Learning from Julie Bell and Jamie Chase

 

Thanks to Julie Bell and Jamie Chase, both great Fantasy artists, I can show you how to draw inspiration from masters, to improve your own creativity and skill.

Both Julie Bell and Jamie chase publish their art on Facebook. 

Julie Bell: https://www.facebook.com/julie.bell.589 

Jamie Chase: https://www.facebook.com/jamiechasearts

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Getting Covid-19 in the beginning of April hit me pretty hard. I am recovering though, and I am starting to take interest in things again: Starting a new job on Monday, working on a picture or two, occasionally working on a book, working on getting my photo sessions going again... I am still a bit careful where and when I spend energy though. I expect to recover fully, but it may take quite some time.

The upshot is that I'll probably blog a bit less frequently than usual. In a few months, maybe, I'll pick up speed again.

Fortunately for me, while being sick, and throughout recovery, I've had great support from my family. It has made everything so much easier. Speaking from experience, you really do not want to get Covid-19, and you really, really, do not want to infect relatives and friends, so please be careful out there.

2020 Dreams of Light and Darkness

Better late than never! I had planned to release a video retrospective about what I did in 2020, things that went well, and, shall we say...some learning experiences, on New Years Eve.

I was strapped for time, and came up with the bright idea of making a Keynote presentation on my iPad, exporting it as a movie, and touching it up in iMovie. That, I believed, would allow me to sneak away to work on the presentation, a couple of minutes here, and a couple of minutes there, without hiding away from family and friends. I always feel guilty when hiding away to create pictures, write a book, or edit the occasional video, but if I stopped doing that, I would not be me anymore.

Using the iPad was a big mistake! It turns out, you can record video clips in Keynote, but when you try to export them, Keynote hangs or crashes. I came up with a workaround, hide the video clips, and export slides with pictures only, then combine everything in iMovie instead.

That worked...until I discovered that every time I made a cut in iMovie, iMovie changed the color toning of one of the resulting video clips. On top of that, I discovered that when recording video in Keyonote, the sound is okay, but when recording sound only, the recording is noisy and the overall quality is pretty bad.

Eventually, I gave up, moved all video clips to my PC, and edited everything with DaVinci Resolve instead. As it turned out, DaVinci's noise filter also made a decent job of rescuing the sound recordings.

If I had used DaVinci from the start, I probably would have been ready on time. I hope I remember that lesson next time.

Enough about my video creation misadventures! What's on the video clip? Is it worth your time? If you are interested in Fantasy, Horror, and Science-Fiction art, it might be.

2020 wasn't a good year for photography, but it gave me the opportunity to think, to come up with new ideas, and to storyboard them. On the video you will find material from the one photo session I had in 2020, with the model and actress Eliza Sica. You will also find plenty of storyboards, and you will be able to compare some of the storyboards with finished photo composites.

While working on the video, it became rather obvious that my pictures changed quite a bit over the course of the year. For the better, I think. I have built connections with a number of very good artists on Facebook in 2020. That, combined with diving head first into art books by Régis Moulun, James Gurney, Frank Frazetta (well, a book with his art, not a book by him), Patrick J. Jones, and others, and practicing 3D storyboarding a lot, has made a difference.

I wish you a great 2021! The odds are pretty good that it will be better than 2020.

Shooting Horrors from the Beyond with Eliza Sica, Part 3

Jaguar Queen. Digital Paint version. Model: Eliza Sica

I am still working on pictures from my photo session with actress and model Eliza Sica. I have long wanted to do a Woman with Large Cat picture. 

This is a perennial favorite among artists. Frank Frazetta's magical Cat Girl is probably the most well known. Frazetta painted several different versions of Cat Girl, and the final one is pure magic. The different versions are in a new Frazetta art book published by Vanguard. I highly recommend it. It was sold out at the publisher, but I managed to buy a copy from Amazon in Germany. A second printing is in the works.

I did a bit of research, and one painting that left me thunderstruck was Julie Bell's Sanctuary. If you click the link, you'll see that it looks good even on Instagram. Quite a feat.

Another important source of inspiration was an oil painting by Régis Moulun.

Jaguar Queen. Photorealistic version. Model: Eliza Sica

I am quite happy with how Jaguar Queen turned out. Eliza did a great job, and the jaguar didn't eat anyone.

Glory Road. Photorealistic version. Model: Eliza Sica

The first edition of Robert Heinlein's Glory Road was published in 1963. In 1974, Delta Science-Fiction published a Swedish translation. I was twelve years old at the time, and a voracious reader. I hesitated a bit before borrowing the book at the library, because on the cover it had a painting of a scantily clad woman who had apparently slayed a dinosaur-like creature with a bow and arrow.

I did not know it at the time, but the artist who had painted the cover was Bruce Pennington. Pennington's image stayed with me through the years. I do not want to be derivative, but now and then, I recreate something another artist has made, to learn, or to get it out of my system.

When Eliza and I decided to do the photo session, I took the opportunity to make a version of the same scene in the book, heavily influenced by Pennington's painting.

I made some changes. The woman in Pennington's painting, Star, is blonde, and the man walking behind her, Rufo, is white-haired. Eliza is a redhead, so my version of Star would get red hair too.

Rufo, despite looking a lot older than Star, is Star's son, so I gave him somewhat faded red hair too.

The picture was fun to make, and I really needed to get Pennington's picture out of my system. If I do another Glory Road inspired picture, I think I can free myself from Pennington's book cover painting, and do something more original.

Train to Hell. Model: Eliza Sica

Train to Hell is a Lovecraftian horror picture. A detective is investigating a series of disappearances from underground train stations, and suddenly finds herself face to tentacles with an ancient horror.

We shot three different pictures with Eliza as the same detective, so there are more pictures in the same series on the way.

Crash Site Battle. Photorealistic version. Model: Eliza Sica

The somewhat unimaginatively named Crash Site Battle belongs to the same series of pictures as Castaway, a picture I wrote about in the second part of this article series.

The idea is that it is a couple of years after the crash landing in Castaway. Our protagonist has made a place for herself in a tribe of humans. If you wonder what a tribe of humans are doing on another planet, I suggest you read Jack Vance's books about Adam Reith and his adventures on Tschai.

You might notice that there is a lot of stuff going on in this picture. As the battle on the beach unfolds, a starship is coming to the rescue. Whether they will have time to land before the battle is over, that is a different question.

If you look at the crashed, and rusted, starship in the background to the right, there is a second battle in progress. A tentacled sea creature has attacked a woman and her, remarkably pterosaur-like, flying steed, just after they landed on the wreckage. In the sky above, her friends are moving in to help.

Even though I knew you'd barely be able to see it, I set the background battle up carefully. In a future photo session, I might make that battle the focus of a photo series.

For now, the only thing I have is a quick sketch of one of the riders.

Quick storyboard of one of the flying combatants in the background battle.

That is it, for now. I hope you enjoyed looking at the pictures, and wasn't too bored with my scribblings.

My plans right now, is to start planning a new photo session, and finish one or two more pictures from the photo session with Eliza Sica. I have also begun a rewrite, and translation into English, of one of my books. That will take quite some time to finish...and then, of course, there is my day job.

If you haven't seen part 2 of this blog series, click on this link!

Be seeing you!

Shooting Horrors from the Beyond with Eliza Sica, Part 2

 

Castaway, with Eliza Sica

Not too long ago, I created a storyboard depicting a female astronaut who had just swum ashore from a crashed spaceship. Piled on the beach beside her, where the few things she had managed to save from the spaceship. When Eliza Sica and I looked through my storyboards, she decided this was a picture she wanted to do.

As I am sure you have noticed, the picture is way wider than most photos. I decided that, because it was meant to have a cinematic look, it would be best to create it in anamorphic widescreen, 1:2.35, format.

Because the picture is so wide, it does not fit Facebook and other social media very well. On the other hand, the format works great for printing. This is one picture I want to print on canvas, and see hung on a wall.

The picture is very loosely based on Jack Vance's Tschai novels. I read the novels many years ago, when I was in my teens. Then I started rereading them while I worked on the storyboard, and I finished the last book just yesterday.

If you liked this picture, you might also enjoy the first blog post in this series.

You might also want to check out Eliza Sica's Instagram account, or even mine.

Be seeing you!

Shooting Horrors from the Beyond with Eliza Sica, Part 1

 

When the Sleeper Awakes (a.k.a. The Frozen)

Eliza Sica (Instagram: @eriizas) is an actress and model I had contact with before the pandemic. Recently, we decided to have a carefully socially distanced photo session.

I maintain a catalog of my storyboards in PDF format. I sent it to Eliza, and we set up a meeting at a café in Gothenburg. (Again - a carefully socially distanced meeting.) We went through the storyboards, Eliza selected the ones she was interested in shooting, and we discussed what preparations we needed, and how to do the shoot itself.

We also discussed our contract. Even for a non-commercial shoot, a contract, although painfully boring, is important. Due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it is a legal requirement in the EU. Beyond that, a contract makes clear the rights and responsibilities of both model and photographer.

I am slowly gathering material for a book about creative photography, and a contract is important for that reason too. When I send my book manuscript to a publisher, I want to be able to show the contracts too.

 The shoot itself went well, despite a mistake on my side: I hadn't made a shot list! This created extra work, because it meant we had to move the studio flashes much more often than we would otherwise have had to do. Eliza was patient though, so it worked. Next time, a shot list will be a priority on my part.

I got the idea for When the Sleeper Awakes from two different stories, both by by H.G. Wells: The Sleeper Awakes and The Time Machine:

What if a group of people are cryogenically frozen, and forgotten forgotten for many millenia when our civilization collapses. Eventually, the cryotubes begin to fail, and only one remains, when it is discovered by Morlocks...

There is one more source of inspiration: I re-read Morlock Night by K.W Jeter some time ago, and that that inspired me to work on a set of Steampunk Time Travel pictures. That got me thinking about H.G. Wells and his stories, and that eventually lead to When the Sleeper Awakes.

You might wonder where I got hold of an old run-down cryogenic facility, a Morlock, and a couple of desiccated skeletons.

I built the environment using commercially available 3D models. I did quite a bit of customization, adding rust, fungi, and molds.

I created the Morlock by mixing commercially available morphs of a Genesis 8 base character. As for the desiccated bodies...it is probably best you don't know.

Creating the Eliza's frozen look was fun. I studied videos on how to create a frozen look, but in the end, I discarded those methods and went my own way:

I rendered the door of the cryotube separately from everything else, because I wanted to build layers of frost on the body and on the door separately. First I matched luminosity and color tones of Eliza and the cryogenic tube. Then I desaturated Sica's skin, and added several layers of frost to skin and hair. After that, I added frost to the cryogenic tube door in the same manner.

For pictures like these, I often use Dynamic Auto-Painter to create a very colorful digital painting version, which I then blend in with the original picture. That gave the picture its final, very strong colors.

The Horror in the Library

The Horror in the Library is of course inspired by H.P. Lovecrafts Cthulhu mythos. Again, both the thing lurking in the shadows and the library are commercial 3D models.

The main thing to get right here, was the light on the monster. I wanted to show that it was definitely not human, but I also wanted to hide the face. What we do not see can be more frightening than what we do see.

There are many more pictures coming up the next few weeks, and perhaps months, given how slow I am when editing.

Long medium to long range plans for the pictures include the book I mentioned, and also exhibitions. For now though, I'll focus on editing the other pictures from the photo session.

Be seeing you!

Pictorialism vs. Neo-Pictorialism vs. Contemporary Pictorialism

Bareback Riders - Pictorialist Version

In this article I will use the same basic photo to create three very different pictures, a pictorialist version, a neo-pictorialist version, and, for want of a better term, a contemporary pictorialist version.

Hang on! You are in for a ride!

The slow bit: A brief history of pictorialism

 Pictorialism is a photographic style that was popular from 1885 to about 1920. The style all but disappeared for a long time, but it was rediscovered in the 90's.

The rising interest in the original pictorialists and their pictures, also kindled an interest in recreating their style. Behold, neo-pictorialism was born!

Neo-pictorialist pictures are stylistically very similar to pictorialist pictures, but there are important differences. If there weren't, this article would end here.

What about contemporary pictorialism? First of all, I invented the term. There are people today, who do what the pictorialists did a hundred years ago. Because there is a 100 year gulf separating the original pictorialists from the contemporary ones, the technology has changed, our society, and social norms, have changed. Therefore, a contemporary pictorialist picture can look very different from a pictorialist picture from 1918.

Enough with the history lession! Let's get on with creating the pictures!

The boring base photograph

Base Photo: Bushes and Borgholm Castle

The base photograph is a picture of some boring shrubs. You can see the Borgholm Castle in the background, but as castle photos go, this one is pretty much a dud. The castle is very interesting, but you cannot see that in this picture.

Let's take this unremarkable photo, and have some fun with it!

Neo-pictorialist version

Bareback Riders: Neo-Pictorialist Version. Note the absence of horses and riders.

Let's begin by giving the picture the neo-pictorialist treatment. When people talk about creating pictorialist pictures today, they usually mean neo-pictorialist pictures.

Neo-pictorialism is mostly a technical exercise. The objective is to make a picture stylistically similar to an old pictorialist picture. The closer you get, the more you have succeeded.

Pictorialists in the early 20th century wanted to evoke emotion. They wanted to create art. To do that, they turned to painters for inspiration. Consequently, they often wanted their pictures to look like paintings.

To create painterly effects, the pictorialists used a great variety of tricks. Anything that worked was okay to use. They often blurred their pictures, they hand-colored them, dodged, burned, used early composition techniques...

Neo-pictorialists recreate the look of the pictorialist photos, much like historical reenactment societies recreate old battles.

Thus, if we take our base photo, and make it look stylistically like a pictorialist photo, then we have a neo-pictorialist photo.

Why are there no horse and riders in our neo-pictorialist version of the photo? Because there is no reason to have them there. Only the style is important. The content does not matter, as long as it does not look too modern. Consequently, neo-pictorialist pictures are often pictures of nature, landscapes, forests. A really old car is okay to shoot, but a modern car is not. To some neo-pictorialists, shooting with old lenses and using the original processes is a matter of pride.

Pictorialist version

Bareback Riders: Pictorialist Version

In the pictorialist (1920) version of the photo, the style is exactly the same as in the neo-pictorialist version, but the content is different. Why?

Because, to a pictorialist, content was important. Pictorialists asked questions like:

Is it beautiful?
Is it scary?
Does it tell a story?
Does it convey an idea?
...and so on

A pictorialist uses whatever means available to further the purpose of the picture. It is that simple.

They did not care about using the "correct" process, or whether the picture conformed to genre conventions. They used whatever means they had. The style is as much a result of technical limitations, as of aesthetic considerations.

For this picture, I have stuck with the convention of making the photo look like a painting, but the technique I use for doing so is completely modern. In case you are curious, I used Dynamic Auto-Painter, a tool that analyses the photo, and with a little guidance from me, recreates it from scratch, as a painting.

Making their pictures look like paintings was a means to an end, not an end in itself. It was a convenient way to help viewers relate to the photos by relating the photos to something the audience already knew. (A bit like when the iPhone was introduced. The iPhone is a miniature mobile multi-purpose device. Most of the time it is used, it is used as something other than a phone. Calling it a phone made it easier for people to relate to it.)

Nudes are common in pictorialism because the nude human form evokes feelings. Most pictures are of nude women, because most of the photographers were male. There are exceptions though. There were female photographers, and photos of nude males.

Note the difference between pictorialist and neo-pictorialist:

• The pictorialist uses cutting edge technology and processes to express emotion and ideas.
• The neo-pictorialist tries to emulate the results of processes used by pictorialists in the period 1885-1920.

What would a pictorialists do today? I am glad you asked.

Contemporary Pictorialism

Bareback Riders: Contemporary Pictorialism

A contemporary pictorialist would ask the same, or similar, questions that a pictorialist would:

Is it beautiful?
Is it scary?
Does it tell a story?
Does it convey an idea?
Do I have to ask exactly the same questions a pictorialist would have asked 100 years ago? (Hint: The answer is NO!)


If you have read my blog posts about the Gothenburg Nudes series, you know that the basic idea was to separate nudity and objectification, for the purpose of making room for appreciation.

This basic idea guided the design of each picture, and of the series as a whole. The Öland Nudes series uses the same basic idea, but it is tailored for a slightly different audience.

People tend to relate to places they know, so I use familiar locations to trigger interest, before I hit t
hem with abstract concepts.

I admit, it does not work perfectly. Some people see nipples, and after that, they see nothing else. This happens both with those who like nipples, and those who don't. Neither group is my target audience.

My target audience is the group of people who appreciates both the beauty of the human form, and abstract reasoning...and especially those who either live in Gothenburg or on Öland.

If you live elsewhere, please do not feel left out. You can appreciate Gothenburg and Öland even if you do not live there.

That is the difference between pictorialism, neo-pictorialism, and contemporary pictorialism as I see it. Feel free to disagree. If you do, please also feel free to comment. I am interested in your opinion, whether your argument changes my mind or not.

Gothenburg Nudes XI: Reflections at the Pond

 Reflections at the Pond is the eleventh picture in the Gothenburg Nudes series.

I had planned a visit to the Gothenburg Botanical Garden to find a suitable environment for one of the pictures.

Two of my friends in Photo Meetup in Gothenburg, Kristina Johansson and Sina Farhat arranged a Short Depth-Of-Field themed meetup in the Botanical Garden. That was perfect for me. It was an opportunity to dust off my macro lens, which was long overdue. Even better, it was an opportunity to meet a few of my friends.

I do meet my friends more often than I bring out the macro. Still, meeting them was long overdue too.

And, I got to photograph two birds with a single click. (Killing them with a single stone sounds too harsh.) After practicing shooting with short Depth-Of-Field, we went exploring for a bit. I got separated from the others, stumbled on to a pond where the water was a still, perfect mirror, and...voila! I had exactly the environment I was looking for.

After shooting the pond, I discovered I was actually just a few meters from the rest of the gang. I joined them, and we left the garden together.

If you want to see how I created the picture, check out the project at ArtStation.

Gothenburg Nudes VII: Bathing Women

I am used to cloudy, windy, and rainy Gothenburg summers. This year, we are having a great summer. Thus...bright, sunny pictures to reflect my bright sunny mood.

I am getting more and more convinced I should recreate at least some of the pictures in this series with live models. It'll be interesting to study the differences.

I published a couple of these pictures in a Swedish art forum on Facebook recently. This sparked an interesting discussion on the importance of art that pushes boundaries. Depending on your point of view, a picture of nude people bathing, or engaged in other activities, is nothing especial, or it can make your brain explode. A picturecan be beautiful, unremarkable, or immoral, depending on who views it.

What art can do, is provide us with a new perspective on what is acceptable, and what is not. I see a lot of pictures, ostensibly art, that are objectifying, and that denigrate people, especially women. I want to help provide a counter-weight to that, by showing that nudity is not the same thing as objectification.

If you are interested in how this picture was created, check out ArtStation. There you will find a sequence of pictures that shows the process in a bit more detail.

Oh, if you are interested in how a painting helped change our view of sexuality, and made us a little bit more open-minded, check out this Wikipedia article about Le Sommeil, by Gustave Courbet.

Gothenburg Nudes II: A Stroll in the Park

After publishing Walkabout, I decided to get out a bit more, and to bring my camera. I wanted to shoot reference photos at easily recognizable locations in Gothenburg. Maybe I could turn those quite ordinary locations into something more interesting.

I have done similar things before, but mostly for Fantasy and Science-Fiction themed photos. This time, I wanted to continue exploring nude art.

While I sometimes do model shoots with traditional model poses, I usually prefer pictures with people who do not look like they are posing. I want the camera, and me, to be as unobtrusive as possible.

The same thing goes for a 3D picture or digital painting. I like people who do their own thing, without the need for approval from me or anyone else, and that shows in my pictures.

Please do not get me wrong. We all need to be appreciated, for what we do, and for who we are. I believe it is far better to find people who do appreciate you for being you, and for pursuing your interests, rather than you trying to adapt what you do and who you are to someone elses notions of what is interesting, attractive, and otherwise worthy of notice.

If you deviate from the norm in a noticeable way, you probably won't find many people who really appreciate what you are, so try to be careful to appreciate them in return. It is worth the effort. I know, both because there are people in my life whom I appreciate very much. Sadly, I have sometimes let friendships, and other relationships slip, and I am the poorer for it.

With the Gothenburg Nudes series of pictures I want to capture the feeling of just appreciation beauty, seen and imagined. I want to spice up the ordinary a bit, which is why I have chosen various locations in Gothenburg as locations for the pictures.

Walkabout (a.k.a. How to apply The Art of War to Photography)

Cheng/Chì (Ortodox/Unortodox) is an idea from Sun Tzu's book The Art of War, that says that to win a battle, you need two things: Ordinary military forces, doing the tried and true things, and unorthodox forces, creating an element of surprise. The principle can be applied to any other art, as well as the art of war.

I used to do a lot of street photography. It is an easy way to get started in photography, but it is also one of the most difficult photographic genres for the simple reason that most of the time, there is nothing noteworthy to shoot.

I followed the rules when shooting street photos, but I also started doing other kinds of photos. Still with a city environment as background, but with a dinosaur, or a spaceship, slipped in to make the picture more interesting.

I haven't done that in awhile, so maybe I should start doing it again.
Technically, this picture is mostly an exercise in tone mapping and saturation mapping. I started using the techniques recently, and I am not entirely happy with them yet. Next time, I intend to work in 32 bit mode all the way through the process, to see if that makes a difference.

Practice

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.

― Anton Chekhov

You may wonder, "why so many nudes lately?" Good question. I wish I had a really good answer, but I don't. Here is the closest I can come at the moment:

When I started with photography, I shot a lot of flowers to learn the basics of composition, and how to handle my camera in various lighting situations. I mean a lot of flowers! I shot more than 8,000 the first year, and more than 13,000 the second year. I was out shooting three times a day, every day.

After that, I was kind of done with flowers, but I had learned a bit about photography. After that, I did street photography, model photography, macro photography, levitation photography, flesh manipulation photography, portrait photography, some art photography, even tried my hand at pin-up photography.

Now, with nudes, I have found something as interesting to me as horror, Science-Fiction, and Fantasy photography. I want to learn more, and I want to integrate the nudes with the kinds of photography I've done earlier.

I have always been that way. I used to be a programmer, so I learned programming languages, then techniques of Object-Oriented programming, then design patterns, then project methodology, then systems thinking, queueing theory, Theory Of Constraints, statistics, military strategy, Chinese and Japanese military strategy...

And, I integrate it. I synthesize.

While I do not intend to do 21,000 nude pictures, there will probably be quite a few more, before I have integrated them fully in my repertoire.

Cheng/Chì

“Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

If you read the picture caption, you already know that Cheng/Chì (Ortodox/Unortodox) is an idea from Sun Tzu's book The Art of War, that says that to win a battle, you need two things: Ordinary military forces, doing the tried and true things, and unorthodox forces, creating an element of surprise.

The principle can be applied to any other art, as well as the art of war. So, in the picture above, the street with all the ordinary people is the cheng, and the nude woman is the element of chì.

So, now you know how to apply the Cheng/Chí principle from Sun Tzu'z The Art of War.

Get out there and practice!

PS. The GDPR Thing!

You might wonder whether a picture like the one in this article breaks the new General Data Protection (GDPR) law. It does not. Journalistic images and art are exempt from the rules. That means it is okay to do street photography, it is okay to create digital paintings from street photographs, and it is okay to manipulate a photo taken in a street, if the purpose is to create a piece of art. You can read up on GDPR here.

Kyla: The Hunting of the Snake

The title of this piece, The Hunting of the Snake, is a horribly bad pun. I got the idea from Lewis Carrol's poem The hunting of the Snark.

There are many different interpretations of the poem. Lewis Carrol was once asked if it was an allegory for the search for happiness, and he wrote in a letter that it was.

I have always been fascinated by the last two verses:

 They hunted till darkness came on, but they found
   Not a button, or feather, or mark,
By which they could tell that they stood on the ground
   Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
   In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away—
   For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Happiness is a Snark. We hunt for it, but when we catch it, it may well turn out to be a Boojum.

Well, unlike the Baker, at least most of the time, we can survive the Boojum, and live to hunt another Snark. Some of us even find it.

In case you wonder, I made the picture first, and came up with the title, and thus also the interpretation, afterwards.

I suppose, it is a case of cause following effect.

Technically, I created the original picture in Daz Studio.

I used three lights for this picture:

• The default DAZ HDRI environment, set at 0.3 strength. This gave me a basic low level ambient lighting. The level you can see in the background.
• A spotlight with 10x10 m area, placed 10 m straight above Kyla and the Constrictor. This gave me a fair amount of light on the trees beyond the large fallen one, and brightened Kyla and the constrictor a bit.
• A smaller spotlight, 5x5 m, 8 m up, with a more narrow beam of light, focused on Kyla and the constrictor.

The end result is that the further away you get from Kyla and the snake, the darker the picture becomes. Some of my recent pictures have had to flat lighting, and I wanted to fix that.

I painted the picture using Dynamic Auto-Painter.

Here is the first version. I wasn't quite happy with it. I think you can see why:

In this version, the background trees are almost obliterated by the muddy, brown underpaint. I had decided to leave reduce the detail in the background, but the DAP default was a bit too much.

Simple solution: I did a bit of post brushwork in DAP. The reason I mention it, is because if you do the same, do set the opacity of the brush down a bit. The postprocessing brushes have higher default opacity than the same brush used while DAP is autopainting. This can trick you into making postprocessing effects too strong.

The Tunnel

 

I started working on The Tunnel about a year ago. The photo is a selfie I shot in a tunnel under a railroad a couple of kilometers from where I live.

I set my camera up on a tripod, took a remote triggered hotshoe flash in my hand, set the camera timer for 10 seconds, and ran like crazy to get into the right position in time.

It took several tries, but finally I had a shot that was good enough.

I wnt to a fish store and shot octopus tentacles. However, that did not work out as I had hoped. Dead octopi don't pose well.

After several tries, I finally put the picture aside. I realized I would have to try something else.

Awhile ago, I started using Daz Studio to compose 3D scenes. That got me thinking about using a 3D model of an octopus to create the picture you see. A couple of days ago I gave it a try.

With Daz, it was relatively easy to position the tentacles.

What you see here are the rendered tentacles, right out of Daz Studio.

I composited, added shadows, and relit the picture in Affinity Photo.

At this point, I had a so-so photo composite. It did not quite work as a photo, because the tentacles looked a bit artificial to start with. Also, the photo was a bit too clean. I wanted a dirtier tunnel.

Filters in Affinity Photo, Photoshop, and most other tools, do a mathematical transformation of the image. In many situations, that is exactly what you want.

However, I wanted a more painterly feel. At this point, I had two ways to go:

• Use the Paint Mixer tool in Affinity Photo to paint the whole picture manually. That works very well, but it is also very time consuming.
• Use Dynamic Auto-Painter to paint automatically, with manual input only where necessary. Much faster, nearly as fun, and arguably, better results. (Depending on how good an artist you are.)

I went with Dynamic Auto-Painter, and created the picture at the start of this blog post.

I also created a couple of variations. The very dark one you see here is actually closer to what I had in mind originally.

My son thinks this is the best version because "what you cannot see is scarier than what you can see."

He's got a very good point.

Because the picture is so dark, it can appear almost completely black on some monitors though.

I created an in-between version, darker than the first, but brighter than the second.

Which version you prefer, is of course up to you.

You can find these pictures, and a portfolio I am building, at ArtStation.

Lost World IV: Aftermath (a.k.a. Blood on Her Hands)

This is the fourth and final (unless I get more ideas) picture of Kyla.

Yes, I named the character. I thought it appropriate, since she appears in an entire series of pictures, and may appear again.

As you can see, it is immediately after the battle against the T-Rex.

I have written about my sources of ideas for this series in my earlier posts. What I wrote then, goes for this picture too. However, there is one influence worth a particular mention:

Joe Jusko! (Check out his pictures on DeviantArt. It is a treat.)

I have learned a lot just by looking at Joe Jusko's pictures. They are strong, dynamic, the colors are vibrant, the compositions lead the eye to a point-of-interest, but it is more than that. Jusko has something special, Jusko has angles.

No, not angels! Angles! In some of his pictures, he is careful not to overdo it, he uses unusual angles to create drama, and heighten emotion.

I'll link to a couple of his images on DeviantArt. Check them out and you'll see what I mean:

• Warlord of Mars No. 8
• Dejah Thoris No. 2 Cover 
• Hawks of Outremer No. 4 (One of my favorites, despite the attack being somewhat dangerous and impractical.)
• POTA Bridge Battle 

Here are two more. They do not use viewing angle in the same way. I am including them because I like them, and because they have female protagonists that don't take crap from anyone:

• First oil painting in 1977 (Wow! I didn't know about this one until I researched this blog post. Except for the hair color, the woman could be my character, Kyla.)
• Stand Off! (If you think the woman looks a lot like La of Opar, it is because she is La of Opar.)

It is very important to know...oh, screw that! I got a new idea for a picture with Kyla. Got to go.

I'll be back!

How I made the T-Rex battle

My current process for working with 3D images, in a single graphic.

Lost World I: Dangerous Shadow

I have had the idea for this one in my head a couple of days. The idea is that sometimes, you have to knowingly walk into danger, and take on something that may be too big for you to handle.

This is one picture that I'd like to make a photographic version of. We'll see how that works out.

Where do you get inspiration for a picture like this? Well, I got it from several different sources. The Lost World theme is from books like Arthur Conan Doyle's book The Lost World, and Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park. Edgar R. Burrough's Tarzan and John Carter books are also strong influences.

In case you are wondering about the nudity: It's the norm on Barsoom, where John Carter had his adventures. Also, I budget my 3D projects carefully, and appropriate clothes weren't in the 3D budget for this month, and because I am still trying to figure out how to do nude art.

There are of course artists that have inspired too. The somewhat exaggerated proportions of the woman is inspired by the art of Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, and Frank Frazetta. The situation, with impending danger, owes more to Joe Jusko, and perhaps FrankCho. (Frank Cho would probably have turned the idea into slapstick comedy.)

Technically, I am a photographer, not a painter, so I take a photographer's approach to creating pictures. That is, I do not create stuff. I take existing stuff, and arrange it on a scene in front of a camera, and take a picture. It just so happens, this time I used 3D objects. and the scene was created in Daz Studio.

Oh, I did a bit of post processing in Affinity Studio and Dynamic Auto-Painter. Dynamic Auto-Painter is quickly becoming a favorite of mine.

I do have a couple of more ideas on the same theme, so this may well turn into a short series of pictures.

Fine Art Nude: Self-Constraints

It is amazing how we limit our own growth and success by self-imposed constraints: 

• I can't do this. 
• I don't dare do that. 
• I'll never be able to learn. 
• I don't want to learn.

There are ways around it though: 

• Learn and experiment in small steps. 
• Find others who want to learn, and learn with them. 

All the small steps you take will add up. Look back after a year, or two years, and you will see that all the small steps add up to giant strides.

I've had the idea for this picture for a long time. Making it was technically easy. 

I built the scene in DAZ 3D Studio.

I used a Genesis 8 Female 3D model as a base. I positioned the arms and hands, and then duplicated the model. Then I repositioned the arms and hands over the copy.

I bent the neck and tilted the head of the original model. When I did that, the models did not quite match up. Instead of matching the necks and heads precisely, I simply turned the head of the second model invisible.

I created a virtual studio consisting of two planes, a floor, and a back wall. Then I created a rather large third plane, made it a light emitter, and placed it high above, in front of the model, and angled at 45 degrees. This provided ambient lighting for the scene.

Finally, I added a spotlight to put a bit of extra light on the model. I made the spotlight a 2x2 metre square, to soften the shadows.

I rendered the scene with Daz built-in Iray renderer.

I did some post work in Affinity Photo, mostly to hide the intersections between the two 3D models at the shoulders. I used a combination of inpainting and patching.

I increased the contrast a little bit, and turned the picture black and white.

Monolith I and II

Monolith II

The Monolith series is very loosely inspired by the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

If you have seen my other Fine Art Nude work, you know that they are often rooted in some aspect of the human condition. The monolith series is more about form, that is, shape, and light.

I put Monolith II at the top of this blog post, mostly because it is social media safe. (Yes, I occasionally chicken out. Depends more on my current mood, than the pictures.) Reduces the risk of getting banned on Facebook.

Monolith I

Monolith I is more about the light than anything else. I wanted to see what happened when I put a very large light source directly behind the model. If that had been the only light source, you would see little more than a silhouette.

I added another light source in front of the model, angled 45 degrees, and high enoug to illuminate the entire monolith. Because of the distance between the light and the model, the model is evenly lit from head to toe.
 
I did add a bit of shadow in the genital area for modesty's sake. Not the model's modesty (she is a 3D model), or yours, but mine. I am still a bit shy about doing nude art.

Here are links to some of my earlier Fine Art Nude pictures:

• Social Media Bubbles
• The Disciples and the Light
• Perpendicular I
• Triangles IV: Shape and Story

 

Social Media Bubbles

If you think you do not live inside the Matrix, it is because you are asleep inside your bubble.

We all live inside information bubbles shaped by the algorithms that choose what information to give us on social media.

Facebook, Youtube, Google, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Linkedin...They all use algorithms designed to provide us information we like, and filter out whatever we do not like.

The information we get, shape our perception of the world. Due to the design of the algorithms, the information keeps narrowing down.

The more it narrows down, the more difficult it becomes to understand other viewpoints than our own. Our points of view are whatever the masters of the algorithms design them to be.

If you think you do not live in the Matrix, it is because you are asleep in your bubble.

Perpendicular I

Have you ever had the feeling that you live on a plane perpendicular to everyone else, even the ones you love?

You can touch, but no matter what you do, you can never share.

Digital Painting: In the Asylum

In the Asylum is a prestudy for Demogorgon, a piece I haven't done yet. I got the idea while working on the Dinosaur Rider series of pictures, and just had to break off and do something different.

Being a photographer is very different from being a cartoonist or painter. Cartoonists and painters usually create their work from scratch. A photographer finds things that already exist, modify them if necessary, and put them together in interesting ways.

This is a simplification, of course. Painters and cartoonists often work using photo references, or like a photographer, with live models. I sometimes create 3D environments as backdrops for my photographic images. The lines are blurred.

Me, I am interested in the results. If I can find a simple way of accomplishing what I want, then that way is the way I go. I constantly strive to learn more, but as a means to an end.

I created In the Asylum by setting up a scene in Daz 3D Studio. I used a stock model, the Genesis 8 Female as a base, and changed skin color, the shape of the ears, and the proportions of the body. Some of the modifications are easy tweaks using pre-built controls, for others, I changed the mesh directly, using scaling transformations. I experimented with a D-Former, but found that, for what I wanted to do, the scaling transformations gave me better results.

The backdrop is a room from the Daz Asylum package. I threw out the pre-packaged lighting, and replaced it with my own lights.

Notice the shadow on the floor to the left of the woman? That is from the window. I placed a light outside the window to get the shadow, and also to control where the light would fall on the floor.

I also added a point light, for ambience, and gave it volume to soften the shadows.

When I had a render, I opened it into Affinity Photo, and used a paint brush with the Paint Mixer tool.

I also tweaked the contrast, and changed the white balance to give the light in the room a greenish cast. I wanted the light in the scene to match the green skin of the woman.

Storyboard or finished picture? I don't know. I could shoot this using a live model, and even a real environment, but I am actually quite happy with the picture as is.

I'll probably move on to Demogorgon instead, unless something else just pops into my head.