George's Art Heros .... Yoji Shinkawa

Konnichiwa!

Another post about one of my art heros .... This time it is it is the very talented Japanese artist Yoji Shinkawa.Shinkawa is most famous for his design and illustration work for the very popular Metal Gear Solid video game series.Here is a picture of him at his desk looking all cool:

(http://www.g4tv.com/g4archives/features/50164/The_Art_of_Metal_Gear_Solid.html)


He was born in Hiroshima, and began working for game developer Konami in 1994 after graduating from Kyoto Seika University.  He worked as an art director for  the game Policenuats, then moved onto being the character designer for the Metal Geor Solid series created by legendary game maker Hideo Kojima. He is now the lead artist on many of Konami's titles.

He is a very talented and unique artist. His weapon of choice is using the Pental Brush Pen. This is a Japanese ink cartridge loaded pen with a brush nib that is normally used for traditional Japanese calligraphy. Shinkawa though takes this pen and uses it for drawing his concept art. He will either just have the pure black and white line work of the pen, or he will more often scan a drawn picture into a computer and under paint it on Adobe Photoshop to give it some colour and tones. 

It is a very cool style .... here are some examples:

(http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/yoji%20shinkawa)

I brought a Pental Brush Pen several years ago, so I thought in tribute to Yoji Shinkowa I would give it ago and draw my own Big Boss from Metal Gear Solid in his style.

My effort:

It was great fun to have a go. However, I don't think I can master it quite like he does ... he is very subtle and graceful with it which is very hard to do.

A banana a day keeps the doctor away

I have been having a bit of a food obsession recently.

I always knew bananas were good for you.... However, I was on facebook the other day and a random fact sheet popped up on my news feed that was all about the magic yellow bendy fruit.

Unfortunately I forgot to save it, so you will never know what it said!!!  Basically it was all about how very healthy and great they are, and it had lots of strange random facts I didn't know about them.

If you do a google search on bananas i'm sure there will be a billion pages saying the same stuff tho, so have a look.

I am now making an effort to eat more of them in my life.

So much so that I thought I would do a quick still life painting of one that is currently sat on my desk that has been patiently waiting for me to scoff her after I was done giving it the whole Leonardo Dicaprio in Titanic treatment .... The sexy thing!

You can now class this as an Art / Nutrition blog I suppose now.

Big to Small

Ok here is a quick step by step tutorial painting done with Adobe Photoshop.

This is one is about the painting process of "Big to Small".... i.e: Starting with big block shapes to begin with, and then refining these to smaller details as you carry on the painting.

This process is followed by many artists and works especially well for loose impressionist style paintings.

"Big to Small" is not a total "God" rule of painting, as some artist will work the other way ..."Small to Big". However, that approach is rather rare and you need a lot of experience as artist to do it. "Small to Big" can be risky in the sense that your painting will end up lacking good drawing structure of the basic underlying shapes if not done correctly.

The reference for this painting was this picture I took several summers' back of the River Thames just outside of Oxford in the surrounding city meadows....

As you will see I followed it to point but changed some shapes and colours subtly as doing straight copies can be boring, and I was also doing it rather quick and rushed too.


Here is the step by step screen grabs....

This was all done on one layer with two brushes... a rough edge brush for the big shapes, and then a rectangular chalk style brush to cut in and do the smaller details.

Stage - (A) Put in the very large block colours and shapes with the big rough edge brush first.

Stage - (B) Carry on doing that but also switching to the small brush for some line work.

Stage - (C) Using the Chalk brush completely now to refine things.

Stage - (D) More of the same, using the brush strokes to follow lines of the forms.

Stage - (E) Noticed the top of the sky was too pale so darkened that up, also put some shadows and little details such as the rope in.

I could have carried on refining this picture but didn't think there was much point as it showed all I wanted out of it really, and like I said I was doing it rather rushed and quickly too.

Hope this helps people, and this will be first of many tutorials in the coming weeks.

Lowdown on the Logo

Hello ...

It's been a busy couple of months, lot's going on what with christmas and other things, so sorry that this blog has been quiet. Had some meetings and got some rather cool and exciting projects lined up in the coming months with some companies and events in Liverpool. I am also currently working on some pictures for a proposal for a local football team that want to move and build a new stadium in the city, hopefully my pictures will help sell the plan to the local council for them, so fingers crossed!

I have also drawn up a course structure for some workshops that I will be running. These will be  beginner and intermediate ability drawing classes - looking to do three sessions for each group, with around 6 - 8 people per group. More info will follow with prices and location soon, so keep posted.

I thought I would share this little gem with you. If anyone is wondering where the design of my logo comes from it is drawn from inspiration from my father. My Dad is a talented artist himself and a all round lovely and funny guy. Back when me and my brother were kids he would draw lots of cartoons of us. They were always very cool and had a unique look to them.

So when I was back home over this christmas break I was hunting through all the old family albums and found this....

It was a couple of cakes he made for me and my brother's birthday with the cartoon faces of us iced on. As you can see the face design of me is now adopted as my logo, all be it with the changes that have happened over the 20 odd years since this was done with me loosing some hair on top and gaining some on the jaw line.

I will do a post on my father's art when I next see him and get some more images of his art to show you guys.

I feel honoured and humbled sometimes to have such a great family and also good friends around me. Their support and faith in me is always really appreciated.

The power of the mind

This guy has a really incredible ability and talent.....


Some people may well of heard about him, his name is Stephen Wiltshire aged 37 from London and he is an architectural artist. 

Stephen also happens to be autistic and is specifically known as a Savant. Savants are people much like the character Dustin Hoffman plays in the film 'Rainman' ... i.e. someone with a neurodevelopmental disorder who have a far than above average ability in a specific skill or skills. 

For Rainman it was his ability to count cards and toothpicks in a casino and to only want to fly with Qantas Airlines, as they were the most statistically safe in the world.

With Stephen he is known for his ability to draw from memory a landscape after seeing it just once! 

Now, we aren't just talking about painting a desert landscape with a couple of cacti and some tumble weeds knocking about.... no, Stephen likes to stretch his limits a lot more than that and goes for vast challenging city vistas.

He will take a good look at the scene once and then go away sometimes for days at end to sketch them out. After he is done and they are compared to the real life counterparts they are frighteningly accurate, even down to the last details of the windows on the buildings.

In 2006, Wiltshire was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to art, and he also opened a permanent gallery on the Royal Opera Arcade in London, somewhere I need to  go check out I think.


Here is a video of him doing his magic and a link to his website....

http://www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk/

George's Art Heroes .... Paul Rand

This is going to be the first of many postings about my different art heroes.

Now just because my style of art is painting and drawing doesn't mean that all these heroes are just going to be 2D artists and illustrators.

The word 'artist' to me is a very flexible and wide reaching term. To sum up the word means for me anyone who is able to express themselves in a discipline or even multiple disciplines ... i.e .... developing and transmitting both a craft and any ideas behind it.

That probably is not the Oxford English Dictionary's meaning of the term. However, I don't really care as that is what it means to me, and so basically a lot of people I believe can fit into and be defined by the term 'artist' ... be them musicians, sculptors and dancers, through to others like business men, scientists, chefs, soldiers and well basically anyone really.

Anyway onto my first one .... Paul Rand.

"Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated."

Paul Rand

I won't bore people too much with his life, if you want to know his whole background just google and wikipedia him. But basically he is a legend in the field of graphic design. I'm sure if you ask any graphic designer about him they will start going all weak at the knees and start chatting about him for hours.

He was most famous for designing a lot of great company logos such as: IBM, UPS, ABC, Westinghouse and Next Computers. The latter one being the company the late great Steve Jobs set up after he was fired from Apple back in the 80's. Steve was a big fan of Paul Rand and there is an interview on Youtube of him singing his praises.

(www.paulrand.com)

Now what I like about Paul Rand was his thought process, his design taste and the way he always wanted to play around with the visual elements to make graphic design not just be boring shapes and type faces but much more like 'art' really. In short he was the thinking mans' graphic designer.

The best way to explain him and his approach is to let him do it himself, so here is a link to a short video posted on youtube by a company called imaginary forces .... http://www.imaginaryforces.com. that I believe was created for Paul Rand's posthumous induction into The One Club hall of fame.

Have a watch and enjoy! ...

Welcome one and all

Hello and welcome to my new art blog.

This is going to be a platform to showcase news and information about my work and views on art in general.

I will be keeping this updated regularly ... (most likely at least once a week).

On it I will post new pieces, works in progress, step by step tutorials and links to videos of my working methods.

I also will post information and links to other artists, art topics and any other links that I think are interesting and may be use to others.

I also want to post regular cartoons that I will sketch which satire current events or are just little comedic statements, as I feel it's always good to have a chuckle and a laugh sometimes.

So please keep checking up on this when you have some down time in your day.

Also don't forget to check my, twitter, linkedin and facebook pages now and again too, these can be linked into from my website: www.georgesneyd.com.

So watch this space!