Meetings and Connections contetual studies and research

For my project my next step after research is 'casting' my characters in a fashion and looking at contextual studies for them


Me and Nicole:
Elektra and Daredevil

















With me and Nicole being a couple the characters in relationships work well for us but in particular these two seeing as like the characters we have martial arts in our backgrounds.

 

Because I'm working realism and surrealism into my work I have been looking at Ninjutsu martial artists for function of the characters. In the comic's Elektra is an assassin so looking at traditional Ninja design will help me redesign her appearance to make more sense. I plan on making use of the glove/gauntlet designs, pants design and the use of footwear called tabbies.

I then went on to look into Sai and Escrima Stick fighting to look at the poses and give me an idea as to what kind of composition I can come up with for my photographs. I found some really dynamic imagery and I plan to take some photographs with me and Nicole at her club's dojo of me and her sparring using the weapons.

Me and Nicole:
Rogue and Gambit

In making the most use of the weapons, the plan is to produce some photographs of other characters as well who also use weapons in order to take the photographs in a safe environment and under control.

For the X-Men's costumes I looked into various things including kevlar, flight suits and parachute materials but decided if they would be in battles and getting knocked about quite a bit they would need something that absorbs impact but is also easy to maneuver in and so I decided on motorbike suits. Now granted the films often portray their costumes as black leather suits, I wanted to look for something of a different approach but eventually settled on thinking that is probably the most accurate of themes. I also looked into some Cajun symbols and patterns for Gambit as I thought I could put a New Orleans Saints patch on his jacket to show off his heritage.

I also looked into some more weapons research and found this bow staff fighting stance which I may adapt in my photos

Me:
Robin

 

I will probably aquire some various other robin costumes to use as a basis but this design has always been my favorite. Robin is a character used for his agility so his costume needs to be lightweight but seeing as how the character is prone to knife and gun attacks his costume will need to be bullet proof

I came across these examples of Kevlar body armour and I like this design because it identifies the key areas that need shielding. I can redesign his costume to match these pannels of kevlar and the shoulder pieces work really well due to the design of the costume

  One direction I had to debate on was mask design for these characters. For my development I'll try various things but in the comics and movies, Robin and any other character with an eye mask tends to have them simply sticking to the face. The movies accomplish this through latex face masks but my theory is that it leaves them more exposed to them falling off. Although the elasticated masks seem cheap and tacky, I think it brings them into the real world in terms of function.

Finally some more bow staff fighting for research




Me:
Nightwing

Nightwing was the first Robin so I felt to use myself for this character also, his costume design will be similar to Robin but I want to give it more of an urban approach

 

To do this I thought of researching a combination of two things I previously searched, Kevlar and Motorcycle suits. I came across a few designs where Kevlar plates were used in the suits for extra protection. This works perfectly for the character giving him the urban edge using motorcycle leathers, and the added function of kevlar for protection

Nightwing's primary weapons are escrima sticks like Daredevil so I can use that research into stick fighting with him also but I want to show that some characters rely also on their bodies as weapons and I plan to try a photograph of me doing a roundhouse kick like the one above to the camera.

Nicole:
Mystique

Mystique is a mutant and enemy of the X-men. Her ability is to shapeshift so for research on how I would portray that I was thinking something like holographic images like 3D posters. It's still an idea I'm playing with but I had a better suggestion.

An example of a modern day mutation is the chameleon, having the ability to change their appearence based on their body functions (e.g temperature).
My thoughts for Mystique would be to give her Chameleon like scales (similar to her appearence in film) and because I like the colours on the first chameleon picture I might use some of that and throw in a few other colours rather than just leave her the comic book blue colour. Throw in hints of reds, yellows and purples.

Mark:
Magneto

This is one I really have to get right in order to engage Mark on my project.For Magneto, there is quite a few ideas I think I can look into, starting with the helmet.

 

My research on the helmet led me to a civilization known as the Olmec. They predate the Mayans and they believed that God would speak to them but tell them terrible things so the block out their thoughts they produced helmets which covered the locations of the brain where thought process occurred.  They created huge head sculptures showing this known as the Olmec Colossal Heads. Magneto's helmet is designed to stop people from reading his thoughts so these two come in the same kind of field.

This helmet which is the same shape as Magneto's is called a Barbute, it comes in a 'T' and a 'Y' shape, is an itallian design based on the Greek Corinthian Helmets. They are traditionally made of a single sheet of steel. In redesigning Magneto's helmet, there isn't much to differ from but I plan to make sure both these two elements are present in the design process

For the cape, I looked into Ferraiolo capes, traditionally used amongst clergy members. Seeing as how Magneto is a preacher of sorts in that he stands for mutant peace, it would be fitting for him to have a garment with religious undertones.

For the general attire I looked into royal clothing I found for Brittish Royal Uniform. Magneto sees himself as king of a mutant Utopia so it makes sense to see himself as royalty and fancy himself a king.

Meetings and Connections begining

For my meetings and connections project I have the idea to produce drawings and paintings of myself, my friends and my family as comic book characters but in my style of art and a fine art media.
I wrote this in my book as 'Combining fantasy and reality through friends and family as comicbook characters in a fine art media. e.g. model a friend and similar to motion capture used in film, paint the costume over the model. I want to assist in a movement where comicbook art is accepted as fine art.'

My expatiation for this goes as so;
When I think of comicbook art the first ideas that come to my head is the pop art style of work from the 60's like the work of Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko

Ditko's artwork layed the ground work on Spider-man as well as many other illustrators at this time creating new superheroes and villains but they have evolved much more in today's times.

The early comic book work would have strong vibrant colours, but not much in terms of tone or detail. The overall drawings are simply illustations and unfinished works of art. With further development the piece above could be an amazing piece of art in a traditional sense but due to time and effort early comic books focused more on completing an issue than providing masterpiece illustrations.

In modern comic book's this has been improved upon and the artwork has become more mature to the reader because of the shift in audience. Comic books are no longer aimed at children and have been proven to be a staple structure in adult literacy (for example Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns or Sin City)
Along with the mature story telling, a higher quality of artwork was needed and so current artists produce pieces like this.

This piece by Jim Lee is an example of today's comic book artwork. Obviously more effort put into this and the use of tone, depth and composition helps to create a finer piece of work to this piece, but there is still a heavy reliant on the comic book style element in the work.

Along with Comic book art always looking like average illustrations which a lot of them are (the difference being if they are good fine pieces or if they are quick pop art style pieces) is the elements of imagination. To some extent I appreciate the imagination used in comic books, super powers, costumes, monsters and magic etc I enjoy. It's a reminder of child hood and a release of freedom for imagination but comic books tend to have a problem with exaggeration, particularly in figurative.
Male superheroes are predominantly drawn with defined muscles that more often that not are shown through clothing and female's with large breasts and skinny bodies. The idea for this comes from the imagination of what the ideal figure looks like and greek god figures (as in the superheroes are special because of their god-like appearences they aren't like mortal men) but for my project I want to address that. Mat in my class is an example, he's strong enough to lift a great amount, but his muscles aren't defined like a superhero.

Although striking and dynamic to look at, this piece has some terrible proportioning and is heavily over exadurated. (For a human being to be built like this would most likely cause them serious problems) It begs the question is the costume unhealthily tight? or does the character just have 6 inch veins.

Along with my gripe with the muscles, the costumes aren't much better. The male costumes are fine, traditionally masks, shirts, pants, boots, gloves, capes etc. With women however, they are quite often dressed more 'smutty'.

Although the majority of comic book readers are male, this costume clearly isn't practical and is designed with only one marketing sense, so I will be aiming at using characters with more respectable costumes or looking for alternative redesigns to give the characters a bit more class.

Although I just spent the majority of this post tearing apart comic book art, something that I connect with and is a big part of my life, my point was to reach this part. Although most comicbook art is the same formula as seen above, every so often there comes an artist who takes a brillaint spin on the traditional style and makes it their own, and in turn a piece of fine art.

Alex Ross

 

Alex Ross is my favourite artist. He produces mainly comic book paintings of a hyper-realistic fashion demonstrating exactly what I want to see in comic book art. No ridiculous muscle exaduration, a high quality of colour coming from the work, this piece in particular has a lot of pop art signatures but where the other pieces I class as illustrations, I count this as a fine art piece.

 I would describe Alex Ross's work as dramatic and operatic narratives particularly the Batman piece above. His character portrayals always have a sense of their surroundings and his paint quality (e.g Batman's cape) captures texture brilliantly. The clear thing I want to get across in my project is I do not plan to emulate Ross's work, but use it as an example of fine art from comic books.

Dave McKean

McKean is best known for his work on the Sandman books by Neil Gaiman and his Batman comicbook Arkham Asylum by Grant Morrison

McKean's work I would say is much more expressionist than Alex Ross, he has a darker quality to his tone, where Alex Ross glorifies the heroes and villains McKean warps them in a twisted way, but as a result it's fine art. There is a brilliant quality to his work, the use of collage, the strong vibrant colours. Reading 'Arkham Asylum' is more like looking through an art book of McKean's work as opposed to a comic book. It's enough to read it for the artwork alone.

I like McKean's art, it's really like a twisted view of reality and the world. It's not the path I plan on exploring contextually for my project but the expressionism and use of colour and quite possibly collage is a plan for me. My contexts will be more like the Alex Ross work but it will be in my style and developed through the painters I choose to look at for research like my last project.

My plan for my work is to use my friends, family and myself to pose in way suiting the character fitting to them, and then I recreate them in their image but the challenge will be to keep the results looking professional and not cheap. Hopefully my work will be similar to these pieces but resembling my friends and family as the characters and in my own style of work, being expressive and focusing on bringing out subtle colour which I learnt in my last project. I also plan to look at motion capture used in films to show how other media forms do the kind of thing my project is about and also I'm going to be researching into the background history of the characters for example redesigning Thor's costume slightly keeping the iconic look but seeing if there's any Norse Viking lore I can encorporate into the piece, likewise with Captain America throwing in some world war II material texture on the costume.

Vision Roundup

After missing a few weeks I figured it'd be easier to recount my vision project like this rather than remember my work for the past couple of weeks.

For my relief sculpture I finished my first one off by adding the texture to the bottom layer. I needed a stone like texture so I mixed pva glue, white emulsion, water and sawdust together creating a rough stone quality texture.

With my first relief done I produced a second one, larger but built in a similar way using the same methods (pva and tissue, the stone effect, etc) I also incorporated some modroc into the piece to cover over the edges. By the end of this I realized relief sculptures were too difficult, time consuming and fiddly to do so instead for my final piece I opted on an oil painting.

I painted one of my landscape photographs using oil paints on a canvas 143cm x 34cm, due to the dimensions of my photo. I am very proud of my final outcome and I'm going to be using oil paints in my next project I think.