Как работает иллюстрация

Когда Леонардо да Винчи закончил « Мона Лизу », он создал мастерское произведение искусства, которое стоит само по себе. Сегодня картина висит в Лувре в Париже и известна во всем мире.

Но что, если бы Леонардо жил сегодня? Что, если бы он нарисовал «Мону Лизу» для рекламного агентства в качестве фона для рекламы в журнале? В этом случае Мона Лиза была бы иллюстрацией. Иллюстрация все еще может быть хорошо известна и влиятельна. Например, наше общее представление о Санта-Клаусе в значительной степени восходит к набору картин Хэддона Сандблома, использовавшихся в качестве иллюстраций для рекламы Coca-Cola между 1931 и 1964 годами. что они были бы столь же широко известны, если бы не были рекламными иллюстрациями.

Как видите, грань между изобразительным искусством и иллюстрацией часто размыта, но различие есть. В словаре есть одно определение иллюстрации: «визуальный материал, используемый для уточнения или украшения текста». Иллюстрация — это искусство, но искусство служит частью большего целого, а не стоит само по себе.

Мы видим иллюстрации вокруг себя в бесчисленном множестве различных форм и форматов. Например, большинство детских книг иллюстрировано. Каталоги, книги и журналы часто содержат иллюстрации. В большинстве руководств пользователя есть иллюстрации, хотя они могут быть грубыми. Воскресные комиксы представляют собой иллюстрированные мультипликационные панели, как и комиксы. Многие объявления на билбордах и в журналах иллюстрированы. Один из способов думать об иллюстрации — это рисунок, фотография или картина, которые служат определенной цели в какой-то более крупной работе.

В этой статье мы рассмотрим пару иллюстраторов и их особую форму иллюстрации. Грег и Тим Хильдебрандты, также известные как Братья Хильдебрандты , создают иллюстрации уже несколько десятилетий. Они, вероятно, лучше всего известны за набор больших, тщательно продуманных картин, которые они создали в 1970-х годах, чтобы проиллюстрировать три календаря Дж. Р. Р. Толкина, изданные Ballantine Books (в то время самые продаваемые календари в мире). Они также создали постер к первому фильму «Звездные войны» и ряд других работ. Их карьера охватывает все: от детских книжных иллюстраций до колоритного пин-апа. Мы увидим, как работает иллюстрация их глазами.

1. Начиная
2. Стиль
3. Эскиз эскиза
4. Окончательный макет
5. Фактическая картина
6. Каталог Гильдебрандта

Дж. Р. Р. Толкин создал несколько самых популярных когда-либо написанных книг — трилогию «Хоббит» и «Властелин колец». Эти книги рисуют свои сцены с помощью слов — текстовых описаний, очень подробных и ярких. Грег и Тим Хильдебрандт, как иллюстраторы, должны взять эти текстовые описания и воплотить их в жизнь в изображениях. Процесс, который они используют для создания таких подробных картин, завораживает.

Но сначала братьям нужно было получить концерт.

Одной из составляющих иллюстрации является тот факт, что многие иллюстрации выполняются по заказу. Кому-то нужна иллюстрация — рекламному агентству, издателю, редактору журнала и т. д. — и он готов платить за иллюстрацию, созданную художником.

В случае с календарями JRR Tolkien человеком с деньгами был Ян Саммерс, арт-директор Ballantine Books. Ему нужен был набор из 14 иллюстраций для календаря Толкиена 1976 года. Ян так описывает сцену своей первой встречи с братьями Хильдебрандтами:

В мире иллюстраций это, вероятно, считается одним из наименее ортодоксальных методов получения комиссионных, но в данном случае он сработал. Братья Хильдебрандт получили контракт и приступили к созданию своих иллюстраций.

With a commission in hand, one of the very first steps in creating an illustration is deciding on the "style" of the work. In many cases the person offering the commission has some specific ideas about the style. In other cases, style is largely left to the artist's discretion.

In either case, deciding on the artistic style of the art involves an understanding of the audience (the age of the audience, for example) and the message the work should send to that audience. For example, an illustration of a car designed for a four-year-old child would certainly have a different style and approach than an illustration of a car designed for an adult, or one designed for an automobile mechanic. Knowing the audience and setting the style for the work is perhaps the artist's most important decision. This decision affects a great number of things in the final illustration. Getting the style right also has a big impact on audience acceptance.

The Brothers Hildebrandt started their careers making documentary films and then went into illustrating children's books, so early on, they had experience creating for two very different audiences. As they started work on their calendar, the brothers spent a good bit of time at the outset deciding on the overall style. They approached this decision by creating a variety of sketches to demonstrate different possibilities. Since they came from the world of children's book illustration, some of their first illustrations had a childish feeling to them. For example, this sample:

Greg Hildebrandt notes, "This drawing was one of the first we did on Tolkien. Then we decided to take a more realistic, adult approach for the Ring. For six years Tim and I had illustrated Children's books. The Tolkien calendars were the beginning of a new style for us."

By working through a number of sketches and working back and forth with Ian Summers, the group established the overall look of the art. This picture shows the more mature tone typical for the Tolkien calendars.

This image is the centerfold for the 1976 Tolkien calendar. It is a painting, typically done in a very large format. Some of the Hildebrandt paintings are as large as 6 feet (2 meters) wide. The background, the tree and each character in the scene are exquisitely detailed.

With the commission in hand and the tone established, the actual process of illustration can begin. But first, the illustrators have to work all of those details out.

When a non-artist looks at the elaborate illustration in the last section, the obvious question is "How do you work out all of the details?" For example, how do you decide what will be in the background? How do you decide how each person will be standing? How do you decide on things like facial expressions and arm positions? Hair? Shoes? Hoods? Belts? Weapons? Accessories? These are all details you have to understand before you can start painting.

In the case of the Tolkien illustrations, many of the basic notions and some of the details come from the word-pictures that Tolkien paints. For example, in Chapter 1 of "The Lord of the Rings", Tolkien paints a picture of Gandalf:

In the forward to the book, Tolkien paints a picture of hobbit architecture:

The Hildebrandt brothers spent a lot of time interpreting these descriptions and experimenting with various representations.

In addition, Tolkien gave some instruction into the appearance of things after he wrote his books. For example, in a letter to the Houghton Mifflin company in 1938, Tolkien elaborated on the appearance of hobbits:

This type of word-picture gives the Hildebrandt brothers guidance. So, for example, in a painting that shows Gandalf meeting Bilbo, Gandalf has a pointy blue hat and a long beard, while Bilbo sits in front of a house with round windows and a round door. Bilbo is the right size, has hairy feet and pointy ears.

However, the brothers also have some liberty as illustrators. Tim notes, "When reading Tolkien's text, Greg and I questioned what it would look like if Gandalf's eyebrows stuck out past his hat. We decided not to follow his text literally because his description of Gandalf's eyebrows would have made them almost a foot long."

Given this guidance, there are still thousands of questions for an illustrator to work out. Most importantly, what is the illustration trying to say? What scene does it capture? Who is in the scene? What are they doing? How do they feel? And then there are a myriad of tiny details. For example:

The Hildebrandt brothers initially work out decisions like these in thumbnail sketches, also known as rough sketches. These are quick, small, rough drawings that allow the illustrator to experiment, try different ideas and work out details in a few minutes.

Tim makes two points about thumbnails:

Having worked out the basics in a series of thumbnails, the next step is a rough comprehensive sketch, or in brief, a rough comp. The drawing technique is still quick and rough, normally done in pencil, and it is larger. But the idea is to include all of the elements of the final illustration and see how they all fit together. The rough comp normally goes to the art director who commissioned the work, for his or her approval.

Artists work in all sorts of mediums. If your illustration is going to go onto the comic page of a daily newspaper, then it might be a pen and ink drawing. If it is going in a comic book or the Sunday paper, you would draw it in ink and color it with a computer. Other mediums include charcoal, chalk, pastels and water colors. For the Hildebrandt brothers, the illustrations are almost always done using acrylic paint in a very large format.

The first step to creating a painting is a final sketch, also known as a final layout. These are incredibly intricate pencil drawings, normally the same size as the final painting, that contain all of the details that will go into the finished piece.

To make a sketch like this, the Hildebrandt brothers actually pose real people in costumes and photograph them. The models are lit as they will be in the illustration, because the purpose of these photographs is primarily to understand and recreate the proper pattern of light. Light on a human face or on a piece of fabric is one of the things that can make or break an image that is supposed to be realistic. Tim: "Our method is to create thumbnail sketches, then make costumes and photograph a model in the correct lighting."

The other reason for photographing people is to work out things like facial expressions and gestures. By posing a model naturally, or by letting the model "act out" the emotions in the scene, it is possible to capture on film exactly the right mood. Then the expressions and gestures can be transferred to the image of the characters in the final layout.

Tim points out, "People usually only see the finished product. They don't realize the amount of work that is done before we even start the paintings. We did very elaborate, full-sized pencil drawings for almost all of our Tolkien work. We had to do them this detailed not only for ourselves, but for Ballantine, in order to get their approval and check for inaccuracies."

Having gone through an immense amount of preparation, Greg and Tim are now ready to begin painting.

The brothers use a unique substrate. Rather than the traditional canvas, they use large sheets of Masonite or Duron, also known as hard board. Masonite and Duron are made from heavily pressed wood fiber material often used to make cabinets and furniture. One side of it is extremely smooth and dark brown. To prepare a Masonite board for painting, the brothers would first paint it with multiple coats of heavily watered-down, thin, white gesso (a mixture of plaster of Paris and glue) and then sand it smooth, so that it has the feeling of an eggshell in terms of texture.

The next step is to transfer the details from the final composition drawing onto this board. The brothers normally do the transfer using homemade graphite paper. A large sheet of paper is coated with soft pencil lead, then soaked in rubbing alcohol and dried. By putting this graphite paper over the gesso and then putting the final layout over it, the brothers can trace out the important features of the final comp. These guidelines make painting much easier.

They generally use an acrylic paint that you would find in tubes in an art store, made by either Grumbacher or Liquitex. It goes on like oil paint but dries much more quickly (acrylic taking minutes to dry, while oil takes days).

The brothers mix their paints on a sheet of aluminum foil. Typically, they start by mixing the various values and shades of color, from the lightest value to the darkest value, for the parts of the scene that is farthest away. In an outdoor scene, these would normally be the colors for the sky. For an interior scene, they would be the colors for the back wall of the room. Since the sky is lighter at the horizon, the palette of colors mixed on the aluminum foil would offer all of the shades needed to paint the different parts of the sky. Then the brothers work forward, painting closer and closer parts of the scene.

One of the surprising things about the painting process is the amount of time it can take. For example, take this painting:

Greg points out, "What I remember most about this is how long it took to paint the leaf-mail armor." Imagine painting every leaf in the mail, every blade of grass, every twig and leaf.

Or this one:

Tim: "I can remember spending nearly a month painting all of the coins and jewels." The fact that these paintings are so large and detailed means that everything takes longer. On the other hand, the size yields incredibly detailed illustrations.

Ian Summers, who commissioned the Brothers for the Tolkien calendars, points out, "The entire art department rejoiced whenever Tim and Greg brought in their fantastic illustrations... The delivery of each painting was an event... They would create a finished piece of art every two or three weeks."

When you think about the amount of work that went into each painting, that timeframe is absolutely amazing. But it comes with the job. As a general rule, illustrators live and die by deadlines. A gallery artist might have really productive times, with great output, followed by dry spells. Because illustrators are contributing to larger projects, they have to meet deadlines, which means they have to be highly productive whenever they're working. If an illustrator gets a reputation for missing deadlines, it could cost him his career.

In the case of the Hildebrandts, the results speak for themselves. And the calendars were tremendously popular as a result.

Since doing the Tolkien calendars in the late 1970s, the Hildebrandt brothers have worked on a wide variety of projects. They do everything from commissioned works for well-off people who want themselves painted in Tolkien and personal fantasy scenes, to a wide variety of original paintings sold as original artwork or prints.

Greg Hildebrandt's company, Spiderwebart, offers a variety of Hildebrandt prints and original artwork, to fit all budgets. Go to the next section to see some of the available artwork.

Here is a small sampling of the incredible "Lord of the Rings" books, prints and original artwork available from Spiderwebart. If you're interested in buying something, simply click on the picture to get more information.

If you would like to see more of the Hildebrandt's artwork, click here. Or check out Spiderwebart's holiday sale catalog.

Books and Calendars

Prints

Original Drawings

Original Paintings