Castaway

Castaway version 2

Over the past two years, I have said now and then, that I want to do more Science-Fiction genre pictures. Each time, I have continued doing more Fantasy, and sometimes Horror, pictures.

This time, I just might be able to switch gears a bit.

I have had an idea for doing a picture with an astronaut walking away from a crashed spaceship for quite some time. Early drafts, which were only inside my head, involved an astronaut in a spacesuit walking away from the crash site in a snow covered mountain landscape.

As you can see, I went from that idea to nude woman on beach instead.

The version above is the second version of the picture. The first version looked like this:

Castaway version 1

There were three things that bugged me about the first version:

• The hair was dry
• The skin was dry
• The position of the woman's left foot was slightly off.

I wanted it to look like the woman had just managed to get ashore with some supplies and equipment.

I drew part of the inspiration for the picture from the Sword & Planet sub-genre of Science-Fiction, in particular from Jack Vance's Tschai books. While working on the pictures, I decided to re-read them, so I bought the Kindle edition from Amazon. My original paperbacks are long lost.

I also decided to make a 360 panorama version. Sadly, Blogger can't show panoramas, and embedding third party panorama viewers have proven quite unreliable in the past. I uploaded the panorama version to ArtStation instead.

If you click the link and have a look around, don't forget to look up.

Is this the beginning of a new series? Maybe. I do have a couple of ideas.

Be seeing you!

Golden Girl - A Frank Frazetta Tribute

The original Golden Girl by Frank Frazetta is one of my favorite paintings, so when I saw that another very accomplished Fantasy artist, Regis Moulun, had made a Frazetta tribute painting based on Golden Girl, I thought I'd give it a go.

If you look at the original, you will notice that the picture has a square format, and that is where I started.

First attempt at a square format picture

The original does not have any dinosaurs in it. In addition to the woman, there is a black panther and three wolves. I briefly considered doing a picture like that, but decided to go with dinosaurs instead. That way, the picture would fit in nicely with my Cavewoman style pictures.

When I tried it out, I liked the initial results, but as you can see in the picture above, the T-Rex is quite large. There is not room for tree more dinosaurs, even if they are smaller than the T-Rex.

I slowly began to realizeI had to let go of the square format, if I wanted to stick with dinosaurs in the picture. I googled a bit, and found that someone had already done a tribute picture in landscape format, and with dinosaurs.

It was Budd Root, of course. He has made a Meriem Cooper version of the picture.

I got to work on a new version of the picture. As I was finishing it up, I did a bit more googling, and found that at least one more artist, Scott Blair, has made a version of the picture.

It pays off to pay attention to the work of other artists. For example, if you clicked on the link to Regis Moulun's picture above, did you notice what happens in the bottom left corner of the picture? I didn't catch it until I had looked at it a couple of times. Changes the tone and meaning of the whole picture, doesn't it?

My final Golden Girl, or rather, my final storyboard.

 I finished a second version of the picture. You can see it above. It's not perfect, but it will do as a storyboard, until the Covid-19 pandemic has passed, and I can start photographing models again.

If you have read this far, I hope you have checked out the links. Frazetta's original is amazing, and the homage paintings are also very good. If you haven't checked them out yet, go back to the top of the article, and start clicking on the links.

Be seeing you!