first came out and it entranced me for years.

Nowadays photorealistic dinosaurs are de rigueur, thanks to Jurassic Park (1993) and TV series like Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) but in the 60s and 70s making prehistoric beasts come to life was a real challenge. Films went for two approaches to the problem – either using stop motion rubber models (Valley of the Gwangi (1969) and A Million Years BC (1966)) or gluing fins onto real lizards, poking them with a stick and filming them in slow motion (The Lost World (1960) and Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1959)). They also tended to mess things up historically by introducing women who ran about screaming and spraining their ankles mid-flight, as was required by the artistic sensibilities of the time. Only the Stravinsky sequence in Fantasia (1940) came anywhere near a decent attempt at scientific accuracy.

A gala dinner held inside a wildly inaccurate dinosaur in 1853

Artists had been trying to recreate the beasts since Victorians fell in love with the monsters in the middle of the 19th century, though first attempts came up with some spectacular errors. Most famous of these was the sculpture of the Iguanadon intended for Crystal Palace gardens. The artist knew the monster had a spiky bit but was at a loss where to put it, so he stuck it on the end of the creature’s nose (it belongs on its thumb). He also made it four-legged, not bipedal, though this did help when a gala dinner was held inside the mould in 1853.

The obligatory Tyrannosaurus Rex

Zdenek Burian’s paintings were revolutionary because of their obsessive attention to detail, and the almost near-photographic execution. Many of them are also ‘action shots’ rather than the rather dull static images of the day. Scientific discoveries have rendered some of the images inaccurate, his biped dinosaurs appear to walk like humans dragging big tails, rather than like birds with their rear ends stuck out for balance. Yet both his dinosaurs and their surroundings appeared completely believable, so much so that one foil-hatted UFO-hoaxer used Burian’s picture of Pteranadon as a ‘photograph’ proving he’d journeyed back in time with the help of his alien chums.

Burian’s painting of a Pteranodon used as photographic ‘proof’ of Billy Meier’s time travel.

Life Before Man is also remarkable for the sheer number and scope of the pictures. The book is chronological and spans prehistory from the cratered volcanic wilderness of 4600 million years ago, through the Precambrian all the way through to the Quaternary era and the New Stone Age. Not only does it show prehistoric monsters in all their glory but also the rise of the mammals, and eventually the different stages of man’s evolution.

Neanderthal man makes something to poke Homo Sapiens with.

After the dinosaurs the mammals are a bit dull; big cats, hairy elephants and odd looking rinoceri, but Burian comes into his own again with wonderfully evocative images of early people engaged in various prehistoric pursuits such as Chipping Flints or Pointing at Things and Grunting in Alarm. Here the quality of the images is patchy, but when he’s at his best you could believe you are looking at portraits of living beings. Here’s his rendition of Homo Erectus from half a million years ago.

Homo Erectus (Peking Man)

Sadly Life Before Man is currently out of print but stray copies occasionally appear on Amazon.

Here’s a link to Billy Meier’s website in which he answers accusations that the photo of a Pteranodon he took while time travelling was simply a copy of Burian’s painting. He backs up his argument with a letter from Ptaah the Plejaran of the Andromeda Council who blames it on Quetzal, another alien, for going off on one and stealing all the original negatives.

John Martin – Catastrophic Artist

Posted on January 22, 2013 by John Guy Collick

A belated Happy New Year to everyone. This post is a bit later than I anticipated because I’ve spent the weeks after Xmas finishing the second draft of Thumb. It’s now been put into a drawer for a month to ferment before I give it another going over and then send it to my editor. In the meantime I thought I’d kick off 2013 with a look at one of my favourite artists, John Martin (1789 – 1854). Martin was a hugely influential painter who specialised in spectacular renditions of cataclysmic biblical scenes. Here’s one of his most famous, The Great Day of His Wrath (1853) which shows the end of the world.

the-great-day-of-his-wrath

Martin’s religious works were revolutionary. Before him paintings from the Bible tended to be of people (i.e. Jesus, the Apostles, Abraham etc.) and covered a very specific range of limited subjects (The Annunciation, The Deposition, Doubting Thomas and so on). People in Martin’s paintings tend to be very small, down in a corner somewhere and usually falling into crevasses while the landscape is hurled about around them. His work follows the Romantic creed of the Sublime, a vision of the natural world that is so vast and powerful that it humbles and awes those who look upon it. At the same time he was influenced by the early Geological schools of the Vulcanists and the Neptunists.

The Destruction Of Sodom And Gomorrah – 1852

The Vulcanists and Neptunists, known collectively as ‘Catastrophic Geologists’ tried to explain how the surface of the Earth had reached its current form. Following the dictates of Platonism, which sees God’s creation as perfect, the world should be a uniform sphere. In reality it has random bits sticking out all over the place. The Vulcanists claimed that the surface of the Earth had been formed by sudden bursts of violent volcanic activity. The Neptunists stated that mighty floods had carved out the mountains and the valleys. The latter had scripture on their side, but in both cases these geologists were postulating a planet that was no more than 6000 years old. Rivalry between the two groups was intense. Neptunists used to waylay Vulcanists and beat them up, Vulcanists would mob Neptunist lectures and throw rotten fruit and horse manure.

The Deluge – 1834

Martin’s paintings belong to this vision of a world subject to massive violent turmoil, with mountains being hurled about and mighty waves thundering over the landscape while cities and people disappear into immense chasms. Interestingly, Immanuel Velikovsky‘s equally bonkers theories of the formation of the solar system (Worlds in Collision, 1950) belong to the same tradition.

Portrait of John Martin by Henry Warren – 1838

The Vulcanists and Neptunists were superseded in the early 1830s by an altogether more sensible paradigm when Charles Lyell published Principles of Geology. This argued that the surface of the Earth had been created by forces still in existence, i.e. erosion. Though seemingly a bit prosaic compared to previous ideas, it was incredibly revolutionary, not least because its claims necessitated an Earth that was millions of years old, not thousands. Lyell, and the idea of ‘Deep Geological Time’, paved the way for Darwin, giving him a timescale in which his concept of evolution could properly operate.

None of this deterred Martin from his apocalyptic visions (or having a crack at some rather cuddly dinosaurs as in his frontispiece to Gideon Mantell‘s The Wonders of Geology (1838)). He carried on painting huge, dramatic canvases that have influenced artists and film makers ever since. My Great Uncle Archie used to come over all peculiar when standing in front of a painting by John Martin. I can see why, they are often so large that if you stand close enough they fill your field of vision, and you get the same feeling of slight dizziness you get with IMAX.

iguanodon
Finally – rumour used to abound that John Martin set fire to York Minster so he could have something spectacular to paint. In reality it was his elder brother, Jonathan Martin, who tried to burn the edifice down, and who ended up in a lunatic asylum.