Watercolor WIPs- Sharing and Learning

[byroncallas]

This is quite the terrific thread. I shall come back and spend a considerable amount of time with it. Wonderful Steve.

[Caesar]

I would add here some Milo Manara images which seem to be reasonably doable to me, probably by means of a simple and direct enough procedure.

[Caesar]

Second lot ...

[Caesar]

Last two so as to have a wise enough list to select from. Unfortunately they don't have a particularly high resolution.

[Steve B]

Personally, upper right (lounging on her side) is my favorite.

A lot of this is very achievable to me, with the use of layers, some transparent colors, multiply blend mode, and a nice texture overlay. I imagine they'd all take a bit of time, as he's very detailed with his color and shading. I don't imagine he just cranked them out either. He doesn't have that "free flowing" and loose attitude with his watercolor work. However, again, part of the appeal of Manara (like Moebius) to me is their smooth, liquid linework. Great stuff. There's a something of Matisse in both of them-- very spare with their line work. They don't really use it to build form through shading, but let it go to town in things like hair and clothing straps, lips, etc. They actually both also remind me a lot of Toulouse-Lautrec. So clearly I see a lot of French in their work, so to speak.

The upper left one in particular is very controlled, IMO, and could almost have been done in Photoshop, honestly, though you have these nice translucent layers of color on the clouds. Bottom right (girl sitting on chair) is wetter than some of the other work, and I'm imaging you'd need to use your blender more to create some wet "texture", but I think we could get close it. The tasty wet work in the bottom-most one is harder to achieve currently-- particularly where the blues are getting loose and messy on the wall in the background. I think you'd need to layer your pinks and lavenders, that would help, but I'm having a hard time getting that loose kind of wet "grit" that you can see there.

I thought I was going to have time to do some painting this weekend, but I think I just discovered last night that I'm going away for a weekend with my wife, no computers or cellphone allowed. So, lucky me, I think I'll be back at my laptop sometime in a few days. If anyone else wants to take the project of recreating some of these paintings on themselves, I'd love to have a pictorial "conversation" with some of these things-- I think that's a good way to share and learn.

edit-
Ah, just saw you posted a new post while I posting. (Say that 5 times fast!). I haven't ever seen Manara do work like that last image on the right. Quite different! Interesting to see an artist push into different spaces.

[Caesar]

I substantially agree on all Your considerations concerning these illustrations and with Your choice. That's the image whos looks like a ink and dry-on-wet watercolor. In Milo Manara drawing comes first, color, when added, mostly give some more atmosphere.

Milo Manara is not French though, just one of the internationally known Italian comics artists, like Hugo Pratt, Paolo Serpieri Eleuteri, Crepax and many more.
Each of them was appreciated in a different area the most, Milo Manara in France in particular, just as Paolo Serpieri Eleuteri in Latin America.
He was certainly influenced by all he experienced artistically, but he cites our millenarian cultural references (The Golden Donkey, by Apuleius for instance), as well as English literature (Gulliver), American western epopee, the Indu mythology etc.
In few words our comics stars and most varied "school" in general is since ever different and independent from either French or Belgian models, full of number one artists, either known abroad or not (btw, Uderzo, one of the Asterix creators was Italian and a cousin of him from Friuli posted his colored drawings here in artrage too). An example of unique comics artist was our great, funny Jacovitti, a national comics star for decades, the only school diaries sold in the 60ies and 70ies at lest were by him. Not to talk about many long lasting Italian comics characters and their series. Even Walt Disney left to our national artists full right to elaborate stories, draw, create new characters for Mickey mouse comics and his band. We've been since and still are an independent subsidiary issuing them all. So, actually we never had to learn from French references, just to interact with them and any evolution. We have our unique patrimony to work on too as well as, in the last couple of centuries, also very close links to the Mitteleuropean Empires and their culture too.
The same applies to our fine art history and painters, often neglected after the XVIII century, whenever the artists didn't get their success elsewhere, in the main European centres. Nonetheless, either abroad, where they were present and then very celebrated and requested (see the Italian painters in Barbizon, but also Boldini, De Nittis, Modigliani in Paris). Our artists they kept a considerably high level and unique contributions even through the XIX and XX century, with some peculiar and anticipatory movements too, like the Macchiaioli, the Metaphysical paintings (see Giorgio De Chirico) or the Futurist paintings and sculptures which influenced respectively, a movement such as the Russian constructivism. Similarly our architectural new solutions of the '20ies and '30ies, in an apparently unnoticed or scarcely known, were models to so many imposing public buildings and muscular statues in Europe and US.

[Steve B]

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that I thought Milo Manara was French-- no no no! Only that I recognized an influence on him from those French artists I happened to know and love. I recognized the confusion my statement might have made after I posted it. Sorry if that came off as insulting to Italians. Not my intent at all.

Your post is actually really interesting and informative Caesar. Lots of great stuff to look up and check out! I'll admit I don't know much about 20th century Italian comic artists. I'm not sure why the French ones seem to have crossed the water, but not the Italian ones. I'm more a fan of Japanese manga, and there seems to be a lot more ties between French animation and anime, as well as manga and French comics, so that's probably why my knowledge is so skewed.

In truth, my experience with more "modern" (I use that term relatively, as I'm talking about the 19th and 20th century in general) Italian culture is more literary- I'm a big fan of Verga's "House by the Medlar Tree" and Lampedusa's "The Leopard", or Pirandello, etc. I've read a few other modernists as well. I've studied a lot of Russian novelists and poets from the 20th century, so I know of the Futurist movement and that it had a dramatic effect on many Modernist Russians (and painters too, I believe), but that's really the extent of my knowledge.

Re: the paintings you've offered up for inspection--
Do you want to choose one to recreate? If you're game, let me know which and I'll pick one too. Then we can reconvene perhaps later this week and compare notes. Does that sound interesting to you? Success is nice, of course, but failures are very instructive as well. I'd probably pick one of the Manara's myself, as I'm a bigger fan of his work, and like his looser line. I'd like to focus on color work, since this is a watercolor thread-- I might even trace out the linework, or desaturate and remove the color work, then go back in and focus on just recreating an interesting watercolor experience. Game?

My vote goes for top right Manara image, or the sleeping one with the strange doll, personally. Both of these are things that aren't too complicated in terms of the detail in the image, and yet are still a bit "watery" and offer a nice challenge that I think Artrage can be successful at. Some of the others are either too clean, IMO, and not really very "watery" or are too dense compositionally, and would take a great deal of time to replicate.

Thanks for sharing all the Italian stuff. I'm going to have a good time educating myself as I look them all up!

[Caesar]

Sorry to be late back to You, dear Steve. I've been busy with a surgical intervention and a few more tasks.

I agree on Your choice and I'd be curious to see either a reproduction (also a partial one) or a work by You using the same style and looking alike as for the use of watercolor and drawing tools. I'm sure You may set up a simple enough technique perfectly emulating these paintings.

I'm also much favourably impressed by Your vast culture encompassing many places and ages (I'm sure not only modern times). I hope that in Europe, schools will progressively provide a wider European cultural awareness and go beyond what national or local pride would suggest to teach, so as to see both, our many shared elements and the unique, rich variety and contribution of each nation to our common European and western civilization, more and more threathened by vulgarity, ignorance, fake alternatives, regress to outdated traditions and greed either by insiders and outsiders.

[copespeak]

It has taken me an inordinate amount of time, but I have learned so much about layering colours and attempting to emulate a watercolour/painterly feel. I am really pleased with the result, and will now revisit a set of black and white fairy prints I did in hard copy years ago, and colour them in!! Thanks for making me think! :0)

[Steve B]

Holy Cow! That's fantastic! 8)

You've gotta say more about how you worked that. Layers, time spent, texture overlays or stencils? etc. I know sometimes these things take time to replicate when you're working on it to learn it, but this turned out REALLY well, IMO. Well enough that I'd like to know more about how you did it. If the YouTube videos or our discussions here have helped you in any specific ways, it'd be nice to see and understand that too-- it always helps when I'm thinking about making new tutorials to help out.

Congrats!