Art inspo: Maxfield Parrish
Maxfield Parrish was an early 20th century illustrator; you’ve probably seen his work many times without even realizing it, as he did many paintings for commercial uses such as ads and promotional calendars. At one point his prints could be found in most homes and magazines in the United States — making him arguably one of the most famous American illustrators of all time.
His work is known especially for its intense color; he pioneered a method of laying down many layers of blue or black ink, then adding translucent layers of paint — or glazes — over the top of those, much as we would use color and overlay layers in a digital painting program today. His paintings tend to be really well balanced but somewhat flat, as he also pioneered taking and using photo references for his work. He extensively used the camera as a tool in his studio, taking photos not only of subjects in costume, but things like closeups of stone, crystals and props to use as reference for the foregrounds and backgrounds of his fantastical paintings.
If you’d like to learn more about Parrish and his work, check out these pages:
https://americanillustration.org/project/maxfield-parrish/
New year
Happy belated new year, friends. I hope you all had lovely holidays and are in good health! New year means new goals: I want to further develop my digital painting skills, which I have been working on for a year now. I’d love to invite you along on this, sharing the studies and exercises I do so you can try them, too, if you want!
New initiatives
Are you on Twitter? On Mondays I host #MeetOCMonday, where I invite folks to introduce one of their original characters and share artwork of them. I retweet replies and also often ask to hear more about the characters. Today is Monday, which means the inaugural MeetOCMonday of this year: https://twitter.com/UnorthodoxRule/status/1482985023955476483
On the second Tuesday of each month this year, I plan to share a short tutorial on something both here and on Twitter. This will be #TutorialTuesday. Look for these starting Feb. 8! If there is something specific you’d like me to do a tutorial on, let me know! The first two in the lineup are how to draw historical vs. modern clothing (with a brief overview of four centuries of Western fashion) and a digital painting tutorial on how to create a frosted glass effect.
Do you have any goals this year, or is there anything you’re looking forward to? What are you working on?
Follow your dreams
When I was a kid, I didn't know what I wanted to be. But I knew I wanted to do something with the written word and art paired together. That led me to pursue art and English in college, and I was lucky enough to fall into a career that lets me work with art and words together every day.
But I always had this lingering little dream that one day, I'd like to illustrate books.
Well, that dream has become real! A writer approached me just when the coronavirus pandemic hit; she wanted to hire me to illustrate a children's book for her. It has now been listed on Amazon, and I got my first look at a physical copy this past week... It turned out more beautiful than I could have hoped!
It is available here: Dream Dog: A Bedtime Tale: Ruggiero, Heather, Meyers, J A: 9798461752880: Amazon.com: Books
So, this is just to say -- follow your dreams, they just may come true!
- jams
Learned some things.
Sorry to dump a bunch of stuff on my watchers, but it's been a while. As I've mentioned before, last fall I joined a Discord art group that has really pushed me to become a much better, more skilled artist. I've been incredibly busy over the past year and a half; there's a whole children's book of illustrations and marketing materials and dozens of editorial cartoons that I'm not at liberty to share here. Still, my journey feels like it has only just begun, but I hope you can see and enjoy the improvement in my work.
And if there's anything you're particularly proud of that you made while I was away, share the thumbnail(s) with me below.
Manage your deviations
For some reason completely unbeknownst to me, Eclipse has removed this link from anywhere obvious. But you can still manage your deviations (that is, move things in and out of storage) by going to https://www.deviantart.com/managedeviations/. I put the vast majority of my gallery in storage when I mostly stopped using this site; it's nice because you can go back and retrieve things from there even though they are no longer publicly available.
I submitted feedback asking why the link is no longer in an obvious place and suggested it be added to the drop-down list when you hover over the "Submit" button; if you think that's a good idea, you should submit feedback saying the same thing.