Today I'm posting an interesting progression of a page in development that I stumbled on. Here you can get a bead on his work flow and thinking. I like how he develops the whole page at the same time. It helps with unity to always think of the page as a unit rather than a series of panels. A subtle but important difference in approach. Thinking through a piece and working it out is what an artist will spend most of his time on. Thumbnails can help but not everyone uses them. Since you can change so much when you're working digitally, theres an argument to be made to set that phase aside and let your preliminary sketch function as a thumbnail. So far I haven't happened onto any thumbnails that Cam may have done.
If there is one thing that excells for me in Wildebeest's art its the faces of the onlookers enjoying the fight or concerned about one of the opponents. The girls in the crowd are so obviously exited it adds reality to the fantasy.
ReplyDeleteI agree. He takes the smallest details into consideration including on-lookers.
ReplyDeleteJust goes to prove that women DO enjoy watching a good girl fight. (or at least SOME women do)Even if it IS all fantasy.
ReplyDeleteFaces in general are great in Wildebeest's pictures. The (female) audience seems delighted and you can imagine how they would love to join in, and the fighters themselves just look so *into* the fight, so passionate and furious that it elevates the whole fight to another level. Great work, and really interesting to see an image come to live in detail like this.
ReplyDeleteFacial expressions are important to me.
ReplyDeleteThe face is arguably the most erotic part of the human body. I would often rather see a closeup of a face than a closeup of some other body part in an erotic sequence. Somewhere in the collection of files I gave Slid are a couple of panels where a fighter is going down on her opponent, and all I show is a sequence of the "victim's" facial expressions as the other girl works her over.
Stanton, ever the master, was great with facial expressions. And I guess he was the only fetish artist I would credit in that regard. Among mainstream artists, you'd go have to go back to the almost-forgotten artists of the forties, fifties and sixties.
I'm reluctant to mention names, because I don't want some 14-year-old comic book fan hitting this page while looking for some mainstream artist, but they were out there, and they are largely forgotten.
I don't read mainstream comics anymore, but I do follow some comic art blogs, and what I see these days is mostly a lot of grimacing. That's all anyone knows how to draw now.
Yeah, I hate seeing the lack of acting in modern comics. The realists that are in vogue right now, trying to make comic books look like movies, photo reference or trace faces most of the time and fall into the habit of drawing absolutely wooden and generic faces to the point that it ruins the story. One can be an illustrator without being a storyteller, which is fatal in comics. I much prefer a cartoony look that is independent of slavish photo referencing and full of emotion.
DeleteLet me also say something about the onlookers.
ReplyDeleteThe onlookers are frequently there to help focus the viewer's attention and to sort of 'think out loud' what the viewer might be thinking himself (or herself).
They are almost more fun to draw than the girls doing the fighting.
Agreeing wholeheartedly, the faces lend the whole scenario a kind of erotic quality that could never be achieved even if you filled the picture with a thousand boobs.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't mean also putting a thousand boobs in there would hurt the picture though :p
"The onlookers are frequently there to help focus the viewer's attention and to sort of 'think out loud' what the viewer might be thinking himself (or herself)."
And I must say that you are extremely good at letting them put into words what I think when I look at your pictures. Their expressions add another level of dynamic to the picture, they give me something to look at which mirrors my own reactions to the picture while simultaneously helps creating the impression that this is a moment in a sequence instead of a picture without context.