Broken Paradise Illustration

James began the illustration for the Ark with constructing a bulkhead template and then arranging it into a perspective grid placed on  the keel to see if he could get the effect of a ship under constriction  he wanted.  After consulting K.G.Powderly a twin keel design was settled upon and the new bulkhead configuration was  designed in Photoshop at the right and placed on a berm to allow workmen to access the bottom of the vessel. A low angle was chosen to enhance the scale of the  craft from a workman’s point of view.

single keel bulkhead                                      double keel bulkhead                               The second bulkhead was duplicated and placed in a

                                                                                                                                                       perspective grid on top of a berm taken from a photo  

                                                                                                                                                       near the on ramp of I-25 and San Mateo in Albuquerque

The completed image was never intended to be an original painting from scratch

but a book illustration built from photographic parts and existing textures to

deliver the greatest effect with available materials as possible.  None the less it

produced an original total illustration that serves the book quite well. Digital

“painting” can be a work painted  in the computer with traditional techniques or

can incorporate manipulated photographic images with near endless variations commensurate with the skills and inventiveness of the artist. Digital painting is a new medium and James thinks it will carve it’s own nitch in the fine arts galaxy as the genre develops and grows. Like it or not, the digital age is here and any artist of any age would explore its possibilities had it been available to them.

1- The berm was extended out with some preliminary details but the framing was too tight and needed to be extended, so in      Fig 2- the image was widened and a dry dock containment wall was added with temporary workers for scale reference. A crane built from odd industrial photos taken from the internet dominates the background. Fig 3 included some rail and a platform which basically set the stage for the workers to inhabit.

Fig 4 was populated with people taken from eastern cultures in an attempt to replicate, without designing an entire pre-flood population, the look of the time and triceratops for pulling the crane platform were layered in. Fig 5 polished off some worksite equipment and in Fig 6 the image especially around the dinosaurs was enhanced to final effect.

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