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!