Art By Committee: Blue Robe Results

The other day someone asked me, “Is that sketch game on Wednesdays just for professionals? Are they all your friends? Does someone have to be a member of an exclusive club to participate?"


A lot of sketch games are set up that way, but not this one. Everyone is eligible; you don’t have to join a club; and I post every submission, not just the cream of the crop. It just happens to be a great crop! Many of the contributors are professionals, but a lot are students or people who do art just for fun.
For those new to Art By Committee, your mission is to illustrate an authentic excerpt from a science fiction novel. This week’s quote brought out everyone’s best, as you can see below:

Damian Johnston

Dave Harshberger

Jenn Morris

Rob Hummer


Michelle L.

Roberta Baird
Jen Zeller

Art Keegan

Tyler Davis

Jess Ellwood

Rose Dawson

Susan Adsett

And, from the original sketchbook, the one by me, my wife Jeanette, and James Warhola.

Now, here’s next week’s challenge: “...selection, so that evolution had leaped. Somehow all that other people noticed about her particular subspecies was its supposed simian characteristic.”


Please scale your JPG to around 700 pixels across. Title it with your name, send it to: jgurneyart(at)yahoo.com, subject line ABC, and let me know in your email if you want me to link to your blog or website. Please have your entries in by next Tuesday at noon.

Previous Art By Committees, Link.

Tomorrow: Last Dino Art Workshop

Edge Induction

It was twilight in Tannersville, New York. A light rain had been coming down steadily all day. I set up my easel under a store awning because I stupidly forgot an umbrella. The aroma of French onion soup beckoned from the restaurant across the street.

The sun must have set by now because the light was failing. The light from the sky seemed to have bluish cast in contrast to the warm lights that were coming on. But I wasn't sure. I could practically feel the cones in my eyes shutting down. Honestly I could hardly see what colors I was mixing on the palette, because I forgot a flashlight, too.

As I studied the scene I realized that I could easily see the sharply defined contours of the utility pole and the roofline against the bright sky. But I couldn’t make out the clapboards or the signs; in fact I really couldn’t see the windows or doors at all—except on the bright white building in the center of the picture. So I tried to paint the scene as I saw it: blurry and tentative.

This illustrates a principle called “edge induction.” When a subject is poorly lit or in shadow, some of the edges will be below the threshold where our eyes can discern a contour. A camera might be able to pick up all the edges in these dim zones, but not the human eye.

It's not just a matter of what the rods and cones can respond to. What happens without you knowing it is that your brain takes over where your eyes leave off. In dim conditions your visual cortex starts interpolating or inventing contours based on the few edges that you truly can see and on your prior knowledge of how things should look.

The brain wants to confirm the contours first, and then it quickly fills them in with textures, tones, and colors—almost like a coloring book. This happens instantly at an unconscious level, as was demonstrated in a study published last summer by researchers at Vanderbilt University.

The visual cortex is always busy constructing a detailed fabrication of the world, whether it has all the information or not, and it tricks you into thinking you’re seeing edges that really aren’t visible.

Painters shouldn’t seek out edges that aren’t there; in fact poetry often springs from deliberately placing edges into obscurity, as Meissonier did in this portrait of Dumas.

Let edges and details go out of focus in sub-threshold or shadow areas, as Gerome did with the shadow-side eye in this portrait of a peasant. If you like a painterly handling, here’s the place to use sketchy, soft brushstrokes. It’s perfectly OK to deny the viewer the chance to scrutinize the details too much.

For more about that Vanderbilt University study and the phenomenon of edge induction, link.
The last three images came from Art Renewal Center, link.

Tomorrow is the Art by Committee sketch challenge. Please get your sketches in by Tuesday at 6:00 pm. Eastern Time, USA. To read about the challenge, link, and then scroll down.

Cockpit View

I suppose the world has changed a bit since the day twelve years ago when I sketched this inflight view of an open airline cockpit. It wasn’t too long ago that taxi cabs didn’t have partitions and that you could walk right into an elementary school—or the nation’s capitol.

Sky Blue

Most people know why the sky is blue: small particles in the atmosphere scatter the shorter (blue and violet) wavelengths from the white sunlight so that the blue light bounces around in all directions, covering the black void of space with a veil of sapphire.

As artists, we need to know a little more than that. How does the sky color change as we look in different directions? Where is the blue darkest or most chromatically saturated?

Here are two photos that were both taken at 4:10 in the afternoon of April 12 in Germantown, New York. The one on the left was taken facing the sun, and the one on the right was taken seconds later facing away from the sun.

The clouds are completely different. Near the sun, clouds have dark centers and light edges. With the sun shining directly on them at right, they are lightest at the tops or centers and they get darker at the sides and bases. Smaller clouds are not as white because they have a lesser mass of vapor to reflect back the light.

The color of the sky is different, too. Around the sun is a region of warm glare which weakens the chroma of the blue, making it more of a dull grey-green. Looking away from the sun, the blue is more saturated, tending a bit more toward violet.

How do we know the camera isn’t deceiving us? Is there another way to check these observations?

I went to my local hardware store and picked up a bunch of blue paint swatches. Here’s how the sky looks compared to the paint swatches while facing away from the sun. One of the blue swatches (A) is a close match to the adjacent area of the sky.

I wanted to photograph the swatches while facing toward the sun, but I had a problem. There was no way to angle them so that the sun could shine directly on them. So I set up a mirror on the windshield of my car to bounce the light back onto the swatches.

But we can’t trust this comparison, because those color swatches are lit by the warm light bouncing up from the ground and from my t-shirt. That’s why the swatches look a little warmer than they should.

Here’s another experiment to demonstrate how the sky gets lighter near the sun. I took a single paint swatch, cut it in half, and taped the symmetrical halves on a mirror to make a device that we can call a "cyanometer." None of the swatches matches the sky exactly. The hue and chroma are different, but the values come close in a couple places.

Clearly the value of the sky darkens as we shift our gaze horizontally away from the sun. The left arrow, nearer the sun, matches the value of the lightest swatch, while the right arrow, just a little bit farther from the sun, matches a swatch that’s two steps darker. The mirror is reflecting another section of the sky, which also gets darker from left to right.

The sky color shifts in value from zenith to horizon, too, as we can see when the cyanometer is arrayed vertically. At (A) there’s a close match of value between the darkest swatch and the distant sky, even though the chroma is different. Higher in the sky at (B), the same swatch looks much lighter than the sky surrounding it.

The mirror reflection shows an instant comparison of what’s going on behind us in a region nearer the sun. This area of the sky is much brighter in value, as well as being duller in chroma, confirming the first pair of photos in this post. The swatches at (C) and (D) show us that the sky in the region of the sun stays about the same value as it goes up from the horizon, because the increasing solar glare offsets the effect of lightening near the horizon.

Let’s draw some general conclusions from these observations.

• First, there are two separate but overlapping systems of color gradations in a daytime sky. One system, "solar glare," is governed by the proximity to the sun. The other, "horizon glow," depends on the angle above the horizon.
• In each of these two systems the sky color gradates in value, hue, and chroma. These two systems interact with each other so that that every patch of sky gradates in two different directions at once. This means that the painter in opaque colors needs to mix at least four separate starting colors to paint any given segment of clear blue sky.
• As we move from the zenith to the horizon, the sky generally tends to get lighter, because we’re looking through more atmosphere. A poet might say we’re peering through more veils drawn across the void of heaven. Near the horizon, depending on the time of day and the direction of view, the sky color can range from a pale cerulean to a warm grey to a dull orange, but usually it’s a whitening.
• As we approach the sun, the color gets lighter and warmer because a great volume of white light is scattered at shallow angles by large particles in the atmosphere. You can see this best by standing near the edge of the shadow of a building with the sun just hidden behind the roofline. A weaker but noticeable lightening also occurs at the “antisolar point,” 180 degrees opposite the sun.
• The point of the darkest, deepest blue, which I call the “well of the sky,” is at the zenith only at sunset and sunrise. To be precise, the well of the sky is actually 95 degrees away from the setting sun across the top of the sky. At other times in the day, the well of the sky is about 65 degrees away from the sun.

Notes and recommended reading

Why is the sky blue? Link.
Some ideas in this post are based on Light and Color in the Atmosphere by M. Minnaert (1954) in Dover edition, link
Minnaert and scientists as early as Humboldt built instruments that they called cyanometers for observing sky colors, but they were of a different design, link.
Photos were taken without polarizing filters.

Fresh Out of Mummies

Maybe it’s just as well that some traditional pigments are no longer made from their original sources.

Sepia brown was once made from the ink sac of the cuttlefish. There’s a chemical substitute now, thank goodness for the little cephalopods.

Indian yellow *allegedly came from the concentrated urine of cows fed on mango leaves. It was outlawed in 1908, because it was hard on the cows.

And mummy brown derived from the ground-up remains of Egyptian mummies. They stopped in the twentieth century when the supply of mummies ran out.

*More on the Indian yellow mystery, link and link.

Tomorrow: Sky Blue

Vignetting: Part 3

Let’s conclude our look at the ten kinds of vignette compositions.

The Sketchy Edge Vignette
A painting can dissolve into sketchy lines, giving us the feeling of an informal sketchbook page. Dutch illustrator Rien Poortvliet often used a sepia penline to establish his vignette illustrations, in this case from the book “In My Grandfather’s House.”


And Dean Cornwell lets his preliminary brush-drawn lines hang out, finishing the figures above the sketchy edge.

The Cutback Vignette

The silhouette shapes of JC Leyendecker’s figures are painted first on a toned canvas. Then he cuts back with white paint, using long strokes and a slippery medium. This is just a study, but it shows his method in action.

This more finished cover is done in the same way, leaving a few spaces between strokes where the toned canvas can be seen.

The Wraparound Vignette

A wraparound vignette sets up the detail around the outside edge of the design, leaving the white of the page open for type. Jon Whitcomb establishes a feeling of firelight and moonlight.


The blacksmith shop of Volcaneum in the first Dinotopia book was conceived in the same way, with the white space used for text.

Breakaway Vignette
In this last vignette strategy, the form pops out of the rectangular panel. It's perfect for explosive action, but it calls attention to itself, so it should be used sparingly. This one appears in Dinotopia: The World Beneath.

I used a similar idea in an unused sketch for National Geographic, where I wanted to convey the sense of speed and danger of a chariot race.

To recap, the ten types of vignettes are soft blur, torn paper, fadeaway, form-link, real white, spillover, sketchy edge, cutback, wraparound, and breakaway.

Thanks to the following this week:
John Flesk, link.
Roger Reed of Illustration House, link.
Leif Peng’s Flickr sets, link.
Jim Vadeboncoeur’s illustrated books, link.
100 Years of Illustration, link.
Armando Cabrera, link.
Illustration Art, link.

Tomorrow: Fresh Out of Mummies

Dino Art Tips 4: Environment

To paint a convincing scene of dinosaur life, you need to think about the setting as much as the dinosaur itself. In this fourth installment of my paleoart workshop, here are five tips to help you paint realistic environments for your creatures. To see the full dino art workshop, check out the current issue of ImagineFX magazine, which should still be on the newsstands in the U.S.A.

Avoid the “dry lake bed” look
I’m guilty of this one as much as anyone else. We’re all tempted to stage dinosaur scenes on featureless dry lake beds. Why? Because it’s easier than dealing with foliage. But nature rarely looks like that. Usually every available piece of ground is covered with plant life. Unless you’re actually setting the scene on a flat landscape, make the terrain uneven. Toss in a fallen log or some boulders. Give the dinosaur something to step over or to squeeze underneath. By giving your dinosaur something in the scene to interact with, you can convey tremendous realism.

Grab environment photos
Whenever you travel to places with Mesozoic plant types, take photos for future reference. Florida has palmettos and cypress swamps that look a lot like what you would have seen 100 million years ago. In other locales you can find ginkgo, redwoods, low ferns, tree ferns, and Araucaria. Take a variety of angles: closeups of branches, tree bases, rotting trunks, and swampy edges.

Add dino damage
Large animals in Africa are hard on plants, and dinosaurs would be no different. Look at photos of plants in Africa, where animals break off low branches, trample small plants, rub against the bark, or nip off all but the highest leaves. If you add dino damage on the plants and trees, you’ll add a level of storytelling that will add naturalism to the whole scene.

Overlap the foreground
Overlap parts of the dinosaur’s figure with foreground detail. This almost always happens in real life. The detail might be a branch, a rock, a clump of ferns, or another dinosaur. Don’t show the whole pose in crisp detail. Throw parts of it out of focus. If the foreground element is close to the viewer, blur it a bit.

Add dappled light
If your scene is set underneath tall trees, most of the subject will be in shadow, with spots of dappled light filtering down from the canopy. You can use this effect to your artistic advantage by featuring the center of interest in strong light, and disguising the less important parts of the pose with dappled illumination. Remember that the size and blurriness of the dots of light increases as the ray of light travels farther from the source of the cast shadow.
Previous dino art workshop posts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
Previous GJ post on dappled light, link.
ImagineFX Magazine, link.
Cassowary image from Picasaweb, link.
Elephant damage, link.

Tomorrow: The last installment on vignetting

Art By Committee: “Tinted Orange”

On Wednesdays we've been playing a group sketch game called "Art By Committee." I share an actual excerpt from a science fiction novel and you come up with a sketch to illustrate it.

This week our quote was: “….protested. He too was tinted orange with anticipation.” I know, it’s a little weird, but I had a feeling you would come up with really creative solutions--and you did! Nice work, everybody.

At the end of the post is next week’s quote, so if you missed this one, scroll down and put on your thinking caps for next week.

Arthur Keegan

Rob Hummer

Roberta Baird

Susan Adsett


Jen Zeller

Gally Mathias

And the group effort from the original Committee sketchbook.

Here’s the challenge for next week, and this one should spark a lot of fun ideas. Please have your sketches in to me at jgurneyart (at) yahoo.com by noon this coming Tuesday. Title your JPG file with your name, let me know your preferred link, and have fun!

Tomorrow: Five More Dino Art Tips

Vignetting: Part 2

Let's continue with three more design strategies for vignetting illustrations.

The Form-Link Vignette
In this approach, the figures are shown in full, but they’re linked to each other using props or background elements, thus making a larger shape.

Saul Tepper establishes the domestic setting and unites the family members using the chair, the doorway, and the cast shadow. The man’s head is cleverly silhouetted against the refrigerator, the selling point of the ad.

Howard Pyle uses the thin forms of the smoke and the horizon as a linear scaffolding to hang the separate parts together.

The Real White Vignette

If you stage a scene so that part of it consists of a white material, the vignette looks natural and unforced. The white element might be a snowy field, a sandy beach—or in the case of this John Gannam, a white bedsheet. The two dark shapes at the top of the composition are crucial to defining the shape of the bed.


The white of the tablecloth becomes the white of the paper.

The Spillover Vignette
For this one, think of the white background not as white paper, but as a field of illumination, flooding the subject and pouring over the edges of the form. This spillover effect was pioneered by paperback cover artist James Bama. The edge of the form can be lost altogether as in this case....

....or the edge of the form can be held. Either way, the figure should be lit from both sides, with the core of the shadow in the front of the form.

I did this painting of an asteroid miner inspired by Bama's innovation. The image appeared on a paperback called Out of the Sun by Ben Bova. I posed the model contre-jour in a doorway, with all the light from outdoors spilling over into the side planes of his face and shoulders. Then in the painting I actually lost all the edges of the forms and let them blend into the background.

Look for the final installment on vignettes on Friday.
Tomorrow: Art By Committee: "Tinted Orange." Deadline is today at 6:00 PM Eastern Time. For more, link.

Thanks to the following this week:
John Flesk, link.
Roger Reed of Illustration House, link.
Leif Peng’s Flickr sets, link.
Jim Vadeboncoeur’s illustrated books, link.
100 Years of Illustration, link.
Armando Cabrera, link.
Illustration Art, link.

Vignetting: Part 1

When you want to compose a picture on a white page, you can always place the whole scene inside a rectangular composition.

But it’s often more exciting to let the picture flow informally into the white of the page. Illustrators have invented a lot of different design strategies for “vignettes” or “spot illustrations.”

This week we’ll take a look at the ten different vignette strategies, starting with the first three: “soft blur,” “torn paper,” and “fadeaway.”

Soft Blur Vignette

The most basic kind of vignette is the soft blur, where the full subject appears against a background that gets lighter and lighter until it melts into the white of the page. The shape of the vignette can be mostly oval, or in the case of this picture from Dinotopia, an uneven elongated shape.

In the world of antique photography, vignetting typically refers to a soft blur gradation that either lightens gradually to the white of the paper or that darkens at the edges. Yes, that's my great-grandpa, Frederick W. Gurney, an engineer and manufacturer.

The Torn Paper Vignette

Dean Cornwell often gives the impression of a ragged fragment torn out of a larger composition. He makes no attempt here to draw the bottom half of figures, but instead lets the edge of the vignette cut across a variety of forms.

Here, too, he paints the figures only down to their hands and then tears away everything below that line. You can design a torn paper vignette by sketching up the whole scene in a preliminary drawing, then actually ripping out the essential elements in a random shape, and following that design for the final picture.

On both of these Cornwells, the tan background would have been brought up to white by the printer.

The Fadeaway Vignette

Coles Phillips invented the “Fadeaway Girl,” who was often vignetted in such a way that the colors of her dress—or in this case her car—matched the background color. Phillips left off the outline so that your eye has the fun of filling in the missing boundary.


The fadeaway idea also works against black, as Leyendecker demonstrates in this fashion ad.


Later illustrators like Coby Whitmore played with the same idea, in this case letting the white dress blend into the white page so that our minds complete the unstated forms.

Thanks to the following this week:
Roger Reed of Illustration House, link.
Leif Peng’s Flickr sets, link.
Jim Vadeboncoeur’s illustrated books, link.
100 Years of Illustration, link.
Armando Cabrera, link.
Illustration Art, link.

Sunset Color Bands

In a previous post called “The Golden Hour,” I explained how rays from the setting sun change color as they travel through large volumes of atmosphere close to the ground.

As the light passes nearer to the surface of the earth, more and more blue wavelengths are scattered out by fine particles of dust and by the air molecules themselves, with only the longer reddish wavelengths remaining. In other words, the light gets dimmer and redder as it approaches to the earth’s shadow line.

You can see this effect most dramatically while facing away from the sun to see how its light looks on an iceberg, a thunderhead, or a snowy mountain.

This painting by Frederic Church, shows the progression of colors traveling down the column of ice from soft yellows through the rosy hues to a more neutral gray.

This painting by the seascape master Frederick Waugh shows a similar sequence of color on a very tall cloud. The reddish rays toward the base of the cloud arrived after passing through much more atmosphere than the whiter rays touching the top of the cloud.

By the way, as you compare the Church and Waugh paintings, note how differently each of them portrayed the color of the water and the color of the distant sky.


Although stated a bit more garishly, here’s the effect of color bands on Mount Shasta at sunset, painted by James E. Stuart in 1921. Link for more Shasta paintings.

"Golden Hour" post on GurneyJourney, link.

Accordion Practice

My son Dan, who is now a music major in college, spent a lot of time playing along with CDs when he was 10 or 11 years old. In this way he taught himself how to play the Irish button accordion.

I sketched him in one evening amid the clutter of my painting studio. I enjoy this kind of unstudied natural situation, where someone is just doing what they love to do, without consciously posing.

My main concern was how to simplify the scene so that I had only two principalities of tone. Using 2B and 4B graphite pencils, I rendered his accordion and his hair as fairly uninterrupted dark shapes, which helped to bring out the light shape of his left arm.

Dan Gurney, link.

Focus on Nature

Yesterday in Albany we attended the opening of an exhibit of natural history artwork at the New York State Museum called “Focus On Nature X.” The exhibition is held every two years, and this is the 10th time the show has been assembled.


My own painting showing T.rex at a watering hole was accompanied by 93 other works by artists from 13 other countries and 21 states in the USA, many of whom are members of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. The paintings of birds, bugs, mammals, and plants are mostly in gouache and watercolor, plus a few in pen and ink and scratchboard and oil.

Patricia Kernan, who helped organize the exhibit, hosted tours through the New York State natural history art collection, which includes bird illustrations in watercolor by Luis Agassiz Fuertes (1874-1927). Susan Bull Riley, an artist from Marlboro, Vermont, said: “It’s really neat to see these originals after loving these reproductions all my life.”

The exhibition will continue through September 7, 2008.

Dino Art Tips 3: Maquettes

The current issue of ImagineFX Magazine features a special issue on how to create dinosaur art.

Each Thursday, I've been sharing a few tips from my how-to article, but to get them all, pick up a copy at the newsstand while it's still available.


Pose dinosaur models
To get a sense how a real dinosaur would look in the pose you want, pick up some dinosaur maquettes or models. The cheap hard plastic models that you can get in museum stores aren’t bad, but if you can afford to pay a bit more, get some better vinyl kits from the top sculptors. You can also find scale model skulls or skeletons that are really helpful in visualizing the anatomy.

Make your own
You can also sculpt your own reference models out of Sculpey or Fimo polymer clay. Start with aluminum armature wire. The maquettes don’t have to be very detailed. But they should be accurate in the basic forms and proportions. You can make them more useful as mannikins if you connect the head with a universal joint or if you leave an adjustable wire for the neck. Then you can pose them just the way you want them.

Get taxidermy castings
You can also buy resin molds of turkey feet and chicken heads from taxidermy suppliers. These show marvelous detail of the hard and soft forms, which is really more convincing than most dinosaur sculptures. The turkey foot looks like a slender version of T.rex. You can hold up any model in the position you want on a C-stand, a standard piece of movie grip equipment. (Thanks, Mick Ellison)


Tips for photographic maquettes
Spray-paint your maquettes a middle grey. White burns out in photos. You probably don’t want the surface to be too shiny, so use a matte finish. Set up maquettes outdoors in natural light against a simple backdrop. Shoot them with a digital SLR on a tripod with a slow shutter speed and small aperture to get maximum depth of field. If you have several models of each general type, like sauropods, shoot them all in the same pose and lighting and use features from each of the models.


Tweak your photos.
You can light the models with a spotlight with a colored gel for “golden hour” lighting. Use Photoshop to make different versions of the reference shots. By sliding the midtone control in “levels,” you can print versions that emphasize detail in the lights or in the shadows. You can get a whole set of fresh poses by shooting a model backwards and then flopping it horizontally.

Art By Committee: ‘Looming Up’ Results

On Wednesdays we've been playing a group sketch game called "Art By Committee," where I give you an an actual excerpt taken out of context from a science fiction manuscript and you come up with a sketch to illustrate it.

Here are this week’s results, followed by the sketch that originally appeared in my book AND a new quote for next week. Great job, everyone!

Jason Peck
Ted Wilson

Dave Harshberger

Arthur Keegan

Guillame Decaux

Roberta Baird

Marcus Blättermann

Joshua Hendry

Mark Heng

Jen Zeller

Tidah Adipat

Susan Adsett

Gally Mathias

And the Committee

Next week’s quote: “…protested. He too was tinted orange with anticipation.”

Great White Attacked

When we recently passed through Hampton, Virginia, we stopped at the hole-in-the-wall headquarters and museum of the Cousteau Society. In their lobby, they’ve got this proof that you shouldn’t tease real great white sharks with robotic ones, especially robotic ones that release a tasty jet of chum. Link.

New York Events

I enjoyed meeting a lot of fellow artists and Gurney Journey readers a week ago at the Society of Illustrators in New York. Thanks again to everyone at S of I!

For those who missed me at that venue, I hope you can make it to the "Dinotopia: Behind the Scenes" digital slide show the New York Comic Con, Saturday at noon in Room 1E02, with a signing at the Andrews McMeel booth 1715 at 2:00. For the full NYCC schedule, link.

Counterchange

Counterchange is the reversal of tonal relationships between a form and its background which occurs from one end of the form to another.

You see this most often when a tree trunk appears light against its surroundings near the ground, and then switches to become darker than the sky higher up.

Ted Kautzky, a watercolor and pencil instructor from the mid-20th Century, used it on the tree trunk and on the bannister railing in this black and white drawing.

I exaggerated the effect of counterchange when I painted this view of Segovia. Clouds were passing over the scene, throwing sections of the city in and out of shadow. I tried to capture the moment when the top of the tower fell into shadow, while the middle section remained in light. I then adjusted the sky tones lighter or darker to bring out the contrast.


Here’s a detail of a painting by Bouguereau. The masses of foliage switch from light-against-dark at left to dark-against-light at right. At the dividing line in the center where the changeover takes place, the definition of the leaves is deliciously amorphous and painterly.


Counterchange can take place along an edge, as it does along this roofline. (Incidentally, I was also thinking of the Windmill Principle, mentioned on an earlier post. I’ve marked the other two “vanes”: next to the sections where they appear.)

Counterchange doesn’t always have to be a complete reversal of tones. Arthur Streeton gets a striking effect on this painting by switching from a dark-against-light silhouette at the top to a light-against-light relationship at the right of the picture. In a strange way the result is more satisfying than if he had contrived a dark cloud behind that illuminated section of the building.

Tomorrow: Art By Committee

Mystery Quote

Please identify the artist who made this statement:

“When you draw, form is the important thing; but in painting, the first thing is to look for the general impression of color…. Always paint a direct sketch from nature every day.”

The prize for the first correct answer is a free deluxe Dinotopia map. Please commit to your guess in the comments before checking Google.
-------------------
Addendum 8:15 AM

Ricardo is right. The quote comes from Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was among the most famous of the academic painters.


Authors of introductory art history books persist in ignoring academics like Gérôme, Bouguereau, and Meissonier, or presenting them as conservative windbags who were stuck in the studio, blind to the revelations of the Impressionists. The 2004 edition of The History of Art by Horst Woldemar Janson and Anthony F. Janson states: “By the mid-1880s Impressionism had become widely accepted. Its technique was imitated by conservative painters.”

Another old standby text, Gardner’s Art through the Ages, in the space of half a page of its 2005 edition, uses the words “confining” “conservative” “constrictive” “constraining” and “limited” to describe Academic painting.

This view of art history is incorrect and misleading. Scholars like Albert Boime started to correct the Janson/Gardner account as early as the 1970s, but the myths and misrepresentations still remain, and Gérôme is routinely ignored, even though he was the devoted teacher of American artists like Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins, William Paxton, Abbott Thayer, and J. Alden Weir.

The true story is that the technique, theory, terminology, and daily practice of plein air impressionism arose from within the academy’s normal practice. The argument in France had more to do with the aesthetics of the sketch, the correctness of drawing, and what was considered acceptable for exhibition.


The introductory text I recommend is Art: A New History, by Paul Johnson, which is well researched, and balances the story fairly and intelligently. Johnson’s text also gives more attention to women artists and to the regional schools in, for example, Russia, Australia, and Scandinavia.

The mystery quote from this post comes from the excellent new catalog of Australian Impressionism by Humphrey McQueen and Terence Lane, National Gallery of Victoria, 2007. The opening quote was noted down by Tom Roberts, an Australian painter who studied in Paris in 1883.

More on Gerome at ARC: link.

Tomorrow: Counterchange

Colored Light and Form

When two lights of different colors illuminate a form, the lit areas interact with each other in unexpected ways.


In this oil sketch of a white head maquette, an amber-tinted light shines from below left, while a blue-tinted light comes from almost the opposite angle.

There’s almost no overlap between the regions lit by each of the lights. One light or the other covers almost every surface of the head. There are just a couple of small places untouched by either light: the dark area where the nose meets the eye socket, and the hollows above and below the ear.


This maquette is lit by two colored lights. One is yellow-green, and one magenta. The lights are placed closer together, so the illuminated areas overlap on the top of the head, the brow, and the cheekbone plane. In these shared areas, the colors mix to a pale yellowish white, brighter in tone than the lightest tones in each of two regions lit by one light only.

Here's another casting of the plaster head covered with silver aluminum powder. The surface now has a high level of “specularity” or reflectivity.


What happens with colored light on a reflective surface? Even with three different light sources (green, red-violet, and blue), the lights don’t really mix very much on the planes of the head. Instead, each light source accounts for a separate array of specular highlights.

Remarkably, our brains are able to construct an understanding of form based on these fragmentary bits of information.

But if we remove the color clues (and flop the image for a fresh look), the form is much harder to visualize. The highlights seem like random light spots on a dark head. This illustrates a key recent finding of visual perception researchers, namely that color plays a central role in the brain's active construction of form and depth, and is not—as is often supposed—a kind of extra frosting on perception.
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Related GJ posts on
Character Maquettes, link
Studio Lighting Equipment, link.

Clustering in Landscape

A few months ago, I suggested the concept of clustering. As you recall, in a scene with a lot of figures, it helps to bunch some of them together, leaving other parts of the picture relatively empty.

The idea of clustering also applies to other design elements, too. This landscape by Emilio Sanchez-Perrier gains much of its compositional interest from the fascinating tangle of trunks and branches in its center.

If you look closely, there’s even man visible through the cluster of branches, and we see why the woman on the bank is gazing in that direction.

Such complexity attracts the eye, which loves to untie knots. But empty areas in other parts of the picture are essential to give the eye a welcome rest.

Previous post on clustering, link.
More at ARC on Sanchez-Perrier, link.

Hair: The Ribbon Secret

Earlier this week we looked at how to solve the “string mop” problem by using big brushes, keeping the masses simple, and softening edges.

It also helps to visualize masses of hair as ribbons. In a real ribbon, the highlight goes across, not along, the curving shapes.

Leyendecker often captured this ribbonlike quality when he painted hair. Note the lock of hair at the righthand edge of this woman’s bun. The cool highlight crosses the lock, with the warm-toned highlight beside it.

When hair is short or pinned close to the head, the highlight extends across a large region of the entire head, with the full mass of hair getting darker as it turns away from the highlight region. Kroyer paints the lighter brown tones where the hair catches the frontal light, and lets the whole back of the head go to an uninterrupted dark.

The same is true with Leyendecker. Even though he weaves those strokes like a basket, he never loses sight of the big arrangement of light tones, linking individual locks into a single light mass across the whole head.

Drew reminded me about pen and ink techniques, so here are some coiffures by Charles Dana Gibson that show all the same principles we’ve been talking about, but in a totally different medium.


Even if you want to suggest a lot of detail, as Boldini does here: use a big brush, merge locks into larger waves, paint the highlights across those wavy forms, and aim for the ribbon instead of the mop.

Part 1 "Hair: The String Mop" link.
Thanks, Steve and Augie for the Leyendeckers.
To see the full Leyendecker photo set on Flickr, link.

Allure of the East

We stopped in earlier this evening for the preview opening of the New-York Historical Society's new exhibit "The Allure of The East: Orientalism in New York, 1850-1930."

Compared to the dazzling and extensive Central Asian textile exhibit in the room next door, the Orientalism show is compact, but it has a few representative paintings by Jean-Leon Gerome (lower left), Madrazo Y Garreta (lower right) and Edwin Lord Weeks (not shown). Both shows will be officially open from April 11-August 17. link.

Tomorrow: Hair, Part 2

Dino Art Workshop, 2

This is the second Thursday post giving you a teaser preview of the material in the brand-new April issue of ImagineFX Magazine, which covers dino art and Dinotopia. Grab a copy at your newsstand for the full story!

It is sometimes said that artists are the eyes of paleontology, because our work gives visual form to the theories that scientists have about dinosaurs and other extinct creatures. Paintings helps shape the way the public imagines dinosaurs. Could they run fast? How did they look when they were attacking—or defending themselves? Were they dull grey or striped or spotted?

There’s bound to be a certain amount of guesswork in paleoart. All we have to start with, really, is a box of bone fragments, a footprint or two, and a lot of opinions. Because these creatures were real, we have an obligation to the facts. On the other hand, since they’re long gone, we have a degree of artistic latitude.

To paint a dinosaur restoration you don’t have to start with a blank canvas and dream the whole thing up from nothing. There are a lot of tricks to fortify your imagination and to give your work those little touches of naturalism that trick the viewer into thinking he or she is seeing a slice of real life rather than an artistic fabrication.


Watch out for the spiky look
A lot of feathered dinosaurs are shown with a spiky, ruffled look. Real bird feathers, including flightless birds, more often show a variety of textures and silhouettes, sometimes with a smooth contour, or blending into a mass. Also, keep in mind that feathers are grouped into into larger tracts. To study real bird feathers, sketch them in ornithology collections, and learn from the work of the great bird illustrators, who have developed the skills of painting feathers over a lifetime.

Change your behavior
I’ve painted more than my share of running, snarling T.rexes, and so has everybody. It’s such a cliche that we almost don’t react to these pictures any more. Why not show a dinosaur drinking water, scratching an itch, bathing, sleeping, or courting a mate? If a dinosaur has feathers, there’s a whole repertoire of preening behaviors that you can infer from birds.

Keep your head down
Look at the posture of real animals. They spend most of their time with their heads down, especially if they’re plant eaters. There’s a tendency for us to paint dinosaurs rearing up in human-like poses. But recent thinking about sauropods and hadrosaurs suggests that they spent most of their lives in more head-down, tail-up postures, unless they are alarmed.


Close your mouth
Dinosaurs, especially meat-eating dinosaurs, are nearly always depicted with their mouths open, but how often do you see films of real animals or birds with their mouths agape? Unless they’re in the act of biting or vocalizing, most creatures shut their traps. On most predatory dinosaurs, the closed mouth has a distinctive overbite, and most articulated skeletons are found that way, too.

Mess things up
Don’t paint the dinosaur in “showroom” condition. They had a hard life, and fossils are often found with injuries and bite marks. If it makes sense for the scene, show them wet, dusty, muddy, or covered with debris. Some of their teeth might be broken off, or their horns scratched and worn.

More
Last week's dino art tips, link.
Cornell Lab of Ornithology: Good source for understanding bird feathers and plumage, link.
Hawk photo courtesy Wikipedia
Elephant Photo courtesy 4x4 Global Challenge.

Tomorrow: Hair, Part 2: The Ribbon Secret

Art By Committee: "Looming Up"

Wednesday is the day for pure science fiction wacky goodness. And it’s your chance to pitch in a sketch if you feel like it.


For those new to the “Art By Committee” game, we start with an excerpt snipped from an actual science fiction manuscript. You illustrate the text either digitally or traditionally. Below is an example by James Warhola.


Read this week’s challenge below. It’s a real corker. I’ll bet all the solutions will be wildly different!


No rules or prizes, just a couple suggestions: please scale your JPEG or PNG files to no larger than 700 pixels across and title the file with your name. Let me know if you want me to link back to you when I post on Wednesday the 16th. Email all answers by Tuesday, April 15 at noon eastern time USA.

Tomorrow: Five More Dino Art Tips

Hair: The String Mop

Like water and foliage, hair has always presented a unique challenge to both the traditional painter and the digital artist.


If you define individual locks too much, there’s a tendency for it to come out looking like a string mop. And if the edges are too hard, it tends to sit on the head like a leather helmet.


To solve the “string mop” problem, group the strands of hair into large masses and look for soft edges. This detail of a painting by Harry Anderson has the hair flowing in broad, wavy shapes. He has also softened the edges at the temple, just to the left of her eye, and where the hair meets the neck.


Tom Lovell has kept a soft edge on the temple, all the way from the ear to the bangs. The hair grows back from this point, and it’s almost never a sharply defined edge. Note, too, that the curls along her neck are stated in large masses, without inserting many lines in the direction of the hair growth to define individual hairs or locks.


Anders Zorn uses a big bristle brush to sweep up individual locks into simple patches of highlight.

On Friday, don't miss Part 2: "Hair: The Ribbon Secret"

And if you're in New York City, tomorrow, Wednesday, please come to my digital slide show "Dinotopia: Behind the Scenes" at the Society of Illustrators, 128 E. 63rd St., 6:30-9:00. Admission to benefit the Society $10/$6 (Students).

Tomorrow: Art By Committee

Leighton’s Lemon Tree

When you’re drawing something as complex as a tree, with all of its myriad twigs and leaves, how much accuracy is humanly possible? Suppose you had all the time you wanted. How much patience and care could you devote to making a faithful portrait of the entire tree in every detail?

Frederick Lord Leighton (1830-1896) undertook such an experiment during a vacation to Capri in 1859. He worked from dawn to dusk on this 21x15 inch drawing for over a week. He once said that drawing a flower or tree was as difficult as drawing a head if you approached it with the same conscientiousness.


When he finished the drawing, he presented it to the influential critic John Ruskin to hang in the Oxford Museum, in the hopes that it would “impede, if possible, the increasing wrong-headedness in study—the careless conceit, the irreverent dash, the incompetent confidence of many modern students.”


Leighton’s Lemon Tree is a monument of careful draftsmanship that rivals Durer or DaVinci. Ruskin marveled at what the pencil is capable of: “The structural quality is finely wrought out, everything is followed out to its termination, every leaf is suggested and yet kept in perspective.”

The drawing was on exhibit last fall in Bristol’s City Museum & Art Gallery.

More
Leighton’s letter to Ruskin, link.
Ruskins response, link.
Leighton at ARC, link.
Bristol Museum show, link.

Tomorrow: Hair: Ribbons and String Mops

Color Obtains in the Light

Some time ago, I promised that I’d share some of the tips I learned from the illustrator Tom Lovell. One of his maxims was: “Color obtains in the light.”

“Obtains” in its old-fashioned sense means “to prevail, or to gather in strength.” Another way to put it is: “Color increases in saturation in the light relative to the shadow.”


In the Vermeer painting of the milkmaid, the colors of the yellow bodice, blue apron, and orange pitcher are all relatively more saturated in the light than in the shadow. This happens because the color receptors of our eyes respond better in relatively higher light levels.


I was chanting the mantra “COLOR OBTAINS IN THE LIGHT” (much to the befuddlement of passersby) while I was working on this plein air sketch of a sign. Where the light struck the top, I observed that the red was truly much more vibrant.

Like all hard-and-fast rules, this one has a couple of exceptions. When a form of a given color is in shadow, sometimes the shadow is filled with reflected light of a similar hue.

For example, the shadow side of this ochre-colored building in Toledo, Spain is drenched in light reflected from an orange-colored building across the street, making it more saturated than the same color in the full sunlight.

Another exception is that the glare of the sunlight can be so bright that it actually overloads the color receptors of the eyes, draining the chroma from the lights, at least temporarily until the eyes adjust. This often happens in contre-jour light situations.

Addendum: April 7
I contacted Dr. Jack Werner of the Werner Lab of Vision Science, Department of Ophthamology & Vision Science, University of California, Davis, and asked him to clarify these points from a modern scientific perspective. He kindly responded:

The change in response of the photoreceptors increases with intensity and then simply levels off. I think the saturation changes that you observe in illuminated spots vs. in shadow are rather complex. It is possible that the lightness in one patch induces darkness in the other patch and vice versa. As a result, your observation depends upon both the direct effects of light and the indirect effects due to lateral interactions in the visual pathways.

In other words, if I dare paraphrase into my own words, we can't evaluate the colors in isolation if they're appearing in a complex scene, because we perceive colors in relation to each other, and the perception of adjacent colors in the light and shade have complex series of effects on each other.

Thank you, Dr. Werner.

Artists as Models

When you’re at a figure sketch group and the model gives you a boring pose, don’t despair. Turn to the side and paint one of your artist colleagues.


That’s what I did on this 20-minute oil study on prepared brown chipboard. I had much more fun with this subject than with the model, who was twisted up in a pretzel. I loved the way the mullions of the windows were casting a shadow on the sheer curtains.

I usually try to check first with the folks around me to see if it’s OK, and usually they don’t care.

At the San Diego Comic Con the organizers asked me to go up on a stage and paint something out of my imagination. This is a tradition for artist-guests at comic conventions, they explained. So I set up my little easel. A group of onlookers gathered round.


“What are you going to paint?” someone asked. My mind instantly went blank. I tried to dream up dragons or giant ant-men or six-armed lizards, but my muse had flown. So I turned to the fellow next to me; I think his name was Donald Yee. Aha! Problem solved. There was my subject!
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Related GJ post: The Ninety Degree Rule: link.

Tomorrow: Color Obtains

Second Graders

Today I visited an elementary school to talk to the second graders about Dinotopia and to do a demo drawing of a dinosaur.

I enjoy talking to second graders because I was that age when I fell in love with drawing, thanks to Mrs. Bailey at Almond School in Los Altos, California.

Kids that age are also refreshingly honest. A girl stopped me afterward to say, "I saw your book at the bookstore and my mom almost bought it, but I found one I liked better, so I got that instead."
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More candid comments from kids, link.

The Windmill Principle

For many years I had a print of this painting by Rembrandt on my wall. I looked at it often. Something about the tonal arrangement gave me a strange feeling of satisfaction that I couldn’t quite identify.

It’s a simple design with a majestic feeling of of fading light. But what was it about that windmill that kept grabbing my attention?

All at once it dawned on me. The vanes of the windmill have been painted with great attention to tonal relationships. The upraised vane is light against dark (L/D). The one opposite that is dark against light (D/L).. The other two are subordinated. One is dark against dark (D/D)., and the other is light against light (L/L).. Each vane of the windmill represents one of the four possible tonal arrangements.

It’s like a Bach fugue that puts the subject through every possible inversion. The resulting effect marries the subject to the background in a way that both separates it and embeds it. In tonal terms, it invites and delights.


I started to look for “the windmill principle” in other painters. In this Anders Zorn portrait, the figure is rendered with all four conditions of tone in relation to her surroundings. At (1) she is light against light, at (2) light against dark; at (3) dark against dark; and at (4) dark against light. Note too that the subordinate edges at (1) and (3) are blurred a little more.

The windmill principle appears again here in this painting by Sir Alfred Munnings. Is this intentional? Were these artists aware of what they were doing? While we can’t ask them, I believe they were very aware of this principle, whatever they called it.

In my own experience, tonal designs like this take conscious planning, like writing a sonata. It doesn’t just happen. Look for yourself and see where you find the windmill principle.

More
Previous GJ post on “invite, delight,” link.
More on Zorn and Munnings at ARC.
Thanks for the pics, Armand!

Dino Art Workshop

ImagineFX is the premier magazine for fantasy art instruction. In the new April 2008 issue, there is a special feature on dinosaur art. Alongside Greg Broadmore, Daryl Mandryk and Bob Eggleton, I offer 25 of my most helpful tips for reconstructing dinosaurs.


On Gurney Journey every Thursday for the next five weeks, I’ll be sharing those dino-art tips five at a time. To get the full impact, go out and pick up the magazine, which comes with a free DVD tutorial disk. Here are the first five dinosaur art tips:

1. Go to museums
If you live near a natural history museum, start there to gather your research. Sketch and photograph the skulls and the mounted skeletons. Most photos in books show the standard side-views of skeletons, but if you’re standing next to the real things, you can choose unusual perspectives, as well as getting a true sense of scale.

2. Talk to paleontologists
Paleontologists are nearly always willing to share their expertise with artists. In my experience they’ve been very accessible, and they’ll answer any questions you might have. Call the natural history museum in your area, or the local university’s paleontology or geology department for contacts.

3. Learn from animal analogues
Use wildlife photos laterally rather than literally. Even though the basic anatomy of modern animals is totally different from dinosaurs, you can glean a lot of information from pictures of elephants, rhinos, crocodiles, and birds. Start a reference collection, either digitally or from photos torn out of wildlife magazines. Stick up a lot of related photos to give you ideas for wrinkles, scaliness, and specularity.

4. Study wildife films
It helps to visualize a pose as a part of a continous motion. Looking at still wildlife photos helps to a degree, but there’s no substitute for studying a slow-motion action sequence on a DVD or YouTube. The recent BBC documentaries are a treasure-trove. They will give you fresh ideas for things like nesting, parenting, flocking, flying, and attack and kill sequences.

5. Feathered friends
Putting feathers on dinosaurs is a fad these days. How could it not be, with the incredible fossil material coming out of the Liaoning Province of China? But sticking feathers on every dinosaur is an understandable pet peeve of many critics. If you want to be conservative, you’re safe feathering most of the small theropods. There’s less likelihood that the larger-bodied animals and the plant-eaters were feathered.

ImagineFX link.
Wildlife photos from Wikipedia Commons

Tomorrow: The Windmill Principle

Art By Committee: 'Wind' Results

On occasional Wednesdays, we’ve been playing a sketching game called “Art By Committee,” where I share a line and you share a sketch.

This week’s results, based on the sentence "A wind—not moving air but currents of force—rose up and tore at her," were as inventive, intelligent, and irreverent as ever. Thanks to all who sent in your solutions, and here are the results.

Topher Sipes

Rob Hummer

David Harshberger

Jason Peck

Jen Zeller

Arthur Keegan

Susan Adsett

Sarah Stevenson

And finally the one from the original Art By Committee sketchbook. Links to the previous ABC posts are here, here, and here. Next week we'll grapple with a new challenge.

Village Books

On the way back through Pennsylvania we stopped off in Milton to pay a visit to Randall Jessup at Village Books. He’s the antiquarian book dealer who sold me Arthur Denison’s Chandara journal several years ago.


It was fun to show Mr. Jessup the finished edition of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. He said he’s been both sorry and glad that he sold the original manuscript to me.

He opened the glass case behind the counter and I was tempted by a gorgeous 1870 edition of Lear’s Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica, but I couldn’t afford it. Although his books are a bit pricey, I recommend his establishment to any serious collector who likes rare editions, especially of travel and adventure classics and original manuscripts (link).

Tomorrow: Art By Committee: Wind