Tomorrow's Event Rescheduled

Because an incoming snowstorm is expected to dump over a foot of snow between here and Massachusetts tonight and tomorrow, the March 1 Dinotopia booksigning event at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA has been cancelled and now rescheduled for Saturday, April 26 at 11:00 a.m.

The Delicate Approach

Some things that you want to paint are beefy and chunky, and they call for a broad handling with hefty bristle brushes. (Below: detail of a rocky waterfall).


But other forms are feathery and delicate. Think of the leaves of a willow tree, the wispy texture of a cirrus cloud, or the waving tassels of a wheatfield. These call for pianissimo painting.


Here’s the view past my easel. I was standing at the river’s edge near Clonmel, Ireland. It was an unusual vista, with intricate foliage framing a light sky. There were no simple blocky masses of tone. Instead there were lots of slender twigs, and there were layers upon layers of leaves.


After a thinly stated preliminary lay-in, I painted the sky with just a thin veil of pale whites and blues. For the willow leaves (detail, above) I dragged a large bristle brush very lightly over the sky to suggest a lot of leaves without actually painting them one by one. I then added a few small strokes at the edge of the mass using a round sable.

The same is true of the upper fringe of foliage. I blocked the big masses of foliage with a large square brush and then added a fringe of individual leaves with a smaller brush. The goal is to give the impression that you’re seeing more detail than is actually stated.


The final painting is 8x10 inches, painted in one session of about three hours. Most of the detail is hinted at. The key to this kind of painting is to use the biggest brushes you can, but to use them very lightly, dragging and scumbling. Then in a few areas, you can use tiny brushes to suggest the most delicate forms.

P.S. Thanks to Kim Barker of LakeTrees for listing GurneyJourney as the #7 Artist's Blog and thanks to everybody who has linked.

Tomorrow: Matania—Without a Net

Reply Card

Here’s an analog-era tip that still works for emerging illustrators who mail portfolio samples to prospective publishers. Include a self-addressed stamped postcard for the art buyer to give you feedback.

The reply card is pre-printed with three lines, each with a box for the art buyer to check.

The first is the most hopeful. It says, “I have a specific project that your work may be appropriate for. Please contact me.”

The second line says, “I am interested in your work but have no specific project in mind at this time. Please continue sending samples. The type of artwork I’m most interested in is: _________________.”

The third is the polite brush-off: “The enclosed samples do not suit our current needs.”

Nearly 100% of art buyers will send back this reply card, and they appreciate having an easy way to give you feedback. Whichever box they check provides useful information to help you target your next mailing.

Tomorrow: The Delicate Approach

Sketchblog Invitation

Blog reader Jen Zeller commented about the recent post "Art by Committee":

It would be quite awesome if you could offer one of these as a weekly inspiration to us sketch-happy blog followers. I get the feeling many of us would love to give back a bit in this job, but on the other hand, you do spend a lot of valuable time with this blog already, and we don't want to go getting greedy. It's a great idea, makes me remember my school days in biology, where I was constantly poking fun with sketches at something the teacher or our text books said.

Thanks, Jen. Let's try it. Here's an excerpt for you, and anyone else who'd like to create a sketch illustrating the line about the Khalians above. No prizes--not a contest. If you'd like to email me your sketch at jgurneyart@yahoo.com, I'll post the results, along with the sketch from the Art by Committee book, on Wednesday of next week.

Bronze Weathering

If you ever need to invent a bronze sculpture for a fantasy or science fiction painting, here are a couple of little tips to make the weathered surface more convincing.

I painted this oil study from observation to study how actual bronze surfaces weather. Note how the upfacing planes of the hat brim, the lapel, and the forehead are all oxidized to a light blue-green color.


The hollows and the downfacing planes weather in a different way as this photo shows. Instead of being entirely covered with a light blue-green oxidation, the downward planes tend to be darker and browner. This is because the downfacing planes are exposed to less rainwater. The top of the ball is also shielded from rain, and lacks oxidation. Wherever the planes face downward, the water is forced to flow in fixed rivulets. Each rivulet then becomes a line of oxidation.


You can play with this effect. This bronze head from the title page of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara was entirely invented. Along the cheeks the rivulets almost look like the path of tears.


If the statue is in a public area, projecting forms are often buffed to a golden sheen from contact with the hands (or hides) of passersby.

As the rainwater drains off the statue, the dissolved oxides leave stains on the white marble below.

Tomorrow: Reply Card

Plein Air Ancestors

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art recently remodeled its display of 19th century painting. The curators have brought a lot of gems out of storage and put them on permanent display in the Henry J. Heinz II Galleries.

Among the highlights are four rooms with dozens of oil studies painted outdoors by the pioneers of plein-air painting in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Most of these artists were northern Europeans who flocked to Italy for the warmth and the golden light.


Here’s a stormy landscape near Rome, circa 1800, painted by Simon Denis (1755-1813). He was working quickly to capture a fleeting rainbow effect. His work preceded the era of photography, the Impressionists, the Hudson River School, and even Constable and Corot.

Denis was painting four decades before the invention of collapsible paint tubes. He had to either grind his pigments on location or carry prepared paints in pigs’ bladders obtained from the butcher.

Here is a view from the Quirinal Hill in Rome, 1800, also by Denis. He carefully rendered the distant town and the central rooftops. I’m guessing that he was working from the view out of his hotel window, and that he ran out of time.


The alley at right is unfinished, which gives a glimpse into his method. He blocked in the big planes first and probably intended to add windows and other details later.


Antoine Xavier Gabriel de Gazeau (French, 1801–1881), painted this on-the-spot study of the Gate to the Temple of Luxor in 1836. Drifting sand covers the collossal figures to chest height.


At the top of the building at right you can see his transparent block-in, with the lower half of the wall mostly covered with a semi-opaque second layer. I would speculate that this was painted in two sittings of about two hours each.

These paintings look like they were painted yesterday. One of the remarkable qualities of plein air work is that it escapes the conventional formulas of the artist’s own time. It takes every fiber of concentration to capture what you see when you’re face-to-face with nature. All the compositional formulas go out the window.


The Metropolitan Museum has brought a lot of other realist paintings back into the light, giving a much more balanced view of 19th century painting. There are paintings by Gerome, Repin, Leighton, Sorolla, Mucha, Bouguereau, and Bastien-Lepage. All these rooms were crowded and buzzing with energy and interest. At last the tide is turning. Thank you, Drue Heinz, Phillipe de Montebello and the Met curators!

Metropolitan Museum’s press release about the new installations. Link.
New York Times coverage, Link.
Article by A. Malafronte on the history of plein air painting, Link

Tomorrow: Bronze Weathering

More Art By Committee

Art By Committee

I've painted a lot of paperback covers. For each job I get a big thick manuscript. I use the old manuscripts for scratch paper. Once it a while I’ll turn a sheet of paper over to see what’s written on it. Sentences like this jump out at me:

“…Flames from the creature licked at his back. Something crackled around his head, and he realized his hair was on fire…”

For an illustrator like me, a line like that is hard to pass up. So I’ve snipped out a few of the best excerpts and stuck them out of context into the pages of a big blank sketchbook.


I call the book ART BY COMMITTEE. I bring it to coffee shops when I’m hanging out with other artists. The other artist might be my wife or it might be a couple of notable comic artists, painters, or animators. I can’t reveal their identities—in fact I can’t remember exactly who drew what. And don’t ask me what novel the excerpt came from. I have no clue.


While waiting for the scrambled eggs, we take turns illustrating the scraps of stories. Here’s a sample page. Click to enlarge. If you like this sort of thing, there’s more where it came from.

Tomorrow: Plein Air Ancestors

Multi-Colored Streetlights

Before electricity, there were basically two colors of light at night: blue-grey moonlight (or twilight), and orange lamplight. Below is a painting by the French boulevard painter Edouard Cortes (1882-1969), who specialized in Paris by lamplight.

As electric lighting replaced flame-based light, new colors entered the nightscape. Fluorescent light has a yellow-green cast. Sodium vapor gives off a harshly monochromatic orange. Mercury vapor’s blue-green color drains the blood out of flesh tones. Other kinds of lights: metal halide, LED, neon, and arc lamps, each have their own color qualities. You’ve probably noticed the variety when flying over a city at night.

I painted this little oil sketch from observation while balancing on a hotel balcony in the predawn light in Anaheim, California. The technique is fairly crude—and a bit smudged from when I accidentally dropped it. What interested me was the contrast between the orange sodium vapor (foreground) and the green mercury vapor (middle ground).


I originally did this 8x10 inch oil sketch in 1995 as a concept for a Dinotopia theme park. Recently I reworked the central boat and reused the image in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. It has three different regions of colored light: blue in the foreground, red-orange across the canal, and blue-green through the arch. The colors are arbitrary; I don't know what kind of lights Dinotopians are using.


Syd Mead, the “visual futurist” who helped design Blade Runner, is an inventive colorist who orchestrates colored light in many of his science fiction paintings. In this futuristic street scene, yellow, green, and blue light each occupy different spatial regions.

In this concept sketch by Mead, a mechanical creature stands above a circle of warm light, while a saturated, monochromatic cyan illumination infuses the rest of the scene. The effect is magical and otherworldly.


Japanese artist Teppei Sasakura also specializes in colored illumination, which he uses here to create a playful, exotic, kaleidoscopic effect.

Here are some tips if you want to experiment with colored light:

1. Try painting a plaster cast, a figure, or a still life lit by two or three contrasting gel-covered lights. Try to shield the motif from all other light influences.
   
2. Keep in mind that mixtures of colored light are different from paint mixtures. For example red plus green equals yellow.
   
3. Try some urban night painting, using a portable LED light to illuminate your palette.
4. Set your camera to daylight (rather than white balance) and photograph a color wheel under different street lights; then compare the digital photos side by side to see how the colors are skewed.
5. Start a scrap file of magazine photos that show modern cityscapes at night.

Wikipedia/History of Streetlighting, Link.
Sky and Telescope article with a spectral output chart, Link.
Joe Maurath's gallery of vintage streetlighting, Link
More boulevard scenes by Edouard Cortes at ARC, link
More on Syd Mead, link.
For more on Teppei Sasakura, link.

Tomorrow: Art by Committee

Animal Characters, 4: Animal-Morphism

So far this week, mostly we’ve been looking at animals that have been made to look more human. Some of the greatest animal characters have been in that category.


But another way to think of animal character design is to try to create real, organic, entertaining personalities that aren’t just human surrogates, but instead retain as much essential animal character as possible. In my experience this latter approach is much more difficult, because it goes against our natural tendency to humanize everything. (Above: Poortvliet)


The mice in Beatrix Potter’s Two Bad Mice don’t behave in merely human terms. They respond to every problem in a way that’s true to the personality of real mice. Their eyes are mice eyes, not humanized eyes. Yet we can tell what they’re feeling: they’re “relatable.” If they had been humanized, the comedy of the story would have fallen flat. Potter knew mice well and kept several as pets.


Tony the Tiger is a purely human type: a hearty enthusiastic salesman. But Shere Khan is more like a real tiger. He has a mind we can fully understand. Disney was adamant that the “heavy” in Jungle Book not be a slavering monster. As drawn by master animator Milt Kahl, he is cool, understated, arrogant, and poised— very much a tiger. Kahl spent a long time studying tigers from life. When it came to the animation, he didn’t need to refer to photos. He drew most of the sequences from memory.


To achieve the breakthroughs that led to Bambi, Walt Disney brought in animal experts like Rico LeBrun and Bernard Garbutt, who could teach the anatomy inside and out. But these guys didn’t necessarily have the animator’s gift.


It also took the skills of artists like Marc Davis, who combined a lot of animal knowledge with an innate sense of personality and inner life. Putting all these skills together brought the Disney Studios a long way forward from the “rubber hose” animation of Steamboat Willie.


I believe that the development of authentic animal characters based on close observation is a wide-open frontier for the pioneers of CG animation. Below: Paul Bransom.


Let me offer a thought, which is very much open to discussion. I wonder if the character creation process that is currently used in many studios is overly dependent on voice casting by famous actors. While many great characters have been created in this way, the process may limit the range of potential types of animal characterizations.

Animators may feel overly tied to the timing, delivery, and even facial expressions and gestures of a voice actor. That actor may or may not have any sense of the entertainment potential of the genuine animal he’s portraying.

The art form is capable of a wider range of conceptions that can be achieved by following a different set of assumptions and starting points—and of course a deep commitment to the study of animal behavior.


Consider, for example, this monkey and elephant by Heinrich Kley. The monkey’s tail is holding up the umbrella, and the elephant is the perfect blend of human and elephantine, bringing out immense personality.


Here’s part of an outrageous encounter between a man and a baboon by A.B. Frost. What makes it funny is that the baboon is perfectly true to its nature. When he wants to fight back, he uses his foot in a baboonlike way to rip off the guy’s jacket.


Here’s a confrontation between a puppy and a chicken by Norman Lindsay. We know exactly what each character is thinking and doing, but neither characterization is framed in anthropomorphic terms. For example, when a puppy wants to play, he throws his paws in the air, and Lindsay has exaggerated that gesture. The chicken uses her beak and feet to fight back, keeping the wings tucked.

Can animal characters be developed without humanizing them? It's easier if they don't talk. Any dog or bird owner knows exactly what their pet is thinking, and appreciates their unique quirks. A dog will let you know that he feels remorseful or playful or angry using a different repertoire of expressions than we humans use.



Animal-morphic characterization doesn’t have to be realistic in a photographic sense, but it has to be authentic and convincing. I’ll leave you with these clips of the dog Bruno in Triplets of Belleville (pencil tests above, finished clips below). Bruno is a memorable character because his thought process and his behavior is so deliciously doglike.


(Thanks to Disney, Warne, Kelloggs, ASIFA, DreamWorks, Pixar, Blue Sky. All rights reserved by their various holders.)

Tomorrow: Multi-Colored Streetlights

Animal Characters, 3: Near Relations

We feel a deep affinity for animals. This cartoon by the Australian artist Norman Lindsay, called "Near Relations," shows people who look like chickens—or are those chickens who look like people?


Yesterday we explored a few of the problems we run into with when we try to design animals so that they express human emotions and perform human actions. We’ve seen the challenges presented by birds, cows, donkeys, and even rodents with their beady eyes.

Here’s an experiment from my sketchbook. I did this drawing while listening to my son and his friends play traditional music. While the kids played fiddle, accordion, and tambourine, some dogs and cats circulated around the room.

Instead of drawing the musicians as they appeared, I tried to imagine the dogs and cats (and a squirrel I saw outside) as if they were scaled up and holding the instruments.

As you can see, I drew the dog’s feet “digitigrade” rather than “plantigrade,” meaning I lifted the heels off the ground. But I forgot to redesign the slippers. The hands are just paws. They’re OK for the sketch, but they wouldn’t work if you had to animate the characters. And I was a bit ambivalent about the costumes. I put the dog in socks and a T-shirt, but left the costumes off the rest.


In the last installment tomorrow, I’ll share some examples of an alternative to anthropomorphism, which you might call “animal-morphism.” (Above, Rien Poortvliet)

Tomorrow: Animal Characters, 4: Animal-Morphism

Animal Characters 2: Humanization

Some animals have body configurations that make us think of them in human terms.


Monkeys, rats, mice, squirrels, rabbits, bears, and kangaroos all seem to have hands. And they seem to be comfortable on two legs, so it’s no wonder they’ve been so popular as characters in animation. Scrat, above left, is exaggerated but not very humanized; the photo at right is humanized but not exaggerated.

We’ve all seen dogs and tigers and elephants on their hind legs in the circus, so it’s not too hard to imagine them in a humanoid mode.

Horses and donkeys are much harder to humanize. Even though they make funny faces, their mouths are far from their eyes, they don’t have hands; and they don’t often walk on their back legs.

So it’s a real credit to the character designers and animators at DreamWorks that they created such a memorable character out of the Donkey. Besides endowing him with expressive eyebrows and giving the lips a lot of mobility, they used a lot of ear movement to show expression.

Prey animals tend to have their eyes on the sides of their heads. This presents a problem on a 3-D character where both eyes need to be visible from a lot of angles to show human-type emotions. So one of the first jobs of the designer is to bring the eyes forward. They also like to show some whites to the eyes so you can see where they’re looking, especially in a long shot.


In Ratatouille, the main rat characters shifted back and forth between humanlike and ratlike characteristics. When they were raiding the food cabinet, for example, they ran on all fours in a very ratlike way.

These are the kinds of challenges all animal character designers face. Which animal characteristics should you maintain and accentuate, and which human traits do you need to give the character--particularly a speaking character--so that he can think and act to win the sympathy of the audience?

In the next post we’ll take a further look at the sympathy that we humans inevitably feel for animal emotions and expressions.

Tomorrow: Animal Characters, 3: Near Relations

Animal Characters, 1: Anthropomorphic Absurdities

Have you ever watched a parrot scratch himself with a feather? Here’s a YouTube video:



Owner Cheryl Rampton didn't train Poncho to do this. He figured out how to hold the feather in his foot and reach back to scratch his neck. If the grip on the feather needs adjustment, he uses his beak to hold it for a second. The wings stay tucked.

A parrot really has three “hands”: his beak and his two feet. With those he’s got nearly as much dexterity as we humans do.


When we want to design a character based on a bird, we naturally want to make their wings into hands. This makes sense from the standpoint of comparative anatomy, but it goes completely against their bird nature. And it’s impractical. A bird can gesture with his primary wingtip feathers, but he can’t shake hands, make a fist, or pick up an object with them.



Putting animal heads onto humanoid bodies leads to other absurdities. Did you every wonder why you never see Elsie the Cow below the shoulders? Would she have (ahem) breasts or udders? Either way would be pretty weird.

For the rest of the week through Saturday we’ll look at how character designers have developed clever ways to infuse animals with human personalities.

Animal Characters 2: Humanization

Realms of Fantasy, April Issue

Realms of Fantasy magazine will have a six-page gallery feature on Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, with an article by Karen Haber coming up in its April 2008 issue. It should hit the newsstands in a couple of weeks.

The issue also has an interview with Holly Black of Spiderwick, and fiction by Delia Sherman, Ken Scholes, Richard Parks, Graham Edwards, and Scott William Carter.

Deleted Scene: Styraco Races

In 1989 I painted this 6x12 inch concept sketch of a Roman-style race event with riders on styracosaurs.

The same year I was beginning to germinate Dinotopia as a book about a partnership of humans and intelligent dinosaurs. With that concept in mind, the sketch hit a snag. No matter how I looked at it, the sport seemed insanely reckless. So it ended up on the cutting room floor.

Tomorrow, don't miss the first of a four part series on animal characters.

Strange Tree

On a hike deep in the forest I found this strange tree and sketched it as I saw it.

I have a theory about how it came to be. Maybe you do too. So here’s a Comment Contest.

A prize pack (a World Beneath audio CD and signed "Visitor Permit" bookplate) goes to the best explanation in each of two categories. Deadline: 9pm Eastern Time Monday. Please, 100 words or fewer, one entry per person.

1. Best scientific explanation.
2. Best fantasy explanation.

Amendment at 9:50 pm to announce winners.

Scientific Winner: Earnest

“I think the tree was originally growing out of either a decomposing fallen tree trunk or a mound of earth. In either case, either the tree trunk eventually decomposed completely or the mound of dirt could have washed away.

This is supported further by the fact that the tree appears to have been growing sideways its whole life, suggesting that it had grown out of some mass that has since broken down.

Fantasy Winner: Eric Orchard

The tree is a doorway. It is made by rabbits, who have secret tree sculpting knowledge. It leads to a world called Lagomorphia. There are doorways to Lagomorphia all over the world, along rabbit trails. The main feature of Lagomorphia is The Great Borough Market. Rabbits from all over the world congregate here and trade different types of grasses. You will find the Eastern Cotton tail, Sumatran Striped Rabbits, Volcano Rabbits and every other type of rabbit. In order to be activated the doorway requires a key : a live rabbits paw pressed on a certain knot.

Tomorrow: Deleted Scene

Serial Painting

Claude Monet is probably the best-known serial painter, though he was not the first: Corot and Turner had tried the experiment decades earlier.

In the 1890s Monet experimented with painting the same motif several times—each time from the same angle, but under different conditions of light and atmosphere. These images were conceived, executed, and exhibited as a group.


Here are just four out of the 30 studies that he did of the Rouen Cathedral. He didn’t get too caught up in the mind-bending complexity of detail in the cathedral façade.

Instead he developed a way of painting to convey his sense of the transitory light effects, from the warm frontal lighting in the upper right image to the veils of mist in the lower right. The worthiness of his approach comes across best when you see the paintings next to each other.

Monet approached other subjects as a series. He painted matched sets of grainstacks, spring meadows, ice floes, poppies, the city of London, the Creuse Valley, and the Seine River.

During a painting vacation in central California, I thought I’d try Monet’s idea, maybe not for 30 paintings, but at least for a couple. I painted the first one in the morning. The first light touched the farthest range of mountains and began to sweep across the hills in the left foreground. The colors in the central mountain mass were cool and close in value.


I returned in the afternoon to find everything transformed. The far hills blazed with browns and oranges of the chaparral lit by the warm light. The jagged landforms became insistent. The sky appeared relatively darker and more saturated.

This little experiment was a reminder that the colors I actually mixed for my painting owed more to the particular conditions of light and atmosphere than to the local or innate color of the objects themselves.

Or to put it another way, color in landscape is less a property of material surfaces than it is of effects of light and air. You see this principle most forcefully when you try painting a series.

Nathan Fowkes, a conceptual designer for DreamWorks Animation and an instructor at the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art produced one of the most impressive examples of serial painting.


Looking out of his workplace window during breaks, he created this array of 36 paintings of the same Los Angeles valley scene. The non-descript white buildings and the far hills take on a limitless range of transformations as the haze and light shimmers and changes. No two are alike, and no camera could have registered these subtle nuances.

Note that blue shadows on the buildings tend to occur on days with blue skies. The colors of the distant mountains vary from earthy browns to pale pinks to soft blues.

If you want to try a series experiment, here are a few tips:

1. Choose a motif that has a piece of sky, some distant reaches of space or mountains, and ideally a house or other white object with planes facing in different directions, because white is the best register of colored light.
2. You can paint the images either on a set of separate panels, or tape off a larger board into equal size increments. But as you work on each study, don’t look at the previous ones.
3. Keep the drawing consistent each time, so that the only variable is the light and color. Spend the first day working out the drawing for all the panels, or do one careful line drawing, photocopy it, and glue identical copies down on each separate panel.
4. Paint the subject in different times of day, and if you can, different seasons of the year.

Nathan Fowkes's Blog, Link.
Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, Link.
1990 New York Times review of a Monet serial exhibition, Link.

Tomorrow: Strange Tree

The Sultan's Elephant

Take one part Jules Verne, add a dash of Steampunk, mix in a little Cirque du Soleil and you've got the Royal de Luxe, a French street theater company that has staged magnificent performances in London, Antwerp, Calais, and Santiago.

The sultan's time-traveling elephant, weighing 42 tons, moves through the streets, walking, bellowing, and spraying water.

But the elephant is just part of a carefully planned series of events that unfolds in each of the lucky cities who host the show. There is also the giant girl, one of the dreams of the sultan. She interacts with the elephant, licks a lollypop, and lets a few children from the audience ride on her arms.

The giantess is about 20 feet tall and weighs 1800 pounds. She is operated like a giant marionette, with the assistance of hydraulics and motors, though her arms and legs require individual operators to pull on ropes.


While parts of the show travel to various cities, a permanent exhibition of the giant puppets can be seen in Nantes France at the Galerie des machines.

YouTube video of the elephant in action: Link
YouTube video of the little girl giant: Link.
Website for Les Machines de l'Île à Nantes http://www.lesmachines-nantes.fr/machines.html
Wikipedia entry "The Sultan's Elephant" Link.

Tomorrow: Serial Painting

Keyframe Animation

Sometimes at a sketch group I’m at a complete loss with the one-minute static poses. I can’t get anything on paper. But give me a real life scene with the subject in constant motion, and for some reason I have better luck.


I happened to be holding my sketchbook when my young son was pulling a bell rope. Naturally he didn’t hold still for a second. But as I watched a couple of repetitions of the action, I realized that he kept returning to the same extreme or "keyframe" poses. So I switched back and forth between those poses, using the flash-glance method to hold them just long enough in memory.

As early as the 1930s, the Disney Studios hired instructor Don Graham to offer the animators a class in “action analysis” using models who moved through a series of poses.

Tomorrow: The Sultan's Elephant

Windblown Cape

How do you get reference for a cape flapping in the wind? That’s something we all have to paint from time to time.

Unless you hang out a lot in hurricanes or on airport runways wearing your cape, you just don’t get to observe the effect too often.


That was my dilemma when I needed to paint a guy riding way up high on a Brachiosaurus. I took the pose in my backyard wearing a satin gown and a red velvet cape just to get into the spirit of it.

In the movies they have those giant fans to simulate wind, but all I had was a puny window fan, and that didn’t move the cape at all. So I had my wife yank the cape back and give it a little flip right before the camera took the picture.


That helped, but I needed to see how the cape might really look with the wind filling it and pushing it back. So I made a little manikin out of chunks of wood and wire and set it on a brachiosaur model that I sculpted out of polymer clay.

I cut the cape from a small piece of red fabric and then soaked it in acrylic matte medium. I arranged it the way I wanted it, and let it dry. Matte medium is like plastic. When it dries, it holds all the folds just the way you arranged them. For the photo it's held up by little wires underneath.

You could also soak a cotton cloth in plaster, but that gets heavy and fragile. The plaster method worked well for a lot of the old masters when they painted angels. Another trick would be to put a cape on a little manikin and photograph it moving it through a fish tank. But I didn't have a fish tank.


Here’s the final picture, called “Up High,” as it appears in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

Tomorrow: Keyframe Animation

Frontal Lighting

Next time you’re at a figure sketch group, set up your easel right next to the spotlight. From that position, the light will be streaming right over your shoulder, shining almost directly at the model. Below is a 20-minute oil study with the light just off my left shoulder.


Usually no one in the sketch group wants that spot anyway because the form has practially no shadow side. Most people prefer to draw or paint from locations where the light strikes the form sideways, reasoning that they can get the form to turn better with more of a shadow side.


But they are missing something wonderful! Frontal lighting does tend to flatten form, but it gives power to the two-dimensional design instead. It gives your whole picture a striking postery impact. It's a good lighting to choose if you want to emphasize color or pattern—to feature a fashion or costume, for instance (below from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara).


And it’s one of the few times when outlines actually appear in real life. The outline is really the thin fringe of shadow that appears at the very edge of the form (kind of the opposite of edge lighting). The line bears close study. It varies in weight in proportion to the width of the plane that is turning away.


So, in the example above, the wide forehead plane yields a broad outline, while smaller planes of the lips and chin result in a thinner shadow/outline.

Tomorrow: Windblown Cape

Juste Milieu

Juste milieu is a name given to both a philosophy of painting and a movement of painters in 19th century France.


The juste milieu artists have been unjustly ignored in the oversimplified and polarizing narrative offered by most art history texts.

These days there aren't many books on them; they don't yet have a Wikipedia entry; they're not even mentioned in many authoritative books about French painting—at least not books in English. But if you read accounts from the period, they were talked about constantly. (Click on any image for enlargement, and to see the artist's name and the title of a work.)


"Juste milieu" translates as “the right mean,” or the “happy medium.” These artists aimed for a middle way between the Impressionist and Academic camps.



Many of today’s new realist painters are trying for a similar kind of synthesis, introducing the best of both approaches into their work.


Starting in the Third Republic in the 1870s, independent painters were beginning to make inroads into the authority of the French Academy.


By the late 1880s, the juste milieu group separated from the Academy, forming under the name “Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts.” Among these defectors were Carolus-Duran, Duez, Besnard, Raffaelli, Roll, and Braquemond.


They combined progressive ideas, like a lighter palette and looser brushwork, with high standards of draftsmanship. Those drawing skills were often lacking in the radical—and now famous—proponents of the new style, Impressionism.


The work of the juste milieu had a looser handling than would have been acceptable during the July Monarchy. They preferred to avoid the “licked” finish of Gerome, Cabanel, and Bouguereau.



At the same time, certain members like Dagnan-Bouveret (above) portrayed contemporary rural folk traditions with a dignity that Academic painters had previously given to classical subjects.


The juste milieu commitment to the middle way won them the admiration of many of the artists from around the globe who came to France for training and inspiration. Joaquin Sorolla journeyed to Paris not to see Monet, but to see Bastien-Lepage. (above).


Most of the worldwide impressionist movements, particularly in England, Australia, Russia, and America, were more influenced by the juste milieu artists than by those that we think of as Impressionists, like Sisley, Pissarro, and Renoir.

Degas, who felt the impact of the group, said of Besnard, (ceiling decoration, above) “[He] has stolen our wings.”

Tomorrow: Frontal Lighting

Pinkwater Portrayed

If you listen to National Public Radio, you’re probably familiar with the velvety voice of commentator Daniel Pinkwater. He’s also the author of many brilliant absurdist books for young people, including The Big Orange Splot and Fat Men from Space.


According to Wikipedia, “Pinkwater tends to write books about frequently obese social misfits who find themselves in bizarre situations, such as searching for a floating island populated by human-sized intelligent lizards.” I sketched him from life at an author event in the basement of a nearby library.


The enlargement shows his characteristic expression when he’s talking: wide eyes, raised eyebrows, and smiling mouth. He was constantly moving during his talk, charming the audience with his anecdotes, but he kept returning to a basic pose, with both hands resting on his cane.

Podcast interview: "Just One More Book," Link.

Tomorrow: Juste Milieu

From Mask to Palette

How do you get exactly the colors you want in a picture….and no others?

This is the third post in a Sunday series about a method called color wheel masking. The first post showed how color masks can help to analyze color schemes, and the second post explored different shapes of masks.

In this post I’ll demonstrate how to actually mix the colors you have chosen for a given painting.

To start with, here’s the color wheel on the left. To the right above the palette paper are some primary colors of oil paint. You can use as many tube colors as you want at this stage. I just have little demo dabs of Winsor Red, Cadmium Yellow, Titanium White, and Ultramarine Blue.



Let’s say you want a monochromatic atmospheric triad with the dominant (and the most saturated) color in the red-orange range. Using your palette knife, mix a batch of each of the three colors that you see in the corners of the triangular gamut.

I've placed a little white box over those colors in this photo. In this case, it’s a saturated red-orange, a desaturated red-violet, and a desaturated yellow-green.


Now you’ve created the “heads of the families” or subjective primaries. Next, extend those colors into four different values or tones. Try to keep the hue and the saturation constant as you do so.

Look again at the color wheel mask. Halfway along the edge of the triangle are little marks indicating your secondaries. These are your in-between colors, which you may want to mix as well. You may end up mixing and working with anywhere from three to six strings of colors.

Before you start painting, remove from the palette all the tube colors that you squeezed out, except for white. This is important, because these colors are outside your gamut. You don’t want to have access to those anymore during the painting process.


At left is a color wheel with a monochromatic atmospheric triad emphasizing red. This time it’s laid out on Tobey Sanford’s digital color wheel (link to download). On the far right are the color ranges I mixed. In the middle is the resulting painting from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

This group portrait takes place in Dinotopia’s phosphorescent caverns in the book The World Beneath (1995). I wanted the colors to suggest a cool, magical ambiance. With the colors in this gamut, it’s impossible to mix any intense warms, even if you wanted to. But as your eyes adjust to the color mood, it feels complete. The relative warm colors appear warm enough in the context of the picture.

I have noticed that when I use the color wheel masking system I am more careful to keep the brushes clean and to push against the outside of the range. Harmony and unity are a given, so the effort goes into reaching for accents. It's the opposite of the color-mixing mindset when mixing color from a full palette of tube colors, where I'm always neutralizing mixtures.


To conclude, here’s a painting from Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time (1992), about the time when I first developed this method. I have digitally reconstructed the gamut I used for the narrow complementary color scheme.

Blog reader Briggsy provided the diagram on the right. He processed the image through a filter created by P. Colantoni, and available for Windows users at couleur.org. What you’re looking at to the right of the painting above is an objective computer visualization of the actual color scheme.

As you can see, it corresponds pretty closely to the generating mask, proof that the system is giving us exactly the intended color scheme. The blue colors are very intense, almost touching the edge of the wheel. The rest of the colors are in a narrow swath running across the grey center to the weaker complements.

I look forward to hearing how this method works for you, either with traditional or digital techniques.

Tomorrow: Pinkwater Portrayed

Mahl Stick

The mahl stick is a rod with a padded or cork tip held in the non-painting hand.


The brush hand rests on the the mahl stick to give it control and to keep it from touching the wet paint.


My plein air mahl sticks are made from metal or wooden dowel rods. But in the studio I use a 26 inch section of a wooden yardstick instead of a dowel. It is sanded and finished with tung oil.


On the underside of the tip is a wooden spacer. This holds the stick at a constant height of about ¾ inch above the paint surface. The inside of the tip is hooked so that the mahl stick can hang vertically onto the top of the drawing board when not in use.


The yardstick markings make it handy for measuring and for ruling lines in the pencil stage. Wood-burned into the top surface is the classic maxim from Ovid: “ARS EST CELARE ARTEM” (it is art to conceal art); in other words, "true art conceals the means by which it is achieved." You might find another maxim that fits you better at this link or this link.


From time to time I use an acrylic bridge. This also stands about ¾ inch off the drawing surface on two legs. This is especially good for inking with a dip pen or Rapidograph.

Tomorrow: Color—from Mask to Palette

Eye Stripe

Once in a while a design feature will show up in animals that are not closely related. A good example is the “eye stripe” coloration pattern, which appears in sparrows, antelopes, and chipmunks.


In all of these creatures, a dark facial stripe runs from the snout to the eye. Directly above the eye stripe is a bright white line called a supercilium, and above that another dark line called a lateral crown stripe. Presumably, eye stripes serve as protective coloration in all of these prey animals, disguising their eyes from predators.


Whenever such features exist in animals as diverse as birds, ungulates and rodents, it’s reasonable to speculate that they may have appeared in dinosaurs as well. This was my rationale for showing eye stripes on the Beipiaosaurus in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.


I used the same idea when I painted a dark patch on the flank of a Camptosaurus in the World of Dinosaurs stamps for the US Postal Service. This flank patch also appears in the springbok.

The Camptosaurus was a tasty morsel for ceratosaurs and allosaurs in the Jurassic, just as the springbok is the Chicken McNugget of the Kalahari.

Tomorrow: Mahl Stick

Stormtrooper Doughboy

Has anyone ever noticed that an upside-down Star Wars Stormtrooper is really the Pillsbury Doughboy's evil father?

Tomorrow: Eye Stripe

Lit Graphic at the Rockwell

Last week Jeanette and I visited the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts to see the exhibition called “Lit Graphic: The World of the Graphic Novel,” which is on view through May 26.

Co-curators Stephanie Plunkett and Martin Mahoney told us that Tom Wolfe invented the term “Lit Graphic” to describe the art form of the contemporary novel-length comic book, which has unfortunately been overlooked by most art museums.

Will Eisner, whose work on the groundbreaking Contract with God (1978) is well represented in the show, is associated with the more familiar term “graphic novel” (though some say the term was used as early as 1964 by Richard Kyle). Another pioneer was Lynd Ward, who told wordless stories with woodcuts in the 1920s and 1930s. Forty-nine of those delicate images, each separately framed, festoon one wall.

Let me say a word about what is not in the exhibition. There are no French or Japanese comics, no daily or Sunday comic strips, and only a few samples of Marvel or DC superhero comics. Although most of the works deal with serious, real-world themes, the curators stopped short of exhibiting work that is extremely violent or risqué. But that still leaves a diverse and vital field of talent.

In the room tracing the history of the graphic novels, there are some representative examples by Robert Crumb (including a teenage sketchbook) , but the other two rooms place the emphasis on the contemporary American scene.

As Mark Wheatley observes, graphic novels are not a genre, but "a language--and it's a visual language." Altogether, there are 146 works by 24 artists, including pages by Peter Kuper, Lauren Weinstein, Harvey Kurtzman, Marc Hempel, Dave Sim, Terry Moore and many others.

You can get an online preview of the work and the personalities by viewing the half-dozen mini-documentaries shot on location by producer Jeremy Clowe and recently posted on YouTube:
Part 1: Peter Kuper
Part 2: Marc Hempel
Part 3: Brian Fies
Part 4: Continued

The Rockwell Museum deserves a lot of credit for their pioneering spirit in championing American narrative art in all its forms. In conjunction with the Lit Graphic show, the museum is hosting a student graphic novel contest, inviting high schoolers from the northeastern US to submit their creations. Winners will be honored in a mini-exhibition at the museum. More information: Link.

Norman Rockwell himself explored personal, edgy themes like war and racism in his later career, and he was always supportive of young talent and new graphic ideas. I feel very sure that he would have been pleased to see the huge turnout of young people who attended the opening.

For museums interested in hosting one of the Rockwell Museum's traveling exhibitions (including Dinotopia), Link
Lit Graphic press release: Link
Recommended reading list from TIME: Link

Tomorrow: Eye Stripe

Two Values

Comic artists naturally think in two tonal values, black and white. Masters like Roy Crane, Milton Caniff and Hal Foster (below) told epic stories with nothing else. This simplicity of means automatically lends power to their images.
But painters have to work at creating contrast. If we don’t, our paintings get the “middle-value-mumbles,” the tendency to paint everything in the middle of the tonal range.

Here’s a good exercise to cure yourself of the middle value mumbles. Do a sketch where everything in the light is rendered in white and everything in shadow is stated in black.


I’ll show you the idea executed in several different media. The medium or technique doesn’t matter; the idea does. In this picture I used a brushpen with no pencil layin. The faces are people in an audience listening to Irish music. They were lit by a single light bulb overhead.

For this to work, you need to have a subject lit by one light source, or by the sun. Try to ignore the actual local color. Push everything to dramatic extremes. The effect will resemble an old photo or a painting that has been photocopied a million times. Try not to use any lines. Define everything with shapes. For the picture below of the library, that meant leaving off the vertical lines on the right of the columns and the horizontal lines defining the stairs.

I laid in the drawing in pencil, and used a fine Micron pen and a marker for the shadows. I drew it in daytime from across the street. I had a hard time deciding whether to make the sky white or black.


If you evaluate the library image in “Image/Adjust Levels” in Photoshop, the histogram looks like a wide flat valley (no middle tones) with tall peaks in the black and the white.


Here's the idea carried out in oil at a sketch group. I used pure titanium white and ivory black, each with its own brush, working over a dark gray ground.

It takes supreme determination to avoid the temptation to blend the colors into greys. Don’t give in! Let edges disappear! The viewer of your picture will not mind seeking out or imagining the edges that you have to leave out.

For more on a related subject, visit the earlier posts on shapewelding and high contrast shapewelding.

Tomorrow: Lit Graphic at the Rockwell

Color Wheel Masking Update

On the two last Color Sunday posts here and here, we’ve been looking at the concept of color wheel masking, the idea that we can map out a color scheme on top of a color wheel.

Blog reader David Briggs has made a brilliant contribution to this idea. He discovered a website called couleur.org by Philippe Colantoni that allows us to actually visualize a color scheme in three dimensions.

What you’re looking at here is a Dinotopia painting called “Palace in the Clouds” paired with a representation of the color scheme expressed in three dimensions.


The little floating blobs represent the amounts of each component color of the composition. On the left you see the hexagonal color wheel in pastel tones. Floating above that, white and blue blobs indicate the large areas of white and blue areas of the picture.

The diagram on the right shows the same diagram as viewed from the side. The vertical dimension indicates the value—or the level of lightness or darkness. The yellow and brown colors show up as little beads floating to the right of the red center line.


Here’s another painting with its color scheme chart. You’ll notice that most of the colors are fairly grayed down, which places them near the center of the axes. The light warm colors show up as a sprinkling of dots in the yellow-orange region at the upper right. The diagram on the right shows dark dots clustered at the bottom, greenish on the left of the red line, and brownish to the right.

My thanks to Mr. Colantoni and and Mr. Briggs for your generosity in sharing your discoveries. Don’t miss this coming Sunday, where we’ll continue our exploration of color wheel masking.

Tomorrow: Two Values

How About a Book?

I was looking at the blog and I had an idea - why don't you write an instructional textbook on painting? --Dan

You should consider compiling an instructional book! --Tom

Have you ever thought about putting your adventure and art lessons into a book form? –Michael

I swear on my life, if you wrote a book on painting, color and picture making it would be the biggest thing since the Loomis books (and possibly Harry Potter). –Victor

Thanks guys. You are very kind. Good questions. You deserve a thoughtful answer, so I’ll devote this post to the idea.

As most of you know, I’m just doing this blog for the fun of it. I fit the writing into spare moments each evening, after my “day job” of writing and illustrating stories. I do it simply to learn new things about art by means of writing about them. Presumably you read it for the same reason. Together we put in a little time each day with the hope of picking up a new thought to put into practice. In this way we become each others' students.

I love how-to books. Being mostly self-taught, I owe much of my education to them. But I have always felt that there’s a gap in what’s available.

• There are lots of books now about plein-air painting, and there are books on how to draw dragons or dinosaurs, but there isn’t much that connects observation with imagination, or that gives you practical methods for painting a realistic image of a scene that doesn’t exist.
• There are books with bold techniques served up like recipes, but not many that really explore the thinking behind picturemaking, or that offer tips on research, maquettes, models, and sketches behind the final execution.
• And how-to art books generally don’t touch on the amazing discoveries in the science of visual perception from the last 30 years or so. As we’ve seen already, a lot of the art school assumptions we have about things like “eye pathways” and “primary colors” turn out to be antiquated dogma.

What do you think a Gurney Journey book should include? Plein-air painting? Color? Lighting? Dinosaurs? Step-by-Steps? Fantasy? Dinotopia? Perspective? Pencil sketching? Caricature and animation? Art History? Lettering? Book Design? Materials? Art school reports? Goofiness? Half of the blog posts are just cotton-candy stuff, like Gallery Flambeau, or Gurning or the Kaaterskill Creek Disaster. GOOD GRIEF! It’s all over the place!


Should the material be broken up, as Tom suggested, into a series of separate books? Maybe a single book shouldn’t try to encompass everything. Books have to be comprehensive and focused, right? If you weed out all the goofiness and road tour stuff, is there enough material yet for a book?

Blogs and books are so different. Blog posts can wander like a beagle following its nose through the tall grass. And as my wife points out, reading a blog is free. If you’re not interested in a post, you can scroll down or click off.

If it does turn out that Gurney Journey becomes a book, then perhaps the blog can serve as an Athenian idea laboratory. I really love the amazing feedback that you are all bringing to the experience. As all bloggers know, writers benefit from being more accountable to real live readers. I can tell you that your input has taken me down avenues I never would have traveled alone, and given me the nerve to go backstage and do interviews.

One of the things that inspired me to do this blog in the first place was a Wired article from a year or two ago called "Radical Transparency." The idea of radical transparency is to let blog readers completely into the thought process of your business. The article itself was rough-drafted as a blog, and the readers played an important role in questioning assertions and pointing out resources or second opinions before the article found its way to print.

So I guess it’s possible that Gurney Journey could evolve into a book. But I’m not in any rush, and I want to keep my day job. But I do have a large and growing backlog of topics yet to cover on Gurney Journey, and it’s better to compile a book from too much rather than too little. For now I want to build up more material in the freewheeling climate of daily posts.

The blog has has led to at least two real gigs. ImagineFX magazine recently asked me to write 25 tips for painting dinosaurs. And Illo magazine is just about to publish an in-depth interview feature that goes behind the scenes. I’m really excited because I love both magazines. I’ll let you know when they hit the stands.

Tomorrow: Two Values

Mountains Underfoot

Not being much of a geologist, I’m not sure what it was I picked up along the shore of the Hudson River.


I’m guessing a chunk of coal? Charcoal? Maybe you know. But what attracted me was the wonderfully complex form, with all the intricate planes and cracks.

I brought it home and spray-painted it with flat gray primer. The paint unified the surface, and made it photograph clearly. Below is how the same little rock looks in real sunlight. Now I’ve got a great reference tool for the future, whenever I need to paint a jagged rocky mountainscape.

It’s hard to sculpt such forms from clay or foam, and hard to find existing photos that meet your specific lighting needs. Why bother, when you can find great rocks everywhere? I got this idea from Maxfield Parrish, who had a small collection of "bonsai" rocks to help him imagine his mountain backdrops.


Next time you take a walk in a rocky place, keep an eye out for mountains underfoot.

Tomorrow: How About a Book?

The Shapes of Color Schemes

Last week I introduced the concept of color wheel masking, and suggested that any color scheme can be represented or mapped as a shape on a color wheel. Let’s take that idea and run with it.


I painted the wheel at left, below. As you recall, it has the full-intensity hues arranged around the outside edge, gradating to neutral gray in the center. It uses the traditional subtractive red-yellow-blue pigment primaries.

This painter's color wheel goes back for centuries, and was influenced by the theories of Goethe and Newton. Two of the astute commentators on this blog, ZD and Painterdog, correctly pointed out that the traditional painter's color wheel is technically obsolete and even somewhat arbitrary and dogmatic, but I still have a fondness for it.


On the right is a mathematically correct digital color wheel based on the red-green-blue “additive” primaries of light. Spaced halfway between RG and B are cyan, magenta, and yellow, the subtractive colors used in printing inks.

My photographer friend Tobey Sanford created this wheel (downloadable here). It may be less familiar to traditional painters. It places the component colors differently around the wheel, but for the purpose of exploring the world of color, especially on our computer screens, it will serve us better in some respects, and we’ll see it again from time to time on future Color Sundays.

Regardless of which wheel we use, most color schemes are built from three component colors or primaries arranged in a triangle called a triad. The area inside the triangle is called the “gamut.” It includes all the possible mixtures from those three primaries, whatever they are.

The primaries don’t have to be red, yellow, and blue. You can use any three colors as primaries, even orange-green-purple—which in fact is what early color photographs called “autochromes” used.

In the case of the limited palettes we looked at a couple weeks ago, for example, we talked about using a less saturated pigment like yellow ochre instead of cadmium yellow. This reduced or muted yellow corresponds with a point well inside the margin of the wheel.

By using a paper mask and rotating it around the wheel, we automatically get interesting reduced gamuts, each with a dominant full-intensity hue and two subordinate, weaker “primaries”.


The mask sets us free to choose exactly the color schemes we want. We’re not limited to the haphazard choices of existing tube colors in limited palettes; instead we can use the mask to analyze or invent any gamut.

The equilateral triangle that I call the “atmospheric triad” is only one kind of color wheel mask. There are other shapes, and each of these basic shapes carries its own personality, regardless of the component colors. Atmospheric triads are moody and subjective, great for “color scripting” a graphic novel or a film.

When you rotate the triangular window around the color wheel, you can see the color groupings change, yet each one seems complete to itself. It suggests the feeling of walking from a room lit by incandescent light into another room lit by fluorescent light, and then stepping outside into the blue twilight. Your brain shifts from one color environment to another. I’ll talk more about the brain physiology behind color adaptation in a future Color Sunday.


Here’s a color mask that crosses over the center a bit more, which I call the “shifted triad.” It’s shifted toward red, which means the subjective gray or neutral (N) in the composition is also shifted toward red. The secondaries (S) are what you get when you mix the dominant full-intensity red with the weaker blue-violet and blue-green primaries (P).


Here’s a complementary scheme, similar to what we’ve seen before. The complementary gamut, regardless of its component colors, suggests an opposition of elemental principles, like fire and ice. At the same time, it’s fairly stable, because its neutral coincides with the center of the wheel.


This one is called “mood and accent.” Most of the picture is in one color mood, with just one accent area from across the wheel and no intermediate mixtures. By the way, note that the octagonal color wheel mask and the color wheel slide into the top of the aluminum U-molding.


You could also pick an accent color that’s offset from the complement. It looks less natural, and therefore perhaps more attention-getting.


What happens when you create a mask that shifts the color balance off the axis? To me it feels like one of those diminished seventh guitar chords, or a dollop of sour cream dropped into sweet squash soup.


What effect do you feel with a split complementary arrangement, avoiding secondaries? To me it seems vibrant and attractive, but also a little unsettled and jarring.


What if the mask selects colors all to one side of the wheel? To me it gives a sense of brilliancy, purity, or weirdness, not something you’d find in nature, but great for otherworldly science fiction.

There’s no limit to the kinds of masks you can cut, and then the infinite combinations you can generate when you start rotating a mask above your own wheel.

Next week, I’ll show you how to take a gamut you’ve selected, and prepare the paints on your palette so that you can use those exact colors in your own painting. The beauty of this method is that it jolts you out of any color mixing habits, and at the same time it forces you to stay within the limits you’ve chosen.

Tomorrow: Mountains Underfoot

Baseball Cap Space Helmet

When you’re seven years old, an ordinary mesh-back baseball cap takes on new life as a space helmet with a rear stabilizer fin.

Tomorrow: The Shapes of Color Schemes

Downfacing Planes

Most of the time we think of shadows as blue. Surfaces in shadows do tend toward blue if they are facing upward beneath an open stretch of sky. We can make a general rule if we hedge it a bit: “Upfacing planes in shadow are relatively blue on a sunny day.”

In the sketch of the library in Millbrook, New York, I observed plenty of bluish color in the cast shadows on the sidewalk, for example.

But planes in shadow that face downward are different because they pick up the warm reflected color of illuminated surfaces below them. You can see this effect in the white pediment. Where the projecting forms faced downward, they’re distinctly orange, not blue at all.

So let’s revise that quick rule of thumb about the color of shadows: “In shadows, upfacing planes are cool, and downfacing planes are warm.“ If you click on the photo above, taken at Bryce Canyon by Tobey Sanford, you can see the cool upfacing planes (1), and the warm downfacing planes (2). What you can't see are my knees shaking.

Tomorrow: Baseball Cap Space Helmet