Images of the Resurrection

William-Adolphe Bouguereau The Three Marys at the Tomb, 1876

Eugenè Burnand, The Disciples Running to the Sepulchre, 1898.

Happy Easter, everyone.
Thanks, Unknown for the link to the large file of John and Peter.
Images from Herman Toit, BYU

Snakes in the Art Class

Patrick O'Brien invited live snakes, iguanas, and hissing cockroaches into his classroom at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art). 

His digital students sketched them from life, gathering inspiration for an assignment to create a poster for the reptile house at the zoo.

The animals came from The Drawing Zoo, a company in the Baltimore area that specializes in bringing exotic animals into schools for drawing. The animals move, but not too much, and they don't mind the attention. They're experienced with people and completely non-aggressive. 

The team from the Drawing Zoo has experience in both art and animal handling, and their subjects are well cared for. They say that "snakes, spiders, lizards, frogs etc. make great models because they are easy to transport, handle and care for, both inside and outside of the classroom." 

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All the photos are by Patrick O'Brien

The Drawing Zoo
My visit to MICA

Focus on Nature XIII Exhibition

Yesterday we attended the preview opening of Focus on Nature XIII, the exhibition of natural science artwork at the New York State Museum in Albany.

The show presents 91 illustrations by 71 illustrators, hailing from 15 different countries. Many of the artists attended the event, some traveling all the way from Australia and Spain.

The art is juried in on the basis of both artistic and scientific merit, and the show includes both digital and hand-painted images.

Artists were invited to share some stories about their work. Dorie Petrochko brought an actual horsehoe crab exoskeleton as she explained the creature's unique biology and how its blood is drawn for the medical industry. "This creature sacrifices a lot for science," she said. It's the oldest living fossil, and has survived twelve mass extinctions.

I was surprised and thrilled that my painting of Kosmoceratops for Scientific American won a jury award. I described how I made a maquette of the dinosaur to study the cast shadows and the dappled light in the forest interior. 

The show also includes my original gouache preliminary study for the Australian dinosaur stamps.

All the attending artists had a wonderful opportunity to visit behind the scenes at the museum, and we had a look at the Native American artifacts in the archaeology collection. 

The New York State Museum also has a very large insect collection well arranged in glass-topped boxes. Any artist or art student who would like to draw a study of a particular insect, plant form, or other biological specimen can make arrangements to visit behind the scenes in the collection. It's good to know in advance exactly what you're looking for because they have so much.
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Focus on Nature XIII officially opens to the public tomorrow and will be up through January 4, 2015 at the New York State Museum in Albany, NY. Admission is free.
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Download the PDF of the full catalog of the show.
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Dorie Petrochko is launching a natural science illustration program at the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, CT. 
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There's a detailed making-of video of my painting Kosmoceratops, that you can order on DVD from Kunaki.com (shipped internationally) or from Amazon.com, or you can get the digital download of the video from Gumroad.

Dennis Nolan and the Hartford Art School

Yesterday I visited the Hartford Art School in Connecticut, part of the University of Hartford, to give a lecture about picture making and world building.

After the talk, a group of about 50 students invited me to do a watercolor demo. I had a great model, someone I've painted many times before: my good friend Dennis Nolan, professor of illustration and noted children's book illustrator. 

Since I only had a half hour, I used the most direct method I know for portraits, starting with big shapes of watercolor laid on wet with a big brush, and then finishing with a few details and textures with water-soluble colored pencils, drybrush watercolor, and a few touches of gouache.

Here's Dennis afterward with his daughter Evie, a student at Hartford. The painting is in a Moleskine water media notebook, using a Schmincke watercolor set.

If you're a high school student interested in studying illustration, I recommend the program at Hartford. It's led by not only Dennis Nolan, but also Bill Thomson, and Doug Anderson. The school also has a very interesting class on the science of art taught by Jeremiah Patterson. The illustration program is strong in observational drawing and painting as well as composition and imaginative realism, and the seniors create their own children's picture book from start to finish. They also recently added an animation component to the curriculum. The illustration program is very popular; this year they have the largest sophomore enrollment ever.
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Dennis Nolan's faculty page at Hartford Art School
Previous post on the Hartford Art School

Street scene with a cool underpainting

Warm air from the south has arrived in the Hudson Valley. The last remnants of winter have nearly vanished, except for one small pile of snow at the end of my neighbor's driveway. 

I'm thinking about fire devouring ice when I start this street scene. How can I convey that feeling?

I open my sketchbook to a page that is pre-painted with blue tones. The blue color is casein: titanium white mixed with cerulean blue. I allow it to dry for a couple of days so the paint surface is closed. The blue will serve nicely as a complementary base for a picture in browns and oranges.

Here's what the surface looks like when I start. I sketch in the lines with a reddish-brown water-soluble colored pencil.

Now I dive in with gouache. I could have used casein or acrylic—anything opaque. Starting with the sky, I apply warm colors with a flat brush. I cover the surface, careful to leave some blue areas showing through, especially on that windshield. I want that car to be the focal point.

I don't hesitate to cover up the lines of the underdrawing. I can find everything again with the brush.

I add more reddish-brown darks on the car and the awning at left. I try to keep any extreme darks from intersecting the sky. I want to achieve the feeling that the skylight is flaring across nearby forms and devouring them, as if the sticks and branches are tossed into the furnace.

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes about "the fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns until it shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an ocean of light."

Here's a detail about as wide as the "shift" key on your computer. Those highlights on the car were blinding. 

See, I'm squinting! You can scroll back up to see the final painting.

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I'm using Winsor and Newton gouache

and Richeson casein

in a Moleskine watercolor journal

Pictures that Tell Stories

Gabriel von Max, Monkeys as Critics

Blog reader Sean Oswald asks: "I was exploring some narrative artworks, and I wanted to ask if you would point me towards some resources that would help me learn about narrative art making. I want to know more about story and how it has been used in visual art to communicate ideas. I would also like to learn more about the pictorial mechanics of telling stories and the science behind it."

Sean, I think this is an important question. I wish there was more written about this, and I think it's a fertile field for study. Most of what's been written about the topic by art historians so far has been dismissive and short-sighted, usually by people who don't really create storytelling pictures.

You asked about pictorial mechanics. The best practical resources I've found are these four books:

Rockwell on Rockwell: How I Make a Picture

Famous Artists Course (Get the editions from the 1950s)

Creative Illustration by Andrew Loomis
Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers by Marcos Mateu-Mestre
....and of course it's something I talk about in my own book, Imaginative Realism

To understand the science behind how we look at storytelling pictures, I would love to see a researcher combine eyetracking data with fMRI brain scans in real time to see what's going on in the brain as a person begins to decipher a picture. Do the mirror neurons fire when you see a picture of a person doing a certain action? Can you actually see the brain engage on different levels as the visual processing moves from lower to higher levels?

Thomas Cole Voyage of Life: (Childhood, Youth, Manhood, Old Age), 1842

Here are a few thoughts on the topic. There are some famous series of paintings such as Thomas Cole's "Voyage of Life" that tell stories with a beginning, middle, and end, almost like a painted graphic novel. The Catholic church has told many Bible stories sequentially in stained glass windows and altarpieces.

Norman Rockwell, Breaking Home Ties

But let's consider single-image story-paintings, and let's begin with semantics. People often call them "illustrations." But I don't really like that term because it's misleading. Some paintings don't illustrate a text—they can stand entirely on their own, just as a play or a movie would do. In that sense, Rockwell's Post covers aren't illustrations, even though they're some of the finest examples of storytelling pictures.

As I mentioned in a post called "Detective Storytelling," I also have difficulty with the term "narrative art" because a true narrative requires the presentation of a series of events, revealed in sequence (First A, then B, then C). In a single picture, unlike a graphic novel or an animated film, all the events are telescoped into a single moment. Previous moments or events are implied by clues, and the subsequent moment can only be suggested. We might better describe this kind of art as a “detective storytelling.” It demands effort from the viewer to find all the clues, and care from the artist to make sure not to clutter the scene with extraneous detail.

‘A Special Pleader’ by Charles Burton Barber

Several books have been written about Victorian Narrative Painting. It's a big subject with a lot of wonderful examples. For example, in this painting by Barber, the dog's characterization shows its conflict of loyalties, and the picture hints at the tantrum the girl threw before she was punished.

Rockwell, Pyle, and N.C. Wyeth talk a lot about the importance of eliminating unnecessary detail, and of choosing the supreme moment to illustrate. Of the three, only Rockwell sat down to write a book about the topic. There are extensive student notes of Pyle's teaching. But they're mostly unpublished, so I'll try to share more on the blog. Also, don't miss the blog by Ian Schoenherr on Howard Pyle. Wyeth's thinking is best revealed in his letters, collected in The Letters of N. C. Wyeth

Ivan Shishkin Wind Fallen Trees, 1888

As a final thought, I believe it's possible for a painting to tell a story without human figures at all, as long as the painting implies a series of events that preceded the moment depicted. Shishkin's forest paintings often describe the story of the forest by presenting evidence of past storms and woodcutters.

Previous Posts:

Detective Storytelling and Before the Judge (Analyzing two academic paintings).

Thoughts on stories in illustrated books such as Dinotopia.

Eye tracking and composition
Stillness and Action
The Supreme Moment