…in five and a half minutes.
Massive Black released a trailer for their upcoming instructional DVD, Book Cover Illustration with Dan Dos Santos. The cover in question is, Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker. Very cool.
Dan Dos Santos paints Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker
Featured Fiction
“The Witch and the Wyrm” by Elizabeth Bear
"The Shape of Stones" by Hildur Knútsdóttir
"After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens” by Rachel Swirsky
I’d say that was an all right way to start my morning.
Mesmerizing.
Wow. Getting to watch the process like that is just all around cool…it’s kinda hypnotic too.
Someone on my other blog asked why Dan spent so much time layering the paint rather than going straight to the color he wanted. In case anyone here is wondering the same, this was my answer to him…
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Dan paints in a highly rendered, layered fashion. It’s impossible to see in the video but when you see it in person, and to some degree in good quality printing, all that layering adds a life to a painting that would just look flat and listless otherwise. Image the way your blood effects the way your skin looks. (Maxfeild Parrish is an extreme example of this layering technique.)
There are other artists that like to paint more opaquely. I’ll soon have another time-lapse video of Greg Manchess painting. He paints in fewer layers without blending the colors as much — he’s relying on getting the values just right, and having the colors interact _next_ to each other rather than one on top of another.
Whichever method an artists or viewer likes is a personal preference, but either way the color and value need to interact to breath life into the work.
The technique is called glazing. It’s been used in paintings for hundreds of years. Basically it lets a base color show through an upper layer so that there is more depth to the color.
Other than how the nature of oil paint affects painting methods, it is used to more closely represent objects with a slightly translucent nature. For example skin, milk, wood, and other objects are not a solid reflecting surface and allow light to penetrate into them a short distance before reflecting and traveling to your eye.
This was a major problem with early CGI animation, because at the time, getting depth in an object was not possible. And if you go back and look at early CGI you will see that objects look more like cutouts than their real life counterparts.
Wow. This was amazing. Bravo Dan!
Irene, you should show this to any editor who ever takes for granted the effort that goes into a painting.
Oh God. This is so impressive.
Its… just… fantastic….
Mesmerizing.
Please this song, anybody knows where i can find it,
Thanks
Danieri,
The song is by Ratatat.
http://www.ratatatmusic.com/
(Half of Ratatat being Mike Stroud, the rockstar son of painter Steve Stroud. I love them both.)