All Things Art and Good III

(The reasons behind the series of articles titled All Things Art and Good and the format followed in each article is explained here, in the first post in the series.)

I first came across Philip Straub‘s artwork, as I do a lot of digital artists I like, on the CGTalk forums. The painting was Llanowar Reborn and I thought that looked absolutely wonderful, what with all the greenery and me being a sucker for anything that’s got lots of foliage 🙂 But that was before I saw Infinite OZ – I was in awe the moment I saw Infinite Oz! One of the few things which trumps abundant greenery in my book of art appreciation is a beautifully done sunset or landscape – and this was both, and in an absolutely stupefying manner 😀

Words fail me when I try to describe Infinite Oz … and yes, I used to call myself a writer 🙂 There’s the calm serenity of the pastoral landscape, the farm with the red barn, the cow placidly chewing cud in the near distance, the swing on the gnarly tree next to the fence, the rolling landscape disappearing into the haze in the distance, and of course, the golden sunset – all of this combines to create a powerful image which makes me long for bygone days and simpler times.

But what makes the image really powerful is the ominous tornado in the distance and the glowering skies. They seem to hint at troubled times approaching, at danger and trials which might destroy the serene scene before us. When I look at the image, it’s almost as if I want to capture every bit of the beauty in the scene before it is destroyed forever by the approaching storm. So I gather in every little detail – the little yellow, blue, and orange flowers; the stream meandering it’s way through the pasture; the golden and rosy tints on the clouds and keep on staring and staring and staring 🙂

But the really wonderful thing for me is the fact that Infinite Oz is just one of the wonderful and inspiring paintings on Philip’s site. There are a whole heap more to explore, enjoy and to stare in wonder at. For instance, there’s the aforementioned Llanowar Reborn, full of greenery, mysticism, and mystery; the colourful, comical and childhood memory evoking Enchanted Evening; the simply mind-bending composition of foliage, water, rock, and lava in the book cover simply titled Atherton; and the somewhat mystical and fantastic Temple.

The above list still doesn’t do full justice to the range of imagery and artwork you’ll find on Philip’s site but I’m simply trying to provide a small sampling so that anybody reading this will be compelled to go there and take a look at all that’s there. If you appreciate beauty, you’ll not be sorry that you did 🙂

[pg-image src="http://www.philipstraub.com/assets/illustrations/magic2.jpg" caption="Llanowar Reborn" link="http://www.philipstraub.com/magic2.htm"] [pg-image src="http://www.philipstraub.com/assets/illustrations/ioz1.jpg" caption="Infinite OZ" link="http://www.philipstraub.com/infinite0z1.htm"] [pg-image src="http://www.philipstraub.com/assets/illustrations/enchanted_evening.jpg" caption="Enchanted Evening" link="http://www.philipstraub.com/enchanted_evening.htm"] [pg-image src="http://www.philipstraub.com/assets/illustrations/Athertoncoverf.jpg" caption="Atherton" link="http://www.philipstraub.com/Atherton_cover.htm"] [pg-image src="http://www.philipstraub.com/assets/illustrations/interface.jpg" caption="Temple" link="http://www.philipstraub.com/Temple.htm"]

All Things Art and Good II

(The reasons behind the series of articles titled All Things Art and Good and the format followed in each article is explained here, in the first post in the series.)

Denis Zilber is a wonderfully funny and versatile artist. You’ve only got to see the title image on his site to get an idea of his talent and his style. I just absolutely love that title image and the mood it evokes. But, I’m getting ahead of myself 🙂 Let’s begin at the beginning.

The first artwork of Denis’ that I saw was the funny, beautiful and extremely comical The Leg. The hint of darkness enveloping the left side of the image, the warm glow cast by the lamp which dispels darkness and covers everything in a rich golden glow on the right, the tiny bugs hovering around the lamp, the intriguingly greenish tinge to the sky, and the pinpoints of stars on the night sky – it all adds to the overall effect.

But most of all, what I love about The Leg are the people in it. The expressions on their faces, the little pink slippers worn by the guy holding the lantern (who for some reason I keep thinking of as "the mayor" :p), the white nightcap with a tassel on the end – these are the elements which add up to an image which is priceless 🙂 Denis commented elsewhere that he knows of no giant bird with just one foot (or something to that effect), so you know the guy has a sense of humour 😀

Then there’s the previously mentioned title image for Denis’ site – The Oldman and the Beetle. This image again illustrates one of my favourite things about Denis’ artwork – the lighting. The warmly glowing lamps on the old man’s cart pierces the gloom of the dark and creepy forest and gives you a sense of well-being, of goodness and warmth. It almost seems to say that as long as the old man travels through the forest with his warm lights, nothing bad can creep up on you 🙂 Of course, given the giant beetle and the glowing lights, I can’t help but think, what are fireflies like in this forest? How big are they and do they glow brighter than the lamps on the cart?

The interesting thing, personally for me, about Denis’ artwork is his versatility. He seems to have several different styles depending on the program he used to create the image (as well as other factors, probably). For instance, his Flash art has this hand-drawn-line quality which I like a lot. It reminds me a bit of Gary Larson of The Far Side fame 🙂 Take for example, Traveling Home. I like the simple colours, the shadowing, again the bright glow of the light, and the slightly space-and-mind bending perspective.

Another one of my favourites, again with a slightly different style, is The Journey Begins: First Encounter. This one doesn’t have so much of the humorous and cartoonish style of the other images. There’s hints of it though, for example in the face of the knight’s helper. I like the detail on the leaves, the nice blending of greens and yellows on the trees, the lines on the horse and of course, the bright glowing light, again 🙂

If I have one complaint, it is not about Denis’ art but the way the images are presented on his site. The images are cut off and so I can’t enjoy them at their full size 🙂 For instance, the title image that I keep coming back to looks much better as it does on his site than it does in the cut off format on his sample gallery. And with The Journey Begins, I can’t help but feel that there is more to that image and that I’m missing more detail because the image was cropped. Of course, I could be wrong 🙂

[pg-image src=”http://www.deniszilber.com/picts_ill/leg.jpg” caption=”The Leg” link=”http://www.deniszilber.com/viewpict1.php?fn=leg.jpg”][pg-image src=”http://www.deniszilber.com/picts_ill/oldman.jpg” caption=”The Oldman and the Beetle” link=”http://www.deniszilber.com/viewpict1.php?fn=oldman.jpg”][pg-image src=”http://www.deniszilber.com/picts_ill/edu.jpg” caption=”Traveling Home” link=”http://www.deniszilber.com/viewpict1.php?fn=edu.jpg”][pg-image src=”http://www.deniszilber.com/picts_ill/knight.jpg” caption=”The Journey Begins: First Encounter” link=”http://www.deniszilber.com/viewpict1.php?fn=knight.jpg”]

A Gallery, My Kingdom for a Gallery!

I meant to write another post in the All Things Art and Good series today since I have received permission from a lot of wonderful artists whose amazing creations I’m eager to share with the blogosphere 🙂 However, I had this little WordPress plugin/coding entry that I had to make since it has some relevance to the art posts.

When I wanted to start writing about artists and their work, I wanted to liven up the posts with some images. Instead of providing links which led in all directions and which people might not be interested in following, I wanted to provide some visual cue as to all the wonder and beauty they might find in my own post. A thumbnail gallery of images seemed the best way to do this.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a single gallery plugin for WordPress which did what I wanted 🙁 There were WordPress gallery plugins aplenty which either provided a gallery provided the images were on your own server or on a remote Gallery2 installation or on a remote image sharing service like Flickr. But what if I didn’t want to download somebodyelse’s copyrighted material and put it up on my own server? (That somehow felt a little icky to me …) What if all I wanted was a simple gallery of images mentioned in each post that provided a thumbnail image at the end of the post and linked back to the original image? There just didn’t seem to be such a beast …

So, I decided to code my own. In fact, I spent most of the day before I wrote the first All Things Art and Good entry in coding up the plugin 🙂 At the moment, the plugin simply takes a list of image links in a post as long as they follow a specific format, remove the image links from the post and instead creates a gallery of these images at the end of the post. The plugin will automatically create a thumbnail version of the original image on my server the very first time. After that, the cached thumbnail is used for the gallery each and every time.

I originally created the gallery to follow a rigid grid pattern based on a certain number of columns. This worked fine except that the nitpicky side of me couldn’t abide the fact that when you resized the browser window, sometimes you might have a lot of empty space because you went with a low number of columns 🙂 So I went for a more fluid gallery which would adjust its layout as the browser window was resized. Unfortunately, this dynamic layout results in some rather strange layout issues. However, I’m going with it for the moment.

Of course, there’s another issue. When I wrote the plugin, I was testing things with the entry I did on Ruben de Vela. Now all of Ruben’s images were direct links to a specific image file. So my method of extracting info from an IMG tag and linking back to the original image worked fine. But when I got to Phil McDarby, I realized that I had a problem – Phil had pages for each image and these pages were full of other images and links which would provide a lot more information to a fan of his work. But my thumbnails were linking directly to the main image only, not to the HTML page!

Of course, I mention the pages in my post and link to them directly as well so as to get around this but I’d rather have the thumbnails themselves link to the proper page. I’ll probably have to modify the way the plugin works to do that though. So I’m thinking about how I’m going to do that at the moment. If you’ve got some solutions to the issues I’m facing, or have been looking for a similar plugin and would like to get the plugin from me, let me know. But tomorrow, we get back to our regularly scheduled program and look at the beautiful and funny artwork of Denis Zilber 🙂

All Things Art and Good

After my previous post about Ruben de Vela and his artwork, I began thinking (and yes, I know that’s not good for me :p) I’ve come across a lot of brilliant art that transports you and makes you stare at them for hours. And I also know that most of these artists (if not all) are famous in their own right and are known to a lot of fans. But what of those others who might never have come across them because they just weren’t in the right place? The Internet, after all, is a massive place. What if I showcased some of these brilliant paintings and digital artwork that I came across during my meanderings on the Net?

With me, to think is to act 🙂 So I wrote to some of the people who’s artwork had simply reduced me to a deaf mute gazing in wonder, or who had made me think, or had brightened my day, and asked them if I could feature some of there artwork on my blog. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to feature their art here as my own, or to even download their images and host them here. I simply want to talk about some of these digital paintings that inspired me and then link back to the author’s own site so that others can find the same wonder and joy I found by exploring all the riches that each of these sites provide. However, I did want to post a thumbnail at my own site to give the readers so that they’ll see how wonderful some of this artwork is and have the incentive to go exploring 🙂

Most of the people I contacted were wonderful and very cooperative and had no issues with what I wanted to do. So I’m going to be talking about some of these digital wizards’ work in upcoming posts. I had actually intended to talk about at least two artists today but as usual, my typing fingers have run away with things and the post is already so long that I don’t think I’ll be able to do justice to two of these wonderful masters of the digital image 🙂 So without wasting further space, let me get on to the artist of the day.

I first came across Phil McDarby, as I did most of the other artists I’ll be talking about here, on the CGTalk forums. (There’s a wonderful variety of great artists on that forum but that’s a subject for another post.) The first artwork of Phil’s that I saw was The Greenwood Deep and it simply transfixed me. Yes, it literally held me still with amazement as I stared in wonder at the vision of loveliness laid before my eyes and tried to soak in all that beauty 🙂

First, there’s that huge tree – I’m a sucker for greenery of any kind and this painting is full of greenery 🙂 The tree gives a sense of age, wisdom, having been there for centuries and millennia. And that pathway through the tree hints at something magical and wonderful lying there just out of reach, to be discovered if you would just walk up that path. Secondly, there are the tree stumps with the glowing holes, which look like eyes. Are they fairy dwellings? Or cyclopean guardians of the majestic old tree in the center? I keep wondering … And thirdly, there’s the little girl at the very edge of the painting. Obviously, she’s discovered this scene just now and is as amazed and transported as I am. What magic will she find if she ventures out, what adventure, what wonderful and magical creatures?

The mind boggles … and lies there basking in all that wonder, glory and beauty while it continues to contemplate this wonderful work of art. And that’s just one of the paintings on Phi’s site 🙂 He’s got a lot more, like Gloaming Born, which has more wondrous and wonderful trees; or Magic, which apparently is a precursor to the amazing The Greenwood Deep; or Wonder, which I can stare at in wonder for hours – the list just goes on. There’s just too many treasures on Phil’s site for me to describe them all. So go check out the other stuff he’s got 🙂

[pg-image src=”http://www.vyro-games.com/phil/site/the_greenwood_deep.jpg” caption=”The Greenwood Deep © Phil McDarby” link=”http://www.vyro-games.com/phil/site/greenwood.html”][pg-image src=”http://www.vyro-games.com/phil/site/Gloaming_Born_Final_Flat.jpg” caption=”Gloaming Born © Phil McDarby” link=”http://www.vyro-games.com/phil/site/gloaming.html”][pg-image src=”http://www.vyro-games.com/phil/site/magic800.jpg” caption=”Magic © Phil McDarby” link=”http://www.vyro-games.com/phil/site/magic.html”][pg-image src=”http://www.vyro-games.com/phil/site/wonder768.jpg” caption=”Wonder © Phil McDarby” link=”http://www.vyro-games.com/phil/site/wonder.html”]