Using a Pencil to Check Measurements

Yesterday I painted a street scene in Hudson, New York. (Link to video on Facebook)

I choose a limited palette of gouache: purple, lemon yellow, white, and two shades of raw umber. (Raw umber varies a lot by brand; the Shinhan is really more of a raw sienna). I add vermilion later on as an accent color.

The limited palette unifies the color scheme, and it's fun to try to mix a green with that blue-leaning purple and green-leaning yellow. 

In the video, I'm using a time-honored method for checking measurements. I choose a unit of length— the apparent height of the opening of green awning. 

I mark off that segment by choking up on my pencil held at arm's length. Then I transfer a comparable unit to my drawing and use that unit of measurement to check other things. It's a good way to guard against errors and to get a reasonably accurate basis for the picture.
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I'm using Shinhan Pass Design Water Color/Gouache and M. Graham Gouache in a Pentalic Aqua Journal.

Interview with the Barbican

The Barbican Centre in London published an interview with me, in connection with the ongoing exhibition "Into The Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction." The exhibit will be up for one more month, ending September 1.
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Creating Dinotopia with James Gurney

Visiting Lumber Camps

In addition to riding the freight trains around America, Tom Kinkade and I drove my Austin America around California looking for subjects for our planned book on sketching. The trunk was full of easels and stools and the whole back seat was filled with art supplies.

Between Fish Creek and Coarse Gold, by Tom Kinkade, markers

We stopped at a lumber camp, and Tom did this marker sketch of an abandoned wigwam (or teepee) burner.

The lumbermen invited us in for coffee and we sketched their portraits as they told us about dangerous aspects of their jobs.

Related Topics
In case you missed it, here's the audio journal podcast of our cross-country sketching adventures.
And here's where you can find old copies of The Artist's Guide to Sketching. No plans yet on reprinting, but there's been a lot of interest.
Previous post about riding freight trains with Thomas Kinkade
This is the last day for entering the Dead Vehicle Challenge. Even if you're not participating, check out the amazing entries that have been coming in.

Riding Freight Trains With Thomas Kinkade

Before he was the Painter of Light™, Thomas Kinkade was a hobo. (Direct Link to YouTube).



So was I. In 1980, he and I decided to take a summer off from art school to ride the freight trains across America. Here's a vintage tape recording from that journey. The quality isn't great, but it's a memory rescued from oblivion.

Thomas Kinkade and James Gurney in Missouri

I first met Thomas Kinkade in 1976, when he was assigned as my freshman college roommate at UC Berkeley.

After Berkeley, we were both art students at Art Center in Pasadena. The train-riding idea began after we met a hobo named Bud at a freight yard in Los Angeles. He told us which cars to ride and where to catch them. We decided to give it a try. 

We got short haircuts and we packed our backpacks with sketchbooks, markers, corncob pipes, felt hats, uniform shirts, and a Tupperware full of a mixture of peanut butter and honey. We were inspired by the writers Charles Kuralt and John Steinbeck, and we wanted to do the same thing with art.



All that summer we slept in graveyards and on rooftops and sketched portraits of gravestone cutters and lumberjacks. To make money we drew two-dollar portraits in bars by the light of cigarette machines.

By the time we got to Manhattan, we had a crazy idea to write a how-to book on sketching. We hammered out the basic plan for the book on Burger King placemats.

By night we slept on abandoned piers and by day we made the rounds of the publishers. We eventually got a contract from Watson-Guptill, and The Artist's Guide to Sketching was published in 1982. It is as much about the adventure of sketching on the road as it is about technique.

One effect of that trip on both of us was that we got a healthy respect for how all kinds of different people look at artwork. We set up at the Missouri state raccoon-hunting championships with the goal of doing portraits of everybody’s favorite dogs. The owners were very particular with the dogs’ proportions and markings, and they weren’t going to pay us two dollars unless we got the details right. It was a tougher critique than we ever got in art school.

We never returned to art school. My art-school friend Jeanette and I stayed in touch and we did some sketching trips together. She stayed through school to graduate from ArtCenter, and I learned what I could from her class notes.

But I got my art education from self-teaching and from working with Frank Frazetta and Tom Kinkade on the movie Fire and Ice in the early '80s.

I was always friendly with Tom in later years, but we were both busy and didn't stay in very close touch. Our families went on a few painting excursions together during the subsequent decades, to Colorado, Ireland, and the Catskills of New York State. I was sad Tom died so young, because his fearlessness and exuberance were a big influence on me.



As a footnote, Thomas Kinkade's New York Times obituary in 2012 said that "Mr. Kinkade traversed the country by boxcar with another artist, James Gurney, to sketch the American landscapes that they encountered."

One of the commentators after the obit doubted the veracity of the claim: “Really? Do you believe that a man born in 1958 traveled around the US in a boxcar like some Depression-Era hobo? He must be laughing wherever he is, that someone was gullible [enough] to believe that myth-making."
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Previously: Working on Fire and Ice with Tom Kinkade

Selective Focus

This watercolor study of an ornate church doorway is by Giovanni Boldini. I like the way he decided to focus on the extreme detail of the carved saints and the gothic arch, but he barely suggested the stairway and the lancet windows.



That selective focus makes the detail area even more satisfying.

I'm impressed with how Boldini chose to paint the most difficult part of the scene because that was the part that interested him. You don't have to paint everything equally!

Relative color temperature on skin tones

Mathieu asks:

I have been struggling over the last months trying to understand how to handle the green parts (cool notes) of the flesh in a portrait.

In the Fundamentals of Painting by Mogilevtsev I could not understand the following text: "The light consists of three parts: the highlight and halftone are cold, and the light space between them is warm." I thought only the shadows are warm and all the parts of the light will always be cold. So what does he calls "the light space" between them? 

Gurney—On page 22, Mr. Mogilevtsev implies that the "light space" is the area between the highlight and the halftone (the halftone is the area just before the light side turns to shadow). What he calls the "light space" might also be called the "lights" or just "the light side." 

Within that light side there can be subtle variations in color temperature. 

He is indeed painting the halftones cool, specifically greenish. The halftones are an important area to observe closely for their value, for the abruptness or softness of the edge as it turns to shadow, and for their relative color temperature. 

He makes the point that relative warm and cool tones can give life to a portrait and I would agree with that. His states that the rules he's talking about refer to painting a portrait indoors. Traditionally an indoor portrait would be lit by a relatively cool north-facing skylight. In that case, the lights are generally cool compared to the shadow, because of the coolness of that blue skylight relative to the bounced light of a wood floor or warm-colored rugs, etc.

Charles Hawthorne

However, I would be skeptical of any fixed rules about cool/warm relationships, such as saying "outdoors in sunlight the light is always warm and the shadows are always cool." If there is very warm light reflected back into the shadows, or a secondary light that is very warm, the shadows can be warmer than the light side. 

Or the color of light in the shadow can vary according to the direction the planes are facing, such as a person standing at the beach, with blue sky above, warm sand below to one side, and blue water below in another direction. It all depends.

On the portrait of the woman, I don't understand the logic behind the green parts of the flesh colors. Where to put those greens? Are they at the edges of the planes right before they turn? 

Gurney—Yes, he seems to be placing the greens at the turning of the form. This is something that old masters often did. It may or may not look convincing, depending on how it is handled. Sometimes this cool effect in halftones is the result of the way you glaze color over a grisaille or "dead color" underpainting.

Let's step back for a minute to remember that the appearance of any flesh tone color, whether in light or shadow, is a combination of: 
1) the color of the surface (local color)
2) the color of the light 
3) plus additional factors as subsurface scattering. 

So, warm local color plus warm light equals a very warm color note. 

I try to consider first the local color as it varies across the form. The color across the mask of the face can vary a lot, as any makeup or prosthetic specialist will attest. It's often redder in the cheeks and nose, darker around the eyes, lighter and yellower on the forehead, and bluer or greener in the neck or chin, plus there are effects caused by makeup and sunburn. 

The reflectivity of the skin varies too, and that factor can influence your color and value choices.

Then I consider the sum total of the colors of light shining on each plane. It might help to place a white plaster head near the model in the same light in order to study those influences.

The color you mix for any given plane will be a combination of all those factors. 



Mathieu continues: When speaking about "cool" or "cold" colors in the light areas why do I always feel that the yellowish and reddish color of these parts is warm? On the above portrait by Rubens the light areas doesn't seem "cold" to me.

Gurney—You're right that most skin tones are on the "warm" or orange side of the spectrum, but we're speaking of a relative thing here.

Sometimes it can be hard to judge relative light color when looking at a living model. That's why painting from a white plaster cast can be helpful for understanding both form and light. By removing the effect of local color, you can see what's going on with the relative temperature of the light.

Bottom line: be skeptical of fixed rules, be guided by your observation, and always compare, compare.
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