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Making of – Arrival in Salvador Painting – Part 1

In 2007, shortly after creating Gerard van Oost and Oludara, I visited Salvador on a research trip.

While there, I had the pleasure of seeing the city of Salvador from the Bay of All Saints twice, once from Fort São Marcelo, and once when I visited some islands within the Bay by boat.

View of Fort São Marcelo from Salvador

View of Salvador from Fort São Marcelo

View of Salvador from the Bay of All Saints

Those experiences ingrained in my mind an image of the European ships arriving in that same port hundreds of years ago. I could easily imagine Gerard’s arrival in Salvador. It is a scene not contained in the stories, but one I thought could make a nice piece of art.

When I finally decided to have a shot at creating that scene, I chose Leonardo Amora Leite (or “Amora”, as he likes to be called) as the artist. I chose him primarily because I’d worked with him for several years as a concept artist. I’m a huge fan of Leonardo’s work in general. His paintings tend to suggest a rich backstory to the image, and I’ve written one story and one poem inspired by his work.

But I also chose Amora because he’d painted a jaw-dropping pirate battle which made me certain he could get the right style for the Salvador painting:

“Pirate Ship” © Leonardo Amora Leite

Leonardo agreed to the project and we sat down together to discuss it. I provided him with a rough sketch of what I imagined: a caravel sailing toward Salvador while the city loomed over it. I also requested he use the vibrant, almost cartoon colors which are a staple of much of his work, as in the painting below:

“The Stone Giant” © Leonardo Amora

While this type of color scheme detracts from the realism of the piece, I felt it would give the painting the feeling of optimism and fantasy contained in the stories.

I also sent over a few dozen painting and photo references, and a copy of the book “Images de Vilas e Cidades do Brasil Colonial” by Nestor Goulart Reis, by far the richest compilation of images of settlements in Colonial Brazil I’ve ever encountered.

In the next post, I’ll detail step-by-step how Leonardo arrived at the final painting.

Continued at: Making of – Arrival in Salvador – Part 2

Caramuru

In “The Fortuitous Meeting”, Gerard hears mention of Caramuru. Even in the late sixteenth century of Gerard’s adventures, Caramuru was already a legend. His extraordinary life would change Brazil’s history forever.

Born Diogo Álvares Correia, Caramuru was a Portuguese who shipwrecked in Brazil around 1510, at the age of 17. Despite his inauspicious shipwreck, he had the fortune to swim ashore just ten kilometers from the Bay of All Saints, one of the greatest natural ports in the Western Hemisphere. He also had the luck to shortly thereafter meet Paraguaçu: daughter of Morubixaba Taparica, a great Tupinambá warrior-chief in the region.

It is told that Caramuru first impressed the natives by shooting down a flying bird with one explosive shot from a harquebus. But what truly saved him was the love of Paraguaçu. They soon became husband and wife, and with a few other shipwreck survivors and many Tupinambá, he settled his own tribe in what would later become the city of Salvador. The Tupinambá gave him the name Caramuru, which probably came from the Tupi word for the moray eel, in reference to his long, “stinging’ harquebus. There are some, however, who claim it is a distortion of “caraymuru”, which means “wet white man”, since he washed out from the sea.

Scenes from the life of Caramuru

(Image: Anonymous. Mosteiro de São Bento da Bahia)

For years, Caramuru worked with the French and others who visited Brazil looking for Brazilwood and other plunder. The French came to know the area where Caramuru lived as “Pointe du Caramourou”. There are tales of him saving shipwrecked Portuguese, French and Spanish sailors, and rescuing them from other Tupinambá tribes which would have killed or in some cases even eaten them. Charles V, Holy Roman Emporer, once sent Caramuru a letter of thanks for his aid. Some shipwreck survivors and deserters remained with Caramuru, marrying his daughters or other natives.

In 1526, Caramuru and Paraguaçu travelled to France. In 1528 Paraguaçu was baptized and given the name Katherine du Brézil in honor of her godmother, Catherine des Granches (wife of the famous french explorer Jacques Cartier). Upon their return to Brazil, Caramuru and Paraguaçu became the first Christian couple in Brazil on record. As far as is known, no other Christian women were living in brazil at the time, and very few would move there even to the end of the century.

Caramuru portrait

The Portuguese soon became interested in taking advantage of Caramuru’s excellent relations with the natives for their colonization attempts. in 1536, Francisco Pereira Coutinho arrived in Brazil to found the Captaincy of Bahia. He allied himself with Caramuru and officially granted him his tribe’s land: right in the heart of modern Salvador.

When the time came to set up the General Government of Brazil, John III, the king of Portugal, decided to locate the capital in Salvador: in large part to Caramaru’s presence there and his prestige with the local natives. Several other settlements had failed because of fights with the natives, and the Portuguese needed somewhere stable to make their base. John III sent a letter to Caramuru in 1548 asking for his aid in establishing the new government, which Caramuru provided on the arrival of Tomé de Souza a year later.

Caramuru died in 1557, and Paraguaçu in 1582. The name Caramuru became immortalized when José de Santa Rita Durão published an epic poem under his name in 1781.

And if Caramuru had never shipwrecked near Salvador, the entire history of Brazil could have been radically different.

Making of – Kalobo Illustration by Paulo italo

I thought it might be interesting to delve into the creation process for some of the artwork and other media produced for the Elephant and Macaw Banner series.

For this first “making of” post, I’d like to tell the story behind the first EAMB illustration ever made: The Kalobo by Paulo Ítalo.

I chose the Kalobo as the first illustration in order to get some practice at directing the art process before moving on to the protagonists. With these first commissions, I wanted to try and put my vision of the characters on paper. To that end, I sent Paulo specific instructions.

My first instructions were to work in black and white and make the illustrations as realistic as possible. Paulo is a specialist in this type of illustration, which is one of the reasons I chose to work with him. That, and the fact that we’re great friends!

For references, I began with the head. The classic Kalobo of Brazilian folklore has the head of an anteater. For my version, I chose the Giant Anteater as the reference.

Giant Anteater

I did, however, feel like the anteater’s head is too narrow for the sense of massiveness which I wanted to impart on the creature. So for a face reference I used the Brazillian tapir, which Paulo later modified into a more birdlike head.

Brazilian Tapir

For the body, I required a bipedal creature with a lumbering walk, similar to the classical troll image. I chose to have humanlike proportions, yet with an immense musculature. Even hunched over, the Kalobo stands a full seven feet tall. The beast needed to exude power. This was complicated a bit by the need to cover that musculature in a thick layer of fur, head to foot. For hair thickness, length, and coloration, I used the musk ox, which also turned out to be an excellent reference for the beast’s huge hooves.

Musk Oxen

The upper legs would be human and terminate as ox legs, with hair covering everything except the hooves.

For the hands, I discovered the wonderful reference of the southern tamandua, which has some of the most wicked claws in the animal kingdom.

Southern Tamandua (anteater)

I wanted to work with a semi-profile view, and wanted the Kalobo to feel as ominous as possible, since the anteater snout could easily make the creature look comical if not done correctly.

Taking all that into account, Paulo came back with the first set of sketches:

Paulo did a spectacular job with this first set, and the pose on the right is the one we used in the final version. I did, however, ask him to add hair around the entire body to better fit the image from the story. For the first full illustration, Paulo also changed to a different pose.

However, this one felt too “active” for me, less menacing than I wanted. Also, it still didn’t have the thick, long hair I associated with the beast. For the final version, we returned to the original pose:

And there it is, the Kalobo in all its ferocious glory! The Kalobo appears in the second adventure of Gerard and Oludara, “A Parlous Battle”, where it creates no small amount of trouble for our protagonists.

Special thanks once again to Paulo Ítalo for doing such a fantastic job.

Please let me know if you enjoyed this “making of”, and I can plan more for the future.

(Photos: Wikipedia)

Peccaries

In “The Fortuitous Meeting”, Gerard has a run-in with animals referred to as “boars”. Today, this animal would be classified as a peccary, but in Colonial Brazil, peccaries were referred to as wild pigs or boars, because of their resemblance to those European animals.

The sixteenth-century chroniclers who first described Brazil had plenty to say about peccaries. Pero de Magalhães de Gândavo wrote about the large number of pigs, including “boars like in our land (referring to Portugal), and other smaller ones which have a navel on their backs”. This “belly button” is actually a dorsal gland which releases a powerful musk scent. Fernão Cardim noted that the smell is so strong, dogs could easily find their trails. He also mentioned that wild pigs were so common they were a staple food for the natives.

Fernão Cardim mentioned that some of the peccaries were so ferocious as to attack both dogs and hunters, and men had to climb trees to escape them–a technique Gerard himself was forced to use.

The fresh-water pigs mentioned by the chroniclers were actually capybara, which are now classified as the world’s largest rodent.

Today we know the boars and wild pigs of the chroniclers as two species of peccary, both still common throughout Brazil: the Collared Peccary and the White-Lipped Peccary.

Collared Peccaries

(Image: Brian Gratwicke, Wikimedia Commons)

White-Lipped Peccary

(Image: Ana Cotta, Wikimedia Commons)

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