Confetti

Twentieth century illustrators have used the term “confetti” to describe the small, colorful paint strokes that resolve into suggestive detail in the viewer’s eye.


Dean Cornwell sprinkled confetti-like strokes throughout his painting of an eastern procession. On the left is the full composition; on the right is a detail showing the riot of floating shapes behind the camel’s back leg.


Another master of confetti is the contemporary science fiction illustrator John Berkey. A detail of one of his spacecraft improvisations appears next to the full composition. Dots, squares, and dashes hover by themselves or in clusters.

Berkey’s approach to confetti balances two-dimensional abstraction with three-dimensional plausibility. The strokes are always arranged in perspective, with attention to lighting.


Contemporary photorealists like Richard Estes (detail, above) create miniature abstract compositions in the midst of their realistic canvases.


Before the impressionist and abstract movements offered realist painters the impetus to think of strokes as having their own existence as pure shapes, detail areas usually tended to resolve into recognizable forms. Here’s a bustling crowd scene by Beraud.


As we zoom in on one small section of the picture, we can make out what’s going on with each of the tiny figures. It’s as if the smallest atom of a picture is always representational, rather than abstract.


Even Canaletto (detail above), whose paintings are a bustle of activity up close, always keeps his strokes tied to intelligible forms: here a head, there a jacket, there an oar.

Personally, even though I’m a realistic painter, I welcome the contribution that abstract painting has made to our pictorial toolset, and I indulge in a sort of confetti, though my own preference is to stop short of strokes that draw too much attention to themselves. Of course, this is a matter of individual taste, and there’s room for a wide range of handwriting.


Here’s a detail of the crowd in the distance in Dinosaur Parade. The figures were blocked in with a square bristle brush. The detail is handled a bit like a mosaic.


To finish up, one last detail from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara: a scene of a festival in Jorotongo. In the closeup, you can see how I sketched in the singers in terms of simple confetti-like shapes.

Related GJ post: Clustering
More images by John Berkey, Jean Beraud, Dean Cornwell

Color Corona

An extremely bright light, like a setting sun or a streetlight, is often surrounded by region of intense color, which I like to call the color corona.


In photography this effect is generally known as a lens flare. A halo of light often appears around a very bright source, caused by the internal scattering of light within the lens elements. That halo or corona takes on the native color of the source, even if the source has burned out (or “clipped”) the film or the sensor to pure white.


Photographic lens flares often include starbursts, rings, or hexagons.
These photographic lens artifacts can be added with Photoshop to give a fantasy painting—either digital or traditional—a realistic effect, but beware: if they’re overstated they can quickly become a gimmick.

A similar effect happens when a bright light travels into the human eye. Light scatters in the eyelashes, cornea, lens, and aqueous humor—the jellylike liquid inside the eye. The light then hyperactivates a region of the cones around the central spot of light.


The color corona also forms around the reflections of the light source on a specular surface like water. This close-up is from a painting from Dinotopia: First Flight. The color corona floods out from the bright water reflections and melts all adjacent silhouettes. A color corona can help to make a source seem brighter than the white of the paper, and actually make a viewer squint involuntarily.


This painting by Peder Mønsted capitalizes on this idea of an intense color corona adjacent to the setting sun. The mountains seem to be taking on fire from the sun, rather than retiring to a cool distant hue.

Related GJ post: reverse atmospheric perspective.
Wikipedia entries on aqueous humor, lens flare.
ARC entry on Peder Mønsted

Animals are not Fauvists

Around 1900, Henri Matisse and Andre Derain began a movement of painting called “Les Fauves” (which means “wild beasts”) in order to describe their wild brushwork and raw color.



It's worth noting that elephants, who are possessed of an eleven-pound brain and 30,000 muscles in the trunk alone, can paint a representational portrait of a fellow elephant (or is it a self-portrait?), and that they do so not wildly or randomly, but with extreme care and deliberation.

The elephant is trained, and this is a commercial enterprise, you might say, but couldn’t the same be said of us all?

Related Gurney Journey post: Gorilla Portraits
Thank you, Daniel M.

Park Bench

This on-the-spot sketch from the early 1980s was made with a brush pen on drawing paper. Everything in shadow goes to black, and everything in light goes to white, ignoring the contour lines bounding the light side.
The technique is a good way to simplify detail. Each figure is an edge-lit silhouette. I worked from left to right, completing each man before starting the next, because I anticipated that the subjects might come and go unexpectedly.

Related posts: high-contrast shapewelding, edge lighting, two values

Bernstein on Metaphor

I know that this is an art blog, and not a music blog. But there are at least two reasons why I can’t resist sharing this clip from Leonard Bernstein’s legendary Norton lectures of 1973: 1. He was one of the best explainers on the planet, and 2. His thoughts on metaphor are universal enough to apply to those of us who draw pictures and write stories.

More from the Bernstein website, link.
New York Times review of the DVD release, link.

Krøyer’s Hip Hip Hurra!

The Arken Museum in Copenhagen is presenting an exhibition called “The Skagen Painters —In a New Light,” currently on view until the first of June, 2008.

The principal work in the show is called “Hip Hip Hurra!” by the Danish/Norwegian painter Peder Krøyer, the ringleader of a group of genre painters who gathered in the fishing village of Skagen.

Krøyer, like the Juste Milieu painters in France and the Newlyn painters in England, blended the insights of Impressionism with the skills of traditional academic craftsmanship, which he perfected in Leon’s Bonnat’s atelier in Paris.


The small color study above shows how the design looked as it was almost fully crystallized. Between this sketch and the final painting he removed the hat from the man with the glasses, and he added a man with a light jacket leaning into the picture at right.

The current exhibit in Denmark examines how Krøyer achieved the feeling of a spontaneous, offhand composition in “Hip, Hip, Hurra!”, which in fact was carefully staged and arranged. The painting took him over four years to complete.


The detail of the final painting shows a principle Krøyer would have learned from Bonnat, namely to be careful not to violate the lights. The large light area composed of the tablecloth, the girl’s dress, and the woman at right is skilfully shape-welded together, with no dark accents interrupting it. This unified structure makes a strong, simple mass that holds the painting together despite a prodigious amount of detail.


Here I’ve taken the final painting and exaggerated the underlying tonal structure. The light shape is an abstract unit that looks something like a butterfly. The light woman’s arm extends upward from it at right, and the dark woman’s arm comes into the shape at left. These two gestures are given compositional salience and they help us recognize the theme of the picture immediately.

Two smaller light shapes float like islands in the dark background of foliage: the head of the woman at left, and the cluster of revelers in the distance.

Further Reading
Related Gurney Journey Posts: Shape Welding, Juste Milieu, Color Sketches
More on Skagen painters, Link.
More on the exhibition, Link.
OutdoorPainting.com feature on Peder Krøyer, Link.
Thanks to Armand Cabrera for telling me about the Skagen painters.

Art By Committee: Wind

On previous Wednesdays, here and here, we’ve played a game called “Art By Committee,” where I give you an excerpt from an actual science fiction manuscript, and then you have a week to illustrate it.

Here’s an example from the original Art-By-Committee sketchbook. Please click on the image to enlarge.

The new excerpt for you is: “A wind—not moving air but currents of force—rose up and tore at her.”

Tomorrow: Krøyer’s Hip Hip Hurra!

Artists Blog Search

Merci to the Artist's Blog Search for listing Gurney Journey among its 500 hand-picked art blogs. This is a Google-powered search engine devoted solely to art blogs, so if you're researching a particular art-related topic, you'll get much more focused results. (Link).

Attic Scene in Allentown

A few days ago, Jeanette and I stopped in Allentown, Pennsylvania for a slide lecture that I gave at the art museum there.


We also visited the exhibition of National Geographic artwork. I blogged more about the show in a previous post.

In 1988, in honor of its centennial, National Geographic asked me to create a painting to express the magazine’s legacy of adventure and discovery. Instead of portraying some bold explorer, I thought it would be fun to show something more poignant and homespun—an old man looking back on his life and his world through the pages of old magazines.


In the exhibit, my painting hangs alongside the preliminary sketches, letters, and photos that went into its creation.

The painting shows an old man and his grandson in an attic, surrounded by the mementos of the man’s life: a military uniform, an old family photo, and a ship clock. I searched out all those items from real attics in my hometown and asked two friends to pose.


In early concepts for the painting, the man sat all by himself. The idea didn’t quite work. It was depressing because the man looked lonely, despite the cat rubbing against his leg.

Here’s a small early charcoal study. I did several of these, and a few small color sketches in oil. I also drew a full-size charcoal comp, which appears alongside the finished painting.

Of course comparisons to Norman Rockwell are inevitable with a subject like this. His work comes to mind whenever you paint American characters in a narrative setting. I love Rockwell’s work, but I wanted to make a picture that was authentic and not derivative, so I closed all my books on him while I was working on this piece and tried to find my answers in real life.


The finished painting is in oil, 24x36 inches. This detail shows the cool light from the window and the warm illumination bouncing back from the attic space. I tried to capture the boy’s faraway expression, as if the magazine and his grandfather’s memories were taking him to another world.

Installation photos courtesy Allentown Art Museum. For any museum interested in booking "National Geographic: The Art of Exploration," contact Mary Dawson at the Norman Rockwell Museum at mdawson@nrm.org.

Tomorrow: More Art By Committee

Sketchbook Scrapbook

Why leave the endpapers of your sketchbook blank when you can fill them with ticket stubs?


Life, you might say, consists of all the dull moments suspended between the Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Hot Rod Motor Jam, and Flubber.

Healing Colors

Can certain colors—or certain groupings of colors—promote well-being, or even healing?


I created this montage of photo samples by snipping random bits from the pages of a single catalog from the mid 1990s called the Red Rose Collection, consisting of products designed to promote inner peace.


The photographer and graphic designer were evidently working from a controlled chart of colors, which I’ve graphed with the color wheel mask, above. The color scheme includes violets, greens, and cool reds, but avoids hot reds and yellows.

An entire field of alternative medicine called color therapy or chromotherapy has grown up around the belief that colors have specific therapeutic properties on the mind and body.


These practices are rooted in very old beliefs of the Ayurveda in India, and in ancient Egypt, where rooms were built with colored glass windows to promote effects on the body. In China, specific colors were associated with certain organs of the body.

In various practices of color therapy, patients observe colors through special viewers, or colors are applied to accupoints on the body, using gemstones, candles, prisms, penlights, colored fabrics, or tinted glass.


Although not all systems of color therapy agree on the associations of each color, most agree that red signifies blood and the base passions, including anger and power. Orange is associated with warmth, appetite and energy, followed by yellow, which represents the energy of the sun, and which is used for glandular problems.


These bright, warm colors are also almost univerally used by advertisers to sell fast food and soda pop.


The spectrum of colors continues through green, blue, indigo, and violet, moving more and more toward states of serenity and meditation.

This progression corresponds to the ascending chakras of yogic practice, and can be charted on the body by superimposing the progression of hues on each of the seven spiritual centers of the body.

The association of spectral color with chakra centers has recently been taken up by mainstream marketers, even appearing on the website of major interior paint manufacturers. (Link).

Critics of chromotherapy argue that these designations are nothing more than pseudoscience, because the health benefits can’t be proven by clinical tests. If the contemplation of certain colors has any effect on a patient’s recovery, they would argue, it’s simply due to the placebo effect.

To some extent, the color symbolism of catalogs like the Red Rose Collection owes as much to fads and fashions as it does to physiological response. Recent catalogs, like Gaiam Harmony have a rather different palette than we would have seen ten years ago; these days health-promoting catalogs tend to sport golds, dull olives, and venetian reds.

I haven’t made my mind up about all this, and would be curious to learn more. In any event, I believe that we artists, designers, and photographers should remain open to the general idea that color can affect us at a physiological level. Color can stimulate us, and it can soothe us—not just psychologically and emotionally, but at even deeper levels.

We should fine-tune our awareness of how we are influenced by the colors around us—not isolated individual colors, but combinations of colors.

Further reading
Interior decoration and associated chakras, Link
More on associations of each color, Link
Outline of contemporary theories and equipment, Link

Ranger Rick, April 2008

The April issue of Ranger Rick magazine devotes eight pages to a portfolio from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, exploring how dinosaurs help humans and vice versa. There's also a page with an exclusive feature: "Where did the idea for Dinotopia come from, anyway?"

Ranger Rick is my favorite nature magazine, and this issue has plenty of other fun stuff, like advice on how to properly skip a stone, catch a frog, make a dandelion chain, and whistle with a blade of grass. Do any of those things, and you'll know that spring is here at last.

Gouache on Tone Paper

Most people think of tone paper as a vehicle for figure drawing with charcoal and white chalk. But it’s also a great base for landscape sketches in gouache. Here’s an example of a view of Prescott, Arizona, painted a while ago ago in opaque watercolors.

The trees in the lower right were scrubbed in with a big bristle brush, and the sky was painted thinly with white gouache. I laid down the semi-opaque ribbons of roadways with a white nylon flat, and came back with whiter touches for the cars and lines. At the end I placed just a couple of red accents in the central area.

The paper wasn’t a typical drawing paper, but rather a heavyweight stock that I got from a limited edition publisher. It’s thick enough that a sheet can stand up without buckling over. I had Kinko's bind up a sketchbook out of the stuff.

There must be commercial tone paper pads that have similar paper which can take a little water without buckling. Maybe someone can suggest sources in the comments.

Rainy Alley

Yesterday was a steady downpour, but I had most of the day free before the Malaprops bookstore signing in Asheville, so I headed out to the nearby town of Black Mountain in search of a non-touristy motif.


I found an alley with a good view of the backs of the shops. There was also a convenient public restroom close by—something to factor in after several cups of coffee that morning. Jeanette wisely opted for a ballpoint pen sketch from inside the car.

I figured I had only two hours before I would be completely drenched.


Here’s how the painting looked after a quick block-in. I’m using a method recommended by Richard Schmid, where you start a tight rendering in one area of the picture, and work the area of finish across the canvas, rather than moving the whole picture loosely along.


The wind was starting to pick up, knocking over the umbrella every time I took my foot off the C-stand. By the time I had to pack up, the paint tubes were swimming in water that had collected inside the box. The lower areas of the picture are just blocked in with tone, with no attempt at rendering.


By two-thirty in the afternoon, as the thunder and lightning started up, we staggered into the Dripolator coffee shop, my old raincoat covered equally in rain and paint.

Sargent at Biltmore

It would be natural to assume that when John Singer Sargent painted a portrait, he had everything his way. After all, he was the most sought-after portrait artist in the world. You’d think he could set everything up exactly the way he wanted it.

But in fact he often had to overcome huge obstacles. His resourcefulness under trying conditions makes his accomplishments all the more admirable.


On Tuesday we visited the Biltmore estate in Asheville, North Carolina, the sumptuous mansion of American millionaire George Vanderbilt, above.

In 1895, at the height of his powers, Sargent came to Biltmore at the invitation of Mr. Vanderbilt to paint a full-length portrait of Biltmore’s landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted.


But Olmsted was not in good shape. He had been injured in a carriage accident in Central Park, and was beginning to suffer from dementia. His sons were running his business in New York. His wife was insistent that Sargent paint Olmsted to look healthier than he really appeared. She worried that if he looked weak, it would injure the business.


When Sargent arrived, the estate grounds were a muddy, barren construction site, not the verdant wilderness suggested in the painting. Sargent found some mountain laurel for a very unconventional portrait background, and he depended on one of Olmsted’s sons as a stand-in for the figure.

Sargent also painted Richard Morris Hunt, Biltmore’s architect. Hunt was also in very poor health, and could not stand for long periods. He died later in the same year.


Hunt’s wife also had demands. She insisted that Sargent paint him looking robust and young. It was hard to get Hunt's availability to pose. The trip from New York took a week by train.

The Biltmore itself was still under construction, most of the building covered with scaffolding, so Sargent had to imagine how it would look. Instead of showing the whole building, he used a corner of the structure as a backdrop, just enough to suggest the Gothic revival flavor.

Jeanette and I found the exact spot where Sargent posed Hunt. You can see exactly what Sargent was looking at. He pushed the architecture back a bit to introduce the ornate balustrade at the upper left and the second column at right.

The canvas is almost 8 x 5 feet. It was painted on location, far from the artist’s comfortable studio. Sargent had to travel with his entire setup, and had no photos to fall back on.

Because Hunt couldn’t hold the jaunty pose for long, a surrogate stood in for the body. The head had to be painted in a completely different location. The reason it looks pasted on is because the light on the face is coming from the left, whereas the rest of the picture is lit from the right, as it is in the photo. I don’t know why Sargent set up this contradictory lighting, because it compromises the painting, and keeps it from being as successful as the Olmsted portrait.

Nevertheless, despite the obstacles, Sargent scored two brilliant works, masterpieces of economy of handling and originality of design.

Tomorrow: Rain Work

Business Cards, Illustrated

A restaurant in our hometown long ago established a tradition inviting people to shove their business cards in the cracks between the shingles covering its interior walls. The result was hundreds of cards festooning the walls beside every table.

From time to time I plucked a few of cards at random and stuck them into a sketchbook, wondering what was the secret behind each business. Here are two examples.

Dappled Light

Light coming through trees results in the spotted light we know as dappled light. The painting below is by Ivan Shishkin.


The circular spots of light shining on the ground vary in size depending on how high the canopy is above the ground. A high tree canopy leads to larger circles with softer edges. Below, in this early Albert Bierstadt painting called “Sunlight and Shadow” the effects of dappled light are worked out extremely convincingly.


When bundles of light pass through small spaces between the leaves, each of those spaces act like a pinhole camera. The parcels of light are essentially like conical shapes of illumination radiating from each pinhole in the foliage.


The circles of light touching the ground are actually projections of the disk of the sun. In fact on days with a partial eclipse of the sun, the circles of light will appear as half circles. In the 8x10 inch oil study above, the circles of light on the roof of the shed are about a foot in diameter.

When each cone of light intersects a sloping surface like a wall, it results in an elliptical shape. On a vertical surface parallel to the picture plane, the long axis of that ellipse will always angle back toward the source of the light.

In the detail above from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, the light is coming from the right. The circles become ellipses as the form of the ship's red hull curves away on the left side.

Therefore, ellipses of light projected on a wall in front of us will slope upward to the right only if the sun is also coming from the right, as it is in this photo also.

Apparently N.C. Wyeth was unaware of this principle when he designed this otherwise fine illustration of Ben Franklin’s arrival in Philadelphia. The result is an error in lighting. According to the cast shadows from Franklin’s leg and from the tree branch at the bottom of the picture, the light is coming from above and to the right. But the ellipses of light on the wall point impossibly to a light source above and to the left.

Further discussion of dappled light, with photographic examples, on Edward Tufte's website, link.

Tomorrow: Business Cards, Illustrated

Still Playing with Dinosaurs!

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone. Above, from a recent school visit.

Thanks to DaniDraws.com for mentioning me in today's post "75 Artist's You Must Know and How to Find Them." I'm really excited to be listed with so many artists I admire, and I appreciate the work it takes to gather a compendium of so many links.

Charley Parker of the blog Lines and Colors talks a bit more about DaniDraws in his post today.

Transparency of Water

When light rays angle down toward the surface of still water, some of the rays bounce off the surface (reflection) and some travel down into it (refraction). Thanks to refracted light, we’re able to see the bottom, and the water looks transparent.

This painting by the Russian landscapist Zhukovsky shows both reflections and transparency. (The image is from Agni Art, a good source for inexpensive prints of Russian paintings.)


Above, the water is almost entirely transparent, with just a few slithery slashes of blue sky reflections to suggest the moving stream. (From the John Singer Sargent Virtual Gallery, a website that catalogs all his works.)

In three previous posts: (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) we looked at water reflections, but this time, let’s also consider transparency.
The relative amounts of reflected and refracted light depends on the angle that the rays touch the water surface. For this reason, when you look steeply down into water, it looks more transparent, and when you look straight out across the water, all you see are reflections.


In the lower right of this study, you can see the streambed because you’re looking steeply downward, but higher up in the scene, the blue reflections of the sky take over.

Same thing in the study below. There’s mostly sky reflection at (1) and there’s more transparency at (2). In the area marked (3), the tones of the riverbottom are darker because the reflected skylight is interrupted by the mass of the rock. Polarized sunglasses will also selectively remove some of the glare of reflected skylight, allowing you to see more of the transparency (or refracted) rays.


In (4) you can see the edge of the last high tide. The tide was coming in as I painted this, covering the rocks one by one, and darkening them as it did so. Because blue light is scattered away and subtracted from the light illuminating subsurface rocks, they look darker and warmer than the rocks above the surface.

Gorilla Portraits

If you want to draw portraits of great apes, you have to approach them in the proper way. You can’t just march up to a great ape enclosure and start staring at them, or they’ll get all shy and disgusted and turn their back on you, because staring is a threat to them.

Yesterday we went to the North Carolina Zoo, the third largest zoo in the U.S.A. We got there early in the day when the gorillas were just waking up.

I remembered something I learned in my primate social behavior class. I approached the glass with a submissive posture, looking down at the ground and backing up with my hand out.

The gorilla loved it. He had never seen a human act like a polite ape before. He came right up to the glass and posed for me while I did this half-hour portrait from just two feet away. It was like sketching someone on a subway. I tried to just glance at him discreetly out of the corner of my eye.

I tried the same approach on the chimpanzee, an wild-born 33-year-old male named “H.N.”

He watched me draw with a professional interest. Every ten minutes or so he wanted me to show him how I was coming along on the sketch.


Next week we'll return to the normal Color Sunday theme.

Traffic Cones

No urban painter is properly equipped without traffic cones.

Before you begin painting a street scene, place two cones in the street in front of you to secure the view. If you don’t, a 12-foot high delivery truck will park right in front of you.

No one will question the authority of traffic cones, especially if you stencil them with official-looking markings.

They also come in handy as distinctive apparel to wear to gallery openings.

Automotive Zeitgeist

What do the faces on cars tell us about the evolution of our zeitgeist?

Backlit Branches

I did this quick 3.5 x 5 inch watercolor a few days ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What interested me was the area where the trees are in front of the shadow side of the building.

The sunlight is coming toward us from the right side. The end of the building is in shadow. This sets up a perfect backdrop for showing the light gray mass of branches catching the morning sunshine. The stripes of rooftiles can just be discerned through the branches.

As often happens in plein air studies, the amount of detail in the scene is almost infinitely complex. You can’t possibly capture every tiny branch and detail, especially at this scale, so the challenge becomes how best to suggest more than you actually define.

I splayed out the tip of the watercolor brush and drybrushed around the light branches, and also drybrushed the branches that were darker than the sky. After everything was dry, I scratched out a few more branches with the tip of a folding knife.


It’s interesting (and a little embarrassing) to compare the photo after the fact. The drawing errors in scale and perspective become obvious right away. I missed a lot of color that was going on in the shadow. But I’m surprised that the photo seems to have completely missed the quality I liked best about the scene—the backlit bare branches.

Politics, Prose and Painting

Yesterday at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC, 110 fourth-graders from three different schools attended my PowerPoint and Magic Marker presentation.

Afterwards I met up with my artist friends Patrick O’Brien (left) and Armand Cabrera (right).

Armand and I set up our pochade boxes to paint the Chinese restaurant across the street from the bookstore. Jeanette stood, holding her watercolor sketchbook. There was a steady stream of curious spectators on the busy sidewalk behind us.

Two guys stopped on their way to delivering beer to a pub called Buck’s Hunting and Fishing. They wondered if we were having a painting contest. (photo courtesy Patrick O’Brien).

Here are the Three Stooges deep in concentration.

An old man stopped beside me. He folded a newspaper and put it under his arm. “Something you might want to know about that building,” he said. “The guy who owned it in the 1940s baked German pastries for President Roosevelt. He baked them right there in that building.”

“Didn’t someone have to taste the food to make sure it wasn’t poisoned?” I asked. He just laughed. “It was different in those days.”

One by one the chefs from the restaurant ran across Connecticut Avenue to see what we were doing. They commented among themselves in Chinese. After they returned, a big cloud of garlic smoke billowed out from the exhaust vent.

A little kid came by, dragging his mom. “That’s AWESOME,” he said.


A woman with a shiny purse said, “Why are you painting that place? It is the ugliest building around here.” Then she looked at my picture. “But you made it look beautiful.” I told her that I tried to paint it just the way it was without changing anything.


Here’s my painting in two different stages. Some of the construction lines, drawn in umber with a bristle brush, still appear in the block-in at left. At right was how it looked when I quit.

The painting wasn’t really finished, just abandoned after about two and a half hours. Near the end of the afternoon, the sun popped out from behind the clouds, bleaching out the pink and green colors of the awning.

Tomorrow: Backlit Bare Branches

Art By Committee Results

We've been playing an occasional group sketch game called "Art By Committee," where I share an an actual excerpt taken out of context from a science fiction manuscript and we see how a few of us mad illustrators put a picture to it. Below is another example taken from the original sketchbook.


What follows are the zany, witty, and wonderful sketches that you all came up with for the line: "I never understood why you were with him in the first place," followed by the one that originally appeared in my book. Thanks again for contributing. Let's take a break for a week because I'm on the road, but I'll toss out another line in the future.

Austin Madison

Arthur Keegan
Topher Sipes

Sarah Stevenson

Michael Dambold
Matthew Kalamidas


Jen Zeller

Davis Ottoson
Dan Pinto

...and the Coffeeshop Clan--Jeanette, Me, and James Warhola

Tomorrow: Politics, Prose, and Painting

Skyholes

A tree presents a complex silhouette against the sky, but the silhouette is almost never completely solid. A few “skyholes” puncture the shape of the tree and let you see through to the light beyond.


In this detail of a Claude Lorrain, there are fewer than ten skyholes painted in the lower third of the main tree. I’ve noticed that the early landscapists were sparing with skyholes.


This detail by Corot shows skyholes nearer the top margin of the trees. Some appear as fairly active circular shapes, which draws attention to them.


Constant Troyon, as seen in this detail, painted skyholes of various sizes, and gave them a ragged character, to suggest that they were fringed with leaves.

One question that every painter in opaque media like oil, gouache, or acrylic faces: Should you paint a skyhole with the same exact color as the sky beyond?


If you compare a photograph to the paintings we’ve seen, it appears much more complex and full of infinite variety. In the center of the photo I’ve placed the number 1 next to a prominent skyhole, and the number 2 surrounded by a group of smaller skyholes.


An enlargement reveals that while the larger skyhole does present an uninterrupted view of the sky, the smaller skyholes contain a network of fine branches and tiny leaves that weren't apparent from a distance.

These tiny interruptions lessen the amount of light passing through from the sky. As a result, these skyholes should really be painted a little darker than the actual sky color beyond.

Images from ARC, Link.

Tomorrow: Your Art-by-Committee Sketches

Profile Portrait

Here's a quick portrait of an eight-year-old. He posed for me between rounds of a kickball game during an third grade picnic.

Warm Underpainting

Here’s a brief but important post for Color Sunday. If you prime your panels with a tint of venetian red or burnt sienna, you can get a good base for many kinds of paintings.


A warm underpainting is especially helpful for paintings of skies or foliage, or any painting with a blue or green tonality. The little bits of color that inevitably remain between your strokes will make blues or greens sparkle by complementary contrast.

An insistent warm underpainting also can act to force you to cover the background with opaques. This 6 by 4 inch painting of an elephant from the zoo is just partially finished. Normally I would cover the entire red-orange surface with opaque paint.

For plein air painting I use Gamblin oil priming, which I buy in a quart tin, and tint it using using a palette knife on a scrap of palette paper. A drop or two of cobalt drier will get the priming to set up overnight if you’re prepping for a painting trip.

For studio work I will more often prime with gesso tinted with acrylic, as this surface allows for a pencil preliminary drawing.

The Sinking of the Cumberland

One hundred and forty-six years ago today, an epic naval battle took place in Hampton Roads, Virginia. The central event on that day was the sinking of the USS Cumberland. I had the honor of commemorating the event in a 30 x 40 inch painting commissioned by the National Geographic Society. This is the first time I’ve shared the painting publicly.


In a future post, I’ll describe what went into the painting, which took well over a year to complete. I’ll also share more about the artwork in an illustrated lecture that I’ll be giving this Sunday, March 9 at the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania, as well as on Thursday, March 13 at the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, Virginia. The Mariner’s Museum currently has the original painting on exhibition.

“Give them a broadside, boys, as she goes!”

The USS Cumberland went down at 3:37 p.m. on March 8, 1862, the victim of the Virginia’s (also known as the Merrimac’s) 1500 pound iron ram and a relentless barrage that covered the deck with carnage. Lieutenant George U. Morris gave the command for all hands to save themselves, but he remained on deck to encourage the decimated pivot gun crew, who took a final shot even as the waves closed around them.

To Buchanan’s request for surrender, he defiantly replied, “Never! We will sink with our colors flying.” The destruction of the Cumberland was a decisive but short-lived victory for the Confederate Navy. The Virginia, which sustained only superficial damage, survived to challenge the Monitor the following day.

Tomorrow: Warm Underpainting

Mark O'Connor

I'm in Boston today with my wife Jeanette, and we'll be heading to Pennsylvania tonight.

On Thursday we enjoyed the music of the great violinist Mark O'Connor. Here's a sketch in watercolor that I did from the second row of his performance/lecture, arranged by the Harvard College American Music Association. I used a couple of hollow-handled brush pens and a very tiny watercolor set all balanced discreetly, but dangerously, in my lap.


I made this sketch yesterday during Mark's improvisation workshop, which our son attended with his accordion. I'm using watercolor again in the Moleskine drawing book. This paper has a heavy weight and a smooth texture, but it's really not made for watercolor, so the washes tended to bead up at first.

More on Mark O'Connor, Link.
Dan Gurney, Link
Moleskine sketchbook blog, Link.

Microraptor

NOVA recently aired a documentary about the flying dinosaur called Microraptor gui, which was discovered a few years ago in Liaoning, China.


I love this little four-winged wonder, and featured it in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. Here is Microraptor flying over the rooftops of Chandara, with its front wings up and its back “wings” or legs down.


Whether this creature was capable of flapping, and what position it held its arms and legs in flight are the subjects of lively debate among both scientists and artists.

What I’d like to show you here is a practical tip for making a quick reference maquette for a creature like this so that you can get the perspective right. I call it a “2D to 3D maquette.” This method would also work for insects, birds, and fish.

To begin with, I found the science article by the Chinese paleontologist Xu Xing, and printed out the dorsal view of the creature, with its arms and legs splayed out flat. The printout was on card stock.

Then I hot-glued some thin aluminum armature wire underneath the paper cutout. I tried to place the wire where the bones go. I then beefed up the volume of the head and chest with plasticene, or modeling clay.


I now had a fully poseable maquette in 3D, which allowed me to experiment with different wing positions. I placed a light source to see how the big planes would look in light and shadow.


This is the work of only an hour or two, but it helped me choose the angle and pose, and it gave me crucial information about the foreshortening of the wing shapes, the cast shadow on his left wing, and the appearance of the tail.

NOVA video on its website, Link.
New Scientist Article, Link.
Wikipedia article on Microraptor, Link.
Thanks, Mike Sheehan.

Tomorrow: The Sinking of the Cumberland

Costumed Model

Howard Pyle once said that painting a nude model is like painting a plucked bird.

As illustrators, comic artists, and animators, we’re most often called upon to portray the clothed figure. Why then don’t we spend more time in the studio drawing the figure fully feathered?

Below is a very hasty 20-minute oil sketch. It’s nothing to crow about, but I relished the chance to try something different.


Granted, there are plenty of good reasons to study the nude figure. It’s a good way to learn principles of light and shade on form. It’s essential to understand the structure of the human figure beneath the garment. And the nude is the Everest for artists, given its expressive potential and interpretive subtlety.

But there’s an anatomy of costume, too. Fabric follows different principles from bone and skin. How many art schools or ateliers teach about velvet vs. satin, halflock vs. spiral folds, and dolman vs. set-in sleeves?

Tomorrow: Microraptor Maquette

Your Khalian Sketches

Last Wednesday I introduced the “Art by Committee” sketchbook, where I take excerpts from an actual science fiction manuscripts, and then illustrate them with the help a coffee-shop committee of artist friends.

I then invited you to join in. The results follow, with the one from the official A.B.C. book the very end, along with another new challenge.

Austin Madison

Kevin Hedgepeth

Guillaume Decaux

Dan Root

Jon Hrubesch

Robert Sloan
Jen Zeller


Michael Dambold

Pat Dizon
Erik Bongers


Rick Carlsen

Rob Hummer
Sarah
Tidah Adipat
Weston Gaylord

…and the Committee: Jeanette Gurney, James Warhola, and me.

Thanks so much to all of you for contributing. Shall we try this once more? Here’s a new line:

“I never understood why you were with him in the first place.”

If you'd like to email me your sketch at jgurneyart@yahoo.com, I'll post those results next Wednesday.

Tomorrow: Costumed Model

Perspective Ink Drawing

You may recall the work of Atkinson Grimshaw, the Victorian moonlight specialist.

A typical finished Grimshaw dockside scene combines mysterious and atmospheric distances with the delicate tracery of rigging and other fine details.

What procedure did he follow to work out the perspective?


Fortunately there are a few unfinished Grimshaws which show his method. This one has a thin layer of brownish oil color scrubbed over the entire surface to establish the overall tonality and mood, but he has not yet moved on to the finished opaque rendering.


Here’s a detail of the same canvas. Grimshaw’s crisp preliminary line drawing shows right through the thin paint. I haven’t seen the original, but most likely the drawing was accomplished in India ink.


Grimshaw, like Bouguereau, Gerome, and many others in his day, preferred to have the foundational perspective work carefully completed in ink on the canvas before going on to the final painting. The drawing would eventually disappear under later opaque layers.

Gerome also used a perspective ink drawing on the canvas before he dove into his renderings of complex tilework.

Other painters like Sorolla, Sargent, Duveneck, and Zorn (and, more recently, Richard Estes and Frank McCarthy) took a more improvisatory approach, and “found it in the paint,” drawing loosely at first with the brush. Both methods are completely valid.

More about Atkinson Grimshaw at ARC.org
Previous posts on the color of moonlight, Link; on perspective grids, Link; and on a Dinotopia preliminary line drawing, Link.

Tomorrow: Your Khalian Sketches (Deadline noon today)

Backs of Heads

I sketch a lot when I’m sitting in an audience. As a result, I end up sketching the backs of a lot of heads. It’s not the angle you would usually pick for a portrait.


But that’s OK with me because I’m fascinated with the challenge of trying to capture a personality from that angle.

Tomorrow: Perspective Ink Drawing

Color Gradations

Like a glissando in music, a color gradation moves smoothly from one note to another. Gradations can be very beautiful in purely abstract terms. They take you from one hue to another, or from a light color to a dark color, or from a dull color to a saturated one. Let’s have a look at some examples.

This gradation goes from a dark desaturated blue to a pale desaturated yellow. So it shifts in hue and value, but not very much in saturation.


This one is fairly similar, but it moves from a neutral (or grayed down) dark to a warm light tone, passing through a slightly more saturated oranges in the middle of its range.


Here are three gradated strips of color. The top one changes primarily in hue as it goes quickly away from a dull red-orange and gradually arrives at a saturated blue, without changing very much in value. The middle one shifts darker in value, and the third one moves in and around related pinks and oranges before arriving at a paler pink.


Now that you’ve seen some gradations out of context, let’s see where they came from. The first color strip comes from the right side of this painting by Caspar David Friedrich. Note that the brownish color of the trees also gradates as it moves away from the bright center of light. When two color sets move together, I call it a "parallel gradation."


The second color gradation appears in the sky of this painting by Maxfield Parrish. The stone wall also gradates very slightly from warmer at the top to cooler at the base.

The group of three strips are all taken from a single Gerome painting of Arab horsemen. This painting is full of gradations, many more than I’ve shown. It owes much of its luminosity to the skillful use of changing color.


John Ruskin observed in Modern Painters (1843) that a gradated color has the same relationship to a flat color as a curved line has to a straight one. He noted that a painting of Turner—and that nature herself—contains movement or gradation of color both on the large and the small scale:

“I wish to insist…that nature will not have one line nor color, nor one portion nor atom of space without a change in it. There is not one of her shadows, tints, or lines that is not in a state of perpetual variation.”

Gradations don’t just happen. They take planning. In some future post we’ll explore some techniques for painting gradations and look at ways to use them in composition.

More from the Art Renewal Center database on Friedrich, Parrish, and Gerome.

Tomorrow: Backs of Heads

Matania: Without a Net

Fortunino Matania (1881-1963) was a historical illustrator and war correspondent who worked for the British magazine Sphere and other publications.

He had a wide range of interests, and his command of historical detail was unrivaled. He could render costumes, weapons, architecture, and furnishings with authority and assurance. He was equally at home in ancient Rome, in the Italian Renaissance, or in the world of the Aztecs. But his specialty was World War 1.


His instincts for composition and staging came from years of studying the old masters, yet for the most part he managed to avoid conventional compositions or formulaic poses in favor of a relaxed truthfulness to nature and a vivid sense of action.

But his gifts went beyond the pedantic accuracy of documentary detail. He brought a sympathetic heart to his characters; nowhere is this more evident than the unforgettable painting of a World War I soldier lingering behind on a battle-scarred road to comfort his dying horse.


Matania’s ability to paint realistic tableaus from the pages of history would be impressive enough had he approached his craft in the normal way¬—that is, by producing dozens of preliminary studies, gathering actual props, sketching on location, and posing models.

He was fully capable of this kind of comprehensive method, but he more typically worked under tight deadlines, dispensing altogether with preliminaries, and laid down a final rendering on a white surface, guided by a vision fully formed in his head.


This would have been hard to believe were it not for eyewitnesses like Percy Bradshaw, who watched him paint a complex scene of a [] cavalry soldier breaching a [Belgian] barricade. He started with a blank board with no sketches, and just started rendering. This is like tightrope walking without a net.

Here’s the finished picture. Bradshaw documented the process photographically in stages and published it in a portfolio that stunned Matania’s contemporaries.


Thanks to the work of Stuart Williams and Geoff Gehman, an art book on Matania is in the works from FHD Publishing's Book Palace imprint—with much higher quality reproductions than I’ve shown here. They've pushed back the pub date because they keep finding great new works. It will be worth the wait.

Detailed bio and collection of color illustrations, Link.
More from Book Palace, Link.

Tomorrow: Color Gradation