Read Issue 64 of Digital Art Live

Welcome to the ‘Lineart’ issue of your free magazine.

This month we celebrate the style of Jean Giraud, best known by the pen-name of ‘Moebius’ which he used for his science-fiction comics.

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LUCIAN STANCULESCU

Lucian is an artist and also makes his own innovative and free 3D software — Neobarok 2.x and now the new Clavicula 0.9.x.

CLAVICULA | SOFTWARE

“Moebius has an immense depth in his characters and worlds. Even if you just skim over the images, you get a sense of profoundness… and you can also project depth and ideas onto his works, even if you do not have the whole picture or know the entire story.”

MARCOS BEDIN

Marcos lives in the beautiful far south of Brazil, and he creates equally beautiful digital lineart illustrations.

DIGITAL ILLUSTRATION

“… I used to view comic illustrations as childish.  Later I realized these simple lines could carry a huge amount of meaning, and the limitations of a comic-book page were far from being a bad thing. Moebius helped me not only in a artistic way, but spiritually and mentally.”

KEVIN R. VALENTINO

Kevin is part of the lively comics scene in the Philippines, and has just been selected for the prestigious PICOF 2023.

PHOTOSHOP | COMICS

“My comic book and I were chosen as part of its Third Official Selection for PICOF2023! Being chosen provides small indie creators like me the opportunity to access vital assistance. It’s a historical horror fiction set in the backwoods of my rural province.”

Also….

• JOHN SWOGGER

• BACK ISSUE INDEX

• 10 WAYS TO CREATE LINEART FROM 3D

• GALLERY

• IMAGINARIUM

Excerpt from our interview with Lucien Stanculescu

Lucian Stanculescu of Romania is making his own innovative 3D software — the free Neobarok and now Clavicula. He is also an accomplished artist.

DAL: Lucian, welcome to the Digital Art Live magazine interview.  We’re very pleased to have someone who is both a very talented artist and an equally talented software developer.

LS: Thank you for the invitation to do this interview, I am very glad to be here! And may I say it is a pleasure and honor to be part of this edition dedicated to Moebius whom I admire deeply.

DAL: Great. OK, let’s start at the beginning. When and where did you first become aware of your creative talent, and was it cultivated by others around you?

LS: I started drawing when I was a child, and I drew quite a lot. It wasn’t anything creative at first, I was mostly trying to represent what I saw in magazines, or on book covers, and I also loved drawing figurines of animals, or scale models of planes and cars. But I had a knack for the shape of objects and was also quite attracted to the shape, more so than colour. In the end what probably mattered most was that I persevered in this, and in time I got better and better. Later, I also started to mix things together in my own fashion. My parents ‘saw something in this’ and encouraged it. My father was also building model-kits of planes at the time, and both me and my brother caught the bug: we helped at first, then started to build our own. I ended up kit-bashing pieces together and this felt much better. We’d also get a lot of magazines and books, mostly science-fiction and that was a great source of inspiration for me, although at first, I preferred to look at pictures and covers, rather than read them, until — at some point — the interest shifted from ‘only images’ to ‘stories and ideas’.

DAL: Thanks. Yes, a lot of people made scale-models then, it must have unconsciously ‘set us up’ for 3D later. Were things difficult in Romania at that time?

LS: I remember only bits and pieces from those times, so I can’t say much about the overall situation. I was only age seven when the revolution broke out in 1989. And I was quite sheltered and rather oblivious to what was going on. But we didn’t have access to much at the time, though it didn’t seem like a problem then. After the revolution, things started trickling in, bit by bit. I got my first PC in 8th grade of school and started making 3D models and short animations in 3DStudio (for MS-DOS)!. Then, in high-school I went on to coding 3D stuff, very simple at first, but that culminated in 11th grade with a 3D rendering engine that was also capable of stereoscopy (the kind with red-cyan glasses and a couple of other techniques). I wrote that from scratch in Pascal and Assembler. Some ideas were from an old book of 3D programming — written before OpenGL and also before GPU acceleration — and derived a lot of the stuff on my own.

DAL: Well done. Not everyone makes a stereo rendering engine for their school project. And then you went abroad to train, I believe? For instance, I see you earned a PhD in Computer Graphics at the University of Lyon in France. How creative did you find that experience, and how was it useful for you in the longer-term?

LS: Yes, after high-school I went to France, at I.N.S.A. Lyon. An engineering school, where I finished with a Masters degree in Physics of Materials. But during all this time I created art intensively, and I also kept coding a lot, mostly for personal artistic projects. I also did a few solo art exhibitions in the campus and participated in a couple of group shows. After some attempts to continue physics in grad school, I decided I wanted to focus more on what I was doing most of the time anyway: art and programming. That’s when I found the PhD in Computational Geometry at University of Lyon — which forms a common campus with I.N.S.A. My future PhD adviser was very kind to invite me for some discussions.

My background of programming, art and physics was quite helpful in getting accepted in the PhD program, whose subject revolved around algorithms for 3D sculpting. Getting immersed in the research field and actively working on digital sculpting, helped me crystallize my ideas about a creative tool that should satisfy my artistic needs.