Andrew Wyeth Documentary

Former Monty Python member Michael Palin has won a devoted following for his travel documentaries on BBC, and he has also presented a few shows about artists, notably about the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi.


(Direct link to YouTube video) In this hour-long video, he takes a look at the world of the American painter Andrew Wyeth.

With his characteristic humor and humility, Palin begins the story at the Olson farm in Maine where Wyeth created his enigmatic painting "Christina's World" and then travels to the locations around Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania that inspired the artist, including Kuerner's Farm and NC Wyeth's Studio.

The documentary presents archival family films of NC Wyeth, and of young Andy playacting in costume. Instead of limiting his interviews to scholars and academics, Palin talks to people who knew Wyeth: the son of his model Karl Kuerner, the farmer who buried him, as well as Wyeth's niece, and his son Jamie. Wyeth's widow Betsy apparently declined to participate.


Palin conducts a sensitive interview with Helga Testorf, the model for the extensive series of figural works that Wyeth painted secretly over many years. Was Helga his mistress? Helga answers the tongue-waggers: "They didn't know any better. They did not know our language. We were not talking that way." Helga says that Wyeth wanted the work to be revealed after the artist's death, and that keeping their privacy during the ensuing scandal was a challenge.

The video was nicely produced, but I found the use of selective "artistic" blurring to be distracting and annoying—and unsuited to Wyeth, whose art was more about sharp focus, selective cropping, and limited color.

Thanks, David Steimel

Maquette of Scroobious Pip

Rick Lovell, who teaches a class in Illustration Techniques at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta says:

"Your 'How I Paint Dinosaurs' video inspired me to have my students create maquettes based on Edward Lear's 'Scroobious Pip' poem." 

"I chose Pip because they don't have to be accurate as to anatomy- they can just have fun with creating an animal character." 

Rick continues: “'The Scroobious Pip' is an everything animal that the other animals couldn’t quite figure out. It was part insect, part bird, part mammal, etc. So I decided to make this a three-part project; 1; the students had to read the poem and do sketches of what they think Pip would look like, 2; they would create a maquette using a wire armature and polymer clay, and 3; they would use the maquette as reference for an illustration done with watercolors and acrylics."

"This is my demo so far. I plan on making this a regular project for my techniques classes. Thanks for the inspiration!"

Thank you, Rick! If other teachers have used my books or videos as a starting point for classroom assignments, please send photos and a description.

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Rick Lovell's blog 

Read Lear's nonsense poem "The Scroobious Pip" 

DVD 'How I Paint Dinosaurs' from the manufacturer or from Amazon

'How I Paint Dinosaurs' video download via Paypal

Classic Stern Steerers

The canvas was up and the runners were down again today. More than 30 ice yachts gathered on the Hudson River, almost certainly the last day of the season.

I set up my sketching stool in the midst of it all and tried to capture the scene in gouache. The Vixen, which gave me a ride last Sunday, is at the far right, and the gaff-rigged vessel at center is the Genevieve.

These are the classic stern steerers, restored by loving craftspeople who are reviving this popular sport that had its heyday more than a hundred years ago. The oldest iceboat out there today was from about 1870, and most were from around 1900.

This video, shot less than a week ago, captures the festive spirit. (Direct link to YouTube)

Put it where you can see it

There's an old rule that animators keep in mind: "Put it where you can see it." 

It's true for illustrators, too. When you're designing a picture, the parts of the pose that are important to the story should be in clear view, while the less important parts can be concealed.

For this illustration in Dinotopia: The World Beneath, I wanted to show Arthur Denison helping a young Giganotosaurus free his foot, which was trapped between some fallen logs. While I was planning the picture, I thought about what things I needed to show to explain what was going on: Arthur's face and hand, the dinosaur's face and the tip of his tail, his ankle, and the logs.

I didn't need to show the dinosaur's hands, Arthur's feet, or the details of plants on the ground, so those parts could be hidden or blurred. The greenish brown background tone helps to disguise unimportant edges at the bottom of the picture. 

Because Arthur's face was especially important, I contrived a lot of lines to radiate out from it, a compositional technique called "spokewheeling."

Read More

Book:Dinotopia: The World Beneath

More about the rule in the book: The Animator's Survival Kit

Previous post: Spokewheeling

Painting Iceboats

On Tuesday I set up my sketching stool in the middle of the Hudson River, a few hundred yards out from the shoreline.


Beside me was a foot-wide crack. Every once in a while it groaned and creaked. When a tug passed by in the shipping lane, the crack let out a dull, low thud, which reverberated up and downstream.

The sun was shining, but there was no wind. That was a good thing, because it meant that the iceboats would hold still while I painted them in gouache.

With the temperature hovering around ten degrees Fahrenheit, watercolors tend to freeze on the brush. I filled my water cup with vodka, which kept it flowing.

Torvosaurus gurneyi

Torvosaurus gurneyi. Image: Scott Hartman and Carol Abraczinskas

Today a new dinosaur is being introduced to the world, and I'm thrilled and honored that that the paleontologists decided to name it after me. It's called Torvosaurus gurneyi.

 The dinosaur, which was discovered in Portugal, is one of the largest carnivorous dinosaurs from the Jurassic and the largest land-predator discovered in Europe.

Lead author Christophe Hendrickx of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Museu of Lourinhã says, “With a skull of 115 cm, Torvosaurus gurneyi was...an active predator that hunted other large dinosaurs, as evidenced by blade shape teeth up to 10 cm.”


Mr. Hendrickx says he chose the name because of a childhood fascination with the book that I wrote and illustrated called Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time.

When I introduced Dinotopia more than 22 years ago, I received many letters from young children who said they wanted to become artists or paleontologists. It gives me great pleasure to hear from some of them all these years later and to find out that they're doing for a living what they dreamed about as kids.

Dinotopia is a fantasy world, but it started with the science. Many dinosaur paleontologists, such as Michael Brett-Surman, Jack Horner, Phil Currie, and Ken Carpenter helped me to visualize the extinct animals that I painted in the book, and one of them even curated an exhibition of Dinotopia original artwork for natural history museum. What inspired me to write the book was the new dynamic vision of dinosaurs that emerged from the work of those very scientists.

Imagination is at the heart of all science, but it's especially at the core of paleontology. Paleontologists have a highly disciplined form of imagination, similar to that of a detective. I'm in awe of how they can pull together scraps of evidence and then—guided by patience and skepticism—build a complete vision of a world that we will never see.

Next time I return to doing paintings of Dinotopia, I look forward to visualizing Torvosaurus—perhaps with Mr. Hendrickx riding it.
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Scientific publication: "Torvosaurus gurneyi n. sp., the Largest Terrestrial Predator from Europe"
Article at NBC News