Arzach Commission

Believe it not, my first time drawing Arzach. Plus, Tár - movie of the decade?

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter.

(It’s likely that there won’t be Castrum for the next couple of weeks due to traveling and work - it will give you time to catch up with previous ones)

Let me tell you something, the summer heat could go away. As every intro states, I live in northern Portugal, in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, pretty much the only place of what is officially southern Europe to regularly escape (to a certain degree) the massive heat waves we’ve been getting in the last few years. STILL, it gets hot enough. The hand sticks to the paper, the iPad and computer get very hot, you get more tired - what I’m trying to say is: I’m not a fan of summers. Never been, never will.

But work proceeds at decent speed, despite the added effort. Aside from designs and studies for the new book continuing, this week I spent a good chunk of time on a commission I was looking forward to get to:

ARZACH!

The request came from a reader that bought a Righteous Thirst Deluxe Edition with a sketch directly from me. Some collectors have a bunch of options for me to choose from, but he pitched me Arzach straight away, which immediately got my blood flowing.

I don’t think this is news to anyone, but I’m a huge Moebius fan and Arzach is probably his most famous solo creation. The man with the tall hat and the flying thing (it is shown has being in parts organic and in part mechanic) are an image recognizable everywhere by everyone. And believe it or not, this is the first time someone actually asked me to draw it in any capacity.

The client’s only request was to have the man, the flying companion and a desert-like environment. The bare bones of Arzach. I ruminated on it for a few days and an image popped in my mind:

The man, reading a map, while his flying companion rests in the middle of the desert. In the background, a temple. Then I added a destroyed space ship in the distance, plus a crystal and a couple of flying weird animals to make this a kind of Moebius greatest hits. The client loved it and asked if I could add something in the sky, hence the planet and moon. As usual, this sketch goes with my approach to screen tones, where I select how many there will be and where they’ll be placed. I chose tones for the main characters (obvious), plus the crystal and the rocks on the foreground for improved readability and the sky for depth.

I penciled things as close to the original proportions as possible. This being a commission, I’m always keen on changing as little as possible to make sure the client gets exactly what they saw and approved in the sketch stage. I also pencil with traditional led (in opposition to using blue pencils in pages and covers) to then be able to erase it and send a pristine piece.

There’s three vanishing points, if you’re into that sort of technical detail: a single one, centered on the ship in the background that serves the entire drawing and two more for the temple - one is on the man’s lower chest (zoom in and you can see a dot there) and the other would be outside the sheet, to the right. This helps making things feel a bit more interesting and organic and separates the built environment from the natural one.

Inking so many lines without a mistake is always a challenge, but I’m glad to say no correction was done - again, something I try very hard to achieve in a piece where the original is everything.

Finally came the tones, where you once more get some margin for error (you can always cut a new one). But I won’t lie - it’s always a relief when you manage to cut one and see that it fits perfectly the shape you inked. Despite me drawing them over the inks with a pencil, cutting is not that easy, particularly for small details. The tones are also very thin, which means they break easily.

The scratched highlights are one of my favorite moments. It kind brings everything to life and pushes the drawing to an analog 3D effect that feels great to look at in person. See these pictures below, which capture the feeling a tad better than the adjusted scans seen above:

Next in line for commissions? EC comics, another first.

Recommendations

Tár.

What a movie. Easily one of the best I’ve seen in years. I was expecting a more straightforward, classic drama movie, one of those that appears to be made for the Oscars, but instead we have something very different. Almost the entire movie is seen through the perspective of the main character but a lot of the plot is given in very subtle cues. It demands your attention but makes it worth it a thousand times, by crafting a growing sense of pressure around someone that is on the verge of triumph but slowly feels it all being taken away by her past actions. The most surprising part for me was to see this kind of drama filmed as a dark thriller/horror movie at points - and expertly so - which makes for some excruciating tension through and through. Its surrealism in some sections also reminded me of Eyes Wide Shut - another tense drama filled with tension and layers that still has people discussing it.

I’ll leave you with a Slate article that goes deep into some bits that show just how close Tár flirts with being a horror/supernatural thriller.

Extraordinary. Hats off to Cate Blanchett and Todd Field.

And as a bonus, a marvelous short I found this week: Tokyo Solitude.

Lovely short movie, visually stunning. If you’re as found of Japan as I am and long to go back, this is for you:

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Have a great weekend,

André