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Hey guys!

This blog has been defunct for a while -- I am now back on my main account at @vlada-artblog ! All new studies I feel comfortable sharing are going to go there. I’ll be reposting my favourites on it over the next while.

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Illustrations by Mathurin Méheut (1882-1958)

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Study stream!

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Study stream!

Good morning!

Gonna do a little study stream in about half an hour; probably a simple still life. Gonna switch to Sywork for these because I want them to record. https://sywork.tv/channel/name/vladas-painting-cave

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Still life is hard! Thanks to everyone that helped me out with my Schoolism subscription!! Here’s my first assignment for Dice Tsutsumi and Robert Kondo’s painting class. We were asked to study objects in ambient/diffuse light. Four more to go!

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Morning sketches & gestures. Ghost Adventures is a trip.

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Study after Jeremy Lipking, still trying to figure out edges. Making myself push these a little bit further. 

Original: [link]

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Silhouette studies for A Thing

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Challenge: 30 days, 10 movies. Pick ten movies you are especially attached to, pick three moments from these and redraw them from a screenshot. Do not focus on copying the scene, focus on how the scene made you feel and try to learn how it achieved it through framing, lighting, and color. Modify the scene if needed, push proportions and contrast. Keep them under an hour each.

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Day 1: Pan’s Labyrinth! I still get shivers when I just think about this movie, probably because I draw such a strong connection with the main character. When I was little I used to spend my summers close to a giant graveyard overgrown with woods, nooks and valleys between the village hills, and the sprawling forests just a bike ride away. There wasn’t a lot to do so I would make up stories about trees that remembered your dreams and monsters in the ponds and ghosts in the branches. Watching this movie is like coming back home all over again.

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Composition studies -- Lawrence of Arabia negative space | enclosed spaces | repetition | shadows and silhouettes

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Lawrence of Arabia – shadows and silhouettes (part 1. 2. 3. 4.)

I’ve saved the best for last. A lot of visual narrative in Lawrence happens with shadows and silhouettes. Like shadow-puppets, they carry just enough information to draw the viewer in and tell a story. Honestly, these speak for themselves.

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Lawrence of Arabia – repetition (part 1. 2. 3. 4.)

How do you translate a sense of a crowd? A careful use of repetition that predates the modern use of CGI cloning has allowed the filmmakers to push the sense of scale to their crowds. Note how grouping creates a more elegant arrangement as opposed to visual clutter. My favourite shot of this set are the endless repeating guns: paired with atmospheric perspective, there is an incredible sense of stretching mass.

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Lawrence of Arabia – enclosed spaces (part 1. 2. 3. 4.)

In contrast with the stretching deserts, the human interactions feel that much closer, no matter their charge. With the use of delicate framing, the viewer is pulled into the shot and allowed to participate in these intimate spaces. 

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Lawrence of Arabia -- negative space (part 1. 2. 3. 4.) The most striking and most-referenced feature of this film is its use of negative space. The compositions are brutal about eliminating anything that’s irrelevant to what they are trying to say. The sense of emptiness, of vastness, is emphasized through the use of wide shots. Even the full caravan scenes are zoomed out to the point of being completely overwhelmed by the bleached out sky.

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Materials studies and some design mockups for later!

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I don't really paint outside (shame!), so I thought I would give myself a kick in the butt and do a few of these a day since I am lazing around here.

Stuff around the cottage and harbor. I learned a lot!

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Once you make this leap into the future or the past and assume a certain level of technological ability of the people living in that place, it will feed your imagination on what the buildings, landscapes, and everything in that new environment might be like. When drawing and designing these new places, you need to be able to let your mind travel to this place and visit it in your imagination. When you get there, draw what you see.

-- Scott Robertson, The Skillful Huntsman

art by Felix Yoon