Artist: Alphonse Mucha and Rebecca Guay

Rebecca Guay: Creator of IMC

Hellooo everyone, this post is just an update of what I'm currently working on. 
Creator and professor at IMC, Rebecca Guay creates beautifully delicate illustrations. Rebecca Guay is an artist specializing in watercolor painting and illustration. She is mostly known for her work commissioned by Magic: The Gathering,^[1] White Wolf Publishing, and DC Vertigo comics, World of Warcraft TCG, Wizards of the Coast, Dungeons & Dragons and Bella Sara TCG.

Her painting style is reminiscent of master artist and illustrator, Alphonse Mucha.

But I love how she's brought a hint of that style and art history to the science fiction/fantasy world of today.

Moon and Stars by Alphonse Mucha is a depict piece that involves nature as well as symbolism and myths portrayed in the form of a woman. Like I explained in my last post on 'Mother Nature' this is what I want my work to come into in my Final Major Project, as I feel not only does it show illustration but also art history.

Music by Alphonse Mucha, is another great example of including all the topics of research but just in one final piece. As you can see the colours wears off from the figure and into the background and foreground giving the figure a sense of purpose.

Like a dream, art both is and isn't true. Both offer a challenge to the tyranny of realism, replacing what is with what might be. Both generate an altered state of consciousness removed from the humdrum – and both lend themselves to interpretation. 

Mother Nature

Hellooo everyone, seems as though i'm piecing together my research by including the fantasy personification of how Mother Nature has its ways, i'm just going to do a small post to show you my point of view that would make my work more interesting by taking a different approach and thinking outside the box.

Mother Nature (sometimes known as Mother Earth) is a common personification of nature that focuses on the life-giving and nurturing aspects of nature by embodying it in the form of the mother.

Images of women representing mother earth, and mother nature, are timeless. In prehistoric times, goddesses were worshiped for their association with fertility, fecundity, and agricultural bounty.

I love Mother Nature’s Autumn art; growing up  I got the privilege to see it year after year due to the uncanny English weather.  What amazes me so is there is such beauty in death because as the leaves slowly die and fall off the trees, they turn a magnificent array of earthly tones: brown, orange, yellow and red; soon to die and fall to the earth to create another picturesque scene.  The scene I am talking about comes on many calendars. You know the pumpkin patches with the piles of leaves next to them or maybe a child popping their head out of that pile.  The colonial stone walls with dead leaves laying in piles waiting to be picked up by the town leaf sucker, with magnificent toned trees and soft blue skies painting a picture of peaceful serenity.

For those that like more landscape type pictures of Mother Nature (like me), take the rolling hills of the south countrysides. They are donned with yellow, orange, red and brown leaves filling the gaps of the eyes’ perspective, with maybe a patch of grass visible showing a bale of hay or maybe a rickety old fence. There might even be a classic church with a huge white steeple penetrating the horizon of the trees. 

Yes, Mother Nature can create paintings in nature that can suit any art lover’s fancy; but you can’t buy her art, that’s the only downfall.  Mother Nature isn't like most artists; she wants you to take her art with you by taking pictures of it, and reproducing her work with your brush and canvas.

Experimentation of materials ~ Pathway Stage

Helloooo everyone!!

Been a busy week so far at experimenting with different materials for my chosen pathway. 

Basically I've began to explore techniques, processes and techniques in order to develop responses and therefore produce ideas.

Here, I am going to show you the couple of technique responses I have made in my sketchbook:

This dark mountain was an interpretation of the turbulent moods that Constable creates in his paintings. The materials I have used are ink and water, I find that in using these materials you will succeed in achieving the dark against light contrast, which can be done so easily.

This interpretation was made against thorough research of McNeill Whistler's sketches. I have only used biro as I wanted to achieve the layered textured look from the landscape upwards.

The industrial aspect of this piece was shadowed by the storm approaching in the skies, in order to create the dark shadows I used ink as it shows the perfect harmony between the lighting beyond the sky and the reflection in the water. I had also used pastel to determine texture within the water of that of the approaching storm in order to make the balance.

Again, I have done a scene that would be able to capture the light as well as the perception of objects in the foreground. The materials I have used are emulsion, pastel, watercolour, ink, biro and colour pencils. Seems as though Turner like to contradict light and the experimental use of colour in his late paintings, I had tried to use the reverse translation from black to white and into colour for detail but as I started to ignore colour; I experimented with monochromatic textures and lines instead.

Finally, one experimental drawing that distinguishes the dark by a varying luminance as the sky.

The image above is what you can see in the background as I found it rather clever to use this drawing as a 'backdrop' whilst I concentrated on two flaps on top. In these two flaps I used pastel and rubbed watered down emulsion to create a mood that is less complex than the abstract raw dark lined skies. I'd found this experiment to be very enjoyable because no matter how harsh I used the materials, the emulsion made sure that everything was drifting in effect of colour that is used in terms of light.

Contextual Study Response..

'The Canyon Pass'

Hii,
So last week I had found out that we had to produce a piece that was a personal response to the artists work (critical studies). The artists that I had looked at were John Constable, William Turner and McNeill Whistler, so in turn i had decided to combine all the techniques they had used like the heavy pastel rain cloud interpretation of the sky (Turner), the texture brushwork in the foreground (Constable) and the minimal detail used in illuminating colors by McNeill Whistler.

In order to create a symphony of all three artists i'd noted down their use of materials, processes, techniques and equipment that they had used and tried to compare it against my own. Without trying to fully replicate their work I had used my own techniques and chose a slightly different location as Constable and Turner both focus on landscapes whereas Whistler focuses on moral allusion, finding a parallel between painting and music, Whistler titled many of his paintings "arrangements", "harmonies", and "nocturnes", emphasizing the primacy of tonal harmony.

Turner at the Tate

Turner, Moonlight, a Study at Mill bank, exhibited 1797. 

"A penny for the old guy. The original London Eye wasn't a Ferris wheel on the Thames, but J.M.W. Turner, whose visual genius and all-encompassing vision engulfed everything in its path." Until the electroshock treatment applied by Francis Bacon, generations of British painters were subsumed by him. Paying obeisance to the great man is both a duty and a delight when visiting The Tate, and now the Turner galleries have been completely rehung for the first time since the mid-Nineties.

He was born on Shakespeare’s birthday in Covent Garden and carried the wrong accent all his life. When Constable, the other great landscapist of the era, met him for the first time, he said that Turner was uncouth, “as expected,” but had a great mind. Indeed. In the new galleries one of the most fascinating rooms pairs six or eight Constables with various Turners. Born within a year of each other, in 1775 and 1776, Turner was the precocious meteor and Constable the plodder.

At 21 and 22 Turner made his first Royal Academy pictures, both depictions of moonlight, a notoriously difficult illumination to capture on canvas. You have to lean in to squint at the astonishing detail that he has carefully inscribed in subtle shades of black and brown, a really virtuoso effect.

Turner, Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, exhibited 1812.

The most remarkable account tells of Turner setting up several canvases in a row to work on simultaneously. He did this by applying one color of paint to each canvas, going down the line one after another. Then he’d pick up a second color, return to the first canvas, and apply it down the line until the works were done — or almost done.
The twentieth century was much taken with the way he prefigured Impressionism and modern abstraction (a claim that makes some art scholars huffy, since Turner’s aim wasn't the same as Monet’s or Whistler’s or Graham Sutherland’s), so it’s a surprise to realize that his genius was market-minded, practical, and even conventional in choosing subjects.

These new galleries are a delight because they are intelligently arranged and contain descriptive notes beside each painting that are interesting, and devoid of art-speak.

But he never bores and always amazes me standing before the sea. Turner made the ocean so turbulent, filled not just with storm-tossed waves but violence, wreckage, sea monsters, glorious galleons, rust buckets going to their grave, even howling blizzards like a frost-bitten Last Judgment — in short, a whole world floating in watery dreams. In comparison with my last post of one of the pieces I had done over Christmas 'Thunder Waves' which was mainly inspired by Turner, and how he managed to compose fantasy and nature and make the correlation flow in each of his paintings.

Bringing form out of chaos while keeping the thrill of chaos was his unique achievement. At the end of his life Leonardo da Vinci attempted the same thing, but in miniature, when he filled notebooks with sketches of running water. Nature’s eddies are fascinating because they capture the eye without allowing the eye to rest on anything tangible, much less grasp it. Some commentators have been baffled by Leonardo’s obsession and consider it, politely, a huge waste of time and talent. In Turner’s hands, the impossible was achieved beyond anything Leonardo left behind. Snow, wind, and steam pass ghost-like through our existence. Turner makes them as haunting as they really are, poised all around the solidity of everyday things. Like light, the most mystifying elements in Nature are fleeting and uncapturable. But Turner was a master of light, too, a notoriously difficult illumination to capture on canvas.

The beginning is always today..

http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=sunrise+in+liverpool&qs=AS&sk=&FORM=QBIR&pq=sunrise%20in%20li&sc=6-13&sp=1&qs=AS&sk=#view=detail&id=ED8FC7B10A89CBADFE5EB2EF9739EEC1252599BE&selectedIndex=15

Hello everyone,
 It's the start of the second week after Christmas, I just thought this post would just show you what I've been getting up to over those two weeks off!

As you all know I like to start my posts off with a resembling quote of what I would like to discuss today so as you can see the title says, "The beginning is always today", basically I have to say that I am faced with a new beginning of 2014 and there's the motivation of getting stuck into my own way of working towards the pathway stage.

SO...over the holidays I began to paint again, not the deadline kind of quick paint to paper kind of thing but the full Monty of detail :) Which was a relief to me as I could express my own style, techniques and way of working without having the pressure of meeting a deadline. I had also got the motivation to start my contextual study before we broke up so I could concentrate on other things that I was looking at spending my time on getting stuck into a new book etc...

Below is some of the work that distracted but also prepared me for the work I was yet to expect:

'Autumn Fire'
Was the first inspiration and motivation to produce the other two, the materials I have used are acrylic, oil, drawing inks and Biro detailing. The reason behind the name was because the of what the colors represent as a season as well as the whole meaning of the painting. The trees were the most significant as it portrays further knowledge to the changes of seasons as well as natures intrigues. 

I haven't actually give this one a name yet, but i'm open to suggestions! With this one I had wanted to change the way I work completely by going ahead with ranges of palette knives and going crazy...In this painting I've tried to express some of the techniques I've only used within my experimentation as I find that working out of my comfort zone shows my skills and confidence in trying out new things.

'Thunder Waves'
Inspired by the heavy brushwork and chaotic detailing of William Turner. This was mainly produced on the final week before we broke up as my head was buzzing with information from my contextual study and the artists i had based it around: John Constable, William Turner, David Hockney, and James McNeill Whistler.