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.