Ben Templesmith

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Cover to the 30 Days of Night trade paperback by Ben Templesmith.
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Cover to the 30 Days of Night trade paperback by Ben Templesmith.

Ben Templesmith (b. 7 March 1978) is an Australian commercial artist best known for his work in the American comic book industry - most notably Fell with writer Warren Ellis, published by Image Comics, where he helped pioneer a new format for commercial comics, and 30 Days of Night with writer Steve Niles published by IDW Publishing which provoked a bidding war between film studios for the movie rights when the story was pitched a second time with Templesmith's artwork. He has also created book covers, movie posters, trading cards, and concept work for film.

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[edit] Style

Templesmith is one of a handful of comics artists with an instantly recognizable signature style- in his case, a style uniquely suited to horror-themed subject matter. His style has proven so successful as to be copied frequently and to be one of the modern definitive horror and vampire looks in comics since 30 Days of Night. His style at times can be extremely sketchy in nature, far different from the norm of clean linework in most mainstream comicbooks.[1] Because if the untraditional nature of his work, his art at times instills a "love it or hate it" feeling in the readership. He is an acquired taste, with many older aged comic fans preferring the crisp more static linework of superheroic comics.

However, that is a stylistic choice. In fact, Templesmith's drawings all contain the visual information necessary to succeed in telling the story. Characters (no matter how hideous they may appear) are distinct and clearly identifiable. You can easily understand where they are, what they are doing, and how they feel in any given panel.

His style alone is enough to mark Templesmith as a competent and diverse artist, but what makes him stand out in the field is the way in which he uses exaggerated style to emphasize character traits. In Templesmith's visual world, almost nothing is truly beautiful. However, the "good guys" (and there are a few in each story, but not many) all clearly look like normal human beings, for better or worse. As for the bad guys...

[edit] Vampires

Templesmith's vampires, which began with 30 Days of Night, represent a fundamentally new way of depicting the traditional horror monster. The Templesmith vampire at rest is more akin to a great white shark stuffed into human skin than the traditional tall man with lupine features and long fangs. Generally, this means a bloated human form drawn on the page combined with what appear to be cut-out holes for eyes, the balls of which are a glistening black without irises- exactly like that of a shark. The mouth is a jagged slit, behind which can be glimpsed row upon row of impossibly long, lamprey-like teeth sticking out at all angles. When the vampire attacks, the jaw distends to impossible proportions, sometimes becoming larger than the head itself. In all cases, the form of the vampire distorts as it becomes more feral. The visual effect is of a being whose very existence violates the physical laws which the human characters are bound to by their normalcy.

[edit] Techniques

Templesmith draws all his art by hand, using various media including ink, pencil sketch, acrylic and watercolour and then scans in the art to computer using greyscale. He then compiles the various elements in layers via Adobe Photoshop and adds photographic or texture elements from an extensive archive of reference material he's compiled over several years. All colouring is done at this level, creating complete art, instead of using the general Anglo-American comics system of having a separate person drawing, then inking and then colouring via computer.[2] Unlike most new computer oriented artists, Templesmith still does not actually draw on computer, simply using it as a layering and colouring tool. He also has yet to learn how to use a graphics tablet, instead still using a mouse and a not so up to date Adobe Photoshop 7.

[edit] Current projects

Currently Templesmith is collaborating with well-known British comics writer Warren Ellis on Fell at Image Comics, an experiment defining a new comic book format for the American market. He writes and draws his own semi-regular series,Wormwood: Gentleman Corpse with IDW Publishing and has long been associated with various projects at the publisher such as Tommyrot: The Art of Ben Templesmith, Singularity 7, and Silent Hill. He also provides covers for the Oni Press series Wasteland.

[edit] Selected bibliography

[edit] Comics

[edit] Game Books

[edit] External links

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