Chris Schweizer's Old Blog: December 2013

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Mary Russell

The Baker Street Babes have mentioned Laurie King’s Mary Russell series so many times and with such great affection on their podcast that I figured I finally needed to give it a go. I’m a little shy of halfway through the first book, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, and I’m loving it so far. So much so that I had to take a break from work to do a quick sketch of Russell as she appears in my mind from King’s descriptions.

The original art for this one is available for sale. 8.5x11," ink on 80# stock, shipped the Tuesday after purchase. First come, first serve.

Saturday, December 21, 2013

Directors: Kasi Lemmons, Rian Johnson, and John Ford

First, Kasi Lemmons, writer and director of the wonderful Eve’s Bayou (which, like the film of another director I’ll be posting up soon, does a fantastic job of doing a story about kids that feels like it’s made for kids despite not being so at all, just such a subtle handling of the heavy subject matter), who also directed Caveman’s Valentine - both pulling excellent performances from Samuel L. Jackson. I haven’t seen her upcoming Black Nativity, but her work on the two previously mentioned pictures and Talk to Me will lead me to do so eventually, despite my general distaste for Christmas movies (not that I don’t love Christmas).

Rian Johnson.

He made Brick, which would be enough to cement him on my favorites list regardless of what his subsequent projects were, but given that those projects include The Brothers Bloom,Looper, and the hotel episode of Terriers, well, Brick almost becomes a non-issue, doesn’t it?

John Ford, director of such genre-defining and genre-busting westerns as Stagecoach and the Searchers, and a variety of other projects, including a pretty neat film called 7 Women, about seven very different people trying to survive in Warlord-era China in the 1920s.

Monday, December 16, 2013

Shadow Over Innsmouth characters

One of my favorite scary stories is H.P. Lovecraft’s “A Shadow Over Innsmouth,” which is about a prissy youngster who goes antiquing in a town populated by (spolier!) fish people. It’s chock full of dreadful buildup, and so I’ve been meaning to do some character sketches for it for some time. Here are a few, including the narrator, the priest from the Esoteric Order of Dagon, alcoholoic nonagenarian Zadock Allen, the young grocery store manager, bus driver Joe Sargent, and a bunch of Innsmouth residents and Deep Ones (as the full-blown fish folk are called). I also did a big Dagon, from the short story of the same name, whom I’ve heard described as a Deep One old enough to have grown to a massive size. For scale, he should be about double the size as he’s depicted here, but I wanted him to fit, y’know.

The original art for these are available for sale (each character is its own piece). 8.5x11," ink on 80# stock, shipped the Tuesday after purchase. First come, first serve. PLEASE INCLUDE A NOTE DESCRIBING THE CHARACTER THAT YOU WANT. I will mark which ones are sold as soon as I'm available. The prices are for the smaller figures; the larger Dagon drawing is on 11x17, and costs $100.

Sold so far:
#2 (Esoteric Order of Dagon Priest)
#5 (hunched fishy-faced sailor with pipe)

Friday, December 13, 2013

Directors: Michael Curtiz

I was always flumuxed when I was younger that despite his having directed Casablanca, one of my very favorite films and a regular contender for the best film ever made, and nearly all of the best Errol Flynn movies (The Adventures of Robin Hood, Captain Blood, Virginia City, Charge of the Light Brigade, the Sea Hawk, Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex), Michael Cutriz (born Mano Kaminer in Budapest in 1886) never seems to get the sort of recognition due to him by merit of his best projects. He gets more love now than he used to in critical circles, but he’s still hardly a household name. The original art for this one is available for sale. 8.5x11," ink on 80# stock, shipped the Tuesday after purchase. First come, first serve.

Directors: Richard Lester

Today's director: Richard Lester.

He made a bunch of the Beatles movies (maybe all of them), but I've never been into the Beatles enough to want to watch them. He is, however, also the best period film director ever, by my money. His Three Musketeers series from the mid-seventies (featuring an all-star cast including Charlton Heston, Raquel Welch, Michael York, Christopher Lee, Faye Dunaway, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Frank Finlay, and Spike Milligan) is the one of the best period films ever for total immersion (though I'd say that Gangs of New York, The Duelists, and Master and Commander do a bang-up job in that department, too) and his Robin and Marian is the best Robin Hood movie, bar none (written by James Goldman, who also penned The Lion in Winter).

He also made a western, I just discovered, called Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, a prequel to the William Goldman (James' brother) Newman/Redford vehicle, which has never had as much appeal to me as it seems to do everyone else. I've bought The Early Days but haven't had a chance to watch it yet. Really looking forward to doing so.

The original art for this one is available for sale. 8.5x11," ink on 80# stock, shipped the Tuesday after purchase. First come, first serve.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Directors: John Huston

So I drew a bunch of directors that I like. Figured I’d throw ‘em up over the next week or two.

First up, John Huston, because he’s the first director I ever read about at length. I had seenThe Man Who Would Be King (easily Sean Connery’s finest film role) and The African Queen(my favorite Katherine Hepburn movie, if not my favorite performance - I still might like her in The Lion in Winter more) and liked both of them a lot, so when I stumbled across this book on Huston at my school library I gave it a read, which led me to other books.

Huston significantly influenced by art in a very tangible way. He famously desaturated the color in his adaptation of Moby Dick by overlaying a black and white version of the film atop a color one, giving the sea story a grim and stark palette. I read that, and thought “Well, I’ll do that in photoshop, with layers.” I started making a duplicate of my garish color layers, desaturating it, and adjusting the opacity atop the color layer. That led me to adjusting the color balance on that desaturated layer - sometimes I’d make it sepia, or blue, or red, but always I overlaid a monochromatic duplicate atop a literal palette. Now I don’t have to do that anymore, but I still use the process to develop new palettes in their entireity, with a few manual tweaks here and there. Thanks, John Huston!

~~The original art for this one is available for sale. 8.5x11," ink on 80# stock, shipped the Tuesday after purchase. First come, first serve~~. SOLD!