The Election of 2016 and 2020

What seems like forever ago, in the innocent way way back times of 2016, I made a poster about the presidential election. It was in the style of Drew Struzan, who popularized the movie poster design of putting a bunch of faces and scenes into a montage. Think of the poster for Big Trouble in Little China, or The Goonies, or Indiana Jones, or if you haven't seen any of those, Stranger Things on Netflix.

If you are young, live under a rock, or have had your memory wiped by years of stress and fatigue, you might not remember what a shit-show the election of 2016 was. It was, by all accounts, pure and utter chaos. It was so entertaining that it truly felt like a movie, with plot threads and sudden reveals, twists and combatting larger than life personalities. They showed the presidential debates in movie theaters. 

Bernie had a bird land on his podium. Russia was ever looming. A man jumped the fence at a Trump rally and rushed the stage. It was like nothing we'd ever seen before, even with how crazy American elections usually are. So I decided to make a movie poster for it. It'd be a good exercise in painting likenesses, and hopefully Hillary would win and I could sell some prints. It was not to be.

I wanted the title to play off of the phrase hell or high water, which is also a movie. And I wanted to be a little tongue-in-cheek. Yeah, Hillary wrapped herself in the flag, because of course she'd embrace this weird faux patriotism. And Bill holding her leg like a damsel in distress is a nice subversion of the trope. Before all the Republicans started licking Trump's boots, they were calling him a liar and a coward. Ted Cruz fought the primary all the way into the summer. Oh, how far the mighty have fallen.

You already know what happened. Like any great dystopian film, the twist is that the bad guy wins. Ted Cruz started towing the line, Paul Ryan retired, Hillary got a book deal, Obama went on vacation for like three years and Bernie kept fighting the good fight. And Trump became president. So I put this painting away.

Fast forward three years, and the news never stopped coming. Every week was an exhausting cascade of crisis both real and manufactured. Then the pandemic hit, the economy took a nose-dive, we were forced to work from home (if at all), and thousands died. 

Oh, also there was an election coming. Unlike last time I designed the poster, where I had a tough time figuring out who and what to put into it, this time it was simple: Trump was at the center of it all. Even things he didn't cause and had no control over, he'd fight to be a part of the story. We handed a narcissist the keys to the country and gave him a megaphone and watched in fascinated horror (or awe, for his fans) as he spun like a devastating top from problem to problem. Just one of his controversies would have sunk any other politician, but he was so full of controversy it actually lifted him out of his own flood. 

One week we were reading emails that showed Trump Jr. had welcomed Russian information against the opposition, the next week we were outraged about kids in cages, the next week we were reading about his lawyers paying strippers hush money to not spill the beans about his extramarital affairs. It was a happy little accident that my first "movie's" title was 'Hill or High Water,' because it was clear that we had picked high water, and we were drowning. All of us, that is, except Trump.

The only thing that I would change if I did it again is paint the Capitol Building on fire instead of the White House. Could have been a real prophet with that! I wanted to make sure I got his centaur-like stance right, and I used a few texture heavy brushes this time to really play up the traditional media look, especially in his pants and suit coat.

I put hands under his feet as if he was being held aloft by his aides. The microphones and a fully submerged reporter still trying to ask a question represented how the media ecosystem simultaneously suffered and was completely beholden to Trump. They needed Trump as much as he needed them. Every tweet was opportunity for a think piece, every interview provided days of analytical content. Every rally was broadcast with morbid fascination. And Biden was no where to be seen. When the election happened, I remember my father-in-law asked me how Biden won when there was so much clear energy for Trump at his rallies. My answer was that a lot of people didn't vote for Biden. They voted AGAINST Trump. And that's why Trump is the only person on a poster that encapsulates one of the most chaotic and unprecedented elections in modern history: because he made it so that the choice was fully black and white: vote for Trump, or vote against him.

And we did.

One more piece for good measure, because I'm not sure I ever showed it anywhere:

Not sure I like the colors, but it was an interesting experiment.

Morning Buzz

 Let's talk about the most detailed, complex piece I've ever done. It's not the piece with like eight figures in a courtroom. It's not the piece with a cyborg woman crashing through a window fighting cyborg panthers. It's the picture of a grassy meadow and a salamander with a coffee and some bees.

Part of the complexity, I mean all of the complexity, comes from wanting to get the greenery right. Yeah, I could imply grass and leaves, and I did in the background, but I wanted the viewer to feel like they were in this grass. I love the look of sunlight shining through leaves, giving them this bright green/yellow glow. If I wanted to properly show those spots of sunlight, I was going to need to really pay attention to individual leaves. 

I found this really beautiful, twisted, moss-covered tree on one of our hikes through Clear Creek Metro Park. It has so much life in its shape and all the things growing out of it, and I thought, you know, this would make a really lovely image. So I did a color sketch.

You can see I had a slightly different creative direction for this one early. But I felt that, as much as I love dinosaurs, we needed a better sense of mystery and discovery. Would I like to discover dinosaurs in a metro park? 100% yes. BUT how much cuter would it be to have a little salamander soaking in a warm summer morning? So I made another color sketch.

This composition would be mostly flowers and leaves in a meadow. There is this nice big tree to anchor the piece, but we need a better defined foreground, middle ground, and background. I can establish a few things by putting some giant leaves and bees in the foreground: we get a good size comparison for the tree, a bold object to help draw us into the image, and overlap to keep the perspective from flattening out. 

The real challenge came not from determining the composition but filling in the leaves. These are essentially negative spaces: it's a meadow, so it is about the collection of thousands of leaves instead of individuals. But as the leaves get closer to the viewer, detailing them individually becomes more important to sell the environment. I didn't actually change the far background that much from this initial sketch. But how the hell am I going to paint leaves into the foreground without it looking like busy chaos? I'm not sure, honestly, but this is what I did.

First, I went back to the tree and shot some reference on a sunny day.

Then I outlined the spaces I needed to fill in my painting and took that shape outline over to the photo and moved it around until I liked the leaves inside of it. Then I traced the leaves in that outline and dragged the tracing back into my painting. This did two things for me: I was able to control what part of the reference I was looking at while painting, and I could control the value structure of the leaves I was painting. There were two value/color structures in the meadow, one for the shade and one for the sun. So I'd draw a shape over the sketch that represented the sun area, then take that shape and find leaves in the sun. Can you spot where I grabbed my reference?

Could I have found a better, more painterly way of filling in the meadow? Maybe. But while I started off painting willy-nilly, I was overwhelmed by the busy-ness of the lush greenery almost immediately. I needed to find structure, especially because I was already making sure to keep my eye on the bigger picture. The leaves in the shadow areas had to be detailed but couldn't stand out beyond the shadow. Similarly, each leaf, sunlight or no, needed to blend into the final image. They needed to be detailed enough to be believable, but not so detailed that the finer elements of my painting got lost. Forest for the trees, and all that. Did I succeed?

The bees, and especially the salamander, actually took the least amount of time. I redesigned the bees to look cuter and less sinister (something about those black pointy legs creeped me out), but the salamander actually stayed exactly the same as the sketch. I was happy with this simple contented smile and his little grippy hands, things that just worked from the sketch and I didn't want to mess up that energy by overpainting him. I spent the most time holding the overall design in mind as I tackled each piece, hyper-diligent to keep colors and highlights in their place depending on whether they were in the shade or the sunlight, background, foreground, or middle ground. This determined everything from value range to detail. 

Here's the starkest example, with foreground sunlight overlapping middle ground shade and background sunlight. The trees in the background needed just the right amount of detail to sell what they were, but primarily to accent the bees.

This is the part of the painting that almost drove me crazy. But once I started grabbing pieces of the reference that I liked and sort of puzzle-piecing them together, the process became much easier. If leaves were in the shade they had three values and two hues: some leaves had a warmer hue from echoing sunlight from surrounding leaves, others were cooler, getting their light by reflecting the blue sky. If the leaves were in the sunlight they had four values and two hues: if we were seeing the leaf from below, they would have a bright warm yellow hue because of the sunlight glowing through them. If we saw the top of the leaf, it had a cooler, whiter hue, since we were seeing the sun bouncing directly off of the leaf. It took a lot of meticulous, detail minded execution to get through this little section of meadow. 

This was one of the only places where the leaves were sparse enough that it was easy to show the difference between abstract soft background and sharper, brighter middle ground. This was probably one of the more fun parts of the painting to execute, oddly enough.

I painted the salamander last, which turned out to be a good idea. He didn't really need much to finish him, just a few sharp highlights so he looked a little slimy and a little rainbow on his cup. 

I tried to really push the brush texture and build around the color study itself to try and maintain some of the energy of the initial sketch. I painted this at 22x36, which means that any image I show online will be robbed of much of the texture the full size image has. So, sorry about that. You could always buy a print to see the texture better!

Anyways, hope you liked it, and my explanation of the process. I'll have more work to show soon!