Wednesday 3 June 2020

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!


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