Erik Tiemens is an award winning movie concept artist and landscape painter extraordinaire.  He has worked on TV series like the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Star Trek Voyager, as well as blockbuster films such as Jurassic Park and Forrest Gump.  Erik is a fantastic painter from traditional oils, acrylics, gouaches and watercolors to digital painting.  While his talent for painting is very good, what I found most impressive was his teaching method for using a traditional medium like gouache and watercolor for painting environment concepts in the entertainment industry.  Erik very clearly shows the importance of all the steps he goes through, from reference to final touches on a painting.

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Reference

From the beginning Erik is very clear to show that before tackling a concept he tries to gather as much reference as he can.  For his Gnomon Workshop DVD demonstration, Watercolor and Gouache Painting: The Techniques of Erik Tiemens, Erik took the time to go out and look at bays, sea harbors, and shipyards to both take photos for reference and to draw from life while there.  Many times throughout the DVD he will refer back to how important the initial reference gathering stage is.

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Thumbnails and Warm-up

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Erik fills this DVD with all sorts of great tips about painting and creating concepts with a brush.  Much like an athlete, artists must warm up their art muscles. Erik’s warm-up starts with creating many thumbnails with differing proportions and orientation to give him self composition variety.  Each thumbnail is only a couple inches wide at most forcing him to work small and focus more on composition and lighting.  One of my favorite parts is when he showed how even the smallest thumbnails can still be effective by creating some that were no larger than his actual thumbnail.  Erik’s use of toned paper for creating his thumbnails increases not only increased my desire for a toned sketchbook, but also helped increase his own efficiency.

Enlarge and Repeat

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After completing his first set of thumbnails, Erik moves on to even larger thumbnails.  With his previous versions for reference, he proceeds to create thumbnails about twice the size of the previous set.  One key to Erik Tiemens’s process is the generation of multiple thumbnails at once.  Always working on multiple thumbnails provides many benefits, but particularly when working with a traditional paint medium, like gouache and watercolor, this allows one to dry while the creativity and focus remain uninterrupted.  Erik is constantly jumping from one composition working on it refining, and then moving to another one to let it dry.  Then he will come back to it once it is dry and draw on top of the paint to plan things out once again.  Once happy with another iteration of sketching, Erik will paint on top yet again.  Erik lists the constant back and forth as a necessary experimental creation part to the whole process.

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Finally Erik chooses a composition from a combination of his thumbnails.  After drawing the loose composition on his final watercolor block he repeats the same process, but now with his larger thumbnails as a guide.

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Throughout the DVD Erik paints and explains his thought process behind the strokes of his brush, and whips of his pen across the paper.  I found it extremely satisfying to see an artist create many thumbnail paint sketches at a fast rate.  Erik Tiemens proving that traditional mediums can still be very useful in a video game or film production studio environment.  Constantly through out the video Erik reinforces the need for artists to experiment, not only with their ideas, but also with their medium.  An artist must really get to know how to work the paints wet into wet, and to use the abstract shapes that the paintbrush can create to help inform their composition.  This tutorial, master class, or for me pure joy of a DVD has caused me to dig out my watercolors and brushes, and start experimenting again.  Thanks Erik!

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