The First Golden Age of Illustration

 I have seen numerous articles referring to the early twentieth century as the Golden Age of Illustration but for me the first true age of illustration lies in the 13th, 14th and 15th century.  Then there seemed to be that necessary combination of skill knowledge and resource to produce great books and the required personal wealth and vanity to support their  production.  

The Luttrell Salter which is in the British museum is an example I have mentioned before. 
Recently another excellent example of this kind of illustration came up for auction in Sothebys.  

It was Louis De Gruuthuse's Copy of the deeds of Sir Gillion De Trazegnies in the Middle East (1464).  The 237 page boasts numerous illustrations but for me the borders of these pages are where the magic is.  Of the pages reproduced were intricately worked foliage.  Among the foliage are depictions of small cannon, peacocks, men with swords and a monkey pretending to be a doctor examining urine in a jar.  It is reasonable to speculate some of these at least were for satire and amusement.  

 The estimate for the auction was 3-5 million dollars.  It would have been a pity for such a book to disappear into a private collection.  Happily the book has been bought by the Getty Museum. It went for 6.2 million dollars.  
The J. Paul Getty Museum has a great resource here looking at renaissance manuscripts. 

Sketches 7

Sketches

Some more sketchyness. 

Space Shuttle Ready for Launch study

Space Shuttle Ready for Launch

Took this subject on to get some practice rendering hard surfaces.  This is something I have not done a lot of and based on this to do it well requires becoming really familiar with the lasso tool and planning the order in which stuff gets layered.

Sketches 6

Some posemaniacs (60 seconds) and making my way through The Hurt Locker (a good movie).  Doing a lot of war stuff mainly because they generally give a lot of interesting poses and shots. I think these are helping even by just getting a little more confident in tackling them.  

Merlin Part 2

Merlin Character Final

This the final of the character started and posted about earlier.  The character was mostly worked out so I wanted to just finish it as well as possible.  I took some time and tried to render as best as possible. Despite the time spent  still not a clean finish but on to the next one. 

Digging For Gold

Digging For Gold

Finally got this piece to some kind of finish.  Seemed to take forever.  I chipped away at it on and off for the past 5-6 weeks.  As you can see below this started off as something quite different.  I did some thumbnails went for the original composition and then got worried about it.  So I changed it all up.  I tried to borrow a lot from Caravaggio's 'The taking of Christ' for the colours and light. The mud started off smaller but then I took some licence with it . Could have kept picking at it but need to move on. 

Merlin Character part 1

Merlin Sketches

I did a series of rough sketches for the Merlin character.  This was to go with the Arthur character already done for the Crimson Daggers mentoring.  I wanted to go for a wanderer.  Probably not of the culture but had absorbed some of its aspects.  I dumped the idea of the staff and wanted to work with the wilder appearing guy.