Old Haunts

Jeanette and I met and fell in love as art students 27 years ago in Los Angeles. Now that we’re here again, we’ve been visiting our old haunts to see how they’ve changed.

When we were engaged, we moved into the Golden Palm apartments in Highland Park. The Golden Palm, or “GP” as we affectionately called it, was a favorite apartment building for students at Art Center. The top floor was occupied almost entirely by art students, and the bottom floor was all working people.

It was no beauty then and it hasn’t gotten any prettier. Our apartment was next to a dumpster. Every morning a mother would lift her son into it to fetch out cans for recycling. They’d then crush the cans at six in the morning by driving back and forth over them with an old Chevy Impala.

When we stopped by yesterday, the grass was tramped to dirt, and we saw broken furniture piled up along Benner Street. There were bars on the windows, and dented vans parked outside with bumper stickers that said “Yo Soy El Army.” Like other places we’ve seen all across America, the rich places have gotten richer and the poor places have gotten poorer.


In the old days after sketching in downtown LA, we’d grab a bite at Philippe’s, home of the famous French dip sandwiches and five-cent coffee.

We expected it would be erased by time, but it was exactly as we remember it, with the sawdust on the floor, the long communal tables, the pickled eggs, and the circus posters. There were only two changes we noticed. Now they have wi-fi and a website. And the coffee now costs nine cents.

Gurning

I was shooting photo reference for a series of games in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, and I had some young friends of mine posing for a game called “graces.” This was a popular game in early America. It involves launching a wooden hoop from two dowel rods.

After I shot a bunch of photos of this hoop game, the girl told me she was pretty good at making faces. Yeah, sure, I thought. Every kid likes to make funny faces, but how many are truly gifted at “gurning?”

Gurning, by the way, is the art of using your face to look completely ridiculous. I’m something of an expert on this. Being a Gurney I come from a family with genetic advantages for making silly faces (although I'm waiting to lose all my teeth to achieve the truly championship-level gurns).

My young friend demonstrated a few of her best gurns, and I realized I was in the presence of a master.

Then her brother, no slouch himself, launched into a few of his best gurns, including the famous “pig nose,” “mouth-stretch,” and “super-pucker.” These take more than just practice. They take instinct and artistry.

I had no choice but to change my idea for the picture. I discarded the idea of graces and went for a gurning contest instead. Since this was Dinotopia, there had to be a dinosaur gurning as well. I believe this is the first painting in history of a “Gurnasaurus.”

Vulnerable T.Rex

This painting appears in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, but it was originally created for Discover Magazine to accompany a story on the vulnerable side of the Tyrannosaurus.

We often see this animal as a ruthless and invincible predator, but in fact its numbers were already declining due to climate changes around 70 million BP, when this scene is set, five million years before the asteroid impact. I chose a moment when the T. rex is drinking water from a receding water hole. He is accompanied by two juveniles, a herd of Triceratops in the distance, a softshell turtle, and various other creatures that are found together with T.rex in the Hell Creek Formation in what is now Montana.

I drew inspiration for the cracking mud and dead trees from a pond in the forest behind my home. The palmetto and cypress came from location studies in Florida.

My consultant was Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, here in his museum with skeletons of baby Maiasaura (photo by Tobey Sanford). Horner proposed the provocative idea that the T. rex may have been a scavenger as well as--or instead of--an active predator.
At his suggestion, I gave the creature a reddish face, similar to the faces of vultures and many other scavengers.

This painting was recently accepted into the Focus on Nature X exhibition of natural history artwork. It will appear at the New York State Museum in Spring of 2008.

Illustrated Classics

It’s hard for us to imagine the impact that illustrated books had a century ago, before movies and television commanded people’s imaginations. Back then a single new chromolithograph by NC Wyeth or Howard Pyle or Jessie Wilcox Smith was a rare pleasure, like seeing a shooting star or tasting a mango. A book with thirteen color plates was an extravagant feast. Today every time we open our mailbox there’s an avalanche of color pictures.

Like everyone else in my generation, I grew up with the TV blasting away in the background. The coffee table was three inches deep in color magazines. But somehow, by some strange magic, those illustrated classics spoke to me from their high shelf. “Take me down, savor me, I will take you to wonderful places,” they seemed to say. Each color plate sent a shiver down my spine.

Somehow I sensed the rarity and permanence of story illustrations, and I developed a hunger for them. Later, I found a paperback collection of Howard Pyle’s pictures. I bladed it and stuck the pictures all over the house. Those pictures were beacons for my imagination, a kind of steady refuge from the flickering world.

P.S. Sorry for the late post. We've been flying to the west coast today.

Bix Maquettes

When you are drawing and painting main characters you need really detailed miniatures for reference. It’s worth putting a little extra time to sculpting these “hero maquettes” until they look just the way you want them.


On Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, I used the little plastic model from Dino-Riders (left) as a reference model for the Protoceratops Bix. But it really wasn’t adequate for such an important character, and the art suffers as a result. So for Dinotopia: The World Beneath, I sculpted the larger maquette of Bix (above, right). I made this one out of Sculpey and painted it with acrylics. The head is a separate piece and attaches it with a swivel joint so that it can be set to any angle.

My favorite Bix maquette is this one (above), sculpted by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. It’s about 36 inches long (about half the size of a real Protoceratops), cast in resin from a clay original.

It has wonderfully expressive glass eyes. The Henson sculptors are masters at capturing a creature’s charm and personality.

The Henson shop also created the hatchling character “26” for the Hallmark miniseries, which was done as a remotely controlled animatronic puppet. It weighed about as much as a watermelon. They handed it to me on the set at Pinewood Studios in London, and all at once it started wiggling its feet, blinking its eyes, and moving its jaws. I almost thought it was alive until I saw two or three guys in the shadows with radio control sets.

Home: Jungle Edition

The only downside about being on tour for so long is that home sweet home turns into a spookhouse. We hit the road in early October and just stopped home for a short Thanksgiving break. But the place looks neglected. The leaves are all down. Oak branches have fallen across the driveway. The grass never got its final cut. Small trees have sprouted from the soil in our gutters.

Our Ankylosaurus keeps an eye on things. He’s looking seedy, too. The sculpt was originally made for an animatronic puppet that appeared in a Dinotopia CD Rom adventure game published by Turner Interactive in the mid ’90s. Remember when publishers had CD Rom divisions?


Hiram is our caretaker. He’s supposed to get the chores done while we’re gone, but he’s been spending all day sitting around eating styrofoam peanuts. Here he is complaining about his arthritis. Hiram is actually a full-size puppet I made from an old cardboard box. He’s a nice guy but he tends to scare little kids.

We realized we were out of firewood with winter coming on. So I got to work with the chainsaw cutting up downed wood. Franklin got the leaf blower working.

Neither of us heard Jeanette shout when she saw a seven-foot rat snake sleeping on the top of the bush where she was raking. We let the snake sleep, poor guy. Rat snakes are pretty companionable critters, and aren’t too frisky this time of year. But in summertime when they’re feeling more chipper they’ve been known to climb up the side of the house alongside the chimney looking for robin hatchlings.

Syracuse University

Syracuse University's art school has a long reputation for training artists and illustrators. Two of my heroes, Tom Lovell and Harry Anderson, graduated from Syracuse around 1930.

The campus adjoins the city of Syracuse in the center of New York State. Its hilly location gives its students lots of exercise as they travel from class to class.

John Thompson heads the illustration program. His approach is traditional and realistic. We sat in on a class as he introduced an assignment on the theme of “inside and outside” He showed slides of compositional framing devices ranging from Titian to Bernie Fuchs.

He will lead a group of students to India this winter for a sketching tour. He told me that he was in no hurry for students to learn digital tools. At the undergraduate level, the focus is primarily on drawing and painting.

Our guide Tim Coolbaugh took us throughout the rest of the art building, a modern concrete structure at the edge of the quad. Lining the hallways were huge self-portraits showing faces contorted with laughter.

The walls upstairs displayed the results of a line drawing exercise taught by James Ransome, where students used markers to draw interior scenes with figures. They used white artist's tape to erase parts of the drawings as they reconsidered their lines and explored abstract shapes.

Seniors occupied the tower rooms of the art building, which they customized with their supplies and works-in-progress.

Syracuse University also maintains the Special Collections Research Center, which has an impressive collection of artist’s papers and manuscripts, including cartoonist Roy Crane’s remarkable instructional scrapbook, assembled to guide his assistants in composition.

After my presentation, I met several of the illustration instructors including, from left to right: London Ladd, Bob Dacey, and James Ransome, and Roger DeMuth (not in picture) all award-winning professional illustrators balancing their own artwork with their teaching.
Thanks and best wishes to all at SU!

Dinosaurs Invade Elementary Schools

On Tuesday I paid a visit to the Grant D. Morse Elementary School in the Hudson Valley of New York State, at the base of Platte Clove. I did my PowerPoint and Magic Marker presentations for 300 kids in grades 4-6 and then another huge assembly of Kindergarten through third grade.

The girls from the school newspaper Just Print It interviewed me with astute questions about the creative process. They pressed me on a lot of topics, like exactly how many more books I plan to write, and then I asked them a few questions about how movie adaptations influence the way they imagine their favorite books.

Art teacher Elisa Tucci has had the students working with dinosaurs for a long time now. Here’s a wall of cutouts, drawings, and paper dioramas. There were giant T.rex footprints cut out of paper and taped to the floor of the hallways.

The kids collaborated on this spectacular panorama of dinosaurs on parade, with exotic architecture behind them.

I'd like to spotlight another teacher who has been working with Dinotopia. His name is Andrew Wales of the Lynch Bustin school in Athens, Pennsylvania. Here’a link to his blog journal, leading up to the big Dino Daze Family Fun Night day on November 30.

He says the students have been inspired by Gurney Journey to paint their own pictures, but "some students imagined a co-existence between humans and dinosaurs that was not so peaceful!" Here is one of the large dinosaur sculptures made from ingenious combinations of cardboard tubes and paper.

Time for Kids, the little magazine that comes home in school lunchboxes, also did a feature on the new Dinotopia book. Here's the link. Thanks, TFK, and my sincere appreciation to all the schoolteachers who have used Dinotopia in their classrooms.

Texture in the Halflight

One of the most common mistakes in painting dinosaurs is to make the skin texture equally prominent throughout the form.

In digital work, the appearance of overall equal texture can happen when a bumpy 2-D pattern is mapped equally over a form. The texture is rendered essentially the same way in the shadow as it is in the light, but in a reduced value or tone. Traditional painters are tempted to do the same. That way of doing texture doesn’t look real because it’s not how the eye sees it.

In fact, the textural relief is not equally apparent in the light and shadow. Texture is very difficult to see at all in the shadow region, and it’s only slightly more visible in the fully lit areas. The place to see texture is in the halflight.


The halflight is sometimes called the halftone or demi-teinte. This is the area where the form transitions from light into shadow. Astronomers looking at photos of the moon call this region the terminator. It’s the area where the raking light brings out the detail of the craters.

On this photo of a dinosaur model, I’ve marked the fully-lit areas with an L, the shadow with an S, and the halflight with an H.

Here’s another detail of a painting from Journey to Chandara, showing the halflight in comparison to the light and shadow. Note that the texture in the reflected light (RL) should also be downplayed compared to the halflight. With traditional opaque painting media, you can suggest halflight texture by dragging pigments over bumpy impastos, or in this case, canvas texture.

In more transparent media you can suggest halflight texture with a drybrush handling. This painting was also done in oil, but the paint is used more thinly.

Happy Thanksgiving. And remember, when you're eating a turkey, you're really eating an "avian dinosaur."

Windmill Maquette

Maquettes can be made roughly and quickly, and still provide plenty of useful information.

Here’s an architectural maquette made of foam core board assembled with a glue gun. It only took about two hours to cut out and stick together. The whole thing is about six inches long, with toothpicks for the windmill spars. As a maquette, it's no beauty!

I spray-painted it gray to make it photograph better. White tends to bleach out in the photo. You can see how the bumpy texture of the paint and the ragged inner surface of the foam board really shows up in the “halflight,” or the area where the form is turning into shadow. The textural effect is strongest on the tail fin and on the side plane of the tower.

There’s also an interesting cast shadow to the right of the cluster of buildings, with cool upfacing planes, and little slivers of light on the edges of the buildings and the terraces.

This is the kind of information I needed from the maquette as I developed the final painting, even though the form and design ended up quite different.

Please check back again tomorrow, and I'll explain more about texture in the halflight, because it's the key to painting dinosaurs convincingly in direct sunlight.

Place Names

If you look closely at Arthur Denison’s map of Dinotopia in Journey to Chandara, you’ll notice a lot of place names that didn’t appear in previous editions. There are new towns with strange sounding names sprinkled across the island.

Let me reveal one of my favorite sources for these names: Merriam-Webster's 365 New Words Page-a-Day Calendar.

This curio cabinet of weird words is a daily delight in our household. When I find a word that I like, I tear it off and tuck it away in a file folder. Later I may use it to name a dinosaur, a character, a group, or a village. Here are a few of the words that I have collected and put to use in the new story.

Sketch of Joe

I met Joe at a family gathering and did this sketch while he told me his life story. He saw so many terrible and wonderful things in his life, fleeing from Hungary, leaving all that he loved behind him.

Rochester Institute of Technology

Most people think of RIT as a technical school for engineers and scientists. But it also has an impressive art and illustration program, which offers its students a skills-oriented course of study in a professional setting.

The campus consists of rectilinear red brick buildings arranged on a large campus on the outskirts of the city. We arrived at the gallery of the art building, which was hosting an exhibition investigating the design of pop-up books. Each of the basic design principles of pop-ups was illustrated with a giant-sized corrugated plastic model that you could try out.

Illustration chairman Bob Dorsey toured us through the art building. He told us that illustration students concentrate on basic skills of drawing and painting for the first two years. When they begin using digital tools later in the program, the college insists on staying on the cutting edge, completely gutting and replacing the computer equipment with the latest technology every two and a half years.

Mr. Dorsey described his program this way: "our illustration program is really geared towards full time studio careers. We have a diverse faculty of real working illustrators who all have their own areas of expertise. This includes traditional, digital, and dimensional illustration."

RIT is one of only two institutions in America that offers comprehensive degree programs in medical illustration (the other is in Cleveland). Department Chairman Glen Hintz showed us tearsheets of alumni (above), and the room where students get artistic training in the area of human anatomy and physiology.

The medical illustration program is closely integrated with the university’s biology department, and students have full access to cadavers and head-to-toe dissection.

To my knowledge, no school that I've seen yet offers a course specifically in animal anatomy for the artist—but I believe every art school should! If you know of such a school, shout it out on the comments.

RIT is also the home for the legendary School for American Crafts. For students interested in woodworking, metalworking, glassblowing, or ceramics (textiles were discontinued in the mid-90s), there is probably no better place to learn from modern masters. Illustration majors are able to sample from these resources as electives.

There are also programs in animation and sculpture or "dimensional" work. Here is a dimensional major named Matt, with his sculpture called the “Key Keeper,” an alien creature who walks on his fingers and holds his keys with his tail.

After my presentation on Dinotopia, I enjoyed talking with Bob Dorsey, Chad Grohman and Allen Douglas of the illustration faculty. These teachers obviously have great sympathy and respect for each other and a profound regard for their students. We’ve noticed that when all the teachers get along as friendly colleagues, the students benefit from the chemistry and the unity of vision, and they do their best work.

Thanks again and best wishes to everyone at RIT, and I wish I had had more time to visit with you!

Bakery Baby

We had to warm up from the bone-chilling November air, so we stopped in the Upper Crust Bakery for some chicken soup and coffee.

At the table near us was a gathering of moms with their 1-year-old babies. Like all infants, they were spellbound by the sight of each other. One little guy looked so well bundled and contented that I guessed he would hold still for a while.

I brought out the ink-filled Kuretake water brushes, which are nice in places like this where you don’t want to set up a whole watercolor kit. The darker one is filled with pure Waterman brown ink. It’s a little too red for my liking. Does anyone have a recommendation for some bottled ink that runs closer to sepia or raw umber? Also, has anyone found a web source for these? I got them in the Pearl Paint store in New Jersey.

Radio Interview

Yesterday morning the rain kept pouring down as we endured the rush hour traffic into Albany, New York for an interview on public radio. We got to the station 45 minutes early, with plenty of nervous energy to burn off.

We parked Trusty Rusty in view of the WAMC headquarters and its performance hall, a retrofitted old bank building on Central Avenue. I started a watercolor sketch of the streetcorner, while Jeanette cast on another knitted sock onto her bamboo needles. I had to fire up the defroster and wipers every ten minutes or so to keep the windshield from fogging up.
I take back what I said yesterday about watercolor being impossible on rainy days. The comforts of the car interior is better than getting a steady soaking outside. Here’s the sketch in my mini-Moleskine, using the Schmincke sepia, light red, ultramarine, and yellow ochre.

We suddenly remembered to tune the radio to WAMC. As I put on the last touches to the sketch, the hosts Joe Donahue and Julia Taylor introduced the segment: “Next we’re going to take a journey into a world of fantasy with artist and author James Gurney…” I rushed in to the studio with a cup of coffee and my sketchbook still in my hand.

The on-air room was lined with foam waffles, and the microphones swung out from spidery arms. Even though the show is called “The Roundtable,” the table is actually elongated. The engineer behind the glass flashed a hand with five fingers—was that five seconds or five minutes? Joe and Julia were completely relaxed and friendly, but intensely focused, always in the moment. They write the intros, segues, and questions the day before, Joe told me. But they depart from the written script on a whim.

It’s the interviewer’s job to get the guest beyond his prepared answers, and the guest’s job to get the interviewer beyond his prepared questions. They were fun to talk to, and got me thinking about aspects of Dinotopia that I hadn't touched in an interview before.

Here's the link to the MP3 podcast of the interview.

Today I do two more interviews: an in-studio chat at WKZE and a phoner from LA to plug the Art Center gig.

Rain and Neon

One of the virtues of oil paint is that you can paint in a drizzle or a downpour. Don’t even think of trying it in watercolor. In 100 percent humidity, watercolor washes won't dry.

Here's the setup I was using for a painting of a storefront scene. The umbrella was a cheap beach umbrella that came with a plastic clamp. It attached to the top of the pochade box. It kept the worst of the water off the painting, but instead an icy river flowed down my neck.

It poured for six hours with no let-up. You can see the painting here in its lay-in stage, drawn in loosely with a bristle brush using burnt sienna thinned with turpentine.

It was fun painting the puddles, but I had a devil of a time with the neon drug store sign, as you can see in the final painting. The neon is an intensely saturated color. But it’s also high in value. It’s impossible to capture in both the intense chroma and the high value in the same single paint mixture.

If you go for the bright red chroma, the value or tone of the paint goes lower, and if you try to capture the lightness, you can’t also suggest the color. Analyzing the photo now after the fact, I suppose the trick would have been to show the bright halo of intensely saturated color directly adjacent to the near-white neon tubes.

Art at SUNY Fredonia

The art school at the State University of New York in Fredonia is an undiscovered gem.

The campus adjoins a tree-shaded small town in the rolling farmland of southwestern New York State. Jeanette and I spent the morning painting watercolors on a nearby Amish farm, accompanied by the sounds of a creaky windmill and a horse-drawn manure-spreader.

Fredonia has a fully restored 1891 opera house where the college’s animation majors can screen their capstone film projects. The school recently expanded its illustration program to include animation, under the leadership of the new illustration/animation chair Jill Johnston-Price.

Because of her expertise, most of the illustration majors develop a love and awareness for the moving image, all of them beginning the traditional way with a pencil and a light table or with stop motion before moving into digital tools.

Dr. Alberto Rey, who heads up the drawing and painting major, was born in Cuba. A gifted watercolor painter and fly fisher, he brings his painting students outdoors to work directly from life. A row of French easels is available for anyone to borrow for their landscape painting exercises.

“We try to get the students out of the sterile environment,” he said. “When they go outside, they have to learn to compose. Otherwise they get too structured and too dependent on photography.”

The focus of the curriculum is on fundamental hands-on skills. Drawing and painting students get the chance to hand-sculpt a figure in clay to deepen their understanding of the form of the figure.

There’s a room set up for intaglio printing and stone lithography, as well as a whole workshop for welding.

One of the assignments involved drawing a life-size self portrait nude in charcoal, which meant scaling up a drawing in the traditional way and very carefully modeling the tones. All the painting students learn how to make their own stretcher bars in the woodshop and stretch and prepare their own canvases.

But Dr. Rey believes that the thinking is equally vital. “It’s important that the students develop intellectually and conceptually,” he said, and part of the work of the painting majors involves writing their own artist statements.

One of the strengths of the art school at Fredonia, apart from its reasonable tuition costs, is the fact that it is part of a larger university, rated twelfth overall in the US News ranking for public institutions in the north. The college is strong in early education, music, performance, and public health. We met one art student who is combining her love of art with nursing and anthropology, with the goal of working in the field of art therapy. Another double-major that we met wants to go into teaching art to schoolchildren.

“It’s exciting conceptually for an instructor to work with the students,” said Dr. Rey. “The students are all different.” As different and unique as clay pots, I thought to myself as I surveyed a display of hand-thrown ceramics laid out on a counter overlooking a stand of maples in their full autumn finery. Such passion for teaching helps direct and fire the destiny of each of these young artists as surely as the potter shapes the clay.

Photo Reference

Photos are a big help, but you can’t take them too literally.

I wanted to paint a picture of an elegant gentleman scrubbing the teeth of a Baryonyx. But all I had available for a model was myself. So I grabbed some baggy pants and a long jacket and stood on the driveway with a push broom.

On its own, the photo is pretty lame. The shadows are too black. The legs appear too short. The coat hangs straight down in wrinkles that don’t describe any action. The pose needed a better sense of action and a clearer silhouette. Every photo is just a starting place, and the fun begins when you make departures from the facts they present.

The Laundromat & the Non-Motif

I welcome being stuck at a laundromat because it means finding a “non-motif.”

You know how it is when you’re driving along looking for a picturesque subject to sketch. You never find it. Everything rushes by too fast as you look out the car window. Being plunked at a laundromat forces you to make the most of wherever you find yourself. Instead of a typical artistic motif, like a barn or a fishing boat, you have the chance to paint a non-motif, which is always more interesting.

Yesterday we spent a couple of hours at Benny’s Coin Laundry in Geneva, Ohio. All sorts of magnificently ordinary subjects presented themselves. Jeanette did a pen sketch of the Hong Kong King Buffet across the street.

I followed the ninety degree rule and faced toward a cell tower and a telephone pole. A guy came out of the laundry and said, “I’ve lived here 25 years, and I’ve never seen an artist painting the CVS.” He told us about how the old dance hall above the general store still has its parquet floor and gas lamps, but it is going to be cut up into apartments.

I used a Kuretake water brush pen. It comes in several sizes and has a tip of nylon fibers. I filled the clear plastic handle not with water but with the same Waterman brown ink that I use in my Waterman fountain pen, which I used for the line work. A second Kuretake holds a lighter tone of ink.

I had never really studied a cell tower before. This was the self-supporting kind, unlike the monopole or the guyed tower.

As we drove away, everything looked paintable, and I had to tear myself away from this one, a fast food sign in front of an abandoned Carnegie library. Non-motifs are all these candid vistas we take for granted in our everyday surroundings. They're attractive not because they are ugly or beautiful, but simply because they're there. They are the ubiquitous universe that we look at but rarely see.

Gallery One

Here I am on my way to a day’s work at Gallery One in Mentor, Ohio, one of the premier galleries for art prints and originals. I gave my Magic Marker presentation to a very smart group of young people. Last night I shared the behind-the-scenes PowerPoint show.

This is Kyle, who told me, “I want to be an illustrator by day and a boxer by night. In the afternoon I can rest.” I drew a picture of a T.rex versus a strutter in his book, while he sketched up the clash betweeen Godzilla and Space Godzilla.

A fun surprise was meeting the one and only Azonthus (of the Dinotopia Message Board) and her husband Greg. They showed us great photos of their wedding album.

And why do you suppose I'm smiling? Because Sue gave me a beautiful fossilized animal dropping, known as a coprolite. It was about 20 million years old, so it had turned to stone, but it looked as real as something you'd find in the park, and a lot of the kids didn't care to touch it. Of all the kinds of direct evidence of dinosaurs and ancient mammals—bones, footprints, even skin impressions—coprolites really make them come to life. Thanks, Sue!

Skybax Model

This painting from the Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara shows Will Denison flying through the mists of Waterfall City on his giant pterosaur Cirrus. I wanted to give the painting a feeling of lightness and airiness, so I stuck to pale tones in the distance, and a warm palette of color overall. It’s another example of the weird principle of reverse atmospheric perspective brought on by edge lighting in a moisture laden environment.


To figure out how the edge lighting would appear on the architecture and the flying figures, I put my maquettes to work in real sunlight. Here’s a little model of Will flying on Cirrus that I've used many times before. The pterosaur model is made from a variety of materials: Sculpey, wood, pipe cleaners, and cardboard. It has poseable wings, which are made from a pair of old stockings that have been painted with latex to give them a membranous surface.


With the model set up in the real sunlight you can see clearly how the top side of the near wing picks up the cool of the sky, while the far wing is warm from the transmitted light shining through it.

Dead Air Syndrome

We stopped at a breakfast place along U.S. Highway 20 called the Country Table. It was filled with guys with plaid shirts and women with dyed hair. Whenever there was a booth occupied by a group of men or a group of women, they were always huddled close, chattering happily away.

But whenever a husband sat with his wife, silence prevailed. There were no words, just dull chewing. It's the same everywhere, not just here. How is it possible to share a whole meal with someone without talking?

Before I got married I used to worry that after a few decades my wife and I would run out of things to say. But so far that hasn’t happened. Our conversation probably isn’t that interesting. We repeat ourselves endlessly. But so far at least we don’t suffer from "dead air syndrome."

South Bend to Three Rivers

Yesterday morning was ideal for sketching, with fleecy clouds rolling in. We set up our chairs on the front lawn of a medical office and got to work with the watercolors: Jeanette with her Lukas set, and me test-driving a new Schmincke mini set (thanks for the recommendation, Dennis Nolan).

I was trying to capture the effect of contre-jour lighting, which meant painting around the little sparkly bits of edge lighting. I probably could have used Maskoid or Liquid Frisket for this task, but didn’t have any.

I tried to blend various colors into the shadow areas, while keeping the intensities muted. Colors are more saturated or vivid when the sun is at your back, and more neutral when you're looking toward the sun. I also avoided putting too much detail or linework in the picture, which would weaken the simple backlight effect.

On the drive up old highway 31 from Indiana into Michigan, there were plenty of gloriously tacky roadside artifacts, like this classic motel sign.

Up in Three Rivers, Michigan, I did a presentation at the Carnegie Center for the Arts, which hosted a Dinotopia original art exhibition ten years ago. Tom Lowry of Lowry’s Books arranged this booksigning event. The great thing about a road-trip book tour is that you can visit towns like Three Rivers that just don't get visiting authors because they're too far from the big city airports.

Readers of this blog will be interested to know that Amy (above, center left) and her family came all the way from Dearborn. Amy was one of the two winners of the “Art History Simplified” contest a few days ago!
I also was honored to meet Sean, who started writing me fan letters more than four years ago. We’ve exchanged quite a few letters since then. Sean’s copy of the original Dinotopia book gets the prize for “most loved.” Thanks, everybody for coming and making the event a success.

Capturing a Cumulus

Here’s a 16x20 inch oil study of thunderheads on a warm July day.

I was amazed as I worked over a two hour period how fast the scene changed from minute to minute. Watch this time lapse video of a similar cloud formation boiling away. As soon as you have the shapes established, you have to paint the details from memory. But you can keep studying the scene for the overall color relationships.

The brightest whites and the sharpest details are reserved for the emerging billows at the top. The purer white colors of the closer clouds transition more toward warm pink or dull orange as the clouds go back in space. Light that has traveled farther has lost more of its cool wavelengths through scattering.

Whenever you paint these attention-grabbing "cumulus castellanus" thunderheads, look also for the shreds of old clouds sheared off by wind currents and dissolving back into the air. These often-overlooked “fractus” or “scud” clouds are the other side of the cloud’s life cycle of growth and decay. They lack the compact density of the billowing clouds, and are never as white.

Valparaiso Viewpoints

Jeanette and I paused in Valparaiso, Indiana to recharge our art batteries. Valparaiso is the county seat of Porter County, but not many tourists come here. The library has a fabulous collection of art books and there’s an art museum on the university campus of that we’ll check out tomorrow. Today it’s time for sketching.

We picked this streetcorner: a shoe store in a brick building with a round turret. Here’s how it looked to the camera.



I tried a sepia sketch in the mini-Moleskine watercolor book, using a few washes of tone and then some brown Waterman ink sketched with a fountain pen. Then I added a wet wash here and there to melt the linework, releasing its inner red tone.

Here’s Jeanette to describe her painting: “I did a pencil sketch in my sketchbook (laid-finish paper), then put down some watercolor. I went back in with a ballpoint pen when the color was dry.”

Our fingers got cold from the November weather, so we tucked into a wi-fi café for soup and coffee. An elderly fellow sat near me and hauled out his laptop. Sitting duck, thought I.

Science, Art, and Fantasy

Elementary school teachers Teresa Moucha and Alice Toepel at the Carl Traeger Elementary School in Oshkosh, Wisconsin started planning their author visit almost six months ahead.

They wrote a grant proposal and a curriculum plan. The idea was to bring art and science together using the fantasy of Dinotopia. Mrs. Moucha and Mrs. Toepel, with the blessing of principal Janna Cochrane, below right, asked their fourth and fifth graders to create their own utopian worlds.

The Oshkosh Public Museum’s assistant director Mike Breza, at the center of this picture with his daughters, coordinated the "Return to Dinotopia" museum exhibit in town and worked with the public library to develop a reading list. He received grant money to allow school kids free admission to the museum, which includes not only Dinotopia artwork, but costumes to try on and four full-size dinosaur skulls.

The students at Traeger sketched actual plants and taxidermied animals. They invented an animal character that talks, a plot conflict, and a plausible fantasy setting. During the two and a half months counting down to my visit, they designed maps, landscapes and architecture and wrote stories about their imaginary worlds.

The results included “Dragontopia,” “Gerbiltopia,” “Fishtopia,” and “Dogtopia.”

When I arrived on Friday, I gave a quick digital slide show about how I work, and then they performed the “Garden Chorale.” Then I visited four classes to talk in more detail with them about their projects and to share my Magic Marker presentation.

The day after the school visit, Mrs. Moucha handed me a beautiful handmade book with thank-you notes tucked into secret compartments. One student named Kaitlyn wrote a note that brought me tears of joy: “Thank you for coming to our school. You really changed my thinking about art.”

Here's a link to a newspaper story from the Nov. 4 Oshkosh newspaper, and a report in the District Newsletter.

Grey Hair or None?

Answers to Art History, Simplified

Here are the solutions to the art history puzzle from a few days ago. You may not agree with all the answers (I guessed wrong on a lot of them), and there’s plenty of room for debate.

Modigliani, for example, was as famous as El Greco for his elongated forms in #2, and the starched ruff in #4 really could have been Rubens as well as Hals.

The Gericault solution was a bit conceptual, based, I suppose on the Raft of the Medusa. Starhorse actually guessed Norman Mingo for #24. Way to go! Mingo was the artist famous for painting Alfred E. Neuman.

Begging your indulgence, I’ll stick with the solutions as they were provided in the version I ran across. Credit goes to the early guessers, who paved the way.

By my count—and check me if I'm wrong—the high scorers were:

• David, honorable mention, with 16 correct answers;
• Kristel, Mark Hudgins, Michael L, Meredith D., Lekola, and Larin, the runners-up with 17;
• and Amy Stegner and Starhorse, the winners with 18.

If that count is right, I'll ask Amy and Starhorse to please email your mailing addresses to jgurneyart@yahoo.com, and we’ll send you the signed Dinotopia map and bookplate. Thanks again to all who took part.

Oshkosh Opening

Today the Oshkosh Public Museum opened its exhibition of 49 original paintings from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

Here’s the sign outside museum. There were also buses with Dinotopia banners, local school events, a signing at the Apple Blossom Bookstore, and reading lists at the library, thanks to the tireless organizing efforts of the museum’s assistant director Mike Breza and members of the community here in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Performers from the Cirque du Soleil were present in costumes that matched the “Liners” illustration from the Dinotopia book. Here they are posing next to the original painting “Spotters and Liners.”

The stiltwalkers made an impressive sight as they walked nimbly up and down the grand staircase, while jugglers managed up to five pins in the lobby.

Thanks to everyone at the museum and to all of you who came to say hello and have your books signed. I’m especially grateful for those of you who drove from far away to attend the opening.

Studio Lighting: Part III: Edge Lighting

A couple of posts ago the topic was lighting equipment and the basic relationship of the two basic sources of light: key and fill. The third light source, entirely optional, comes from behind.

Often called an edge light, it lights up the fringes of the form, separating it from the background. It’s also called a “rim” or “kicker” in the TV business, and it usually requires a source that’s stronger than either of the others. The form has more snap if the edge light doesn’t overlap too much with the key light, leaving the dark turning of the form (sometimes called the “core” or the “hump” of the shadow) intact.


This oil study from the model has the key and rim lights placed just far enough apart so that you can see the core of the shadow on the forehead.

If you want to introduce an edge light source, it should be a different color from the key. By applying contrasting gels to the key and edge lights, you can generate some interesting effects with skin tones. On this portrait I used a warm key light and a cool edge light.


On a future post I’ll suggest some painting methods to make it possible to do these quick oil studies in the standard 20 or 30 minute poses that you get in most sketch groups.

Road Kill

Whenever I see a road kill I want to look away. But I also want to look.

What kind of critter bit the dust? Did he suffer?


I saw this one on County Route 16. Did a double then a triple take. Something was wrong. Nothing has blue guts.

Close inspection revealed it was a stuffed animal. Cat, most likely.


Which set me to pondering. What was a stuffed animal doing crossing the highway? Was his stuffed-animal family waiting in the bushes, crying for him? Is there a whole village of stuffed animals in quilted calico houses hidden there past the swamp?

Hmmm. Material for a story. You take it and run.

Art History, Simplified

OK, all you art history geniuses. Let’s test your Art IQ. I ran across this chart, where each famous artist from history is distilled to his or her essence. See if you can come up with the missing names to go with the numbers. I’ll send a Dinotopia map and bookplate to the person who gets the most correct names before the answers are posted on Sunday.