Whitcomb Demo

Jon Whitcomb, the king of American glamour illustration in the 1950s, shares his step-by-step method for how to paint a head in transparent wash:

Step 1. “Over softly penciled outlines, Whitcomb paints a light gray tone, which begins to establish the shadow area of his picture. After this has dried completely, he paints a medium gray tone over it, but stops short of the edge of the first wash. This light edge — you can see it on the forehead and neck, tends to soften the division between the light and shadow areas.”

Step 2. “Whitcomb establishes the over-all tonal effect early. First he paints a light wash over the entire skin area, the eyes, and teeth. Then, with ink, he paints the blacks: hair, eyebrows, eyes, nostrils, and corners of the mouth. He has left the light-struck areas of the hair white because he is still working in bold, flat areas of tone, with no serious effort yet at modeling.”

Step 3. “Now that the light and dark areas of the drawing are definitely established, the artist starts working within these areas to model such forms as the jawbone, nostrils, lips, etc. Observe how he uses the graded wash to suggest the rounding of the forehead. He also starts modeling the hair in the light areas, leaving the white of the paper for the high lights.”

Step 4. “The modeling is completed, but Whitcomb has not lost his strong, simple pattern of whites, blacks, and grays. Notice the subtle modeling on the girl’s lighter cheek. Some edges of the hair he has softened with a damp brush. With small touches of opaque white and grays he has added sparkling high lights. He has softened the edge between light and shadow on chin and neck with touches of thin opaque.”

Demo is from the Famous Artists Course

More Whitcomb samples online at Leif Peng’s Flickr Set
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By the way, I've made it easier to leave a comment by permitting comments from people with no Blogger account, and also by removing the Captcha step. Apparently Blogger has improved their spam detection filters, so those impediments are -- hopefully -- no longer necessary.

Couple at Diner

Yesterday, Bryan asked if I approach people to sit for an on-location sketch, and if I show them my sketchbook. 

Here's a recent example of one where I didn't ask, they didn't notice, and I never showed them. They were pretty far away across the restaurant. He was bent over his cellphone and she was talking to him, waving her wrist around in big circles as she made her points. Once in a while he would grunt a syllable in response, but he never looked up from the phone until his scrambled eggs arrived.

What I was thinking about as I was drawing was not just the contrast of poses and shapes and colors. I was also interested in trying to convey the relationship between the people, as it appeared to me from their body language.
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Previously: Caught Looking
Dead Air Syndrome

Suit Dynamics

Men's suits get interesting when the pose moves out of neutral. I sketched the same speaker as he shifted back and forth between two poses during his talk. 

The jacket and pants hang fairly straight in the left pose. But as he put his hands in his pockets, new points of tension emerge. Folds radiate from the red arrows at the button and the hand. A long pipe fold on his pants leads all the way down past the knee. Because he lifted his shoulders, folds also radiated from his shoulders. 

In this illustration by Austin Briggs from the Famous Artists Course, the leaning-back figure has folds radiating from the shoulder seam, the knee, and the crotch. But the back is fairly smooth.

There's no substitute for drawing from the costumed model to learn these dynamics, which change not only with the pose, but also with the type of fabric and the construction of the garment.

"I Paint" by Thijme Termaat

(Video Link) Thijme Termaat took two years to develop this 3 minute time lapse / stop motion epic, where he paints a series of paintings, stepping in and out of the illusion that flows from his brush. By wearing the same shirt and holding the same pose as the camera makes big jumps in time, he appears to bring the painting along in magical leaps.
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Thanks, Frank.

Kids and Art

A lot of school groups and families have been visiting the Dinotopia exhibition at the Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin, as reported by Rob Duns of WAOW News. (Video link in case the player doesn't work)

Teachers have brought out model ships and dinosaurs to explain Arthur Denison's voyage to the lost island in the 19th century.

There's a book with a binding covered with the dinosaur footprint alphabet, bronze corner pieces, and bits of ferns sticking out from the bottom. Is it really Arthur Denison's journal?

I was about 10 years old when my family took me to the DeYoung art museum in San Francisco. With five kids, my family didn't go to art museums very often, so it was quite a novelty for me. Luckily, there was an exhibit going on of Norman Rockwell's paintings. I was only tall enough to see the shoes in his paintings. But what shoes! They seemed to have a life and character all their own. 

At the exhibit, my dad bought the book 

Norman Rockwell: Illustrator 

for me, and for the next few years, I studied every word over and over, especially the section in the back where Rockwell explained in great detail exactly how he made his pictures. Since I never met any real professional artists as a child or youth, and there was no Internet, that book was my lifeline, and I still have it. Maybe in a future post I'll show a few of my very lame early attempts to use the the Rockwell method.

Anyway, I just want to say that I'll look forward to meeting museum-goers of all ages at the Woodson museum next week, but I'll especially be looking for that 10 year old who is just like I was. I'll be visiting Wausau on March 1-3.

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Dinotopia exhibition at the Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin

Programs and events

Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time -- 20th Anniversary Edition (Calla Editions) on Amazon

Get a signed copy of Dinotopia 

The traveling Dinotopia exhibit was organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum Contact them to get the show at your museum.

Aardman's upcoming pirate movie

Aardman Animation, the makers of Wallace and Gromit, is putting the finishing touches on The Pirates! Band of Misfits, which may be the most technically ambitious stop-frame animated film yet.

(Video link) This short trailer gives a peek behind the scenes at the unique logistics required for making the 3D theatrical feature. Aardman, which made Chicken Run and The Curse of the Were Rabbit with the clay-mation technique, switched over to all digital for Flushed Away. 

With this film they've returned to the physical stop-frame process, though they're using pre-fabricated mouths rather than forming the mouth shapes in clay each time. The mouth shapes were designed on the computer and printed out with a 3D printer. 

As this little making-of trailer explains, the filming process is incredibly time consuming, taking 18 months to shoot, with up to 40 separate set-ups going simultaneously. Director Peter Lord says, “It’s really three-dimensional chess. It does your head in.” 

The movie is set for release in late March (Europe) and April (USA) 

Official movie site

Interview with Peter Lord

Aardman animation