Tom Thomson

By

Armand Cabrera

Tomas John Thomson was born near Claremont Ontario Canada August 5, 1877. One of ten children he was raised in a rural area on a farm where Thomson developed a love of the outdoors and nature.

Thomson tried different jobs during his twenties apprenticing as a machinist for a short time , attending business school and working as a commercial artist. He tried to enlist for the Boer war in 1899 but was refused because of his health.

It was in 1909 after securing a job as an engraver for Grip LTD that he began to paint in his spare time. The other employees included Franz Johnston, Arthur Lismer, Frank Charmichael and Fred Varley. These men would later form the Group of Seven along with AY Jackson, JEH Mac Donald and Lawren Harris. Though Thomson painted with these men he was never officially part of the Group of Seven.

Thomson continued to work as a commercial artist until 1913 when he decided to try and paint fulltime. He never realized his goal and found side work as a guide, fire fighter and ranger to help supplement his income. Thomson painted many outdoor sketches of the untamed northern wilderness. It is this raw and rugged aesthetic that he is best remembered for. His strong graphic design and bold, sometimes crude brushwork captured the spirit of the places he painted.

Thomson died unexpectedly, in 1917 at the age of 39, of a possible drowning accident. Since his death his art has come to stand as Canada’s first national art with little connection to Europe and its influences. The work of Thomson and the Group of Seven still has a powerful influence stylistically on Canada and its subsequent generations of artists who respond to its bold honesty.

Bibliography

The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson
David P. Silcox
Firefly Books 2003

Quote

The source of our art then is not in the achievements of other artists in other days and lands, although it has learned a great deal from these, our art is founded on a long and growing love and understanding of the North in an ever clearer experience of oneness with the informing spirit of the whole land and a strange brooding sense of Mother Nature fostering a new race and a new age... ~Lawren Harris

And Now For Something Completely Different

As many of you already know I started my art career as an illustrator working in science fiction and fantasy. This was back in the mid eighties and before computers were tools for artists. Computer games looked like pong and pacman not like a blockbuster movie.

I still work in games and in Science Fiction and Fantasy and recently had the opportunity to contribute to a book called SciFi Art Now. John Freeman is the editor and has a blog where he is interviewing some of the artists for the book. My interview is here with a link to a download of this step by step demo in .pdf format.

My piece in the book was made digitally using my own photo reference and 3d models and combined and painted in photoshop. For this piece I painted right on the plate (photo) although this isn't always how I work digitally it is an effective tool to quickly sketchup ideas and bring them to completion. The following is the step by step process I used to make Marooned.

I started with a photo I took on a painting trip to the Sierras in Eastern California. The sandstone looked melted and gave me the idea for a crashed spaceship. I got down on the ground to shoot the small sandstone rocks from a worms eye view.

1. I  separated the foreground from the sky into two layers. Using a hard brush, selecting local colors and the eraser tool I began to make the framework of the spaceship.

2. I created a third layer for my figures around a fire and established some color to get the general feel of how it will fit in the scene.

3. Next I painted some walls with portholes to make the ship seem familiar, again using the local colors in the photo to keep the sense of light.

4. I continue to add more hard edges and machine like shapes and establish a horizon line with mountains in the distance.

5. I rough in the figures around the fire on another layer. I paint them all in warm hues so they will stand out against the rest of the scene. I make one figure female and the two sitting figures male to create a subliminal tension for the scene. Next I created a sky gradient on another layer. This will be my basis for the stars and planetoids that come next.

6. I create stars by using the noise filter then selecting a limited color range and copying and flipping the selection. I do this a couple of times adding a layer each time and make a color pass over each version to vary the look of the star field. The last thing I do is go in and hand paint selected stars with the airbrush tool before collapsing the layers back down.

7. I build and light the planetoids in 3ds Max and then import the images on to their own layer in Photoshop. At this point I collapse all of the layers except the figures and fire and then manipulate the colors and values to harmonize the scene. I want everything to be covered in dust to give the sense of the passage of time, unifying the color does this and I choose a color that will compliment the tones in the fire.

8. To finish the painting, I collapse the whole image and adjust the color for the figures and add more detail around them. I work all over the image fixing and adjusting where I think things need it.

Mural Step by Step

by
Armand Cabrera

I was awarded this commission through a design company I work with from time to time. The client initially liked a barn painting I had done. The image for the original painting was 20 x 24. For the mural the client wanted the painting to be 119x19 almost five times the original length. I mocked up the new version in Photoshop for approval and once the okay was given I started the project.

The first thing I needed to do was build a frame work for the linen. I decided to just tack the linen to the framework and after it was completed roll it up and ship it to the clients where it would be stretched and framed for the hotel. The framework consisted of three pieces of 2 x 4 foot birch panel held together with 1 x 3 pine. This would allow me to sit it on my easel and secure it. The easel is counter balanced and slides side to side making it easy to paint awkward sizes like this.

I figured on a week for the painting process; one day for the drawing, one day for the block in/ wash, and three days to finish.

For the drawing I divided the image space into twelve horizontal and two vertical sections to make it easier when placing the elements. The drawing took me 9 hours.

I mixed some test colors for the foliage before I made up the large piles of paint and I blocked in the dark cedar trees and some other key elements as guides over my initial drawing.

For the block in I worked on the background and then the foreground saving the middle areas for last.

This way I would get the two extremes in hue and saturation shifts established making the middle section easier. The block in took me 10 hours.

The last few days were spent refining and adding details where appropriate. I changed the middle of the painting, moving and shrinking a tree between the barn and pond that I thought looked good in the initial digital mockup but was distracting at full size. The total time for the painting was a little more than sixty hours.

This is the first mural I have done in many years. There were three done for businesses back in the seventies and eighties, a store in Hawaii (6x15 feet) and a restaurant (9x12 feet) and store in California (12 x24 feet).Those are long gone, they were painted directly onto the walls and did not survive the remodeling process and in one case the store was demolished for a newer store.

I’m hoping because it will be mounted and framed it might make it through the inevitable remodeling ten or twenty years down the road. The Mural will be in the Gaylord Opryland Hotel which reopens on November 15th 2010 in Nashville TN
http://www.gaylordhotels.com/gaylord-opryland/

A Sense of Scale

by Armand Cabrera



Scale can be a tricky thing in a painting. It is not important to paint large paintings to have a sense of grandeur on your art. What is important is making yourself aware of the principles and using those to your advantage so you don’t have to resort to clichés of constantly adding tiny people or other recognizable objects to make the illusion work. While these are one way of creating a sense of scale their use should never be a substitution for good design and a thoughtful approach to the subject at hand.

I think the first thing you need to create a sense of scale is correct aerial perspective. All your vanishing points must be accurate and your horizon line must be established. This is true for landscapes without manmade structures as well as paintings with them. Perspective will create overlapping forms and the proper arrangement of these will help the illusion of space and distance.

A secondary effect of scale is atmosphere; painting things with the proper lessening of chroma and value as they recede into the distance. There is no formula for this and you must be a keen observer of the subtle shifts that take place and act as visual clues for scale and distance.

Another effect is the loss of detail as you take in larger areas of view. It seems counter intuitive at first but the bigger something is the less detail you can see on it. If you can see a complete eight story building in your view, the inclusion of individual panes of glass on the windows only shrinks the idea of scale for the viewer.

It is the same with natural things in the landscape a distant hillside looks smaller if you paint every tree on it as opposed to getting its overall form and color and value. People often do this with large bodies of water. They focus on the waves and when they paint them the waves height to width ratio is enormously exaggerated reducing the scale of the ocean in the process.

Lighting is also important for a sense of scale. Outdoors light falls in parallel rays and you have to make sure you paint it that way or you will give the illusion of indoor point source lighting and shrink the sense of scale.

Many times the emotional response we feel to a subject is based in large part on a sweeping sense of scale. Making yourself aware of the effect scale has on what you are observing will help you capture that sense of scale in even small paintings