ertorre.com
A short while back I bought a new iPad. The main reason I did this was so that I could use the Apple Pencil. I was very curious to see what I could do with it. Shortly afterwards I discovered the Procreate program/app and since then, I'm off and running.
Here are some examples of the type of things I've done!
First up is this picture of actor Robert Conrad. I found the image via Google and it is from an appearance he had in the 1970's in the Battle of the Network Stars TV show. After a couple of attempts at using the iPad and Pencil, this is the first one I consider an out and out success. I'm extremely happy with this image!
Next up is a take on one of my favorite movie stills, this one from the 1922 film Nosferatu. Nosferatu was the first -and done without permission!- adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Mr. Stoker's widow sued and the movie was ordered destroyed. Luckily, copies survived and today I consider this the best adaptation of Dracula... quite a thing to say considering how many great adaptations of the story have been made since!
For people in and around my age, the below image is a classic one. It is Raquel Welch in, if you couldn't tell, the movie One Million Years B.C. I've never seen the film but I've always been fascinated by this image and, therefore, wanted to take it on. It came out pretty nice!
Not every attempt works and, in the below case of Lauren Bacall, I consider this one a failure. Don't get me wrong, I don't think its terrible but it just didn't quite hit the note I was hoping for. That's the thing about art and life in general, you give each job your best but sometimes things don't quite work out. On to the next one!
While I wasn't all that happy with the Lauren Bacall piece, the opposite happened with the below piece, that of Charles Bronson in the movie The Dirty Dozen. When I started this piece, I thought it wasn't working and I'd just abandon it. But I worked on and, as if by magic, the piece wound up working quite nicely. That's not to say I consider it one of the best one's I've done, but it captures Mr. Bronson quite well, even if it looks like it could use some color and/or background.
And here we have another piece that I feel is a grand slam. We return to the character of Dracula and Mr. Christopher Lee's interpretation of the good Count. While the movies Mr. Lee was in might not have been uniformly good, there is no denying his interpretation of Dracula was something unique and fascinating. Mr. Lee made the Count frightening and animalistic. Very chilling stuff!
Next up is this picture of Rutger Hauer from the 1986 thriller The Hitcher. I loved that film, wherein Mr. Hauer plays a remorseless killer who has a weird thing for C. Thomas Howell's character. Along with his appearances in Blade Runner and Ladyhawke, these are probably my three favorite Rutger Hauer films. By the way, when coming up with the character of B'taav in my Corrosive Knights series, I very much had in mind Mr. Hauer as the visual representation of him.
The beauty of doing these images on a computer is that its giving me far more freedom to experiment than I've had before. When I inked using a brush and on paper, I often had to get everything done "right" for if I didn't, it was a pain to white out large and small areas to correct errors. Further, after inking a piece I can also do some interesting colors. In this case, I used an image of Paul Newman -an odd one as he had a beard and longer hair than usual- and played around with bright, Moebius (Jean Girard)-colors. Fun stuff!f!f
