{"id":2044,"date":"2012-03-05T19:53:04","date_gmt":"2012-03-05T17:53:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethingwicked.co.za\/?p=2044"},"modified":"2012-03-05T20:01:32","modified_gmt":"2012-03-05T18:01:32","slug":"issue-19-artists-profile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/somethingwicked.co.za\/magazine\/2012\/03\/05\/issue-19-artists-profile\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue #19 – Artists Profile"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hendrik Gericke<\/h3>\n
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Issue 19 - Illustration by Hendrik Gericke<\/p><\/div>\n

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What’s your day job?<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>
\nNot so much a day job as a lifestyle that you bend any which way to generate income. I’m a professional artist.<\/p>\n

What’s the last thing you worked on?<\/em><\/strong>
\nJust came off a storyboarding gig, this cover for Something Wicked and a couple of caricatures of South African musicians.<\/p>\n

How long have you been painting?<\/em><\/strong>
\nI’ve been painting intently for about six years; any painting before that was too uninformed to count. Been drawing all my life, though.<\/p>\n

What’s your favourite medium (oils, watercolours, pencils, digital)?<\/em><\/strong>
\nI tend to circulate favourites. Oil paint and a massive blank canvas is the most fun, because you can really throw yourself at it. I have the longest history with ink, and digital offers so many possibilities that I embrace them all equally.<\/p>\n

How did you come up with this piece?<\/em><\/strong>
\nI recently got turned down for a sci-fi concept art gig, because I didn’t have enough of that kind of thing in my portfolio. It’s annoying, because I love sci-fi, yet in concept art it’s been done to death and I tend to go the opposite direction to the general norm. So I took this as the gauntlet that had been thrown down and jumped at the chance to get stuck in. A massive inspiration of mine is the painter John Harris, who has done a lot of covers for Tor Books (they have an amazing stable of artists), and I definitely took cues from him. I wanted to relate the sense of scale between the craft and the planet, giving it a telephoto feel.<\/p>\n

The clouds in the background are spectacular. Are those painted or is it photo-manipulation?<\/em><\/strong>
\nI have been doing a lot of matte painting of late and nowadays very little is actually created from scratch, much of it relying on what is called photo replacement. A small section of the cloud is actually a photographic reference, but most of it is hand painted. Once you have an accurately lit section, it can be expanded upon to good effect.<\/p>\n

Your art has featured in almost every single <\/em>Something Wicked issue to date. If you<\/em><\/strong> can remember, what was your favourite piece to illustrate?<\/em><\/strong>
\nIt’s funny, because I forget about a lot of work that I have done. I’m always looking ahead, so when a piece is finished, I’m through with it. That said, when I look at my work on the SW page, I’m often surprised at the balls I had to do some pieces. I really liked the WW1 story, which I think was for the first issue, as well as a piece of a bridge and a riverbank which was set in eastern Russia (if I recall correctly). In the latter piece I left a massive white area, which I don’t normally have the restraint for; I always tend to drift into big white areas, which is a shortcoming. Frank Miller knows how to leave blank areas to amazing effect!<\/p>\n

Where can we find more of your work? <\/em><\/strong>
\nAt the moment there’s not much in galleries, but my web address is\u00a0http:\/\/www.flyingdutchmanart.com\/<\/a> and I’ll be putting more work up for sale there shortly! \u00a0Here’s my online shop:\u00a0http:\/\/www.etsy.com\/shop\/hendrikgericke<\/a><\/p>\n

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