An insight into one of my more favourable artists

When it comes to preference and the subject of artists; I have a few favourites. Firstly I'm going to cut out every traditional painter, so no old masters. I'm doing this because there's just too many. That said, there's still tonnes of digital artists I love. Sam Carr with his generous anatomy knowledge. Jonas De Ro with his amazing...well, everything. Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme with his ridiculously good compositions. I don't want to talk about any of these artists. Because considering everything, my favourite thing to see is still ultimately colour. Iv'e chosen to look at Peter Mohrbacher. I'd just like to say I own none of the artwork in this post.

Colours man. AGhghugh. That's literally my response to his work. Colour theory is just so pivotal to everything and it's often shunned to one side. People are generally obsessed with learning how to draw everything incredibly well, which is good at first, but then you have no concept of making things interesting. You can be technically correct, inspired or colour driven. It's rare to see these elements come together so sensibly. One thing that is misinterpreted is the idea that artists like Peter know everything about colour to achieve colours like this. This is wrong. Beyond the general colours of a piece there are lots of subtle colours that make all of the others pop. Very similar to an oil painting. And when you think about oil painting, it's generally the process of mixing colours and placing them together that gives these new, interesting colours. It's a result of the process is generally what I'm trying to say. And it's no different to photoshop. Layer styles is pretty much where all these insane colours come from. It's random. Random-ish. Random to the point of creation, but with room to change these colours willingly. So, that's the random aspects of the colour. But it's still mostly organic, thought out and such. Going back to oil paint, to get the colours that you want, you have to mix them. They have to be mixed from pigments, basic colours. If you think about seeing things, with our small field of view; You don't see an awful lot of different colours because they're all bound by the lighting conditions. They're muted. Peter colour picks from a colour wheel in an unusual manner to achieve his palettes.

So, here's a colour wheel. Nothing impressive. Now imagine I want my painting to be mostly blue with a bit of purple. I'd select the primary pigments from the outside of the wheel. Like so.

This selection is now your entire palette. Your yellows, greens, oranges, everything that isn't in the selection still is. It's just squashed into the grey area in the middle and balanced into the colours that you want. So from this tiny selection, lots of colours can still be used.

So, that's a bit of colour theory. I'm going to look at one of his pieces and try to explain some of his thought processes behind creating it. Throughout Peter's pieces one thing that remains somewhat consistent is the colour itself. It's one of the first things established. Composition however is something that changes over and over. Literally over years in some cases. Here's his work in progress for a single piece.

Started in grey scale. Added a small amount of colour with layer styles. He uses a round brush almost exclusively so everything is literally rendered.

He realised the colours he made were rather interesting. Worked in with more of this palette. He wasn't happy with the character or colour. 

Established this lovely palette. Noticed the eye lens flare was distracting.

Adding more compositional elements. Circles are always good.

Character wasn't really doing much before. Made him more interesting by making him more inhuman. Giving him these trinkets in his hands. He has lots of hands, why not. 

And then here's the final. More of the green-ish blue was added over the top. In the shadows on the face you'll notice. Going back to the more automatically added colours. Peter makes art like this, fundamentally for one specific reason; It's what he wants to paint. It's what he wants to show. And it turns out the way it does because of the constant self evaluation. Literally, over years.

Here's a few links to more of his work.

His Deviantart: http://petemohrbacher.deviantart.com/gallery/

His lovely website: http://www.vandalhigh.com/

An interesting chat about his work and showcase of how he does it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6wnLpTtQUE

All artwork in this post is owned by Peter Mohrbacher. Not by me.

Thanks for reading.