A "Land of Winter" Triptych

Just a little triptych of pre-production images for my personal project: "Land of Winter". Composing images in black & white is a lot of fun, it's satisfying to wring a sense of drama from a composition using tone.

New Year at the Beach

Well, we've successfully completed another transit around our local star, and we've ticked forward an increment on our calendar. Time to celebrate!

This time I spent New Year staying with some friends, a couple of whom were generous enough to host us, in Cleggan, County Galway. It's a more rugged, rainy, and windswept place than I am used to in Ireland. Dublin's gentle, graceful shore is nestled against the rather contained Irish Sea. The West coat, by contrast, is hewn into its serrated undulations by the unrelenting violence of the Atlantic Ocean's full fury. 

Click for full-sized version

Now back in Dublin after strolling those beaches, strewn with rocks and tide-pools, I've kicked together another little digital painting. This has wound up becoming another bit of concept art for my "Land of Winter" narrative project that's been in the works for some time, but I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out for a relatively quick piece of work. I was doing some experiments with layering textures to give the sense of a large, shallow, sandy tide-pool, one only a couple of inches deep, but blasting a reflection of the tumultuous sky back at us.

Here's a version without the two guys fighting to the death, in case anyone's interested.

And just for the sake of documenting, here's the rough composition about five minutes in. Unlike how I usually do these, I didn't start with a scanned sketch, so I just kicked around digital paint for a bit. As anyone who has taken a cursory glance at my other illustrations can see, yes, there's the overpowering backlight again. I'll tone it down next time, but in this instance, I stuck it in there as anyone who's spent a winter as far north as Ireland will tell you, that low, blinding, cold sun is a feature that is difficult to escape, and is one of the main visual cues I plan to use in "Land of Winter" to create a sense of contrast and alienation in our poor hero. (It also makes driving here in the winter a real pain.)

The combatants' poses I came up with while referring back to sketches I had done at a fencing club a few years ago. I can't claim that they are terribly accurate or effective poses for skewering one's enemies, but I hoped that the downturned sword in the foreground would both give a sense of being on the defensive backfoot, while also drawing the eye to the mid-ground figure. Our hero's the one in the unenviable position of fighting for his life with the sun in his eyes.

Rough Draft

On the Beach

A typical Irish summer.

Just a quickie little tonal piece again, this time our intrepid hero shortly after arrival. Still needs work, just wanted to convey the idea of a vast stretch of low-tide beach covered in sky-reflecting tide pools.

Hospitable looking place, isn't it?

Must... Keep... Posting...

Going for the "American Gangster" poster's cut-off-face award...

I need to stay on the ball with producing work and uploading. My current job search is occupying quite a bit of time, and when I spend time with one thing, I regret not spending it on another. Not a very helpful attitude to have, so I'm going to do a bit better with scheduling and allocating my time from now on.

This is just a quickie little Corel Painter doodle to get back into the swing of things. I haven't done a whole lot of work on things like page layout and typography, type / logo design. I'd like to develop those skills quite a bit as I go on. I'm not even sure if the type ideas in this little doodle are interesting at all, but the ball must get rolling somewhere.

Why not here?

More practice images.

Here comes trouble...

Just another practice image from Land of Winter, same general setting as some of the other images — a rain-swept village that's the site of a brutal bloodbath. 

This week marked the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. For a country that has not had a peaceful history, it's arresting to think that its most devastating, bloodthirsty conflict was against itself. It was the first industrialized war, with mass produced rifled bullets able to fire a straight shot, but strategies that relied upon bunching men together in easily targeted groups. 

It's also intriguing to note the euphemisms that are still used when referring to the war's motivations. The argument that it wasn't slavery that motivated the conflict, but "states' rights" is somewhat misleading, as the only "right" that was under threat was the right to own and exploit human beings.

The Civil War also has the onerous distinction of containing the single bloodiest day in American history — the Battle of Antietam, in which 23,000 men were killed. From 6:00am to 9:00am, one man was killed every second.

"When we came to that beautiful cornfield... That was when the trouble began... Oh but the bullets did fly. I didn't see them, but I saw their effects. Men were falling all around us. Our bugler was standing near me when a cannonball struck him in the head and cut it from his shoulders. I think I got some of the blood and brains in my face... Brave men on both sides are falling, to rise no more. Thousands of them."
J. Polk Racine, on the Battle of Antietam

More "Land of Winter" doodles.

Can't make an omelette without...
Getting doused in an arterial spray.
One of the lessons I've learned from Samurai films.

Batter Up!

Just a couple of quick little Painter XI doodles relating to "Land of Winter". The former being a little bit on the psychotic side, I know.

Land of Winter concept art, and Improving my Posting Habits

I seem to only update this blog annually. That is probably a mistake. I will try to be more diligent about posting new material as I make it. These days have been split between endeavoring to find a job, script-writing, and creating concept art for the script I'm writing.

The current plan is to turn the script into a graphic novel, or a similar format, upon its completion. When working alone, as I am, animation is such a labor-intensive process that it rarely makes sense for the sorts of projects I have cooking up. My main interests tend to lie in narrative. Ideally I like to convey that narrative visually, but I also immensely enjoy dialogue, and occasional forays into conceits that cannot be expressed without a bit of dialogue. I have nothing but absolute respect for the John Lasseters of this world who can convey sophisticated emotional experiences, often in very brief runtimes.

It's a skill I need to improve, it certainly isn't easy. Like the quote that's usually attributed to Blaise Pascal goes, "I apologize for writing such a long letter, I did not have time to write a short one."

Anyhow, with all that said, I may as well explain the images at the top of this post. They're from the script I'm working on, as I attempt to establish a tone and aesthetic. The former is approaching the intended look of the bulk of the piece, with the middle approaching the intended look of a recurring sequence of traumatic flashbacks for the protagonist. The last one is the intended aesthetic for the third act clash, borrowing liberally from the climax of Seven Samurai, if I'm going to borrow, I may as well borrow from the best. These were all done in Corel Painter XI. Usually I work from a sketchbook, scan the drawing, then paint, but in these cases I decided to try my hand working digitally from scratch. For all you lose in immediacy using a tablet instead of paper, you gain a lot in flexibility after the sketch is done.

And finally, just because Ireland sensationally clobbered England in the closing round of the Rugby Six Nations, a quickie little sketch from the week before that turned out to be somewhat prophetic.

Ireland finally coming into form in the 6 Nations Rugby, as imagined a week earlier