lines and colors :: a blog about drawing, painting, illustration, comics, concept art and other visual arts

Friday, March 31, 2006

Daren Bader

Posted by Charley Parker at 9:16 am

Daren Bader
How’s this for a transition, from yesterday’s post about eye-placement in portraits to today’s illustration of a cyclops. (What’s that saying? “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed, giant-tusked, white veined, maniacal, rampaging cyclops is king.”?… or something like that…)

Daren Bader is a fantasy illustrator who, among other projects, does a number of illustrations for the Magic: The Gathering card-based game. He steps outside the usual approach to that genre, though, in that he treats his Magic paintings like illustrations for the grand adventure fantasy books that were the stomping grounds of illustrators like Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth, who he obviously admires.

He tackles his mythological or fantasy subjects with broad strokes and painterly chunks of color, using strong value contrasts for drama and nice tonal control for atmosphere. The result makes for images full of action, adventure and lots of visual fun.

He creates interesting fantasy animals that are wierd amalgams of dinosaurs and mammals, and also paints more straightforward images of dinos. Some of his pen and ink illustrations show the influence of Franklin Booth and Roy Krenkel.

Link: www.darenbader.com/
Site Quirks: The site is a little less than straightforward. In the galleries you have to rollover the thumbnails on the left to reveal categories on the right, then click to enter the sub-gallery. Once there the large images are revealed by rollover rather than the expected click, which can be disconcerting if they haven't all loaded yet. Also there is sometimes a set of next/previous arrows under the vertical row of thumbnails that advances to subsequent galleries. Altogether not a very intuitive arrangement. Also many of the sub-galleries say "Coming Soon", and have said that for many months. It's worth the effort to nose around, though, there's some cool stuff here.