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HOULY1970 — The Kill
Published: 2007-02-05 19:43:57 +0000 UTC; Views: 3704; Favourites: 85; Downloads: 1725
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6B Graphite on 140lb medium textured watercolor paper.20" x 16"
( Smilodon Fatalis and Bison Latifrons )
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Comments: 96
This is so fascinating, and it reminds me of something I went through recently. I bought a new art book, A Painter's Guide to Design and Composition. I got it because I didn't trust myself on composition at all even though I was good at design back when I was a typesetter. Also, in school decades ago I got picked on a lot by certain college art teachers over composition rules I was breaking, and used to get furious at them for correcting my paintings and drawings in ways that ruined them. I had an insect with proportionally large, natural wings sweeping out of the image area because I'd gotten it so large that I couldn't fit them in. I liked the effect anyway.
Prof came up and changed it, drawing the wings in within the image area and rounding them off unrealistically, breaking up their lines and natural shape and leaving them stunted -- so small the animal would not get off the ground. I was horrified. I did it his way and got a good grade on it but it made me sick to look at it and I eventually abandoned it in his classroom, because I couldn't stand to look at the pathetic cripple. I didn't get what he meant about the wings leading the viewer's eye out of the picture, since to me they seemed to sweep into it toward the animal's head.
But it's been thirty years since that class and in between I was a typesetter and did a whole lot more artwork on that intuitive "this looks right" basis. I've made changes to things to make it balance better but don't think of that much -- and it was spooky reading that book and finding out it was a feelgood book. That nothing in it was unfamiliar or new, a lot of it was things I didn't think of as composition like drawing emphasis with the area of greatest value contrast or with detail vs. looseness.
It left me feeling a lot more confident about what I'm doing now, and I went to looking at all of what's on my walls in those terms to recognize that yeah, I don't totally suck at composition. But I don't really plan it much. I wind up deciding it in that intuitive way, what looks right or feels right to me. I can understand how you were deciding whether or not the other cats were in the picture, but once you settled on it, I understood it completely. I knew that look on his face -- that was his confident, proud "here comes my family to share my kill" look with a lot of love in it. Cat love. The kind of quiet love that's very immediate and trusting.
Ari will look at me like that. Or walk all over me and lay down as if I was his best cat-friend in the world. Sometimes he's not even purring but he'll lay down next to me because that's where he belongs. Smilodon is a social cat, and that's something I have never really seen an artist portray before. The roaring Smilodon is so common -- and you show him in this moment of quiet intimacy when the battle's over and the family's happy.
In seeing him, I can see the look on her face or his cubs. Your art draws me into the scene and creates an entire world. I'm seriously considering this drawing as the climax of a story or novel, it would be neat to follow both animals to the point their paths cross. The bison's interactions with his herd, the Smilodon's interactions with his pride. After writing The Hunt, I started getting the idea of doing another Pleistocene novel without any human characters, or at least not from the point of view of the human characters. More like White Fang or Raptor Red where the main character is one of the animals and its interactions with all the rest are from its point of view. Including, given time and place, maybe some distant interactions with humans, but from the cat's point of view.
It's still jelling but whether the bison is a major character or not, the bison's getting into it too. I wonder whether he was distracted, or got lost, or held back to defend his herd and succeeded ... he looks very noble and that might have been something like that. I'll know when I write it, but this drawing moves me very deep. I don't know how long it'll take to get to where I can do the pure nature novel, but I know I'll do it someday with a cat for main protagonist.
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I'm like you Robert. I just do what looks good to my eye. I only read the book about composition do's and don'ts just recently. Most of the time I get it right on my own, but it was an interesting read. I don't plan on following it too religiously. I knew when I placed the second lion that things no longer worked, and in retrospect I'm sure that I've broken the rules many times, but if it felt okay to me then who cares. Haha
I can see it as being the ending of a story as well ... Sort of Raptor Red like. Where the pride goes through hardships to finally catch up to the Bison herd that is their lifeline in the end.
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Yes! Exactly like that, it looks like the happy ending of "family troubles and love troubles among the sociable cats." With needing to find the bison herd when it migrated, minor climate changes involving changes of territory, various natural disasters and inter-cat disputes, some jerk of another cat trying to cut in and the cat in the drawing having to resolve some personal problems with his mother-in-law. I have some plotting notes on that sort of thing in my hard drive, one of my working days I started sketching it out and also bringing in the broken-backed cat -- the invalid female the pride was taking care of having made it into the LaBrea tar pits. Her story ends rather heroically with her roaring and warning off her daughter's mate when she is already stuck in the tar pit and going down, I wanted her death very moving and altruistic because her skeleton is the proof those cats took care of their kinfolk.
This would be the chapter after that when the male she warned goes off still hungry and does find the bison herd, calling in the family as the nearly-grown cubs, his mate and maybe her sister show up. I don't know all the family members yet, the ones I'm certain of are the young couple and the older female who is matriarch whether she's auntie or mother -- I could actually bring in the feline "auntie" custom too if the opening tragedy leaves a young adult orphaned.
Part of the plot involving LaBrea is that I think if the cats never succeeded in getting a meal off a stuck mammoth, they would eventually learn not to try. The danger is greater if they sometimes succeeded in getting handy stuck prey without hauling it out, but the numerous cats that wound up in it were the careless and overconfident or unlucky. The cats would stake the place out. They'd know it for a prey-trap -- but predator traps that always worked would eventually lead the survivors to give it up as a bad go, the way modern wolves and coyotes tend to stay off livestock until game is scarce because of the risk and don't usually hunt humans because of the risks. Predator traps are probably inconsistently rewarding. Sometimes they get away with it, and that leads them back to try again, eventually with tragic results.
Does that make sense to you?
It is Raptor Red like in type, but I didn't just lift the entire plot structure. I'm just going to vary the types of trouble the main characters go through and bring in the same sorts of tangent-chapters looking at life cycles of other animals in their area. I know I'll at least touch on the bison herd and its social interactions, studying a bit of how modern bison interact with each other and predators. Instead of a defeated old bull like the big gaston Raptor Red's young male got, I see the bison as either an altruistic herd defender taking a calculated risk but overconfident about his abilities at cat stomping, or an overconfident and hot-tempered bull -- except that his expression doesn't look like shocked overconfidence. More like he was aware he might die in it and did save the herd.
I also might tie them together if the injured old female got stomped by that bull, turning it into almost a feud plot but feud-by-coincidence, not quite going there with the anthropomorphism. Certainly the cat would know he'd stopped a danger to his family if that was the exact same animal that stomped auntie flat.
Actually I'm not sure if Auntie is a nasty mother in law to him or not, or if there are other in-pride conflicts going on and rival males trying to cut in. I'll have to see how that goes, because your drawing is affecting my plot! I had a mother-in-law conflict going but the maned young male in your drawing doesn't quite fit what I had in mind -- unless I switch things around and it's a conflict between Auntie and his mate, old matriarch and younger providing female. She might have been his Auntie.
I know that from here on out, I need more practice at composition to achieve what I want with it. I may deliberately try some of those "rules of composition" techniques if I get a problem piece and it does help to know why some of the things I did worked. But I have yet to achieve the grand sketchbook organization when unrelated subjects still make a pleasing page with multiple drawings. I am beginning to think the way to get the level of composition that I want is to do lots and lots of oversize pages with smaller drawings on them, instead of just using small sheets one sketch per -- which is what filled my 4" x 6" spiral sketchbook.
Often if you break the rules it comes out better. I've seen this thousands of times, there's no rule that hasn't also got its exceptions. Getting ideas that break up things like "never center the subject exactly" is fun. I think that's its own level of skill and that it's not always necessary to articulate or analyze it. You have a better eye for it than I do, but I'm learning. And the composition book was a serious bit of ego boost!
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Does that make sense to me ? Hell, it sounds like you've already written it ... haha.
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LOL -- that's just the plot outline. My real research for this novel is still ahead of me if I want the quality of Raptor Red. What vegetation grew in the area? A local map would help, especially a paleontologist's idea of what the area was like and what features changed from today's LA. What other animals were in the environment, what kind of weather disasters were there... I need to research all of this in detail and then get as much of it accurate to what's known as possible, letting subplots and interactions develop out of facts like the way the old female survived for months when crippled and unable to hunt. ~kitten42 suggested that she might have been helping to watch cubs while the rest of her pride hunted, which seems plausible to me. But that's speculation, it'd help a lot if I had an idea what was guesswork and what's known. I don't know if there's a way to tell how old individual cats were in the assemblage, or if they're just comparing with the lifespans of comparable surviving big cats and other secondary deductions.
So I do have a lot of work on it and the plot outline will probably mutate accordingly. But I have the main plot worked out and the one thing I don't want to do is anthropomorphize their society. Show them living as social cats do, more than trying to create cutesy too-humanlike characters who happen to be sabertooths.
On the other end of speculation, I sometimes wonder about the monogamous pairbonding of birds and if I created human characters with just that tweak to make them respond more like eagles than sparrows, how that would affect society. Pure science fiction and in that story it'll be because someone thought it'd be a good idea mutating human DNA to change instinct, resulting in people with hardwired courtship behaviors complex enough to protect them from people not in their group. Title of that story or novella is "The Swan Maiden" and is also still in progress.
I always have a bunch of these cooking on the back burner and then the time comes when it's time to write it. I mulled over "The Hunt" for years before I actuallly wrote it and then threw out the first version to try again a year later with a better book and more memorable characters. What is seriously annoying right now is that today the wrist is acting up and I haven't even been able to type as long as usual, I have to knock off after only an hour or at most three or four instead of "ooh today I'll write" and whammo, dive into the book till it's done. So I'm taking it easy on that too and just hanging on DA when I'm up to it. Or sketching.
I'm also working myself up into a painting mood since I got that comment from you, looking at the paintings I've done and the materials I have here to fool around with. I may even start with some of the sumi-e type stuff where it's done in a dozen strokes, that'd also be easier on my wrists. Might get out the Sakura watercolors for that.
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Yes I can understand that there would be a lot of research involved. It's one thing to fool those that haven't read into the facts of those times, but a true fan of the era would out you in a heartbeat.
The plot sounds good so far. I'm not sure they'd leave a crippled member to guard the future of their pride. I'm sure they'd leave a competant deffender along with her to deffend both her and the cubs, which might add to the subplot of her being bitter towards having to be babysat as well. I can imagine it'd be hurtful to her pride as a hunter, and provider.
Maybe some sumi-e Ari sketches Huh ?
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You might be right about that, she'd resent having to be defended and if there was strain between her and any other pride member that could turn into hissing-spitting matches and growing deeper resentments. While they might have the expectation she'd eventually get better. There might come some recognition on her part that she had healed as much as she was going to when she goes out to try the tarpit trap.
You're right about the fans of the period. People who are paleontology buffs will automatically snap up any book on their favorite subject and I can assume those are the guaranteed-sales -- who won't be back if I get something major wrong. If I get it right, then when I go bounce into another time period they'll be preordering it as soon as it has a release date just as I would if Bakker had another novel. I keep Raptor Red around as a reference too, and trust his science. I'm at a disadvantage not being a real paleontologist, but on one level this novel has to function as a popular science nonfiction book too. The more background details I find that are documented, the more the real buffs including first-time readers will keep coming back to it and maybe buying a second copy when it's worn out. Which I did for Raptor Red, though I still miss the holographic Utahraptor cover on the first edition.
Hmmm... I haven't successfully done sumi-e Ari yet. I might try monochrome dark brown for him sometime soon...
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Oh my icon expression LOL it was my amazment look Houly heh heh
I'm amazed by all your shading and details I love it 
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yay for paleo arts X3
love the detail, the textures in the grass and the fur look smexy
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Straight up Damn Smexy !!! haha
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this is amazing i would give anything to be able to draw like that.
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It's simple ... Just sell your soul. Haha
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Your work is just so wonderful. And your saber toother is splendid.
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Wow, John.. you have done it again.. I just love your pencil work, and I think it is just that kind that gets to me the most of your work.. You are so good at the smoothness.. I love the composition in this one here, and the motif in itself is a good idea. It is raw, and wild, but still not in the act, so to speak.. Calm and wild at the same time. I adore it! Definately worth that favourite... if I could give you five of them, I would
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Awww You're too sweet Ingrid.
One is more than enough. I'm glad that you like it.
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My pleasure, you're very welcome
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WOW JOHN ! I truly think this is one of your best works. Great texture and detail in the fur. Artistic sky and powerful! - Linda
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Thanks Linda, I'm honored.
I did do a bit of style contrasts with my hard edged Illustrative clouds and the grass. It offsets the greater detail that I put into the animals to make them become the main focal point of the drawing.
I'm glad that you like it.
John
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Thank you Miss Emma, I appreciate the comment.
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Not a problem at all, you're amazing.
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Not at all, I'm incredibly envious of your talent.
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Practice makes perfect my dear Emma.
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Yeah, I must admit I HAVE perfect the stick man.
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haha. It's all uphill from there Emma
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haha damn it. i hate uphill.
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haha ... most do. I'll give you a push.
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better be a big push for the hill im climbing
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Yeah I saw on your journal that you're having boyfriend problems. Good luck with that Emma.
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Life is tough, just gotta pull through it.
I'm sure we will.
thank you.
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*perfected
obviously haven't perfected my typing skills though.
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