25 Imaginative Illustrations Inspired By Film // WellMedicated.

Note that Justin Reed, the resident artist from the dawn of Good Is The New Bad, is represented here with 3 of his finer pieces.

Many of the remaining works are just as clever. The Highlander novelization is a personal favorite.

When I look over my portfolio, sometimes I try to see what’s missing. It’s difficult to look for ways to add some variety, while at the same time challenging myself artistically. For a while I’ve noticed that I never really paint any types of animals. So when I was given the opportunity to paint something I haven’t tackled previously, in this case a great white shark, I went for it.

I have a tendency in my paintings to feature one individual prominently, so it was refreshing this time that the “main character” in the painting would be a shark. Water is also something that I enjoy painting, playing with the shifts in color and its reflective qualities.

Over the last few months I’ve been approaching the process of painting differently as well. In the past I would simply jump in with the characters until they were fully rendered and then proceed to paint the surrounding background.

I would find many times that color relationships would be drastically different, some colors would be too intense while others may be too saturated. The result would feel muddled and haphazard. What I’ve been doing recently is beginning with the most distant objects in the background, in this case the sky and sea, and gradually working my may to the foreground. It’s never a perfect process, but I think the initial layers of paint form a more cohesive image.
Since college I’ve been using Golden Acrylic paints, and while I’ve used all sorts of other brands and find most of them to work just fine, I simply prefer Golden’s line of acrylics. Recently they released a line of Historical Acrylic Hues, which are supposedly recreations of colors available long ago. I first tried these out a few months ago but struggled with the paint flow and low viscosity. At first I didn’t think I’d be able to use them, however I really enjoyed the range of colors I could achieve with them, particularly with skin tones. I decided to stick it out and now, with the exception of Titanium White, Jaws is painted entirely with these historic hues.

Often I butt heads with a painting, so it was nice to work on something that went as smoothly as this. The final painting is acrylic on canvas, 18×24 inches.

Every once and a great while I’ll watch a film that completely catches me off guard. The first time I saw Pulp Fiction, long before I knew who Quentin Tarantino was, I was fifteen years old. From the moment Jules shot the guy laying on the couch in the motel room, Pulp Fiction was as rough on me as the characters were to each other. Unpredictable and shocking, I felt I was watching real people commit these horrible and sometimes hilarious acts, instead of just characters in a movie.

That first impression remained with me when I began working on this painting. When I select a project to work on, I like to research it to locate any information that may inform which direction I’ll take the painting. In this case, I searched online for film reviews and the observation I found most common was that this film dealt with salvation and redemption. These are very powerful themes and I felt they worked nicely with my tendency to portray characters at their core. The most obvious use of this is my depiction of Butch, who I wanted to show at the moment he decides to save Marsellus Wallace, because I feel that speaks most truthfully to his character.

With the other characters I tended to pander more to my fifteen year old first impressions, with Jules being ruthless and cold and Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace exuding what I saw as cool. The color choices I used for the characters were also intended to reflect their personalities, in particular Mia’s face being red meant to signify lust and Vincent’s infatuation with her, and the blues in Jules’s face reinforcing his cold demeanor.

This painting was also the first time that the dimensions of the canvas reflected the widescreen aspect ratio of the film I was portraying, giving it a more cinematic feel. Another first in this painting is the inclusion of Easter eggs for those familiar with the film, such as the briefcase and Butch’s gold watch. Setting the painting in the diner also felt appropriate, as the scenes within it served to bookend the film.

Mostly my painting of Pulp Fiction was a sort of amalgam of my past and present perceptions of the film. To me the most enjoyable part of painting something is following the direction it will take and seeing how different themes or ideas can interact with one another.