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eye candy

These Beautiful Oil Paintings Might Throw You For a Loop

by Susana Polo | 10:22 am, January 3rd, 2012


The comics world has no shortage of artists who’ve made a name for themselves by creating very photorealistic paintings of superheroic subjects. In a genre with such lowered standards for realism, it’s understandable that there would be a demand, or at the least, an intense curiosity to see what characters would be like with more rigid narrative or visual demands placed upon them.

Doug Bloodworth, however, is doing something slightly different than that, even.

Instead of painting realistic comics, he paints comics… realistically.

Does anybody else suddenly really want an Oreo?

(via Illusion.)

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  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1208921 Nikki Lincoln

    It took me a few minutes to realize that those were the paintings and not photographs…. I better get a second cup of coffee. 

  • Megan Danger

    that’s awesome

  • Anonymous

    I don’t get photo-realistic paintings. I mean, I understand them as a form of pop art, I guess. But if that’s the look you’re going for, why not just take the picture instead?

    Also, do you think he has to pay royalties, or is his art being subsidized by the snack food industry?

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=48611001 Neal Johnson

    Wesley,  because he can.  Paintings can create images and scenes that don’t exist to be photographed. And if he wants to make those as real as a captured image, it starts right here with his ability to mimic real life in paint and brush.  Plus, these aren’t…life exact, there’s a tint of the artist’s focus and emotive quality in the light and color that a camera might not pick up, not without heavy editing, in which case, you might as well create it from scratch.

  • http://www.commonplacebook.com electrasteph

    Exactly – coming at something similar from the photography perspective, there are folks who art direct their photos so heavily and then edit in Photoshop so much that the “photo” doesn’t actually seem like a photo anymore, in my opinion, at least not the way I like to take them. But they’re fantastic works of art and worthy of praise. This is just coming at it from the other direction.

    It’s sort of that debate in writing between people who fictionalize their memoirs and people who write fiction with autobiographical elements in them – I get that we want find the line between the two, but how important is that line? I guess it depends on whether there’s some level of truth that the artist is asking you to accept about the work.

  • Frodo Baggins

    There’s more to art than the final result.

  • http://profiles.google.com/lowsee Heidi Mason

    I’ll take the PB&J ;)

  • http://profiles.google.com/lowsee Heidi Mason

    I’ll take the PB&J ;)

  • Anonymous

    Here’s the thing: photorealism that achieves this level of “fooling” the viewer is really, REALLY hard. (Note that the shinier surfaces in each painting are slightly less convincing than the rest; capturing that effect without the use of photography is incredibly difficult.) Working with oil paints is also not easy, and really time-consuming to boot, So, I’d hazard a guess that at least part of the answer to your question is “Because I CAN.”

  • http://ladymercury-10.livejournal.com/ Maiasaura

    I totally had the same problem.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Kris-Martin/518073275 Kris Martin

    eh…oils are easier to work with than acrylic actually. and those these strive for photo realism, they don’t actually succeed.

  • Anonymous

    What about hyperrealism instead of photorealism then? The appeal to me is that everything looks so real it’s almost fake.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Kris-Martin/518073275 Kris Martin

    to me none of it is hyperrealism, or photorealism. none of it looks so real it looks fake. such as the crumbs in creme wafer painting, the oreos, the pb&j as well as the jar of jelly, and the marbles all fail to be either hyper real or photo real. and some of the shadows in them also fail as well.

  • http://www.facebook.com/davidedwardm David Edward Martin

    Bloodworth’s paintings are quite interesting and a denmonstration of formidable technique.  However he is commiting plagiarism by exactly reproducing DC and Marvel comics with the intent of selling his results.  Roy Lichenstein got away with profitably plagarizing comics artists fifty years ago and that’s been a sore topic ever since.

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