Interview : Tiziano Baracchi       

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Tiziano Baracchi was born in Verona, Italy in 1972. His love of fantasy art began as a teenager and he was encouraged by his family to follow his passion. He taught himself how to use acrylics and oils by studying the techniques of the masters of illustration and the classical painters, such as Elmore, Royo, Botticelli and Bourne-Jones.
Tiziano went on to study and practice architecture while his passion for painting remained only a hobby; that is until he met Ellen Million, a well respected e-commerce entrepreneur based in Alaska. The licensing of his works by Ellen’s fantasy art business and a growing number of private commissions encouraged Tiziano to pursue the path to becoming a professional illustrator.

In 2006 he began painting digitally with Photoshop and Painter, in addition to acrylics and oils, and soon after he began working in the industry, painting card-art for Fantasy Flight Games A Game of Thrones ™ (from G.R.R. Martin’s novels) and LightCon’s Topia World ™.

IT’S ART: Why did you shift from traditional to digital painting?

Tiziano Baracchi: I discovered digital art online a few years ago, the work I saw aroused my curiosity and I started reading tutorials and experimenting. I finally jumped the fence, mainly out of frustration. My commissions came mostly from abroad and required image files, not originals, and my traditional works, no matter how I fiddled with them, always lost a lot after scanning and when seen on a monitor. Not to mention, the damp, hot weather we have here in Verona during the summer made it almost impossible for me to paint, colors would dry on the brush or react strangely. And it was during these months when I finally had the free time from my day job to paint. Digital was the perfect solution for all these problems.

IA: What do you find to be the main differences between these two techniques?

TB: The main difference for me is that I feel I am free to experiment, even with commissioned works, when painting digitally. If a change doesn’t look good I can just delete the layer and nothing is lost of the previous work, this is not possible to the same extent when working with traditional media. At the same time, a traditional work is somehow warmer: working with a brush on paper or canvas creates naturally the textures and variations one strives so hard to obtain in digital painting.

Then there is the time factor: with digital I just have to turn the computer on and I’m set, I can paint anytime and for any length of time available, even 10-15 minutes. It is something I cannot do with acrylics and oils and is an important factor when one has to juggle deadlines and a non-art related day job.

IA: You depict a lot of characters in your art. Is there a reason behind that?

TB: I have always been fascinated by the human figure, its complexity and its range of variations. And then there is the influence of personality on individual features and the immense range of possibilities that a basic human shape has when you count in the different body types, color combinations, and then hair, clothes, accessories…

A character, just playing with those elements, can say much about his or her culture, traditions, way of living, the world in which he or she lives and the way she ( I paint mostly women, really) fits in and sees her world, I really enjoy telling stories through portraits, or at least trying to.