Original subtitles

And so it usually began with a simple phone call.

Hello.

What is the project?

What is the deadline?

And then, of course, the biggie.

What is your budget?

Once we worked that out and got it all straight, the process of working would begin.

If I was lucky, I would get to talk to the director, because

I'd like to know the real spirit and purpose of the film.

And then sometimes I'd read a script.

Other times I'd just get a short paragraph of what it's about.

Sometimes I'd actually get to see a rough cut of the film.

But the most important thing was that I got to

see all the still photography from the film.

So began the creative process.

I did black and white comprehensives to begin with, to show them my thinking.

Sometimes the studio would have concepts that they would give to me.

Sometimes they'd say, here's some of ours, give me some of yours.

But on this particular project, all the concepts were my own.

So I began by drawing black and whites of what I was thinking.

These were 14 by 22 inches on 20 by 30 inch illustration board.

I gessoed them and drew on them with pencil and painted

on them with black and white paint, acrylic paints.

I started with the simple, most direct approach, which is, here's the hero.

One big, tall, ugly mother...(!).

And that's what he was.

This is an introduction to Hellboy, so you can see his tail and his giant gun.

He's a bit mysterious, looking over his shoulder at us.

You can see that he stages the hero as the main focus, and yet he's not your typical

hero, which is what I got from the script and the movie

and the stills, is this is exactly who the guy is.

So I put him in a background of the city, but one that's like industrialized.

You can see the smokestacks burning fire.

And the idea was to set up a feeling of danger, cold-hearted cities, and this guy

seems to be dominating the scene.

So this was the beginning of my conceiving.

I wanted it to be very hard-edged, not in

hard-edged art so much as it was just the design.

You can see how the background, there are sharp edges.

They're not natural, puffy clouds or beautiful flames,

but kind of graphically hard -edged and dangerous.

And that gives it the emotional feeling that this is going to be about something

that's a bit cruel, a bit scary, like Hellboy himself looks, and yet he has

that big gun and he's going to take care of things.

And that is the point of art, is to make an emotional connection, and that's what I

try to do with the paintings and how I design the poster to make people have that

curiosity and that interest because of the way

that I've designed and painted and conceived them.

The composition is on many levels.

I was talking on its emotional level, but there's also just the visual design,

which is, okay, he's long and tall, the

city's horizontal, so he's rising up above it.

The shot I used is a shot taken below eye level, so you're really looking up at him,

which gives him strength.

And then what I did was to make the bottom of the poster,

which I designed to be bright and light and fiery.

His figure rises up in contrast above that, so he's silhouetted with his light

edges against a dark background, so that you have a tendency to look at his

head first, not just because it's his head, but because the light and dark

composition, he's contrasted against the dark background.

So you do see him first, and then you obviously follow his figure down and

around, which I can't draw it for you now, but just how your eye flows down his body

and up his tail and around the fire and back up again towards his head,

so it gives you kind of a nice S-shaped composition

for eye movement and to hold you in the composition.

And then, of course, I put the title at the base there, which gives a good solid

foundation, so you don't just go crazy going round and round and round.

So it's compositional design.

Each one of the comps will have a compositional design on its own,

but maintain the spirit that I also spoke of.

The thing about doing comps for movie posters is when I first started in the

business, they said, do me a thumbnail, you know, just a little idea.

Well, I found out very quickly that nobody understands

what that means, and I started doing them tighter.

And then I'd get a job because people understood what I was saying.

Then other artists got wind of the fact that I was

doing tighter comps, and so they did tighter ones too.

So they were competing, so I had to do them tighter

again, and then pretty soon I was doing color comps.

It got to the point where people were doing finished paintings

to try to get the job, because it became so competitive.

Late in my career here, they're very tight.

The composition is sound.

The idea is sound.

And I'm thinking ahead to the coloration that I want to

support the idea of the whole composition in the first place.

So I'm doing these.

They are finished.

There's no question about what they're looking at, how they intend it to look,

and the only thing that's lacking is the color.

And it just takes more time, i.e.

more money.

So we start with black and whites.

In this case, I do as many as I think is appropriate.

And this was the first shot out of the bag, as it were.

So I'm going to do a number of these to give them a number of choices,

because they didn't know what to do.

Another comp that I did was, alright, I understood

that this was Mike Mignola's comic character.

So he began as a comic character, and now the movie is being made about Hellboy.

So it's a natural to kind of take the comic stance in the promotion of the film.

So I did this one that's a very classic comic kind of guy come breaking through

something or other with a big fist, which is his

trademark, and his big gun, and his angry face.

So this is a comic approach, and it's just

that straightforward action-adventure hero guy.

Of course, the twist in this is the natural

twist of the movie, which is he's Hellboy.

He's not Superman.

He's this ugly, red, fearful-looking guy.

And so this is the big explosive comic book approach, which might have sold

because there's so many comic books going on now

between Batman and Spider-Man and this man and that man.

So if they wanted to address the comic approach with the

sale of this movie, I thought it might be a wise choice.

Doing comps is the opportunity to be creative.

This is a chance to show people things that they didn't

expect, wouldn't have thought of, and haven't seen before.

And throughout my career, I always took the opportunity, when I do this set of

comps, to show them things they hadn't seen.

Because the truth is, people need to be comfortable, even

though they often ask, I want to see something different.

So I take the opportunity to do not just new designs and new ideas or different

takes on things, but artistically to do things that are unexpected.

And I always found that the more times they see it in the comp stage,

all of a sudden they get used to it because they think they've seen it before.

And so they're comfortable and no longer afraid to address

something that is really new and hasn't been seen before.

So this comp is one of those small attempts to do something unexpected.

And as you can see just by looking at it that this is not your typical looking movie

poster and surely not your typical hero poster.

But I had done a similar design like this for one

of the Shawshank Redemption posters I had painted.

And I thought this would be a nice place to do it again.

This particular piece was, well, it's another way of looking at the hero.

Instead of him standing alone, he stands with the whole group of paranormal fighters.

So here they are, of course.

Hellboy is the biggest.

And I took a pose of him with the pyramid shape, the classic strong base of pyramid

with his head rising to the top of the

pinnacle, making him the hero and the champion.

And yet his four compatriots are completing and

echoing that pyramid shape in their designs.

So that's what it was based on.

And then you see the clouds are echoing that shape too.

And the type can go up in there or at the bottom.

Every time I do a design, it's designed to really be the poster.

Therefore, I have to think about where the title would go, where the billing block

would go, where any other kind of lettering or

statement might appear on the composition of the poster.

So that's the reason why there's space above and space below.

But the overall composition is that classic pyramid shape.

And the concept is now there's a whole group of heroes that we're going to get to

know and be interested in seeing who they are.

I like this one particularly because I did a little research on Mike Mignola's comics

to see what he was pursuing so I'd understand the movie a little better.

And it was really a very gothic designed idea.

And it reminded me oh so much of the Hunchback

of Notre Dame, you know, this anti-hero.

He's a good guy but he's fighting his heritage of being from hell.

He's a hell boy.

So he's lonely.

Nobody understands him.

Nobody gets to get to know him.

So I thought of the Hunchback of Notre Dame sitting on the top of Notre Dame.

There you can see he's sitting with the other misfit monsters and dragons.

And he's overlooking the city that he cares to protect and yet he's rather lonely.

So he's big and ugly but somehow gentle and caring and carrying a big gun.

So I just thought this was a nice idea.

I really liked it.

I thought it really epitomized what the movie was about.

Compositionally speaking the reason he's on the left-hand

side is most of our audience is European, American.

We read from left to right.

It's just kind of how our eyes move.

Designing composition, that's something that an artist takes into account.

Composition just isn't a nice layout.

It's understanding how people see things and how they emotionally react to them.

And it's much easier for us to start in the upper left-hand corner and go from there.

So what do you get up there?

The sun or the moon or whatever it is going behind Hellboy's head.

And that makes him the first place you look.

And then you see the title and you easily

drop down then through the sky to the bottom.

And then it pulls you back to the left and up the building.

So it's kind of a circular or following that kind of reading format.

It's a very typical way for a Westerner to read a painting.

We can also talk a little bit here about the

technique which you can see it's in black and white.

And it was just drawn in pencil.

But some of the grays were put in with airbrush,

acrylic paint, and a lot of the little spattery things.

And I did want to indicate that when I painted this it wasn't going to be slick

particularly, but have a little bit of grit and texture to say this is really,

I don't know, whatever has grit and texture.

It's a little more masculine I suppose.

It's not the cute, slick, ironed out kind of

guy, but this guy's kind of down and dirty.

I like this particular one we're looking at now.

It's the fight between good and evil.

Because this is Hellboy, but he's a good guy.

And so there is this statue in the movie of the Archangel spearing the devil.

And I thought that was just a beautiful image.

And so it becomes metaphoric of the whole movie.

So here's Hellboy and this statue.

And it just like summed it up for me.

And there he is looking great.

He's a hero with his big gun, which we've got to see what that's all about.

And these cut off horns on his head.

And then the background that I had thought was a good compositional and emotional

design for the piece was this hard edge, sharp, fearful looking background.

And edges to the picture just gives a whole emotional feel.

I thought this was good metaphorically, storytelling and emotionally designed

piece that I really would like to have done as the finished painting.

This particular one is again the whole set of heroes

here, but just another take compositionally on it.

with the bigger head of Hellboy, so he's the dominant one,

but look how angry he is with the black background.

And then the other heroes in a little secondary form.

You can see the composition, then you start again on the left with Hellboy,

and then you go across and run down the page with the heroes.

So it's again the way the eye follows through the page.

And there's the sharp edges again, but this time they define the edge of the

poster between the black and the white there.

And they're thinking different size, different shape, different proportions,

big head of Hellboy, full figure of Abe Sapien, just a couple of heads of the dad

and the FBI guy, and the girl is more of a headbush shot, and she's got her fire.

So there's a lot of interesting things going on here, objectively with the

characters, but also just compositionally,

so there's variety, interest, not redundant.

This just makes it interesting, the variety of sizes, the different pacing

between the characters is about timing, like music notes: 'ta-ta-ta...', that's a boring tone,

but it's up and down, a little space between,

and all of a sudden it becomes very interesting.

So it's another compositional way of thinking, to think about it as music,

something interesting in timing and shape and value and pacing.

And that's part of what this design is about,

not quite so formal, a little more informal.

Again, I thought it would be nice to do the whole

group, because it's a very interesting group.

And rather than a more formal composition, like the pyramid one we spoke of

of, this one's asymmetrical, a little more informal, although a very tight-knit

group, rising to the heights above the city and above the composition.

Hellboy, unusually big, everybody else smaller and smaller and smaller.

It's like Mount Rushmore, I mean it's a very powerful composition for me,

up the center, highlighted by the sun right behind Hellboy.

And again, that scary, ominous guy, all made

so by design rather than naturalistic looking.

And then the city below, to give it a little

presence and scale, as well as production value.

It is a movie, after all, costing who knows how many millions to make.

So it's nice not just to have the human element, which is what we connect with,

is the humanity, but to put some of the production value in.

The big city, open spaces, and this has a feeling of openness and bigness,

so that you say, okay, this is not a small production,

but rather a big A-rated movie kind of look.

I hand them over and they go to the studios we're in.

Wherever the powers that be that determine these things, they take a look at it,

have their meetings, make their decisions, and then they get back to me as to how

they felt about them and if they want to go any further with them.

Thank God they did want to go further.

Step two.

Step two was for them to tell me which ones they liked and

to make some changes to them according to what they saw.

And what I did had inspired them to thinking about what they really want

with the poster, and that's what this was all for.

Not that they necessarily had to pick one and say that's the one we want,

but rather this stirred their thought process and what they liked, and from

there they told me what they would like to see next.

So the first one I did, they liked.

So as you can see, if you make comparison between the two,

they saw some of the things that I did that they liked.

You might notice the changed background instead of a bleed.

It's got all those sharp edges and even more so to give it that feeling.

And they liked seeing the whole cast of characters, so they took that composition

I had and put them running down the right side and

then the big singular Hellboy on the left side.

The city they liked too, and then they got a

chance to see what I was thinking about the color.

Of them seeing the seven, there's a piece from one, a piece from another.

It's what my wife has always called the Frankenstein school of design, you know.

A head from here, a hand from there, a foot from

over here, and a composition from over there.

And that's very common and typical for how these things are built, because a variety

of visions and ideas spurs thinking and choices,

and this is the result of the second step here.

There's no question here exactly what I intend to do on the finished painting.

And it's the same technique I will use on the finished painting.

So what they're seeing is the way it's going to be painted.

It is color pencil and airbrush acrylic paint.

And you will see as we go along exactly how I accomplish this.

But at this stage, it became very important that

they see exactly what it's going to look like.

So they're seeing exactly what they're going to get.

It's just down in scale.

But technically, they're identical to the finished painting.

Well, here we go with our pyramid comp.

They like that one too.

No doubt why, because it's a good, strong, powerful composition, that classic pyramid.

And this is a good, strong movie about strength.

So you can see it didn't change in concept overall.

Got rid of the clouds, made them bigger in the scale of things.

And the figures behind Hellboy have changed in order and in size a bit.

But the idea is still intact.

Now a lot of this happens not necessarily because the client said change it.

But it's also an opportunity for me as the artist to improve.

I take a second look at what I did and said, you know, the clouds are kind of weak.

I'd rather take those striated, sharp and dangerous kind of sky instead of

the puffy cloud thing.

So I did that with some of the other things I'd done in the other black and

whites, like putting the sun behind Hellboy's head to highlight him.

I made changes, they made changes, and together

we make something better each step I take.

But you can see again, the technique is identical to my finished technique,

from the water spots, to the colorations, to the glows, the values, the colors.

It's all there in this color comp.

So I think what's enlightening hopefully to many people, it's not one of these

things where they come to the artist and say,

oh, we like your work, paint us a poster.

It doesn't work like that.

We go through all these stages and all this thinking.

And I'm not stuck on one idea or one technique or one thing.

It's like I always have to be creative, make it better every chance I get,

improve, improve, improve, until it gets to be like this perfect image.

And that's what you see developing here.

And it takes time over a number of changes and a number of ideas.

And many people involved because I have many people to please.

They chose a third one to go to color.

Look at this one.

Go ahead, find a change.

It's identical!

And I was so happy because this truly was my favorite.

I just loved the theme.

I loved the metaphor.

And I had this idea for the color.

To me this is just a beautiful piece of art and something to fall in love with and

something to keep after the movie is done and gone.

You look at this and it will just give you a

pleasant and powerful feeling every time you see it.

So I was so happy that they saw it, they loved it, and they just said do the color.

And I was so happy with what I conceived originally

that I didn't make any changes at all to it.

I just really liked it.

So I just tightened it up and painted it and gave it the color.

And it was one of those very pleasant experiences.

You see little changes in some scale, very little things.

Not that making changes and improving other ones aren't a delight as well.

It's nice that they appreciated this one for what it was.

And I was hopeful for it, but I really loved it.

So just look at it and enjoy it because it was a lot of fun.

But what happens is as much as they liked it

and I liked it, they asked for another concept.

They said, you know, we'd really like the group of

people, heroes, but we'd also like to see our villains.

So now it's getting more complicated.

I tried for the simple, but now it's getting more complicated.

So it went from one guy to five heroes to eight portraits.

So I took some of the things they liked, some of the things I liked, and composed a

new and fresh idea, which is, again, the five heroes, but you'll note Hellboy

is utterly dominating the picture.

In fact, his shape pretty much is the picture, and everything falls in either

around him or in front of him, but he is the holding factor with the

sharp border, the orange and blue coloration to give it a lot more power and

strength, and then the full figure villains just again to change scale and

size and color so that the good guys separate from the bad guys.

This they liked, and I thought it was very powerful and expected kind of response to

the whole idea, but one I still enjoyed and thought was very strong.

So I presented this as another idea, and guess what happened?

They liked it... but they wanted more changes!

This is the state of the art.

Keep changing it and making it better, hopefully, every time, and sometimes their

concepts and their ideas don't necessarily fit or translate, so there's always a

communication, and I did always try to educate those who don't speak the visual

language, they speak their emotional language or their commercial language,

and they tell you, this is what you should do, and I've always asked them,

well, what is it you're trying to accomplish?

Don't tell me how to do it, tell me what you want to do, and then my language is to

translate that desire into a visual response.

They told me what they wanted to accomplish in the changes on this comp,

and this is what I came up with.

Again, the big change here, as you can see, is the background.

It went from that sharp, edgy kind of barbed wire feeling that I kind of liked.

They wanted the more gothic feel in the background, and again, harkening back to

the concept of we want a little more production value, and we want to feel kind

of the spirit of the film, which was that gothic feel.

So all I did was put a gothic arch behind them,

and you see what it did for the composition.

Now, if you think a circle, you see the top half of the circle is the arch,

and you follow the round where your eye would

complete the other half, you see it's there.

The five characters are half a circle, and the villains are the bottom half of

the circle, and you can see it's a very formal composition.

Hellboy and the bad guys are lined up dead center, and if you draw a center of the

circle, it's right on Hellboy's chest where the circle is for his logo.

You know, it's all there.

Yeah, and there's sub shapes to graphic shapes that hold it together.

You can still feel, because of Hellboy's power, that triangle shape, and you see

how his arms and his gun and the sides of the arch are parallel to the board,

so there's a repetition of the rectangle and an X to it, all towards the center,

which centers on Hellboy, which is where your eye goes,

who is the center of the story, as well as the picture.

So there's a lot of compositional elements, the color as well.

So this is kind of where I went, and you

know what they said when they saw this thing?

They said, that's it.

Paint it.

So it was a win.

They got what they wanted.

I got to paint something that I thought was really successful and beautiful.

And from here, pull out a new piece of illustration

board, because it's time to paint the finish.

So I pull out my 30 by 40 board, put it on my drawing board, and the first

thing I always did was to 'Gesso' the surface. (see Liquitex Gesso)

I use heavyweight board.

See, if I put a coat of wet paint Gesso on the front

of the board, what do you think is going to happen?

First it's going to shrink up one direction, and

as it dries it will curl up the other direction.

The way you stop that from happening is you wet both sides of the board.

Now I know some people who just put an X across, that ain't going to work.

And some people paint the back with Gesso and the front.

Why waste the paint?

It's just moisture.

So I start by actually just painting water on the back of the board, turn it over

immediately, and I Gesso the front of the board.

And when it dries it never moves at all, because it's shrinking

both sides at the same time and it stays nice and flat.

So that keeps the board from moving because it's already shrunk.

Pre-shrunk board.

And that's the first beginning of the technique that made it

possible for me to change the artwork any time I wanted it.

The reason simply is that I create the original surface it's painted on.

So I can always recreate that surface.

It's not on raw paper that once I paint on it it's gone.

I Gesso the surface.

Then if I have to erase or whatever, paint over, I can always put that original

Gesso surface back on it and it looks just like the original board.

The variation here, when you first start seeing me

draw on it, it looks like it's on white, but it's not.

This is on gray board.

And the way I make the Gesso gray is I put a compatible medium.

I'll Gesso it with Liquitex Gesso.

It's the same as the Liquitex paint, except it's not ground as finely as the paint.

So when you Gesso a board it has a little bit of grit in it then.

This is a gray board because I put as much black or Payne's

gray paint in the Gesso to make it the value that I desired.

I put at least two coats on it.

It'll be dry to the touch in an hour.

But when you start attacking it with a pencil, if

it's still soft inside you kind of dig into the board.

So it's really best if you plan a day ahead and Gesso it a day ahead so it's

good and solid and hard and dry for the day you want to start painting on it.

And you can do it thin, you can do it smooth.

Thin the paint a little bit and it comes out smooth.

You keep it thick and you start seeing brush strokes.

How heavy you want your brush strokes, make the paint thicker.

If you thin it down too much you destroy the binder

and if you use it too thick it gets kind of plasticky.

So you have to experiment with that to see what pleases you.

But you know, you've seen those paintings of mine where there's the swirls and the

big brush strokes in it and stuff, well that's all done in the Gesso layer.

It's not done with pencils, it's done with the Gesso underneath.

I do use, as you'll notice in the pictures, a projector.

And that is really the first step after the comps and Gesso and the board.

I lay my board flat and project my comp down onto the board

and I'm able to then size it up exactly the size I want.

So I just kind of outline the shapes and general shapes of what they are.

And then what I do is go back to the original photography.

Like in this one, one head at a time projecting into place, into position.

And then I use the projector to draw them in.

And the reason, what that does is it makes my job very fast.

What would take days to draw in by eye and by hand,

I can trace in, to use the ugly word, tracing.

Tracing in exactly the right place, exactly the right

tilt, in exactly the right proportion by tracing them in.

So that was the first step and I do that with the 6H pencil.

The next step is then when everything is projected in at a certain stage,

and that's what you're looking at mostly is what I've done with the projector,

is then I redraw it.

I see more.

I can add my understanding of draftsmanship and anatomy to clean it up,

to alter it, to do whatever I need to do to make it more to my taste.

I just read better.

I have to translate a three-dimensional person into a two-dimensional object.

And photography doesn't always do that well.

It reflects exactly what you see, but artists, hopefully, are not just

drawing what they see, but what they understand.

What's important is not how you get there.

It's where you get in the end.

Especially in art, because they don't see how you're accomplishing it.

They only see the end product.

So if you trace it and you get it right, fine.

Get it to your taste.

That's your business.

It's no more honorable to trace it or to draw it by hand.

I spent six years in school sitting in front of a drawing board and a live model,

and that's where I learned about anatomy, how to draw and

get your proportions and your gestures and all that stuff.

And now, as a professional, I have to get it done now.

Not later.

Now.

So that just speeds up the time like crazy.

And that's one of the professional things you learn to do.

It's just basic stuff, and there's so much understanding, and there's so much

mysticism and egos involved in that kind of stuff.

"- Well, I do everything out of my head!"

"- Well, good for you!

Does it get you what you want?

Fine."

I need to do portraits of accuracy, and I need to do them fast.

And this is how I do it.

You can see that what I'm drawing in, some of it is redrawing, changing the

direction of lines, making edges sharper, making points, rounding things,

lengthening things, whatever I'm doing.

You can see I'm changing and really drawing them now.

But now there's the medium value, there's the dark value.

I'm adding darkness where there was nothing before.

And it's because all this drawing is going to show in the end.

So the direction of making the lines, they're all choices

that add to what is my taste as well as the technique I use.

You can see the close-ups that I roll my pencil.

I learned that in high school in drafting.

You want to keep your pencil sharp as you're drawing along, roll it, and then it keeps

the point sharp instead of wearing down the point.

Another thing you do is you draw on the side of the lead or whatever you want to

call it, because you're using a point on the diameter rather

than the point of the pencil, so it always stays sharp.

Plus it not only makes a sharp side, but you can draw

it sideways and make a really broad and soft line.

So you can use it in any way you want.

Push it, pull it, use the point, use the side, roll it.

There's all kinds of things you can do.

And once you do it for a while, you don't think about it anymore.

You just think about the kind of line you're trying

to create, and you turn the pencil accordingly.

So if you watch carefully, you can see all the different things.

All this is going to show later.

I'm adding the darks, which you can see once I

paint, all I'm doing is adding tinting color to.

You see how quickly it will change, because the darks are already there,

so I'm just adding a little bit of color to it.

And then the third step would be adding the lights.

So that makes the rendering really fast, because I've

worked the dark side and the light side separately.

I've worked the drawing separately, the painting separately, and this is part

of what makes it fast, and it's also part of what makes it

very easy for people to do, because you just look at here.

I'm just looking at the draftsmanship and somewhat the dark tones.

When this is fully drawn, you go: "Geez, that's almost a finished painting!"

Once I put the color in, you go: "No, THAT's really a finished painting!"

Then I put the lights in, you go: "No, THAT's really a finished painting!"

because each step has a finished look to it.

And people wonder why I do so much drawing underneath.

Well, it's because it all shows.

Now, you'll note on some of the faces that there's color to them already.

It's because now, remember, what I do is I paint transparently, more or less.

So you see the darks.

But if I drew darks on a person's face and they

showed through, they'd all look very gray and filthy.

So on a space like where you want the color really

fresh, like on a person's face, I draw it in color.

So the values that you'll note are already there.

The turns and the edges of the face and the planes are all defined at this stage,

but in color.

So when I add a little bit more color to it, it

will disappear and just look like a change of value.

And I didn't have to sit there and render it with a little brush, every little

change, because I drew it in, and now the color just evens it out.

So you'll see that later in the painting stage.

But notice, this is the stage I draw it in.

Now the guys, I want them to look tough, right?

Well, I drew them with a dark pencil.

And they look tough because you can still see the lines

and they look like they were cut out of stone or something.

And the girls are soft, gentle.

We don't want them to look like they were cut out of stone.

We want them to more look like Silly Buddy or something.

So I drew them in color so their edges will turn softer and gentler.

Where guys, they can turn fast and hard with edges.

Look at the difference between Hellboy's face and the girls' face.

Hers is all soft already.

His is all tough already.

So here's an aesthetic choice that I even make at this level.

That the guys are tougher than tough and the girls are softer than soft.

I'm already making a distinction between them.

You'll see the sharper, straighter lines going around Abe Sapien's head.

I thought a skull was round.

Well, it goes around, but it goes in straight lines.

Well, again, that's my choice.

To make him harder than, say, you look at the girl and she's going to be softer.

So it's all willful acts and this is at this stage it's done on.

At this stage you can see I've got it pretty well drawn in.

As much as I can do with the pencil.

And you can see how complete it is.

I mean, the composition is there, the color is there, the draftmanship's there.

A lot of the values are already drawn in.

You've got a pretty complete looking picture here.

And it's just the drawing stage.

But anyway, at this stage, okay, I get out the paintbrush.

And wherever the black is black, I paint it in with acrylics.

So everything I use is compatible.

I'm not putting like watercolor on top of oil paint or

something where it's going to fall off and slide away.

So this is acrylic paint on top of acrylic Gesso.

It's sound, it's plastic, it ain't moving and it's

not going to separate from the layer underneath.

I hear I'm painting in the blacks.

Some silly people make the mistake, well, you're

drawing, I'm just going to fill in all the blacks.

Why?

For one thing it would take forever.

And unless you want some texture you're creating under there, I just paint it in.

If I want a texture then I paint the texture in however I want it done.

But now you'll see how quickly this comes along.

It still just values black and white and grays.

But I'm just painting in the blacks.

Because I have my comp, I know where it's going to be black, I'm painting it in.

And I can always fix any mistake that's ever made.

And you'll probably see me paint the line in the wrong place.

So I just take my finger and wipe it off.

It's not sacred.

It's not sacred until it's done.

This is the process.

Yeah, there's a little smearing going on here and there.

But nothing is going to hurt it.

You can see how dirty that piece of tissue is there under my hand.

It's rubbing stuff, but it's not rubbing the drawing all over.

I just take a piece of tissue or tracing paper or vellum or anything.

Tracing paper is nice because it's cheap.

But you can see through it so you know where you are and where you're working.

And I just put it, as you see, under my hand to keep from smearing it.

The drawing, because it's still just a raw drawing.

It has not been fixed in any way.

Here you can see I'm kind of meshing the drawing with the paint.

Look how hard that is to do.

Oh my goodness.

He's just brushing it.

What the heck?

Does it go from drawing to paint?

Yeah.

And later I'll airbrush it from paint and drawing into color.

But you can see it's this.

Again, I do everything I do the easiest way I can think of.

With the least work and the fastest, but with the highest of quality.

This isn't all just experience.

I can achieve the same means simply and faster.

Rather than working my tail off to blend the darks together.

You can see I did it very quickly.

I knew where I was going with the drawing.

Making it black and making it lighter towards the white.

And now I'm doing just the opposite with the black paint.

You know, it's solid black.

And with a little bit of dry brush textury, you run

that across the drawing and it blends right together.

You see, one thing I did because of my technique

or my taste, I put outlines around things.

So it's really easy to come up against a thicker

black line drawing with a brush than it is a thin one.

And I don't necessarily fill it in.

I willfully leave little white spots and little holidays and stuff because when the

paint fills it in, it makes little fans here.

Kind of dances around and moves.

Like Groucho said, you know, I want it to sing, I want it to dance.

Well, you don't render the hell out of it because you'll kill it.

I leave a lot of things that happen.

And if they bring more to the painting.

And here, you know, here I am kind of like, okay, I'm willfully painting in a

certain direction, you know, cutting lines here and there.

I don't know, some of it shows.

But if it happens to show, so much the better.

If it doesn't, it hasn't hurt anything.

Or even here, where I'm painting around the edge of it, I'm

not just painting out to the crop lines, which you can see.

I'm kind of giving it a cool little shape, you know.

I'm doing something nobody else would do.

I don't know about nobody.

But I'm pushing my brush instead of pulling it.

"You'll ruin your brush!"

Yeah, but I'll make the painting cool.

What's more important, the brush or the painting, you know?

And I'll go: "I've been using this same brush for 20 years!"

I used mine this afternoon and I made a really cool painting.

But I ruined the brush.

So, I mean, a lot of times you don't see that edge in the poster.

But when people buy the originals, often

they will frame them outside of the cropping.

Because they see that the edge is really sexy.

And it adds some real flavor to the painting.

So, I do it on purpose because I like the edge.

Most things I invented, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist before.

That's the trouble with ignorance.

You have to go down the road that other people have walked.

Education is much better then you can know it

without having to suffer through it for years.

But look at that painting change.

What was a drawing 15 minutes ago.

Now look at the value pattern.

It's completely changed.

What I'm doing here now is the secret thing.

This is not some kind of commercial brisket that you can cut out.

And look how precise I am.

Look at that.

I'm being a smart ass.

It's not precise.

And what I did is I took a piece of tracing paper, laid it down on some paper

backing in another part of the room which you didn't see.

I took a spray mount.

I spray one side of the paper lightly.

You'll learn how much by practice.

I let it dry a little bit so there's no sticky stuff on it.

In fact I turn it over, lay it down on the piece of paper I was spraying over.

Stick it to that and then pull it back up.

And it takes a lot of the glue and the tack and the crap off of it.

And then you saw me sticking it on the board.

And what I'm doing now is cutting out a shape

I don't want to have a color sprayed on.

You'll see as I go on this is the only thing on the whole painting I mask.

Because I hate masking.

The reason why is I can't see how it relates to the rest of the picture.

What color and what value it is.

If it's covered up with frisket I can't see it.

So I only do it rarely and only if I need a hard edge.

Or if there's some texture I'm putting on

free form then I don't want it to get on that.

I'll do it.

One of the few times on this whole piece that I do any masking or frisketing.

The reason is you'll see that I don't want to get a

texture I'm going to put on it on that background.

So you can't tell which part I'm cutting out at this point.

And I only stuck the piece of tracing paper on the part that I wanted to mask off.

I didn't have to do the whole picture.

Just that one piece.

But what it is is it's the sky background that's behind them.

I'm going to be putting texture on the figures in the foreground.

And I don't want that texture on the clear sky in the background.

So I'm just masking it off because you'll see how I put the texture on it.

It is not exactly a controlled process.

So this is an X-Acto knife.

You keep your knife sharp so you don't have to press too hard.

You can see the paper moving.

It's not stuck too hard.

But you'll see why I don't have to be all that accurate.

First of all I put a line around everything.

So as long as I go sort of down in the middle of the line, it's not affecting anything.

The other problem you run into with frisking is you cut too deep.

You're going to leave a line in your board.

And it will always be there.

So you kind of learn how to control the depth of it.

And sometimes it's frustrating because it's like little pieces don't get cut.

So you have to go back and cut them again.

That's just part of the job.

But, you know, when I'm done doing it I just

wad it up and throw it away because it's done.

Sometimes I forget which side I was cutting to and I pull up the wrong side.

Like right here.

A minute I'll realize that I was cut.

I think this is where I'm doing it.

I'll realize I did the wrong side.

I told you we all make mistakes.

There you go.

Nowhere near perfect.

What do you say?

I tore it.

I'll just stick it back down.

Of course once I get it off you want to be able to see it.

But you know that that whole background behind their heads is masked off.

So that's my lesson in masking.

Well, one of the lessons.

You'll see another one later.

I don't use this fancy expensive stuff that pulls up your drawing.

It's just a little bit of spray mount and a piece of tissue paper.

It's light tissue so you don't have to work hard at it.

But I can see through it.

It stops what I'm going to do perfectly.

Uh oh, didn't cut out that part.

Missed that.

Okay, I'll do it now.

And I pull it off that way because I haven't cut through too much.

So sometimes it tears the wrong piece.

Or the wrong part.

So I kind of got to work it a bit to get it off.

This is... people always wonder how I do it.

I call it the old tooth brush.

I'm just adding little dots to everything.

They come out different sizes because it's not overly controlled.

A lot of people do it with an airbrush.

I know that's smart.

How to adjust an airbrush so it spatters, you know.

But it's all too even.

This is like all uneven.

It's all different sizes.

It's more interesting.

It's a thing I developed.

I really like what it does.

Again, it adds a touch of organicness to the painting.

Because it's not drawn and brushed.

You can see the dots very beautifully.

It's just black paint put on.

What that brush is, is a typewriter.

They used to have those things in the old days called a typewriter.

It was a mechanical device.

It got dust and ink and crap in it.

So they had a brush to clean the typewriter with.

Well, this is a typewriter cleaning brush.

Which is nothing more than, you know, four times the size of a toothbrush.

And I'm using the back end of a brush to brush it with.

And I'm putting... you saw just putting a little bit thin.

Whatever thickness you want.

I'm using black.

You can use any color you want or a number of colors.

But this one I'm using black.

And the reason why is I discovered if I put this texture over the top of the

drawing, it starts to disguise the drawing.

It makes the drawing look ten times more detailed.

It's just something I discovered that doing this just alters the look of the drawing.

So you'll see in the close-ups how the drawing seems to have changed its appearance.

But you can see the dots are all different sizes.

It's graying it down, yes.

So the background is not quite so bright.

But I love what it's doing to the drawing.

It just makes it look more rendered.

I've gone to all this effort when I'm not doing anything at all.

And depending on how thick or heavy I make the paint,

the dot gets lighter or fatter or thinner or drier.

So you can kind of control it.

But I'm putting the texture everywhere, even on the black, because it will show up.

So it's just wherever you want it.

Oh, and there's another thing I didn't mention.

Look at that.

That's going to be rock.

So I put a really heavy, bigger, fatter texture on it.

And it's starting to look like rock.

See, there's without and with.

You see the difference?

I'm already thinking this is going to look like rock.

So I made the paint heavier, so it made bigger, darker dots.

See how I drew it in a different shape?

I drew it kind of in circles and stuff, instead of straight lines.

Because I was already making texture, but it wasn't rendered texture.

This is the impression it gives me.

Now I'm putting the dots on it, and that gives it more on top of that.

So it's already layered and textured.

I don't have to do hardly anything.

Uh-oh, here comes the big dots.

See them?

And they say, how do you do that?

How do you control that?

Well, first of all, I'm just painting where it was masked off.

That's just big blobs.

But the reason I'm putting it on here, this is specific.

It's going to be rock.

I want it textured.

So all I'm doing is I loaded the brush, and

I'm just tapping it with my finger on the top.

And that makes the paint jump out of the brush.

I'm just holding down the tissue paper, because

it has a tendency to pull up as it gets wet.

Don't get scared if you try and it pulls up.

Just hold it down.

I mean, the one texture serves to, say, rock.

The other texture serves to kind of soften the drawing a little bit.

So the same technique does different things in different places.

Many times in painting, one thing serves many, many levels, you know.

It can make color, it can make value, it can turn an edge.

It can add a texture all in one stroke, you know.

So there you see I pulled the mask off.

Now you see why.

So you're always starting to see the value

patterns, the bright backlight behind the figures.

And then basically the framework of the painting is the stone overhead that's

drawing a circle around the main characters and the darkness.

So the figures will be backlit, so there will be

a nice contrast between them and the background.

So you'll see them first.

I said, there you go.

Look at that sucker.

Uh-oh, something's changed.

Remember that gray background?

Now you see it was gray.

This is the first time you see the contrast.

Well, you mean I wasn't painting around the white the whole time?

So the reason that it's on gray is because when you're rendering, if you're on white,

that means every color and value put down

there has to go from white down to the dark.

Here I started in the middle of the value pattern.

I've added the pure black and now I'm adding the pure white and everything else

is nice medium tone without doing any work.

So I painted over the line, what do I need to do now?

Wipe it off.

Okay.

But you're seeing the technique, why I choose what I choose.

See, when I go to paint transparently with the airbrush, you will see how quickly the

color fills in because it's not on pure white, it's on gray.

So the gray actually fills in a lot of the color value.

You'd have to mix to get down to that value.

So here I just said the only area that's going to need pure white is in the

background, so that's what I'm going to do.

Why a gray board?

Why did I mask it?

Why did I add the texture?

When did I do it?

How did I do it?

It's all right there now.

Okay, now the black and white is ready for color paint.

This is going to be airbrushed.

I have two colors on the palette, a cadmium red and kind of an alizarin red.

And I have an airbrush, which is an Iwata HP-C, I think.

It's the simplest one I could find.

It's connected to a CO2 tank, not a compressor,

because I don't like the noise and I'm not mechanical.

I don't want to remember to put oil in the compressor and you've got to put a

moisture evaporator in it to keep the moisture out of the lines.

And you don't have to do any of that with the tank.

So it's quiet.

I turn on the pressure and the regulator and it's ready to go.

So I have, as you saw on the tabaret, I have an old butcher's palette I've had

since I was 18 years old, and it still works every day.

I mix the two colors with water until I get the consistency I

want in the brush, which is, I don't know how you compare it.

You can just see it.

But it's, you know, like heavy cream or something.

It blows pretty good through the brush.

I like to keep the paint pretty close to as dry as I can and still have it flow so

when it hits the board, it's almost completely dry the minute I brush it.

But what that does is because the paint's being atomized, and if it dries fast,

it adds a little texture over those pencil lines, which I didn't mention.

I've spray fixed them.

I didn't show that.

I use workable spray fix.

Just light enough to fix the pencil in case I happen to rub my hand across it or

something because once it's under the paint, it's completely fixed.

So it's adding a little texture on top of that pencil so

that it grabs pencil when I do the color on top of that.

And there's my... now you're seeing my other masking technique.

A four by six index card, you know?

Buy them by the hundreds.

So I'm not much of an airbrush artist, and I don't need to be because I have my

little card, and that keeps it from overspraying.

But a little I like because it harmonizes all the colors.

And look how quickly the colors change.

I'm putting hardly any color on there, but because it's gray, the value's down

already, and I just have to add the intensity.

When I first begin, a little slow because I'm trying to test out the color and the

brush and see if it's working because, again, not overly mechanical.

But I don't have to be real specific.

He's all red!

But I'm kind of going slow because I'm starting.

I just want to test out where I'm going with it.

And you can see the drawing shows right through it.

So there's the darks.

Nothing's light at this point.

Everything's from like middle down.

And later what I do is because I divide it off into the three parts, the darks,

which is the drawing, the colors, which is the acrylic

paint, and then the lights, which are the colored pencil.

So I work from middle to dark, and the other side I'll work from light to middle.

So I'll have worked both sides of the value scale

and every square millimeter of the painting.

So I'm still adding a little value, you know, a little darker.

Make sure I don't go too dark.

But I let the gray and some of the overspray darken even whether the light

area is, because I come back with lighter colored pencil to highlight it.

You see this, you know, it's subtle, but, you know, it's changing, but not,

you know, it doesn't have to be overly accurate.

Because the trick is the black is keeping it sharp, and later when I come back with

the light prismacolor, it's a pencil again, and I can make any one I want sharp.

So the airbrushing doesn't have to be like terribly sharp

and accurate, just the right color in the right place.

Because again, it's a transparent color.

And you can see that what was really black lines are turning a little bit gray

looking, because the paint isn't perfectly transparent.

I mean, if I wanted perfect transparency, I'd be using inks or dyes.

But the trouble with those paints, they're fugitive.

You put them in the light, they can be gone in the afternoon.

Acrylics is perfectly permanent.

Yeah, any painting in the light is going to die, fade and be bleached out.

But this is much more stable and will last much longer.

But that's okay, because you'll see later, it gives me

a little bit of room on the dark side that I can go back now.

If I put a black line on there, it's going to show up as a darker line.

So again, it's giving me room to move.

I made it really dark to begin with.

It gets a little reddish-black now.

Later I can make it more black.

I want to make a darker line around his eyes or around the figure or somewhere.

I still have room to move.

I keep having room to move.

And even when I go back with the whitest white Prismacolor and do a highlight,

it's still not the whitest white in the world,

because the Prismacolor isn't perfectly opaque either.

And if I really want an opaque line, I'll get out my Gesso and paint it in.

And if I want an even whiter highlight, if I get out the acrylic white,

it's even whiter than the Gesso.

So I give myself a whole lot of room to move and to

work within the limitations of light and dark paint.

If I started out with white, then everything would have to be as white as I

could possibly get, and I'd have to keep painting around it.

I don't have to do that here.

I come close enough, because I have room to paint around it again.

I have room to get lighter and I have room to get darker.

I can put down a red, like I'm doing now, and say, I want it a little darker,

but a little bluer, like under his lip.

So I'll just get out the blue and paint it under his lip, and it'll be kind of a

bluish red, because they don't ever really mix.

You see through them, just like you see the pencil through the paint.

A lot of people wonder how I get the vibrant

colors, so it's just because it's transparent paint.

And it's done with the airbrush, so it's never actually mixed together.

Here, if you look very closely, I've changed the colors.

It was kind of that cadmium with some alizarin in it.

Now I have a magenta.

And around the edges, I'm changing the color to a

little bit of a magenta, where it turns into the white.

But it doesn't hurt what I've done to the red.

So I'm just altering the color.

So I'm putting magenta over the top of it.

And I'll keep doing that until it's like really sexy looking.

I've changed to an orange color, and I'm outlining him in orange,

because I know the background is going to be kind of yellow and orange.

This is the thing I do.

It's not technical so much, sort of, but it's more taste and choice.

But it's a two-dimensional painting, and I want

the edges to roll like in three dimensions.

They go out of focus, or they change color, or they pick up color from the

background, and you get a little prismatic effect around the edge of things.

So I pick up background colors or local colors around the edges of things.

You can see how it just rounded out the figure.

And I was just outlining it with what's going to be an orange

color, plus it kind of moves from the light, the scales.

There's a white there, and then before it gets to the dark

red, it'll go through orange and yellow and to the white.

So I kind of paint it that way, too.

And it kind of turns the edge a little bit.

Where it's going to be orange around the outside, it's turning towards that.

And where it goes towards the red, then it's turning back the other side of

the white to an orange and then to the red.

And it just kind of rolls.

It rotates the image.

It's not in the photograph.

It's just something I do to give it more of that dimension.

But you see some of the magenta where it's turning.

And then I'll put in some darks, but I start kind of with the local color

or the medium color, and then I can move into the lights,

and then I can move back the other way into the darks.

So eventually I'll put those darks in, too.

That's the beginning.

And you can see how it goes.

And the rest of the whole painting will go like that.

Each area has its own local color.

And then if I wanted to hold the whole picture together, I

can overspray the whole painting and kind of make it one.

So I can just do local color and then put a glaze of red over

the whole painting and everything will shift a little bit.

Any color you want.

Any way you want.

And that's the beauty of the airbrush.

And the acrylic.

Because it's not going to pick up what's underneath it once it's dry.

So what I'm doing is just darkening the reds a little bit.

So you do a little, and then your eye does have a tendency to

get used to it or get a little wasted after looking at one color.

So you do what you think is right and then you step back for a while.

Let your eye rest and come back and you go, oh, that's not bright enough or dark

enough or red enough.

So, you know, as I add the other color, you say, well, this obviously needs to be

darker or redder or whatever I'm doing here.

But it's there.

So I don't have to think about that as much as

if I was painting and drawing at the same time.

I'm only doing one at a time.

And there's the simplicity of it.

And you see where the dark lines, where the paint's getting darker and

darker until it's kind of like, well, which is which?

And they're eventually going to wind up pretty much the same.

But I always have, like, I like your terminology, a road map.

So I determine where I'm going and I just follow the road.

But as I get back down into the darks and the blacks in

his face, then it's all going to kind of run together.

OK, so I figured it out.

Now I can paint the rest of it much more easily.

One thing I always do is I wind up doing it too heavy and then it gets really wet.

Which you really shouldn't do, but I'm always in a hurry.

That's what the shine is.

It really shouldn't be that wet.

But I ain't waiting around because now I figured

out what color and value I'm going to make it.

So I'm just going for it.

And if you get too heavy with it like that, it'll get

slick because it's making a sheet instead of atomizing it.

So you've got to stop that.

And sometimes you make a mistake and say, oops,

got a little much of this, a little much of that.

But there is something else I've discovered about

this paint so thin on the page it may be dry.

Even if you paint thick with acrylic and it's dry, it's not cured yet.

So if you get it wet and wait a minute for it to soak in, you can get it off.

I really went way the hell too far.

I'll get my spray bottle and spritz it and get it wet.

And you've got to be patient enough to wait for it to get wet into the paint.

And then you can take a paper towel and tamp it.

If you very carefully rub it just a little, you can start getting all the

paint off without disturbing the drawing underneath.

Now one of the big things that happens in the movie industry is even after all the

comps and all the drawings and all the approvals and all the people involved and

you go to all this trouble to paint it up, they go:

"Okay: we want a different head on Abe Sapien."

So you get out your kneaded eraser and when this is all dry, you can erase it.

A lot of it will come off by rubbing.

Oil paint people think, oh, that's such rust cast in a stone.

You take your thumb and rub on any oil painting.

After about 30 seconds, it starts to come off.

Just rubbing it with your thumb to think that, oh, that can get off with an eraser.

It's not an issue.

And it's not because it's weak paint.

It's just any abrasion is going to take it off.

That's just what happens.

So you take it off with a kneaded eraser and then the

pink pearl eraser and you can get it down to... 90% of it is gone.

Then you just re-jazzle it and start over on that particular area.

It's very movable.

It's controllable.

It's changeable.

It's alterable.

It's fixable.

And you can't tell.

That's the beauty of it.

You can't tell that you've removed head 2 or 3 times.

Which I do.

And you look at the painting, you'll never know.

And the blessing is the thinness of the acrylic paint, the erasability of

Prismacolor, and the replacement of the gesso base.

So it's all fixable.

And it's all compatible.

Acrylic paint is plastic.

And the only thing about the Prismacolor is the wax.

And wax doesn't change.

It's completely stable.

And because it's on the top, if you put the waxy surface

on the bottom, then the stuff on the top would peel off.

Which people have a lot of trouble with that when they try to imitate my technique.

But hopefully they see how to do it right.

And that will never happen again.

So that's how I do it.

As with anything, you can't just dive in.

You can read about swimming.

But until you get in the water, you go, oh, it feels different than I thought.

This is how it's done.

And it can be done.

But you can see I keep using my cards as a basket.

It's the same thing now.

It gets redundant.

That's why I watch TV and all kinds of stuff.

Because the creativity happened with the designing and the conceiving of the idea.

And the draftsmanship is a little harder, but the painting is fairly easy.

Because I've divided it into sections.

Now I'm just drawing.

Now I'm just adding color.

Now I'm just adding some highlights.

Let's have a look at that now.

It got red, and I'm just adding some black.

Rolling that edge.

Nothing to it.

I didn't have to mix the red and the black

constantly to get it to go from dark to light.

I just gave it the color.

Now I'm just spraying the textures and the dark side.

The cracks in his arm.

And it's like, whoa, what's the deal?

Well, remember, it was all drawn.

And 90% of what you're looking at is the drawing.

But you can't tell one from the other at this point.

It's just shapes and colors and values.

Oh, look at the water going down.

Oh, he's spritzing it with this water and a crummy old ruined spritzer.

So it makes all crummy shapes instead of a spray.

It's just making drips.

What's he spraying?

I'll bet it's black.

See how much further away it is?

Makes it softer and lighter.

Can't even see it.

Oh, there's some water sitting on the surface.

I can see that.

Well, what did the spraying accomplish?

Didn't turn it green.

I think that's just water.

I wonder what he's doing.

Must be waiting for something.

Oh, that's a paper towel.

He's tamping it.

The spots of water are going to get picked up.

He changed the color of black.

Now it's kind of motley-looking.

See how those breaststrokes are gone?

Once again, texture adds texture, but it adds a kind of modeling and change

of color and ins and outs and ups and downs.

If you had to render it, it would take forever.

Don't rub, don't move it, just tamp it.

If you move it, the paint's all wet and it would be like trying to remove it and it

would wipe it all away because you got it wet.

So I spreckled it with the toothbrush and with the spritzed water.

All that was is water poorly spritzed on and then airbrushed over the top with any

color you choose and then tamp up the water.

So it's just like blotting.

So wherever it wasn't wet, that's why you wait a

little bit between airbrushing it and tamping it up.

You wait for the paint to dry, but not the water.

So the paint's thin, dries fast.

Once the paint's dry, tamp up the water and you get this wonderful texture there.

So now instead of rendering his jacket, it's got all kinds of neat texture on it:

Drawing texture, sprinkle texture, spritz water texture.

Now you add a little color and it looks pretty hot.

Looks like you've rendered all kinds of junk and you haven't done anything.

This is pretty good for showing how I airbrush it.

Oh, in a straight line there?

Put the card up.

Don't want it to go over there?

Put the card up.

Look at that.

Not even close to the painting.

Oh, I don't want to go over on that highlight on this jacket.

I just covered it with a line with the card.

Didn't want it in his face, so I put the card there.

This doesn't matter.

It's all very peculiar.

See, and then it, I don't know, is it tedious to sit here for this long?

Well, the fact is, it took, again, it took a day to project the drawing.

It took a day to tighten it up and fix it up.

This painting will take a day to do the color.

So, I mean, okay, so it's a 12-hour day, but just a day.

You've seen the texture added.

And don't, don't get all like, oh, how come he painted down the edge of

his jacket with the orange, and that's all?

Because I had it in the airbrush.

I knew I was going to do it.

I'll do it now.

Some of it's got to be fun.

I mean, my goodness, art's supposed to be fun.

It's peaceful.

It should be enjoyable.

It should create something that's happy, so you should be happy doing it.

And a lot of it, you know, a lot of it's experimenting.

You say, well, why do you do that twice?

Because the first time wasn't enough, I wanted to change it, so you kind of...

You fuss with it, I fuss with it.

Do a little, see what it looks like.

Hmm, is this going to be the right color?

So far, it looks right.

The overspray makes it a little bit harmonious.

All the colors seem to have something to do with one another.

Plus, it disguises some of the black that isn't pure black.

And it gives me room now to go back and put black exactly where

I want it instead of all the blacks being exactly the same.

So it gives me, again, some room and some variety.

Saves me from masking and gives me another layer to work on.

You go to school, you read books, and they tell you how they did it.

It's not a rule, it's just a possibility.

And that's what I'm trying to give to my friends out there, is possibility.

Look, you may not like that.

So you keep that part out.

Or you only like this one thing that's very interesting.

Or just an attitude.

You can experiment.

You can try something new.

Try something different.

But look at the texture on this coat now.

That was all that spritzing and spotting.

And you can still see the drawing with all the interesting lines and curly cues and

straight lines and directional lines and breaks in the planes.

It's all still there.

And it's not identical to the photograph.

It's more enhanced.

People always wonder, how come the people look

more like the people than the people look?

Because of draftsmanship, which means being able to do those things.

Make a guy tougher then a girl being softer.

Make a guy's nose sharper and his cheek chiseled and this

turning the edges on all the different planes in his face.

You know, making one part harder than hard, making his foreheads harder than his cheek.

And not just drawing what you see, but knowing it is, so

drawing it so it feels like what you know it looks like.

I've got to say, this is harder.

And how do you do that?

You draw the line straighter.

You make the change of value sharper, faster.

You make it slower here, the way you render it.

That's why sometimes you'll see lines where there... why is that line in his face?

It's making it sharper.

It's turning an edge.

And people accept it, because it's more so than it's

2D, so it has to be more so to really emphasize it.

And that's history of 6,000 years of people learning what kind of symbol in

drawing can it make to have this represent something 3D.

Well, you've got to emphasize what you know about it, not just what you see.

It's this many layered understanding and application to achieve your goal.

And a lot of it's just like, wouldn't it be interesting if this line went fast?

What if this line went slow?

You see that, and you see the artist drawing

a fast squiggly line with a curl at the end.

And you say, well, he didn't render that line.

He went "whoa!" with his hand.

Well, that's just something human.

That says something about speed.

So it tells you a lot, and it's just a line, or it's just a color, or just a texture.

When you're seeing things, maybe you don't know what it's doing to you.

But it's doing it.

And that's why people like the work.

It's because it's adding this human touch, this explanation, visual communication

about something you know, but it's got to change worlds.

And so I changed the way I do it.

Look at all the funny shapes.

Well, that's movement to me.

Because my hand had to move to make that movement.

Anybody sort of sees that, knows it's a line drawn, interprets it as quick,

fluid movement.

It's like dancing with a pencil.

Well, you see it.

It leaves its tracks in the mud.

There it is.

And that can be done graphically with shapes, or speed of line, or width,

or texture of it, or color of it.

Every little thing should be the decision of the artist.

And every square inch of it, you can see that I'm working every piece.

I mean, so far I've been over that one piece probably, I drew it, I re-drew it,

I put texture on it, two different kinds of texture, and now

I'm putting three or four different colors over the same area.

So, you know, I keep considering it and reconsidering it, and as more and more the

picture comes into being, then I start balancing the parts I've already done.

So as it gets next to this, and sits next to that, it's got to change.

It needs more of this, or less of that.

So it all becomes one cohesive statement in the end.

Yeah, and you see the one that went down to the card and hit it, because the

airbrush, you know, you gotta make sure, because it's mechanical, that the right

amount of paint is coming out, and it's the right size.

Whoopsie, too much, took it off.

This is not typical airbrushing.

So as you can see, it's very generalized, and why?

Because the drawing is what's holding it together.

It's not all drawn with the airbrush.

My airbrushing is quite different than the average.

I'm probably going to ruin the industry.

You know, you could paint it with a house brush.

Yeah, it's a balance of the things and knowing where they're going.

You know, you don't have to sit there and meditate on one particular little thing,

because you know you have all these tools in your box that say, well later I'm going

to do this, later I know I'm going to do that, this doesn't

matter, this is a generalization, this is, you know.

And it did start with the drawing, because that's specific.

And that specificness holds the whole thing together, all the way to the end.

You know, even later when you go to the light side,

it's only because you see where the darks are.

It's really that drawing in the initial stage that is really the foundation of the

whole piece, and so it's first, but it's detailed, and it holds everything together.

It's like a roadmap to everything that comes afterwards.

So I did [???] away, and he's looking pretty nice, but he's not really finished

because I want to see the other things next to him to see where it goes.

See, I'm more interested in the design and the texture

and the movement than I am almost with the rendering.

Because it's more interesting.

I'm just going to sit there until you don't know what made it.

I know what made that.

That's a pencil line.

Yeah.

I like that.

I'm not trying to fool you into thinking it's something other than what it is.

Right now, I'm just doing the white, which is the brightest.

Let's see.

Look at it change.

It's so simplified, so easy.

And again, it's just pencil.

If I happen to make a mistake, I could erase it.

So I'll go along and do the whites and then I'll go, OK, it's a middle tone.

Is there another color?

I add a little more yellow where the edge was turning.

A little more orange.

If I want his forehead harder where I over sprayed it, take a

pencil that matches the background color and make it a hard line.

But I have a choice.

I don't have to then, oh, I wish that was soft and go back and paint in a soft line.

Look at that.

All of a sudden, where did all that go?

It's a triangle.

You can't tell the difference anymore.

The black, the color, and the white is all one.

Your eye fills in the difference.

Let's see how sometimes I use my pencil one way, sometimes I use it another.

No, because it's a small little stuff.

I use it like you were writing because it's more delicate.

Yeah, OK, I see.

I hold my hand, my pencil with my middle finger, not my first hand finger because

it's more comfortable for me.

It's not a rule and it's not a magic key.

It's just how I hold it.

No, it works fine for me.

And again, I change it up all the time.

It isn't static.

And a lot of the times, it's not even drawing with the fingers.

It's drawing with the wrist or drawing with the elbow.

You know, on little stuff, then you focus down on bigger stuff you can open up.

Oh, look, I was using four different pictures to do one portrait.

Because I like this part of the photo better than

that part and this one will look neater by that one.

You know?

So it's not even one picture of it necessarily.

Just the parts I like.

Uh oh, I've been working around on it some.

It's not really starting at the upper left hand

corner or working down to the lower right hand corner.

People: "I've seen him work!...

... That's what he does!"

Come on, when did you see that yet?

You know?

But the fact is, well, you can't work on everything at the same time.

The general idea is to keep everything developing pretty much at the same rate.

I didn't finish one head and then move on to the next.

Everything come up together.

The drawing came up, then the color was balanced back and forth.

Which is really hard for you to see that I'm going back and forth.

But the drawing's that way too.

I started putting the whites in, but I didn't

finish Hellboy and then move on to the next one.

You know?

I did whites on most of them so that I can see where it was going and then I'll start

putting color in it because it's balanced now.

So everything comes up mostly as much as you humanly could at the same time.

And the reason is you keep it balanced.

Because it would be terrible to do one and then realize that, oh, it's all too light

or it's all too red or it's all too... So you bring it all up at the same time.

There you can see the proscenium with really heavy spattering texture on it.

And little baby-spattering texture.

And it almost looks like rock and I haven't even done anything to it.

Now all I have to do is pick a light source and put some lights on the side of

the edges wherever the texture is, you know?

And it'll look like a rock.

So it'll have been achieved without like any work.

If you look careful, I see some blue dots and I see some orange dots.

And so I spattered it with all different kinds of colors.

It wasn't just the black.

And you see the glow of the background around the edge of it.

So I could over spray it there with red on top of it.

You saw I was doing black before.

Well, see, turned it red and orange.

So it feels like the light is coming up underneath it.

But I didn't do it on the people because I wanted them to stay fresh and sharp.

So you focus more on them.

See now, I'm softening that white line with a little pink.

Drawing squares.

A square on his lip?

What the hell was that?

And where there's a hard edge, I actually drew a line to make an edge.

And where there was no hard edge, I didn't draw a line.

It's just drawing technique.

It's counting on people to have a brain and an eye and experience in life.

There's some yellow.

There's some purple.

Look at the purple on the edges.

Purple on his eye.

Yellow around his lips.

You go, why all that?

Well, first of all, the Prismacolor is drawing hard edges.

It's adding texture.

It's adding direction and shape.

It's also not opaque.

It's picking up... it's...

You're seeing through it and seeing the color underneath it.

A lot of people can't get the same color because they

don't realize it depends on what color is underneath it.

So it helps it.

Because it's not really opaque.

It looks like it, but it's not.

You can't draw with the white over the black

and expect it to be really, really white.

You can't put the pink over green and expect it to still be pink.

It's going to get muddy.

It's all part of the technique.

You can't cover your mistakes with a pencil.

If you make a mistake, erase the stupid thing.

But you see I'm bringing the sharpness back to it where it needs it and leaving

it where I don't need it and don't want it.

Adding more detail in as much as I drew detail with the black.

Now I'm doing detail with the white.

So it's twice as detailed as it was before.

And it's still easy because I'm just doing one side of the value scale.

So I think that's fun just watching it.

It's fun to draw it because I'm not just threadling these horrible soft little things.

No, I'm having a good old time.

Look at that.

This is cool.

I like that.

Do some more.

Now look, you can still see the blacks.

You can still see the textures underneath.

But all that texture adds up to this beautiful...

I like to just focus on one little thing.

It's like a little impressionist painting

and you're mixing all the colors and shapes.

It's not a rendering.

It's an impression of more than just what you see but of what you feel.

Which is, to me, that's what art is about.

It's an emotional response to a visual stimulus.

Well, then I'm doing everything I can to stimulate

you in an appropriate way for the subject matter.

So it's more than rendering what I see by a long shot.

But I think that's part of what's enjoyable to do it as well as to see it.

As you can see, it was how it was done.

It's not disguised.

You see the lines.

You can see the colors.

You can see the splatters.

You can see the dots.

It's all there.

And it all adds up to, oh, a much more interesting thing

than just a photograph and just a reflection of the guy.

To me it does.

That's what style and taste and personality and individuality is all about.

So everybody expression can be different.

Even if you dain to copy the technique, you're going to do it differently.

But it takes time to render it up to that level.

And I haven't even started.

Then I do at the end, after I get all the lights on, see everything's lighter then,

then I do go back and do darks again.

But now I have a choice where to put them.

So everything being the blackest pencil, I can just put it where I want it.

And I'll put like red in his nostrils and around his eyes because those are open to

the air and they're full of blood and they're really red.

And maybe they don't look like that way in life,

but you draw them red and we completely accept it.

And that white still isn't white.

It just looks that way on the screen because it's the whitest up there yet.

Later I'll go back and highlight it with paint.

So just the really specific lights get light.

So it's all a matter of choice and balance.

Which again, is personal.

So where I do it, someone else isn't going to do it.

But look at all that you have to do on one image.

It does take a long time.

It is tedious.

It is hard work.

And the whole time you're doing it, you're going I hope they like it.

I hope this is right.

I hope this pleases them.

And that's very distracting from this is what I'd like to do.

This is what I think is right.

On top of that, you're going this costs some 150 million dollars to make.

And if it doesn't open well on Friday night, they lose it all.

And it's all based on them seeing this poster

and thinking that would be fun to go see.

So do you want that job?

It's artistic talent and vision and capacity and education and experience.

And it's also temperament that I don't get all bent out of shape about it.

I love what I do.

I have confidence in my education and experience.

And I'm doing the best I can.

And there's no reason to get worried about something that I can't control like

someone else's response, someone else's opinion, someone else's change of mind,

someone else's angry and fearful way they live their job and their life.

I know what I can control and I know what I can't control.

So I do what I can and wait and see what the results are.

Not to say that I didn't spend a lot of my life and time listening to the responses

of people, which is how I've learned how to please people.

My personal art, that's kind of what it's about.

There'll be figures in there and they draw you into the picture.

But very quickly, all of a sudden you start looking at the pure art of it,

the art for the sake of the art, that it's

paints and drawings and colors and textures.

It's just like, ooh, they all come together and, you know, accepting and

understanding 90% of what we knew, we learn through our eyes.

And much of our joy and appreciation comes through our eyes, you know, from the

flowers in the field to the sunsets, to the people we love.

They're so beautiful, the little children and the beautiful women.

And that's what art does.

It's not a book.

It's not teaching you.

It's not an education.

It's an experience.

It's an emotional involvement.

And that's probably why I like it, because it's emotional.

It takes intellect and education and experience

to accomplish the ends you're looking for.

But in the end, it's to get an emotional response from people.

And that's what's so much more than technique, because it's having a purpose

an emotional intent, knowing how to achieve that in others, is a whole other

study and a whole other level of appreciation.

And the technique and all that is just the means by which it's put down.

But it's not the purpose, by any means.

It's just the means by which to get it.

In some of this you can see, hopefully in my work, that it's drawn emotionally.

And a lot of the choices are made for emotional reasons.

Not that I'm doing it without brains.

I mean emotional purpose in the end.

I do it intellectually to achieve the end result, which is emotional.

So here you see now I've changed.

I've gone from basically the lighter, brighter colors.

I'm going into the darker ones now.

So I talk about the red around the eyes.

That's a really dark, deep, red pencil.

And I'm using that instead of black because it keeps

the flesh alive and full of blood and living, you know.

So I'm using red on it instead of just black or brown or something dead.

And redrawing again.

But see I've gone back to the darks but now I'm

a little more selective about where they're dark.

So you can see I'm not sitting there tediously drawing it.

A little darker here, a little sharper around the

rim, a little darker in the corner of the eye.

And look at the scale.

That's a pencil point.

It's not very big.

You know, I'm looking at the emphasis of edges and not just the value but the

shape, the line, the direction, and the edges.

See, these nostrils make it red.

The other parts that looked really sharp and

hard before are now in comparison looking softer.

Because this is more contrasty again.

So it looks sharper.

Whereas the other ones were closer in value.

The other colors on his face are looking more gentle now.

Like his forehead and chin and stuff are much softer

looking where they looked kind of sharp before.

It's a matter of that contrast we spoke of.

Now you're just putting around the sharp edges

of his eyes and his glasses and his nostrils.

So I'm adding a little more color here.

So you go back and forth, of course, because it is a matter of balance.

So you put the darks in, you go oh, this wrinkle needs to be a little warmer,

a little more fleshy or a little darker.

You make those choices as you go along.

You don't just do it and say I'm done.

You balance everything.

And again, that's kind of the idea of the technique.

You can keep balancing it, keep changing it, keep working it all together.

And it gets you more control over your finished product.

Well, that's how it came out.

No, this was all a matter of choice.

And there's even things I do after I get it drawn.

(There's obviously...) I'm starting towards the darks

and the blacks will come in the appropriate place.

But even after that, once I get that all done, I look at it and say, okay,

what more balancing, harmony, focus does it need to really start singing and dancing?

And then I will sometimes get out my airbrush and say, okay, the whole thing

has got to go a little redder, a little darker, a little softer,

a little mistier or something.

And I'll work over the top of all this, too, a little bit, you know, just very

subtly to harmonize or bring out edges and little things.

And there's still the very bright highlights, which

I haven't anywhere near reached that yet either.

So you want that bright sun you hold off until last.

So it's the brightest thing on the picture kind of thing.

So you always have room for your emphasis and your focus.

But a lot of this have to get in what I'm doing now and have done through the whole

thing is a lot about the experience of drawing and the knowledge and

accomplishment of how to achieve all the different possibilities that drawing offers.

So a lot of what you're seeing is it's not

rendering, it's explanation as well as expression.

So you can see a lot of it's just action lines, they're

movement lines, they're not all just definition lines.

Just this needs a little more movement here, a little more direction here,

a little more, you know, little things that are more about

how you feel about it rather than how it really looks.

A basic drawing thing is to feel with the tool what you're doing.

I mean, like if I draw a wrist, I don't, if you're wearing a bracelet,

I don't just draw a line around the wrist.

I move my arm and my hand around it as if I was actually drawing in three dimensions.

I was trying to pull the pencil around the back and over the top.

And you do that, it gives it more that feeling.

So a lot of the things, you feel it in that sense, not emotionally, but if you

feel like you're drawing around it, you will have a tendency

to make it look more like it goes around it, you know.

You feel like it's hard, you draw it like

it's hard, and it'll look more like it's hard.

You know, so yeah, it's in that sense.

You couldn't do it and be divorced from it.

So again, it's many levels.

It's that emotional, I'm feeling what I'm drawing, I understand the shape,

which comes from knowledge of living.

I've seen what it looks like to go around the other side, and I've got to draw it so

it looks like it goes where I can't see it, not just ends two-dimensionally,

but feels like it goes around.

You talk about eye, I have to understand the architecture of an eye, that it's an

orb, and it's got a hole here and an iris there, and eyelashes and eyelids have

depth, and they roll around on top of the eyeball, you know, and if you know all

these things, you draw them like that's how they exist.

But more so, like, putting the red inside the eye, I know it's an open organ,

I know it's full of blood, I draw it redder than it looks, and you accept it,

in fact it's more so, and doesn't look horrible or anything, it just looks better.

So in some ways, yeah, you have to feel it, you have to understand it,

and you have to be able to then interpret it.

It's all many-leveled, obviously.

There's things you don't comprehend or don't see by just watching it be done,

but why was it done that way, and what did it achieve?

Well, that takes years.

You're seeing how what looked harsh to begin with just doesn't look that way anymore.

It's all those different kinds of things, it's the balancing, and you know,

drawing over the parts I didn't want to see, and make the second choice,

and a lot of the original drawing, and the dots, and all the sprinkles are

still there, but they've just fallen into their rightful place.

And they also help to achieve the final result, so even though some of them

recovered, and you can't distinguish one from another, that's good, because it all

resulted in the finished arrangement, so it all added even if you don't see it.

There's not any bright highlights or any glazing taking place yet.

That's all the pencil work.

So there's the basic three levels.

The dark drawing, the color painting, and the light drawing.

And the benefit is you work both sides of the value scale.

And you get to draw everything 2 or 3 times.

Minimum.

So you keep getting to make varying, advancing decisions.

So you don't just make one and forget it.

But you keep re-evaluating over and over and over again.

Well, then at this point I could just add that... you know... At this point,

all that was left is a little balancing, maybe, with glazes with the airbrush and

some of the really hot highlights I'd paint on with Gesso, or even with the

white Liquitex acrylic if it really needed to be bright.

But that would be pretty much it.

And that was, as I said, two days to draw, one

day to paint, and two days to render it out.

And that would be finished.

And there it goes out the door to some stranger who delivers it to the studio.

- And then, you get a phone call? You know what I'm saying... "Excellent job!" - I wish that would happen.

It would make my day.

But usually you don't hear from them unless they want something else from you.

They don't usually call to give something to you, like thanks.

No, usually it's just: "Next job, please."

And that's a very pleasing experience to say: "Oh good! Another job!"

You do a good job, and that's what happens.

They come back.

It's a very simple equation that a lot of people have missed these days.

But it's getting those, you know, forty years of

experience under your belt to get it to that point.

But it's always, you know, the neat thing about art is tomorrow is another day.

You get to do it again.

Hopefully the best painting is the next one you do

because you've learned something else today.

All I'm trying to do is hurry people's experience a little bit so they get closer

to that day when everyone they touch is going to be perfect and beautiful by

learning maybe a little bit more technique.

And if I can offer that, then I'm very pleased.

For many filmmakers of my generation one of the key things in

life was to someday do a movie that had a Drew Struzan poster.

To me, every movie that had to be something

special had to have a poster by Drew Struzan.

His posters had a warmth and a humanity that

I feel is completely lost in posters today.

A sense of excitement and adventure that was the

natural evolution of every painted poster before it.

That sold you all the thrills and the chills and the adventure.

But it didn't sell it in an old fashioned way.

It sold it in a way that I believe was exciting to him.

And therefore, like any artist it made it

exciting to the people that saw the posters.

Drew Struzan is in my book one of the three

greatest movie poster artists that ever lived.

I thought it was just time for us to acknowledge how much we love Drew Struzan

and how important he's been.

That's why I and guys like me want to hire him and get him involved, you know,

cause that art lasts.