Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Everyone needs a Storybook Steve.

I mean, how many people can say that they have a friend who writes heavy metal songs about their paintings?

One of my dearest friends, Steve Belleville (a.k.a. Storybook Steve) is an absurdly talented and a perpetually-professionally-in-demand musician/ songwriter who can pick up and play any instrument he can get his hands on (and play it well, mind you).  I have witnessed this firsthand.

Steve has also been, to me, a constant encouragement/ sounding board/ collaborator and source of creative inspiration for a number of years.  But he has outdone himself once again.

:: click on the player above or the “Download” link to play the song by Storybook Steve ::

HOW IT HAPPENED:

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Boston, Massachusetts for a few days to visit Steve.  It should be noted that the painting above was about half-way done at the time and was, at the time untitled.

The gray monster in the painting is Prescot, for those of you who haven’t met him yet.  He can also be seen in two other paintings in this series:  Prescot and the Butterfly On a Not-So-Sad Day and Prescot Goes To Work.  Steve has always been Prescot’s number one fan, so I was sure to take my laptop so I could show him the work-in-progress.

Steve plays Bass, Mandolin and sings backup in Chad Perrone’s band and I got to see them play a great concert while I was there.  Their opening act, The Bright Wings was also great and I absolutely fell in love with their name.  Its just such a good name for a good band.

I couldn’t get it out of my head.  And since Steve was the reason for my trip and has always been Prescot’s number-one-fan and it was his band that I was going to see when I learned ofThe Bright Wings and since Prescot is about to be awakened by The Butterfly who, incidentally, has some very bright wings, it seemed only appropriate to appropriate ‘Bright Wings’ for the title of my painting!

The story would be interesting enough if it ended there.  But it doesn’t.  No, Steve liked my newest venture into Prescot’s world so much that he felt moved to write a heavy metal song about it.  (Using the same title, of course.)

THE SONG:

I begged Steve to let me post the lyrics and the demo version of the song and he agreed, as long as I put up the following disclaimer:

I’m supposed to warn you guys that this is indeed a DEMO version.  In other words, it exists only as a quick-and-dirty, record-keeping device (but I think it sounds awesome).  Also, its all recorded with acoustic guitars so you’ll have to imagine the distorted electric guitars and the crashing metal-type drums with double bass and china cymbals etc…

I LOVE how Steve expanded on the mythology of story with this song…

The link to the mp3 is at the top of this post and so I’ll end with the lyrics.  Enjoy!

(This post is continued in part 2…)

Today He Will Awaken to Her Bright Wings

music and lyrics by Steve Belleville

Four hearts firing in a mighty chest

Beneath the grey skin stretched across a powerful breast

Beneath a suit and tie, beneath an open sky

Met with two slumbering eyes

In one heart he dreams of the Caspian Sea

The second: his mother’s voice sings from the trees

In the third, erratic wings color the breeze

His fourth heart lies still for dreams yet to be

But today he will awaken to her bright wings

And their flutter in the forest changes all things

The red tree shading Sigmund shudders, miles away

As the fog releases Prescott from its dark, dark sway

If one day he’s covering hilltops in stride

The next he’s imprisoned by eyes shining wide

And focused on his fingertips, guiding her flight

‘Til four hearts are pumping in syncopated time

But today he will awaken to her bright wings

And their flutter in the forest changes all things

In the deep of the dark of the greens of the moss: memory

But today he will awaken to her bright wings

And their flutter in the forest changes all things

The red tree shading Sigmund shudders, miles away

As the fog releases Prescott from its dark, dark sway

(continued from part 1)

I did a concept painting several years ago called ‘Sigmund And The Red Tree.’  My friend Pablo Smith and I wrote a short film about Sigmund.  Pablo even did an animation test or two.  It ended up not happening for whatever reason, but I bring this up now to demonstrate how a painting can ALMOST tell a story, but not really…

Sigmund sits there under his tree and… …thinks?  It looks posed.  Now that was sort of the point when I was trying to establish the mood of the painting, which was sort of a rip-off of Morgan Freeman’s ‘treasure hunt’ scene at the end of The Shawshank Redemption.  (It is, of course, debatable as to whether or not this mood was actually achieved.)

But even as still and quiet and warm as that scene from Shawshank is, there are all kinds of thought-provoking layers to it…  Morgan looking for the tree; Morgan finding the black rock; the suspense building; Morgan digging for the treasure; Morgan finding the curious box; Morgan’s reaction to the treasure; Morgan looking around to see if anyone is watching…  There is SO MUCH story, so much acting going on.  Even as he is still, he is acting.  There is a story being told.

Granted, a story this rich is difficult to convey in a single image; a single painting.  However, it doesn’t make me any less interested in attempting to do so.  The old masters did it.  Check out Las Meninas by Velasquez among many others.

Even if I do just a simple character study with no background, I want that to reflect some sort of non-diegetic occurrence to which the character is reacting or, at the very least, reveal how the character would act if it was moving around.  I want to see a motivation or an insight into who the character is.  Are they honest or dishonest?  Anxious or brave or afraid and why?

I am ready to divulge yet another obsession…

It is the art form most generally described as storytelling.  Whether said storytelling happens through pictures or words, music or motion, it pretty much doesn’t matter, I am obsessed with it.

I never get tired of thinking about storytelling.  I never get tired of talking about it.  I never get tired of reading about it or learning about it and I certainly never get tired of experiencing it.

This goes for storytelling done well or even not-so-well, because I am SO obsessed with storytelling that I often sit through the most atrociously-scripted romantic comedies merely for the challenge of deciding how I would ‘fix’ the broken story if I had been the one writing and/ or directing it.

This is why, though I love both Bela Fleck and The Flecktones and Nickel Creek, I believe that the Nickel Creek kids tell a more compelling story than The Flecktones.  The Flecktones are not without their storytelling qualities, but their stories are just simply not as engrossing, as lucid as the lyrics to any given Nickel Creek song.  In other words, The Flecktones don’t make me cry.  Well, sometimes they do, when I realize how unattainably-skilled they are at their instruments.  I won’t go into that here, though.  That’s for a different post on a different blog.

…and here’s how it all applies to painting:  Several years ago, I was in a portfolio review with Frank Gladstone who was then in charge of artistic development at Dreamworks Animation.  Frank is an awesome guy and has given me some fantastic advice at various meetings over the past few years.  He was flipping quickly through the pages of my portfolio.  I had all of these painstakingly-detailed paintings in there and I thought they would surely qualify me as a shoe-in to their art department.  Frank was being encouraging, but it was obvious that none of my work was rocking his world.

And then he stopped flipping.  He stopped on one of my throw-away ‘sketchbook’ pages at the back of my portfolio and he started raving about this one little sketch of an alligator that looked like she was in love.

If I remember correctly, Frank said something like, ‘Yeah, like this!  I love this.  This is a great drawing, see?  Its a drawing that tells a story…’

All of my other work was upstaged by this one little sketch!  And its not even a remarkable drawing!  But it has something real, something emotional.  I’ve been obsessed with storytelling my entire life.  Though stories had found their way into the ideas and concepts behind my paintings, (I had gone to great lengths to follow the Jim Henson/ George Lucas school of thought by developing the back-stories and non-diegetic worlds of the characters in my paintings) the stories had not really found their way into the actual images.

So this is now my pur

suit.  Every painting, every drawing has to tell a story.  This alligator sketch is okay.  Its not heart-stopping like something Glen Keane would do, but it does, in fact, tell a story.  The alligator is not just standing there, arms down to her sides, posed in profile or straight-on.  No, she is acting.

(continued in part 2)

In part one of this post, I divulged my obsession with the television show LOST. I explained where my desire to do a piece of fan art for this show originated. Here’s some insight about my process behind creating this image.

Conceptually speaking, there is an inherent challenge in doing a piece of fan-art for LOST. That is, the story is not yet told. Its not finished.

With something like Star Wars, the illustrator has quite the clear set of canonized boundaries. For example, you can’t have Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker fighting a duel in Cloud City unless its a scene from that famous ‘I am your father’ fight where Luke gets his hand chopped off. The story has been established and we know that they never, in the history of the Star Wars timeline, fought any other battle against each other in Cloud City.

With LOST, I have no idea what the ‘rules’ for the Smoke Monster are and how it relates to John. I don’t know what they will or will not do by the end. I have no idea if they are friends or foes. I can guess, but I don’t know.

We got one vague clue in The Cost Of Living (S3) that the Smoke Monster may be afraid of or unable to face John, but that’s about it. But we do know that there is a connection between the two characters. So if I was going to put both of these characters in the same illustration, I would have to be careful how I presented their interaction.

I opted for no real interaction. John is moving through the jungle and he spots the monster passing by. He crouches and waits as it glides into the distance. Yeah, I know, I kind of chickened-out on the story. Poor planning.

I started small for a reason. I have a few ideas for pieces of LOST fan art and this began as a mere sketch of something simple that I could start with. I’ll probably try multiple times to get a really nice LOST piece. It just so happens that I stayed in-love with this one long enough to have it reach a certain level of finish. I was having to solve a lot of visual problems this time. Next time, I can focus more on the story.

I’m not entirely happy with it, visually or conceptually.

Visually speaking, there are a few perspective issues. The likeness of Terry O’Quinn could be a little more accurate. (Hi, Terry! I hope you’ve Googled yourself and thus found my painting of you… …thanks for rocking my casbah…)

In case any of you are wondering, I did not, in fact, chicken-out on the likeness by having him facing away from the camera.

This idea came from the movie poster for The Bourne Ultimatum. Its basically just the back of Matt Damon’s head. I loved that. I had never realized how recognizable the back of Matt Damon’s head is. I noticed quite a while ago that the back of Terry O’ Quinn’s head is also extremely recognizable, so I went for the challenge of trying to convey a clear likeness from a back-three-quarters-view.

To be frank, I LOVE the color palette and the layout, which I struggled with incessantly. I kept chopping the painting into pieces and moving stuff around and painting-in the gaps. I wasted a lot of time due to poor planning, but oh well… …I’ll try again later…

I think I finally got the ‘wide angle lens’ look that I was going for. This was also really hard, trying to make it feel like a real, physical environment. That’s usually all solved in the drawing, but seeing as how I was moving stuff around all the time, the drawing became only a loose guide and not a blueprint for the whole painting.

I love the multiple greens that I was able to incorporate with blues and greys and yellows all mixed-in. I really like how the distant background is tinted with blue. It feels so ominous and kind of scary.

There’s also all kinds of fun planty-gobbeltygook in the jungle-parts, so feel free to download the image from the portfolio page and zoom-in with your image viewer and have a look-see.

Finally, I have to say that I am pleased with the piece. It was a tremendous learning experience and I am really excited to do another one. I also can’t wait to finish that Star Wars piece and I can’t wait to show it to you good people.

Let me know what you think…

I am the LOST Stalker…

When I worked on the Disney lot, I would regularly walk over to the now-famous ‘Building 23’ on my lunch break, or when I was leaving work for the day.  For those of you that didn’t already know, (although you have probably guessed by now) Building 23 is where the writers of ABC’s LOST create the most brilliant, moving, engrossing television show that I have ever seen.

I would just casually walk by the building, (then loop around and walk by again… …and again… …just kidding!) hoping to God that I would “coincidentally” run into Damon Lindelof or Carlton Cuse (producers and head writers on the show – geniuses both) when they were leaving work for the day or heading to the commissary for lunch.  Alas, I never saw them, not once.

Had I bumped into them, I would have begged them to let me buy them lunch.  Everyone has to take time to eat eventually, so why not enjoy a free meal and rid yourself of your stalker all at once?  All I wanted was to spend an hour, or half-an hour even, talking about how in tarnation they write such consistently amazing stuff.  I never get tired of thinking about LOST.  I never get tired of talking about it.  I never get tired of reading about it or learning about it and I certainly never get tired of experiencing it.  It is, to say the least, a marvel.

This is not, of course, a novel concept.  The show has been collecting fans by the millions with its nigh-irresistible tractor-beam of mystery and full-gamut of emotional truths for four long years.  However, what I have learned about my paintings (not to mention writing) from this show is perhaps, somewhat insightful, though still not entirely original.  All of that will be covered in my posts on visual storytelling.

I was just coming down from an amazing art-buzz…

I had just seen some amazing concept art for the new Turok game over at ConceptArt.org and those beautiful paintings got me wanting to do something all jungle-ish.  Me plus jungles plus fan art equals…

The most basic level? I am obsessed with LOST, so I decided to do a piece of fan art.  : )

I haven’t finished a piece of fan art since I was like, thirteen years old.

I did start a Star Wars piece a few years back but never finished (though I will tell you that I am currently rebooting that painting and it should be up here in the next couple of months).

I decided last summer that I wanted to start doing more fan-art.  This is primarily because I used to love doing it.  There is a teenage boy inside me that will never grow up.

I also want to put together a sort of fan-art portfolio and go after some geek-publishing work.  I want so badly to do some Star Wars comic covers or a cool pin-up of Batman fighting Two-Face.  If there is a teenage boy inside me that will never grow up, I might as well appease him and capitalize in the process.

But how do I create a painting, an individual image that does justice to LOST’s labyrinthine, perpetually-mysterious story?