“Sapphire” by BM

The past few months of silence I’ve been on a personal journey. Before I felt comfortable writing this article I wanted to have a deeper understanding of the components to be deconstructed. Today we have a piece by the, needless to say, world-class artist BM. When I ran this article idea past her, I received one of the fastest responses of my career so far. Still didn’t take the edge off once it sank in how amazing she actually is. Like many writers I was faced with my inner critic, the little voice wondering how the fuck we allowed ourselves to take on challenges seemingly far beyond our actual skills. I’ve not fully triumphed over my self-doubt, but I do want to get this piece written. Additionally I feel that I’ve developed a much better understanding of the tools, techniques and special sauce that makes BM’s work so wonderful.

In preparation for this, one of the things I had to figure out was what exactly I wanted to deconstruct. BM is very good at a lot of different things and consequently there are lots of directions one could go. The first thing I did besides scroll through her portfolio was study her actual painting process. I picked this particular piece because it embodies the fundamental elements of her process and style, and also because it strikes a deeply personal chord.

There are a few main structural components to her work that I want to drill into. One is construction and glazing, which is the process that she uses to build and then create her artwork. Another is what I’ll refer to as “detail allocation” something I’ve covered before but that is really emphasized in this piece, and the relationship between value and form. Then I’ll dig into artstyle, references and how we ultimately incorporate life study, anatomy and visual library into how we make art.

Let’s start with art style and how to pull in life studies and the other things I mentioned into your work. The first thing that struck me about BM’s work is that her characters look very realistic with a few exaggerated stylized components. The anatomical awareness and particularly the understanding of light is very apparent in her work. On my own artist journey something that I’ve run into a fair amount is the extent to which stylized work should be informed by real life. What I’ve found unsurprisingly, is that the best stylized artists have the greatest knowledge of what they are exaggerating and stylizing. A piece works as long as whatever you are making has plausible anatomy and plausible perspective and so on, and to achieve these skills, pulling in our study of real life and using references allows us the freedom to improvise. The more dynamic our visual library and the better we understand how things look in real life, the more creative we can actually be. A great example is how BM uses light in this painting. Around the areas of primary focus, say the face and main part of the hair the shadows are very dynamic and thoughtfully placed, with realism coming through. In other areas with less focus she uses a much softer light and dreamy blending technique as a kind of stylistic choice, because she understands the affect of value and detail.

This brings me to the next component which is the allocation of detail and how she builds this into her construction process. On BM’s Instagram and YouTube she has a few samples of her process, that elucidate some of what I’m talking about. She starts off with the basic form, roughly places light and dark and then begins to fill in the detail and glaze to perfection, like a good ol’ fashioned donut. In Sapphire the allocation of detail is fairly obvious which is why I thought this would make a good example. In areas of focus the details become sharper and more explicit and then as we move out details become more sparse, but still implied, and the values become softer and more dreamlike. This dreamy effect is captured because of BM’s understanding of the affect of light and explicit detail in a piece. The more information the more we’re likely to focus on it, while the brain fills in detail where it is implied. I’ve seen a great number of comments expressing how people wouldn’t be able to emulate BM’s process, but whether that’s true, anyone can learn the fundamentals of her art process. Through study one can understand the very logical reasons behind her decision making. Since she has a style that I’m greatly fond of and would love to incorporate into my own, I would say the areas to focus on are having a plausible anatomy from life studies that allows one to discard outlines and focus on detail and value to create form.

The last element that I’ll talk about is the difference between a piece with outlines and without, and also the impact of work on the viewer. As an anime enthusiast a linework-centric style is something I’m quite familiar with, but in semi-realism and beyond when we want to further enhance our utilization of value and understanding of form, using fewer outlines can be very powerful. The difference between 2D and 3D is really the extent to which lines are used to represent something versus light and shadow. If you think of something like drawing a ball, the difference between a circle and sphere is not only the placement of shadow, but also the blurring of the edges of the circle. The light and dark tell the brain that there is depth and volume to the form regardless of how much of the elephant is in our line-of-sight.

BM’s characters look so perfectly sculpted as if no lines were used and the brush strokes and texture that can be seen in her work gives everything she makes the feel of something from a top art atelier. If you are looking to graduate into 3D and give outlines a break for something new, please give BM some time and attention.