thesabs
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Warrior Boy Breakdown
🕑 Added 2025-03-10 22:45:24 +0000 UTCThere is actually two main inspirations behind this series, the first one is just my old love for the fantasy genre, in particular the works of Frank Frazetta:
Drawing barbarians, warriors, goblins and monsters is always fun, even when there's no NSFW content involved, but as you can see from the paintings above, Frazetta's works express a clear fascination for the human body, and in many of his paintings, the male body is also depicted with a certain grace and sensuality:
Obviously, not all his male characters are painted in this style, and in general sensuality is something much more prominently on his female characters, but it is clear that there's a range for how he depict his male characters, and in general, the genre of fantasy has a obvious appreciation for the physicality and sensuality of the human body.
The second inspiration is just my personal interest for the grey area that sits between masculinity and femininity. I just have a certain fascination for how masculine and feminine aesthetics can be mixed and match, how far can you push the male form into feminine aesthetics while still maintaining a clear masculine form? and vice-versa? can it be done without going into androgyny?
Artistically speaking, for someone as interested in the human forms as I am, it is just something I have to explore, and the theme of fantasy with it's focus on the human body is the perfect match for creativity and experimentations.
As for the art style, it is pretty simple, I start with a simple sketch setting up the important shapes and silhouettes:
In the next step my focus is in the areas of contrast between my lightest and darkest tones, to make sure these areas will have the appropriate level of attention, I start with them first:
After these areas of contrast are stablished, I just add in one final value that will reinforce this composition by reducing the contrast in the other areas that aren't the main focus:
It can be hard to see the simplicity of the value configuration here with all those distracting colors, details and textures, but if we get rid of the colors:
and simplify the values to it's 3 major blocks:
You can see that in general, the value composition is very simple, I just made sure that my most contrasting values (black and white) only meet in the areas of most importance (his face and body), meanwhile, the other areas of less importance always have the middle gray serving to reduce the contrast.
Using a simple value composition like this let me focus on the other aspects of the illustration that I consider more important for the project, like the characters forms, proportions and expressions.
And that's pretty much it, hope this breakdown was an interesting read.
thanks a lot for your support and patience my friends ^^
Cheers!
Comments
The sabu
thank you again for the thoughtful comment Kozark, I'm always happy read your kind words about my work ^^ As for the masculinity/femininity thing, I definitely agree that there's a tendency for art-styles that lean exponentially more to the feminine side of the forms and aesthetics, wish isn't a problem at all, but as you said, there's a lot of interesting untapped potential to be found in the endogenous middle ground between masculinity and femininity, lot's of fun to be had ^^
The sabu
I know the feeling my friend, there's just something about the things that fascinated us in our youth that can stick with us for many years after. For myself, I can remember the exact book that made me fall in love with the genre, it was a RPG solo book called "Deathtrap Dungeon", the cover and internal illustrations were just mesmerizing! Later I found that they were made by no other than Iain Mccaig! easily one of my top 10 favorite artists of all time.
Anton
I always love this sort of fantasy art. I grew up reading so many paperbacks with gorgeous painted covers and there's something about this style that makes me smile.
Kozark
There's a video I watched a few years ago that taught me how influential subtracting a work down to simple black and white/ greyscale can be in mapping a visually attractive scene, that it sort of forces you to handle your character, the details of your character, and the environment in a way that catches your eye. Everything shaped esthetically pleasing, kinda like the rule of 3's in photography. I believe movie directors have and will intentionally release black and white versions of a film for this very reason, they can show the most fundamental visual esthetic of placements and lighting that makes for a dramatic and emotionally stimulating version of the film (for a lack of better terms, I'm typing this at 10 at night). Have you checked out the Franzetta Girls YouTube channel? I believe it might be his daughter that runs an art museum in (I believe) his former residence. She's very proud of everything that he's done. As for the close balance of masculine and feminine forms, one of the details I've appreciated in your work is how you don't just lean your style drastically to either side like many artists do these days. Usually erotic artists in femboy genres predominantly cherry pick male parts on very curvy female body plans, which is fine but seems to be the popular combination these days. It's nice having such a well learned artist who works and mediates more in the middle ground, especially since there's so much beauty that teeters on that edge. Many Greek and Roman statues make for some of the best examples of that silver lining in androgeny. Anyway enough with my two paragraphs of comments. Thanks for choosing to keep at your work drawing art for all these years Sabu, you've really carved out a space as one of, if not the best, artist in this community. It must be exhausting work, many of us love and really look forward to your new ideas ❤️
