Queen of the Black Coast 5
- QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST 5 - A black ink and black color pencil on an 11 x 14 size coquille board. It appears as Plate 5 in my art folio based on the story by Robert E. Howard, "QUEEN OF THE BLACK COAST," published by Bortner and Kruse in 1976.
When I was learning to draw I sometimes came across a "how to" art book written and illustrated by an artist who did not believe it was necessary to learn about all those bones and things that are inside the bodies of humans and animals. What you see, they wrote, is all you need to know.
And that is true if you are painting a portrait and are looking at a person posing for you. Or you are out in the wilderness painting an animal in it's natural habitat. But for an illustrator like myself, models and wilderness treks are not part of our modus operandi. I ignored those "You don't need to know" instructions, and went ahead and learned a few things about anatomy.
In most cases I had to create the people and animals I drew, as well as having to place them in poses and situations dictated by the story I was illustrating. As in this case, where I created a scene from the story in which hyenas are attacking Conan. I did not have "models" to look at. So, unless I had some fundamental knowledge about the skeletal structure inside people and animals it is unlikely that I could draw them convincingly.
That's also why every illustrator needs to have a picture file, sometimes called a "morgue," to collect pictures of everything as source material. Though I had pictures of hyenas in my morgue, none were in poses I needed. But I studied the pictures to learn where the joints of the hyena's shoulders and feet were, and how their spinal curves flowed, in order to imagine them properly in the poses I gave them.
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