Week Three is upon us! Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet this week - there are some personal things going on that have been a bit time consuming and distracting - but I’m out here trying to get back on track!
And let’s do that with some cool stuff from THE CULL!
I’ve got a few really fun interviews about costume design with some amazing artists lined up - I hope for next week? - but in the meantime I wanted to show off a very cool process post for THE CULL. As I mentioned in a previous Process Junkie post, these will be an ongoing series of sorts, looking at process from all kinds of angles - this time just the pure joy of watching Mattia De Iulis be brilliant in a short painting video.
I’m hesitant to share too much too soon on THE CULL as this project will not be releasing until after BLACK CLOAK wraps, but sometimes something is just too cool and you can’t wait to show it to people!
These kind of process posts are still free for now as we spread the word in these first few weeks, but if you want to keep seeing stuff like this, you should definitely consider subscribing if you haven’t already:
And of course, if you missed it in the original post about these projects, here is a promo page from THE CULL by Mattia:
All right, it’s back to work with me - but sound off in the comments and let us know what you think! <3
xo~Kelly
Mattia is no less than magnificent. The way he viewed and felt this page always reminds me of a dreamlike feeling, the composition of the landscape sounds dreamlike, in a Lovecraftian way. The gray palettes, the slowness, the beach, the mist, the rocks, the eyes, the creature and the cloudy sky. It is an almost palpable synesthetic mosaic. And it comes, the same feeling as when I read The Night Ocean (1936) by R.H. Barlow with Lovecraft itself. There is an excerpt that might describe my feeling,
“Now that I am trying to tell what I saw I am aware of a thousand maddening limitations. Things seen by the inward sight, like those flashing visions which come as we drift into the blankness of sleep, are more lived and meaningful to us in that form than when we have sought to weld them with reality. Set a pen to a dream, and the color drains from it. The ink with which we write seems to dilute with something holding too much of reality, and we find that after all we cannot delineate the incredible memory.”
Honestly, I love these landscapes of nature with an unnatural object in the middle, the feeling of "strangeness from the unknown" coursing through your veins. Like the narrator of the aforementioned short story, he describes his mood for this as a sight of “brief hideousness and underlying filth of life,” the “lethargic fear…of the peering stars and of the enormous black waves that welcome to clasp [his] bones within them—the vengeance of all the indifferent, horrendous majesty of the night ocean.”
Hyper-realistic comic artists that also have cartooning skills kind of blow my mind. For the longest time it was realism vs. expressiveness, but this is both.