The One

We “met” almost 5 years ago and it felt like love at first sight (at least from my side). Since then I wanted to draw this building many times but somehow the right moment never came… under those 5 years (doesn’t sound convincing, I  know). I always had a soft spot for old wooden buildings with charming details and this one was very old and really beautifully detailed.

It’s called Vastveitsloftet and was originally build in  XIVth century in Norway. After a few hundred years it was transported to Stockholm’s Skansen.

The surrounding is really picturesque as the building is placed on a high rock, overlooking a bay. If we have poor eyesight we probably won’t even see gigantic, grey socialist architecture on the other side of the bay.

The building originally served as a storehouse and maybe that’s why it was so carefully decorated.

What I find charming in a wooden architecture, are imperfections in the material: knots, cracks, signs of deteriorations, and elements in different sizes.

One day later...

Sweet, but… dark, desaturated tones would be much more sufficient.

And one more day... 

Gloomy, but not too gloomy (i.e. lagom gloomy). For some strange reason, this mood fits old Scandinavian buildings quite well :)

Swamp Fortress

We are moving forward with exploring medieval fantasy architecture. After simple wooden huts and decaying townhouses, it’s time for a larger building - a castle in the middle of wetlands.

1.      In the case of fantasy objects, imagination is crucial, so…

Yes, that’s the fruit of my imagination. If you saw some of my previous posts, you’ve probably noticed, that thumbnail concept sketches made for my own projects are barely legible and they rarely foretell success in further works on a drawing. Let’s see what will happen this time!

2.      A really fast sketch on a large paper which will develop in a finished, detailed drawing

3.      More cautious drawing with ink

4.      Details

5.      Adding materials and shading. A few hours of adding materials and shading, actually. There is also a place for a mysterious creature from the thumbnail sketch, hurray!

This could be a finished drawing, but, in fact, I added watercolors to it. You can take a look at a short video, to see the results.

If you would like to know how to design imaginary buildings, like this one, you can watch my Skillshare course. I’m talking here about using more or less fantastical building materials, creating feasible structures, but also telling how life in various types of buildings could look like and how their function would influence their look. And of course, I couldn’t ignore my favorite subject: The Frequently Made Mistakes 😊

Medieval Town - video courses

Recently I finished preparing a Skillshare course about designing fantasyarchitecture. I presented there many architectonic details drawn from imagination, talked about the rules accompanying medieval builders and highlighted many frequently made mistakes in designing fantasy architecture. An important part of the course are “case studies” - four detailed illustrations summarizing four chapters of the course.

I explained there a designing process based, among others, on historical and constructional aspects. In this blog post, I’ll shortly present how they were drawn step by step. Today it’s time for a little, medieval town square.    

1.      If you don’t know, what is presented here, I don’t blame you. Luckily for me, shortly after that (i.e. before I forgot what I was thinking about) I began to draw a full-size, neat sketch.

2.      If you don’t know what to draw, just start with a horizon line placed in 1/3 or 2/3 of the height of the frame. Drawing vertical lines in 1/3 and2/3 of the width of the frame should be also helpful in setting the composition. I added also a few other divisions. Easy stuff so far 😊

3.      Probably now you can see, that there will be two fragments of buildings on the foreground (on the right and the left) and some houses with a bridge/gate in the background. Medieval towns quite often had irregularly shaped roads and “squares”. That’s why there are two different vanishing points for these two foreground buildings, as they are not meant to be parallel. It’s also time to decide how high the floors should be.

4.      Defining actual shapes of the buildings. Do you see the striking similarities with the first concept sketch?

5.      Marking the most important details, which should give some character to the scene.

6.      Further delving into the details…

7.      Erasing pencil lines and leaving only the fine, ink drawing.

8.      Seems like a big step forward in comparison with the previous one, but this part in fact required relatively little thinking and lots of arduous work. The one important aspect here was a decision about the light direction.

The next post will be dedicated to the third “case study” from the course - “Swamp Fortress” (I hope that the title is a bit intriguing).

In the meantime, you can take a look at how this medieval town square was colored with watercolors in sepia tones!

BLIGHTINGALES - music album illustrations

Based on my long and insightful researches (i.e. checking “likes” on Facebook and Behance and posting a one-question questionnaire on DeviantArt) I discovered, that my viewers/readers are most interested in my gothic illustrations.

Oddly enough, I don’t have too many opportunities to make such artworks. But today I can finally share with you a mysterious, ruined gothic cathedral painted as a cover illustration for a grey-metal (doom-death-symphonic black) band “Darken My Grief”.

So far I could only listen to a few demo fragments, but I hope I managed to capture an appropriate atmosphere. Luckily the band’s frontman – Duddu had quite a clear vision regarding the whole graphic design.  Considering this, the task may sound like a piece of cake, but in practice, it meant seemingly endless editions of the whole mass of tiny little elements. Apparently, that’s what happens, when two perfectionists meet. Anyway, the final result was worth the effort!

One of my ugly concept sketches – let’s call this phase “a necessary pain”. Probably at this stage the clients are seriously wondering whether they made the right choice when hiring me:

The final illustration – I had almost a total freedom here. The only requirement was to capture a woman and a flock of birds. So I decided to put them in a gothic environment (with cathedral’s ruins in a shade of whitened bones. Charming, I know):

The front cover design:

The back cover illustration (probably you can notice letters DMG hidden in the central symbol resembling an angel – this symbol is actually frontman’s brilliant idea):

Some of the lyrics backgrounds:

And now I’m waiting impatiently to listen to their music...  

"Fantasy Castle"

“I know only one thing. When I sleep, I know no fear, no  trouble, no bliss. Blessing on him who invented sleep."

Stanisław Lem, "Solaris"

This is a  kind of prelude to the tutorial about 3-point perspective. I'll present here how the drawing was created step by step. Whereas principles of perspective will be explained in the next few days in a downloadable tutorial somewhere here http://grimdreamart.blogspot.com/p/tutorials.html. (At least that's the plan)

1. Setting a composition. Guiding lines were made with a pencil:

2. Aha! experience - it will be a castle. At this stage there are lots of constructional lines and I'm still not sure what shape the castle should eventually have. Using a pencil rather than a pen is much more safe right now:

3. When all what's desired is fixed with a waterproof pen (Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pen is my personal favorite), we can get rid of additional interrupting lines. Well, it doesn't look excessively awesome, so...

4. Let's make some additions: windows, ornaments, dragons. It's immediately more cheerful, isn't it?

5. Time for watercolors. It's better to start with the environment before we'll go to the main subject. Apparently it's not necessary to choose warm colors for the foreground and the colder ones for the background. In some circumstances an exactly opposite approach can also work out well. Let's try it!

That's how the background looked like before it dried up. Grains of salt bravely absorb water and leave a fancy pattern:

6. These additions mentioned in the step 4...ekhmm, they're easier to draw with a pen than to paint with watercolors. I should have thought about that earlier...

7. Now it's time for textures made with a thin brush and dense paint. What's even more important I had to work further on overall color settings and  unify the whole painting. It required using a broad brush and diluted paint (yellow, purple and opaque gold):

8. Working on details with a pen once more. The whole drawing looks more "sharp" that way: