| |
 |
 |
|
|
| |
 |
Artist Spotlight |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
This Month We Spotlight Fellow ArtBeacon Artist Aaron Newlands.
Aaron Newlands is a digital artist currently residing in Scarborough, Canada. Aarons's work can be seen and purchased on his web site:
"AN-Graphics".
Q: Aaron you are one of the few ArtBeacon artists working in a complete digital environment. Did you find computers or art first? Prior to composing your work digitally had you been doing so in other formats or mediums? If so what inspired you to find/change to digital art?
A: I did a lot of art during high school, mainly working with pencils. While nothing I did back then was spectacular I had been steadily improving and was quite happy with what I produced. After I left school I really didn't do much drawing at all. Many years later I sat down to do it again and to my shock and horror learned a very important lesson about art. If you don't practice it then some seriously bad things can happen. I was so rusty it was like something out of a bad horror movie.
At that time a friend showed me some images he had done on his computer. He admitted that they were not particularly good but had mainly been fooling around. I could see the potential in it if someone had the aptitude and determination. Digital art I think is no different to any other medium in the sense that it draws certain people to it. Just like watercolor painting will touch something in someone else, or pen and inks to another and so on. Seeing the potential of the medium and as I was feeling that I was at the starting block with drawing again I found myself really inspired to try my hand at it.
Q: In seeing your work it is tough not to be impressed with the detail and often photo-realism of your subjects. How did you learn to compose work digitally and how long has it taken you to get to where you are in regard to your skill level?
A: When I started I felt it was really important to go back to basics. I went out and bought a lot of drawing and painting books and magazines. While the application is very different from painting to digital art, the actual process of what makes a good picture are very similar. When you look at a good landscape painting I think it is very important that it look natural. We will all find different things we like about a painting but on a subconscious level it needs a natural feel to it. A great many of my early pictures didn't have it. When I looked at them there was something wrong. I could not always put my finger on it, but it was there something that just wasn't natural. A created landscape rather than a natural one.
The first two years I spent working with the various computer programs, as I had to learn them from scratch as well as all the art guidelines on making good pictures. Once I was happy with what I was doing and firmly decided that I wanted to do military artwork then it was research all the way. I bought books, watched videos, and went to museums, airports.
When I decide upon a project I will buy a couple of books. Read about both the plane and the pilots who flew them. If there is a museum that has one of them I will try and go there to see it, touch it, get a sense of its size. If I can I'll buy a model of it and spend many hours "playing with my planes" as my wife says. She thinks I am just a big kid at heart and she is probably right. I bank the plane, roll it, and climb with it. What I am really trying to do is get a feel for how that particular plane moved and how it looked in flight. With each aircraft picture I aim for a sense of its speed or grace.
The tanks are a little different. Tanks are not graceful or overly pretty like an aircraft can be. They are big, heavy and metal monsters. Landscape is paramount where the tanks are concerned. I do a lot of reading on where the tanks operated and try hard to find pictures of them in the field and then emulate that.
I think the detail and photo-realism in the end comes from a mixture of the research, plain hard work and a huge passion for the subject matter.
I started in 1999 but it was only last year that I finally felt that some of my work was then good enough for sale.
Q: Regarding the subjects you choose, how did you develop interest in war machines and fantasy subjects?
A: The fantasy came about from always reading as a child. I was a huge reader as a kid and had read books like Lord of the Rings, The Belgariad, Dune, I-Robot and things of that nature. When I was 12 a friend introduced me to Dungeon and Dragons and I was hooked. To play a knight doing good in a fantasy world was very exciting to a child. So my fantasy and Sci-fi art is very influenced by that.
With the military items I think like most boys all things mechanical had interested me... planes, trains and automobiles. I could watch trains or planes for hours and never get bored. You could have left me at an airport or a train station and I'd be there hours later.
But I became really interested after learning that both my Grandfathers had served in the Second World War. Both had ended up as P.O.W.'s. My father's dad was Australian and was captured in Singapore by the Japanese. He never spoke of the time he spent in Changi other than to say he had been there. I only found out some of the inhumane mistreatment they suffered from a book his C.O. had written.
My mother's dad was English and was captured by the Germans at Dunkirk in 1940. He spent most of the war in one camp or another. He spoke a lot more freely about things. He always avoided talking about when the S.S. would pass through the camps and the things that they would do to the prisoners, but for the rest, he was happy to discuss it. He spoke about his comrades, his training, how he was captured and general things at the camps, some sad some funny.
He taught me to not hate out of turn and to look at things objectively. While the seed of interest I think was always there, it was really my grandfather that brought it out.
Q: Are there subjects in this genre that you won't work on and why? Conversely are there subjects that you would like to explore or that you are planning to do in the near future?
A: Absolutely. There are some good aspects like comradery among the men and the amazing bonds that soldiers formed, even ones from different nationalities. Many German fighter pilots got on amazingly well with Allied ones after the War.
But for all that I can never ignore the simple fact that much of war is inhumane. I don't know what it feels like to kill another human being. I don't know what it feels like to have the adrenalin rush and the excitement of shooting down an aircraft or the sadness that many pilots have said they felt after seeing it crash or of having bullets tear into my plane and not being able to escape it as it catches fires.
I can only imagine what those things must have been like and like many of us; I thankfully never will experience those things. I don't feel at all comfortable with doing images depicting war itself. Even though it would be a fictional event, the intent behind a battle scene, whether it be in the air or on the ground is still one of real people dying. I wouldn't enjoy doing that sort of image.
You can look to the sky and watch a Spitfire roll through the clouds as graceful as any bird, its Merlin engine purring more than any kitten and see the beauty of its form and engineering. In essence it is that which I strive for in my images rather than their wartime usage.
I will never do images of the SS or of the prison camps and death camps. Anything along those lines I will always do my very best to avoid.
In the near future I want to work on more aircraft, those being my first love. I want to start to focus a lot more on individual pilots and also on World War One aircraft. So few of these planes are flying anymore. If I can do a picture that shows them in the sky and if the print is bought for a child,then that really does make me happy.
A project that I am very interested in getting to is doing a RAF Spitfire in the colors of the Czechoslovak pilots. When Germany invaded their homeland some escaped to England. They signed up with the RAF and flew during the Battle of Britain and beyond. When they returned home after the war and the Communists took power, many of these pilots and other WW2 Vets were imprisoned for fear that they might influence the people. Captivity was harsh and deaths were not uncommon. Even after their release they never received any recognition. It took the Czechoslovakian government till the 1990's to finally give these men the honor that was due them.
I am also very interested in exploring more science fiction and fantasy...dragons, knights, vampire vixens and cyberpunk.
Q: For many reading it may be completely unknown how one goes about making such artwork. What is the process in creating these types of images and what is needed to do so?
A: Unfortunately digital art is an expensive thing to get into. First and foremost you need a computer and a good one at that. To do digital art you need the software usually more than one. The lower end programs cost several hundred and the higher end can be several thousand and your first-born child.
My process for actually doing a picture is to first decide what it is I want to do. Say the Spitfire Mk1a. Following the decision I will start researching...the aircraft, as well as, the pilots. Sometimes it's the plane first, others it's the pilot. With the Spitfire I decided upon the plane first and then researched the pilots to find one I liked. With the Bf-109 I had decided upon the pilot first so the choice of plane was dictated by that.
I will do a couple of sketches, very basic in nature, just to give myself a rough idea of what I had in mind. When working in digital art objects are 3 dimensional. A tree once created will have a complete trunk, branches and leaves. The tree can be manipulated and moved. The physical creation of the tree can be quite time consuming. Landscape is created piece by piece. Computerized putty if you will. Like all art if its rushed or the proper time is not spent then the finished picture is going to look very bad.
Everything in the digital environment has to be colored. Just like a painting. Pixels are to me what oils are to a painter. When the picture is finished the file has to be transferred to the printers who make the high quality physical copy of my work. I then sign the prints get them matted up and the completed image now signed and matted is ready to framing. I have kept the matting to 11 x 14 as it's a standard size and frames can be found at most department stores.
Q: Which of your paintings do you find impact viewers the most?
A:
The German Panther has been a surprise one for me. I have received a lot of comments about how something so large and consuming looks so natural in the city environment.
The F-16 has been said several times to look very peaceful.
The Japanese Claude fighter took a lot of work to complete. The use of the rising sun has generated a fair amount of comments.
Fantasy wise, the Female Ronin has attracted a lot of interest and is one of my more risqué pictures.
Q: Which of your paintings did you find the most challenging to create? What made it so challenging?
A:
Probably the hardest picture to do was the Emerald vampire. It was so important to do a night picture as she is a vampire, but at the same time show detail of the area and also of her. That balance was very difficult to achieve and I spent several weeks working on completing it.
Military wise, the P-47 Thunderbolt proved to be a very difficult piece, far more than I expected it to be. I always wanted to do some ultra-low level pictures. Cutting the hedges as it were. But I found creating depth to the picture and the impression of speed became an obsession. While I am very happy with the finished product it is a love/hate relationship I had when making it.
Q: Which pieces of your artwork do you find/have you found yourself attached to the most? What is it about this/these piece(s) that make them so difficult to let go of?
A:
Without a doubt it has to be the Supermarine Spitfire. Ever since I saw it in the movie Battle of Britain with its Merlin engine. I just love the plane. I had seen several at museums but it was finally in 2003 that I saw one flying at an air show. The one I did in the picture was researched a great deal. I chose pilot Brian Lane who fought in the Battle of Britain. Unfortunately he didn't survive the war. The colors and letters all correspond with his Mk1a.
The Bf-109 German fighter, the main adversary of the Spitfire. This Bf-109 is done in Adolf Galland's colors. He shot down 104 aircraft, formed the world's first jet fighter squadron and received the Knights cross oak-leaves swords and diamonds medal. He is perhaps most well known for during the Battle of Britain when German losses had started to rise, Herman Goring came to the coast and after yelling and screaming at the pilots asked what could he provide to them to make things better. The story goes that Galland looked him right in the eye and asked for a squadron of Spitfires. The Bf-109's came in so many different colors that I have always been fascinated with them. Galland's personal fighters always came with his emblem of a cigar smoking Mickey Mouse holding two pistols. The symbol can be seen just below the cockpit.
One of my very dear friends died of cancer. I knew that she was in very bad shape and spoke to her on a Friday. The following Sunday she died. I had not realized quite how bad things were and she had done a good job of hiding it. She loved spooky novels and vampire ones in particular.
I was working on a couple of pictures for her when she died. She never got to see them. Which is something even more than a year later that I am still feeling rather guilty about. This picture will always have special meaning to me. Both to enjoy the time we have with people we care about and a reminder to myself to make sure I get the job done.
Q: Do you currently work in other artistic mediums? If not what other artistic mediums would you like to explore and why? Have you thought of collaborating with other artists in these areas?
A:
I don't think I will ever be doing any other mediums. I have great respect for the drawers and painters out there. In the end it's a talent I just don't possess. I am a very hands on kind of guy though and I would one day like to collaborate with either a plastic model maker or I have seen these great aircraft models made of mahogany wood. It is often hard for me to find physical items of the projects I want to do. Having a physical aircraft to maneuver helps my inspiration process to no end. So to work with someone who could make something for me to use as a tool for a picture is something I find both useful and fascinating.
Q: Are you planning on or currently displaying your work in any art shows or galleries? If so where and when? If not what do you feel is keeping you from doing so?
A:
At the moment my prints are not in any galleries or shows. I did sell a couple of prints to the official U.S. Army museum and I was really happy about that. I would certainly love to have my work in some galleries or shows. One of my main goals was always to do quality prints at a price parents could afford if their child was into aircraft.
Digital art is a relatively new medium when looked at over the history of art. I have met some great painters who feel that digital art is every bit as much art as what they do and others who feel if paint doesn't touch canvas then it just plain isn't art.
Galleries have been a touch market. They have only so much space and get approached by reps from big firms selling prints of well-known and established artists. While a vast majority of those prints are in the hundreds of dollars compared to mine which are smaller and a lot cheaper but its still a known quantity to an up and comer and many galleries just don't seem to be prepared to take the chance.
Q: As an off the wall ending to our interview... if you could create a new denomination of currency what would it be and who would be on the bill or coin?
A:
We have just past the 100 years of flight milestone, which of course started with the Wright brothers. In that time aircraft have progressed in the most amazing of ways... from biplanes to the space shuttle.
So I would create a new 100-dollar bill. One dollar for each day of the centenary and on it I'd like Leonardo da Vinci whose following quote so embraces my childhood flights of fancy.
"For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return."
Leonardo Da Vinci
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Did You Know? - All ArtBeacon Artist Sites Are Listed Under "Resources"
In the navigation a top every ArtBeacon page is a link titled "Resources". Clicking on this link will bring you to a page with several resource types including "Artist Web Sites".
You can display "Artist Web Sites" results by Name or Location.
NOTE: Individual artist site results are displayed automatically once a site/store is published. Content for these automatic site/store references are pulled from "About The Store", "Store Name" (from your "Site/Store Settings" page) and "City"/"State" (from your "Account Information").
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Forums & Community
We remind you that you can discuss account setup, business practices, recent site developments, and suggestions, with fellow members and the ArtBeacon Development Team in the ArtBeacon Forum. >> Access The Forum |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
