Tea Time
Written by Teresita Blanco (The Artsy Sister)
I drew this a week ago. It featured a scene from my book. I am in the process of jazzing it up, in order to publish it. Sure, the writing should speak for itself. However, pictures are worth a 1000 words, as the saying goes. Anyhow, the scene depicts a weird dream of the protagonist. He dreams of all his brothers and sisters. It is a way of keeping in touch with them, like one of those psychic connections. Still, they are separate enough not to feel each other’s pain. Well, I am putting too much though into explaining their bond. It is just as it is. Marduke dreams about his peeps, and enters their dreams at will. It is sort of his thing. Not, his main thing, just a thing that I thought would be interesting.
Anyhow, the sister is drinking tea with her companions. All I said was that they were a fire demon and a ice demon. I did not went into too much detail. I left it vague, because everyone has their own view of what a demon should look like. When I got around to the drawing, I decided to define them. The arrangement was pretty complicated around the edges. I got it from an actual painting, featuring children drinking tea. It is good to look at artworks, in order to speed up the composition. Real world models are expensive and hard to come by. They are either on the industry, or they do a little pimping on the side.
Either way, it is really hard to manage. To shorthand it, I have a huge collection of paintings for references. Most of the are from paintings are between the 1700s to the 1900s. Impressionism aside, that was the best era for figure drawings. All the people in those paintings looked like what they should be. All the proportions were dandy, and not exaggerated. Sure, most people talk about anatomy and the renaissance. However, the painters from that era were sometimes still caught up in medieval trends, and then mannerism came into the scene. Bodily distortions started to get somewhat trendy. I suppose it would be a good a time as any to tell you who are my favorite painters. Whenever I am looking for inspiration, or even people poses I look onto their works.
For dresses, I normally look at the work of James Tissot. His mother had her own boutique, and so he putted a lot of effort into rendering the dresses of women. He also illustrated his own Bible, which was interesting. For medieval fashion, I look onto the works of Edmund Blair Leighton. For nightmare scenes, I check out the works of Zdislav Beksinski. He is one of the few 20th century painters that I actually respect. His work is pretty cool and original. For regular dreams, it is better to see Michael Parkes. He too is a modern fellow. He is alive and well and still working. The whole making dream like paintings is more of a 20th century movement. It is known in art books as Surrealism.
Still, there are precursors to that movement. Goya is a good example of that trend. He illustrated in the real world, the nightmares that his subjects were having. He had a lot of illustrations relating to nightmare and madness. Henri Fuseli is another fellow, that shows hints at surrealism. I would mention more, but those are the only fellows that come to mind. I am certain there is a lot of art history teachers that have bones to pick with me. However, history is subjective. All we have is a bunch of individual things that happened, and the historians putting it all together to try to make sense of the whole. You know how it is, going from micro to macro.
For people poses or whatever, I like William Adolphe Bouguereau. He was a Victorian painter who thought others to paint. One of his best students was Henry Matisse, believe it or not. Arthur Elsey is also good if you need little kids for your paintings. Another fellow whose works I like Arthur Rackham. If you want to do book illustrations, his work shows you how to go about it. Well, I think that is just about everything about my painting influences. There are more folks I could mention, but this isn’t about them. This is more about me. So, whatever, let’s cute the cake, and good life to you.
