I recently took a trip to the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. There I saw some mind blowing landscape paintings by Albert Bierstadt. The environment for this piece was influenced by his work. I still have a long way to go, but just studying his use of value and color made the process a lot easier.Painted in Photoshop CS3.
This is a Gnomon Contest winner!
He is so boned
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ReplyDeleteSo let's see...a semi-naked and quite scrawny woman is actually restraining the arm of a fully grown man holding a weapon. It's ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteWhy not a woman of size? Why built like a model, with arms like twigs? This is why this neo-fem fantasy stuff sucks; at least when men make barbarians, they're usually people that would be convincingly dominant in life: Conan, Hercules, any Frazetta character, yeesh. At least Frazetta gave his women some size. Your gal here couldn't beat my little brother playing mercy.
Women like the one in this picture get beaten by their boyfriends on a daily basis; it's time to paint some gals that actually have a chance to kick some butt.
Actually, anyone can stop a swing if he or she catches it before full momentum. That's why boxers and ultimate fighters sometimes shove their heads into their opponents' personal spaces: the punch cannot be executed completely and therefore has only a fraction of its normal power.
DeleteAdditionally, the woman is not that scrawny - fantasy art tends to exaggerate the musculature of its subjects. She may be skinnier than the average subject, but she looks almost as muscular as I do. I can pick people up by their armpits and throw them or lift them over my head and onto my shoulders, and I can do one-armed pull-ups.
The "men-made barbarians" that you refer to often have the characteristic bulk of power-lifters and bodybuilders, frequently the slowest and least enduring of all athletes (not to mention, they'd only be good for about one punch in a fight). Not good for a combat situation.
Yes, sometimes I, like many men, want to look like those huge men, but looking like that and being fit for combat is a hard set of criteria to maintain. And then again, this is "fantasy art," two words that allow for some serious literary license.