Erté

(Sorry this is kind of a big post.. When I start looking at pretty things it's hard to stop and I'm kind of a reference machine.)

The other day I remembered the sculpture artist that I drew a lot of reference from for Treebeard during character design: Romain de Tirtoff, who went by Erté (french pronunciation of his initials, RT). His work isn't really reminiscent of any of the fashion or timeline decisions we've made, but I was really inspired by his use of form. I think he has a really thoughtful and beautiful way of handling shapes that would be interesting to consider for how elements in the environment or her clothes/hair move.. Not to mention it would be a really strong contrast between the ethereal world and the flat, dull reality.

So here are some pictures, that if nothing else are fun to look at :)

Some of his paintings are fun too:

Someone made a stained glass version, with teal!

Sabzi

We've been talking a lot about stylizing our character. Realism doesn't interest us, and neither does the typical pixar or dreamworks style of 3D cartooning. Nor do we necessarily want to create a 3D piece that looks hand drawn or like a painting.

Enter Sabzi, a little known painter and sculptor I first discovered in a small gallery in Whistler.



I thought this idea would be great for our girl - minimalistic facial features, strong sense of form and lighting, storytelling in gesture and pose. I think the painting itself is a little to indicative of paint, too much texture, brush strokes, etc. So I think if we reduce the noise, we could come up with something special.

Here's a sculpture of his - I think this is a good indicator for what a 3D model could look like.