Among my most treasured discoveries on Flickr are the impressionistic, yet electric landscapes of contributor girlgreen. In particular, the gorgeous example above caught my attention by its resemblance to some of the colour effects in the paintings of German romantic Caspar David Friedrich.

 Clicking the photo will take you to my brand-spankin’-new Flickr account!

“Purple is mad as it can be both warm and cool at the same time.” Treated to such a beautiful presentation, I found Words and Thoughts in RGB an enjoyable refresher on the basics of colour history, science and application. I hope you like it too.

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BRADREID.COM remains in a holding pattern. Following the most costly software expenditure that he has ever made in his entire life, the artist is currently investigating the possibilities offered by 3D computer graphics, of which the above test pattern is in no way representative. (I’m talking about the same technology you see in the movies, folks.)He hopes to have some little thing or other to show for it here very soon.

Please stay tuned.

May 28, 2008: I put quite a lot of time and effort into the CG thing, but truth be told not much came of it. CG is a lot to take on in one’s spare time. Oh well, I don’t have much else to do but brush myself off and try to get on with something else. Too damn bad I spent so much money though.

 
Peter Jackson’s Monkey Business, (c) Brad Reid 2006
Illustration Friday topic: E is for… Entertainer

If you’re like me, then you’ve been ogling the advances in motion picture colour for some years now. Some recent standouts like Yimou Zhang’s House of Flying Daggers and Michael Mann’s Collateral express a joy of colour that makes almost everything else – and certainly almost everything from before 1995 (or around then, I would guess) – seem grey and tired by comparison. I love the colour in these movies. For my liking, their use of colour seems to go beyond mere assistance to the story – their colour seems instead to be part of their whole reason for being.

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Think of this as the shorter, edited version of what was previously posted at this url, the most difficult post for me so far. Despite its apparent simplicity, One Dozen Flavours, presented ‘live’ as a work-in-progress here at bradreid.com, had an arduously prolonged development.

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Watchmen (Issue 5, Page 8 detail), Dave Gibbons 1986
Colours by Brad Reid 2005
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Basically, ever since a lack of funds forced me out of my painting studio four years ago, I’ve been racking my brain for some new inlet – economically feasible inlet – back into the full-time creative life. Such was the problem that led me to two or three months this past year during which I did little else with my free time outside of figuring out the new digital methods of comic book colouring.
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I’m sure there was some regression involved here. From the third grade on until I began to favour painting at the age of 22, my whole ambition in life, filled with youthful naivety and a whole-hearted love for comic books, was that I should become the greatest comic book artist that the world had ever known. Yeesh. But still, I must admit, even now, that if some work with comic book colouring were to happen by my way, it would thrill me more than just a little bit.
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Gold Digger (Page 4 detail), Jean “Moebius” Giraud 1987
Colours by Brad Reid 2005
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I expect that the methods of digital colouring that I worked out during this period of learning will stick with me and continue to develop throughout the rest of my career. Repeat visitors to this site will see them implemented in upcoming work. A future post just might feature a tutorial on the basics of my approach to digital colouring. Suffice to say, any kind of advanced work is not as straightforward as Photoshop dabblers might guess – my initial efforts were devoid of any real sense of light. One should consider that Photoshop was never intended – at first anyway – as a generator of content, but rather as an editor.