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bellatrys — Midsummer Mermaid, 2007
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Published: 2007-07-11 01:36:43 +0000 UTC; Views: 1564; Favourites: 18; Downloads: 0
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Description
Loosely inspired by a phrase in Oberon's speech to Puck - "And certain stars shot madly from their spheres, To hear the sea-maid's music" - in emulation of the Golden Age of Art Nouveau illustration - Mucha, Pyle, Parrish, et al.Original pencil drawing scanned, redrawn and coloured in Photoshop with a Wacom Intuos tablet.
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Comments: 4
Hidys --
Asicho posted on Shejidan that you now have a DeviantArt page, and I had to look. Love the mermaid!!! Please -- more art soon! One is not enough!
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well, thanks! But I'm sure you're more familiar with Art Noveau than you realize - a lot of its most famous examples were poster art, and a lot of them are still popular, like these examples at allposters.com , I'm sure you'll recognize some of them from people's dorms and stores etc. And modern sf&f illustrators have been and continue to be influenced by Art Nouveau illustration schools - Stephen Hickman, Thomas Canty, just to name two. (Kinuko Craft is ,of a Pre-Raphaelite, altho' there's a lot of overlap, art genres aren't cut and dried either.) Oh, and tho' Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted Classical subjects, he did so with a very Art Nouveau style and sensibility - and he was a direct model for Dinotopia! So much so that I nearly had an attack of quasi-vertigo, so bad was the deja-vu when I first opened up Dinotopia in the bookstore.
Other famous illustrators whose works are still popular as prints or as inspirations for contemporary fantasists would include Dulac, Nielsen (who worked briefly for Disney, on Fantasia, the bit at the end with the candles in the forest) and Rackham - Canty's work shows a lot of Rackham influence - Charles Vess of Stardust fame, and Amano best known for his work on Final Fantasy...
And yes, historical eclecticism is a hallmark of Art Nouveau: i.e., we pick and choose bits out of history all over the world and fooge them together, like so .
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While I confess that what I know of Art Noveau could be written on one of her scales (a small one, at that), I like it. The figure is very reminiscent of ancient Egyptian design, which makes a very eclectic mix with the (I'm assuming) Indian-inspired jewelry.
It's quite lovely.
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