Toning the Palette

American illustrator Andrew Loomis in Creative Illustration (1947) recommends a method called “toning” the palette or spectrum. The way you do it is to choose a single color and mix it into all the other colors on the palette. The amount of this toning color can be a little or a lot depending on how subtle you want the effect to be.

In this set of samples, clockwise from upper left, he has toned the colors with red, blue, green and orange. The addition of a single color to the colors on the palette cuts back on the saturation of all the other colors, the toning color staying the same.

It would be a good exercise to try this method as a set of adjacent experiments, as Loomis has done. Side by side the color keys are obvious; alone it can be hard to see the effect. Note, too, that Loomis has chosen to feature his toning color prominently in the dress or the background. He doesn’t say this, but I would recommend that you tone the white with the theme color as well, because white sets the key for any color scheme.

More Loomis online, link.

Contrasting Characters

Here’s a pencil sketch of two men at a meeting. Whenever I draw two people side by side I’m try to accentuate the contrast between them.

In this case, one has a protuding chin. The other’s chin is tucked into folds in his neck. One has a sloping brow, while the other’s protrudes. One’s chest is thin and slight, the other is fairly wide.

Painting with Jacob Collins

Yesterday Jeanette and I had the pleasure of painting alongside the Hudson River with Jacob Collins. Here is Jeanette's ballpoint pen sketch.

Jacob’s new landscape exhibition at the Hirschl and Adler gallery in New York was reviewed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. He is the founder of the Grand Central Academy of Art and the Hudson River School for Landscape.

The motif was a kilometer away from the parking area along a park road. I used a hand truck to carry the lunch, c-stands, and umbrellas. All my painting gear is in my backpack.

Jacob is holding a paintbox, a handmade palette in another box, two Munsell color swatch binders, and all his painting gear in his backpack.

We’re both using the Open Box M 10x12 pochade palette, which mounts on a camera tripod. We’re both wearing dark shirts to cut down on glare in a contre-jour view.

Both of us brought more stuff than we really needed. Neither of us used a separate hand-held palette, because we mixed the paint on the surface directly below the painting. My palette surface is white because I cover it with disposable freezer paper.

The light changed quite a lot during the five hours we spent there. Here’s my painting, which is very tiny: 6 x 12 canvas-covered sky panel.

Tomorrow I’ll be participating in the Millbrook Paint Out at the Thorne Building in Millbrook, New York.

Art Mediums

Your votes in the art materials poll have been tabulated, and it looks like the lowly pencil is right up there with Adobe Photoshop as the most popular medium, with oil paint right behind. Here are the results from the 282 of you who voted:

171 Photoshop
155 Graphite pencil
122 Oil paint
93 Watercolor
92 Ink (Brush or Pen)
82 Acrylic
53 Colored Pencil
41 Charcoal/Conte
40 Gouache
37 Photographic
29 Corel
27 Pastel/Chalk
22 Marker

All the remaining choices were 10 or under. Thanks to all who joined in.

Accordions and Monsters

I’ve been doing a lousy job with the homework assignment that my unexpected visitors gave me earlier in the week. They handed me a little book and asked me to read it, but I only spent about five seconds flipping through it, looking for pictures.


Some of those pictures were pretty darn good, at least from a technical standpoint.

It’s nice to see that there are accordions in heaven. But all those happy, smiling people start to get on my nerves, even though I’m a guy who paints utopias!

I thought of a quote from the artist Jean Giraud:

"One is never made only of light or darkness, but both. I believe I have always encouraged artists to express their duality, telling people who know how to show pain, horror and anger in their work to also look for ways of expressing their other face, the angelic face, the face of joy; but also encouraging those who express their inner beauty to accept their other side, their dark side, and express their pain and anger.”

I agree with Mr. Giraud that each of us has to make an effort to develop the opposite side of our vision. My own creation of Dinotopia tends toward the rosy or whimsical side of life—though it does have its share of cheats and scoundrels.

There’s a darker side of me an artist that I have to give voice to once in a while. Back in 1990 I painted a monster for a science fiction paperback called “Total War.”
This is the sanitized version: the original version had a lot more blood dripping down the knife and the jaw. I thought I’d go all out. The art director sent it back and asked me to clean it up a bit.

I sculpted a clay maquette first to really figure out the form, and lit it with separate colored lights. This tone paper sketch was the only form reference I used; I didn’t take photos of the maquette, but used this study instead.

This paperback cover is not a masterpiece. It’s as shallow as a lot of modern art that tries to do nothing more than shock. It’s as one-dimensional as the painting of smiling people with accordions.

In my heart I believe the greatest works of art weave light and dark elements inextricably together. This is the hallmark of the great works by Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Rembrandt. Sublimity is mixed with banality; joy with suffering; kindness with cruelty; beauty with ugliness. That is what our life is like. We are composed of light and clay.

Thanks to Pharyngula for spotlighting the post on the unexpected visitors.

Art By Committee: Stone’s Bark

Wednesday is the day for a game called "Art By Committee,” where you illustrate an actual excerpt from a science fiction manuscript.

This week’s quote was: “Stone emitted a kind of bark – ha! – and showed his teeth again.”

This one was open to interpretation: is Stone a dog, a rock, or a man? Everyone cleverly illustrated the quote, but no one visualized it in the same way.

Be sure to scroll down to the end of the post for next week’s challenge.

Dave Harshberger

Rob Hummer
Anna Myers

Jen Zeller Andrew Wales

Raluca Braming-Hansen

Arthur Keegan

Heather Dawson

Todd
Isaac (9 years old)

...and the one from the original sketchbook. Now, here’s the challenge for next Wednesday. Hopefully your imagination will take over for the poor author, who apparently ran out of gas.
Have fun! 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.

Flagging the Head

“Flagging the head” refers to placing a white shape behind the head of the most important character in a figural composition. It’s a sure-fire way to place the viewer’s attention exactly where you want it, especially when you’re working against an impossibly busy background.

In this illustration by Maurice Bower*, the woman’s head gains importance because of its position against the light of the bright window of the crowded pharmacist’s store.

In “Norman Rockwell Visits a Country Doctor,” 1947, the doctor’s face would be lost in the clutter of his desk were it not for the brightly illuminated bunch of papers behind him.

When I painted this holographic workstation, I was worried the hero would be lost in all the detail, so I flagged his head with a slanting white table. You can see the Dean Cornwell and John Berkey influences on this paperback cover from the mid 1980s.
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*The Maurice Bower painting is lot 29 of the upcoming June 7 auction at Illustration House in New York, link.

Unexpected Visitors

When the doorbell rang yesterday, Jeanette leaned into the studio and said, “Jim, would you get it?”

A silver BMW with spoke wheels had parked in the driveway. Two men with blue shirts were standing on the front porch.

I reached for my sketch pouch and stepped outside. The younger man said, “Are you concerned about the future?”

“Sure,” I said. I opened up some folding chairs and invited them to sit down. I asked the younger man if he would be willing to sit for a sketch, and he agreed. He opened his Bible and read the stories of Adam, Noah, Job, and Lazarus.

“According to Jehovah,” he said, “God is bringing this system to an end, and suffering will come to mankind.”

The older man followed along with his index finger in his own Bible. He glanced up from time to time to watch me draw. I was using a 4B graphite pencil. After I sharpened it a couple of times the pencil became almost too short to hold. The older man said, “I was wondering when you were going to get a new pencil.”

The younger man said that no one had ever sketched his portrait before. He brought out a camera and asked to take a picture of the sketch and of us together.

The older man reached into a leather case and handed me a book entitled "WHAT DOES THE BIBLE Really TEACH?" and "SHOULD YOU FEAR THE FUTURE?" They said they would be back again. I’ll have my watercolor kit ready.

Color Zones of the Face

The complexion of a light-skinned face is divided into three zones. The forehead is a whitish or golden color. From the forehead to the bottom of the nose is reddish. The zone from the nose to the chin tends toward a bluish, greenish, or grayish color.


In real life, these zones can be extremely subtle, almost imperceptible. They are more pronounced in men.

This is an unretouched reproduction of Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Washington.

Although this chin is covered by a white beard, this portrait of the surgeon Nicolay Pirogov by Ilya Repin shows the first two bands clearly enough.

Women and children don’t have the five-o-clock shadow, but they can be a bit greenish around the lips, and many artists play this up to bring out the complementary lip color. Below, a detail of a portrait by Sargent.

There’s reason behind this. The central zone of the face has more capillaries carrying oxygenated blood near the surface. The forehead, by contrast, is much more free of muscles and red blood cells. And the chin, especially on a man with a black beard, is bluish from the microscopic hairs. Around the lips are relatively more veins carrying blue deoxygenated blood.

Like all general rules, there are plenty of exceptions. But it’s good thing to keep in mind next time you’re painting a head.

Paint Brand Poll Results

Thanks to all 146 of you who joined the oil paint brand poll. Here are the results.

The first number is the number of you who said you use that brand. After each brand is the list price/current sale price for a 37-40 ml tube of ultramarine blue from one of the online art suppliers.

102 Winsor & Newton 13.90/6.95
45 Gamblin 10.95/8.21
37 Old Holland 13.29/10.63
30 Grumbacher 9.25/6.11
22 Holbein 11.95/7.93
19 Williamsburg 12.95/9.34

5-10 Art Spectrum, Blockx, Cennini, Daler-Rowney, LeFranc&Bourgeois, Permalba, Schmicke, Sennelier, and Vasari.

All other brands received fewer than 5 votes. In the comments, feel free to say what you love or hate about any of the kinds of oil paint.

And if you have a second, please add your vote to the art medium poll at left.

The View from Seat 23F

If Frederic Church booked a seat on a modern airline, what would he think of the view out the window? How would he respond to a landscape of pure clouds with no terrestrial foreground?

Early in his career Church painted this scene based on the sunrise view from the eastern scarp of the Catskill Mountains. It has the feeling of being detached from the ground, but there are still vestiges of rocks and trees beneath our feet.

A couple months ago I sat atop Storm King, a mountain overlooking the Hudson River near the cities of Newburgh and Beacon. As I sketched, I found myself unconsciously wanting to invent a repoussoir element in the foreground to give the viewer something to hang onto.

I was thinking of Caspar David Friedrich’s famous painting of the wanderer above the sea of clouds. He puts us on the dizzy heights with the world below almost swallowed up in vapors.

One contemporary artist, Hillary Brace, draws cloudscapes entirely devoid of solid ground.

I think Church would have loved the challenge to paint a pure sea of clouds. After all, his most famous painting, Niagara, dispensed with a solidity and security altogether.

Landscape painting at its best uses visible matter to convey invisible realms of space, air, depth and silence.

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Thanks, Chris. Hillary Brace, link. Jing Hao, link.

Elm Tree

A mature American Elm tree is a majestic—and increasingly rare—sight in the northeastern U.S.A. Only about one in 100,000 is resistant to Dutch elm disease, which killed off a hundred million trees starting in the 1930s.

When I saw this one in the neighboring town, I wanted to paint its portrait. It was a hazy day, so the distant trees were pale, and the sky was a cool, milky color.

The study is in oil, 8x10 inches. The branches arch outward from the central trunk, drooping downward at the outer edges. A poison ivy vine scales the trunk. Deer have browsed the bottom four feet of the ivy. A golfer stands in the shadow practicing her golf swing.

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, in her book Six Trees, wrote about a similar elm:

There was not in the whole countryside another tree which could compare with him. He was matchless. Never a stranger passed the elm but stopped, and stared, and said or thought something about it. Even dull rustics looked, and had a momentary lapse from vacuity. The tree was compelling. He insisted upon recognition of his beauty and grace. Let one try to pass him unheeding and sunken in contemplation of his own little affairs, and lo! He would force himself out of the landscape, not only upon the eyes, but the very soul.

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Wikipedia on the American Elm, link.
Website dedicated to saving the American Elm, link.
USA Today article about the return and resurgence, link.

Art By Committee: Chukumbu

Wednesday is the day to cut loose a little with a sketch game called "Art By Committee,” where you illustrate an actual excerpt from a science fiction manuscript.
Everyone brought out their sense of drama and mystery, as well as wit. Thanks, gang! Be sure to scroll down to the end of the post for next week’s challenge.

Jen Zeller

Dave Harshberger

Arthur Keegan

jrtistic

Anna Myers

Eli K.

And finally the drawing in the original “Art By Committee” sketchbook, which I’m afraid is a little gruesome. It must have been something in the coffee.

Here’s the challenge for next Wednesday: "Stone emitted a kind of bark -- ha! -- and showed his teeth again."Have fun! Please scale your JPG to around 700 pixels across. Title it with your name, email it to: jgurneyart(at)yahoo.com, subject line ABC, and let me know 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.

Repoussoir

The French word “repoussoir” refers to an object placed in the foreground of a composition that enhances the illusion of distance with other objects. The word conveys the sense of “pushing,” as if the foreground object helps to push back the far spaces.

In this painting by the Hudson River School painter Jasper Cropsey, the trees at the margins of the composition act as a framing device to send back the mountains and the setting sun.

Frederick Lord Leighton painted this processional scene, which has a strong sense of motion from the right to the left.

The figure leaning on the wall at the far right gives the feeling of an actor standing at the proscenium of a stage. He pushes back the plane of the other figures and anchors the right side of the composition.

According to Odile Chilton, visiting professor of French at Bard College, “repoussoir” also conveys the sense of “strong or vigorous color or tone to make the clear and luminous parts of a painting more visible.”


This painting of the Grand Canyon by Thomas Moran uses strong tonal contrasts in the foreground rocky ledge, which helps launch the viewer into the colorful spaces in the distance.

Thanks, Chris, ARC, and Dr. Chilton

Tomorrow: Art By Committee

Ian Ballantine

“There is no problem in the world that a book can’t solve,” said Ian Ballantine (1916-1995).

He was the founder of Ballantine Books, and he published the first authorized paperback editions of Lord of the Rings. He was a tireless promoter of science fiction and fantasy books and visually-oriented books for adults.


In his retirement, he was a mentor to me during the early development of Dinotopia. After I had completed the paintings “Waterfall City,” (1988) and “Dinosaur Parade” (1989), I proposed to him the idea of a picture book about a lost island of humans and dinosaurs. He encouraged me to write the book as well as illustrate it. His wife Betty served as editor for Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, which was published by Turner Publishing in 1992.

To commemmorate his faith in books, I asked him to pose as the model for Nallab (complete with resplendant eyebrows), the third assistant librarian of Waterfall City. The head librarian is a Deinonychus named Enit, seen in the upper right of this illustration from Dinotopia: The World Beneath, 1995.

“Enit” and “Nallab” spelled backwards is “Ballantine.”

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Wikipedia entry on Ian Ballantine, link.
"Nallab" on the Dinotopia Wiki, link.
Gallery of art from A Land Apart from Time, link.
Dinotopia books available from the Dinotopia Store, link.

Induced Color

If the color temperature of a fill light tends toward a certain hue, our visual system compensates by making the key light appear to be composed of the complementary color.

On a camera, this is the result of “automatic white balance.” Scientists call it “chromatic adaptation.” Artists call it “simultaneous contrast” or “induced color.” These are all related ideas, and they’re fun to experiment with.

I set up a little plaster head over a green-colored table surface, which bounced the fill light into all the shadows. The greenish shadows made the light side appear reddish or warm. I painted the study with strings of color based on viridian for the shadows and venetian red for the light. Note that the bounced light within the keylit side (like under the brow) is warmer than the shadow side.

Then I took my little plaster horse head and set him up over a reddish source of reflected light. Now the same key light appeared to shift toward a more greenish hue.

I set up this maquette with a neutral surroundings to eliminate the chromatic contrast between the light side and shadow side, and painted it with white and umbers. This is more the standard practice in atelier training, but it's a real eye-opener to explore color effects along with tonal modeling, even with ultra-limited palettes, as I've been using on all these studies.

Leave your casts or maquettes white if you’re going to be observing them directly with the eye, because these color effects are more pronounced. Paint them a 30% gray (flat spray primer works well) if you’re going to photograph them, because otherwise the bright tones will burn out on the top end.


Here’s a concept sketch for a science fiction paperback cover. Cool light with warm shadows isn’t used as often as “golden hour” lighting. It conveys a weird, artificial feeling, because only unnatural environments have cool, direct light coming from below.

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For a fun optical illusions demonstrating chromatic adaptation, link
and Duke University's Dale Purves "see for yourself" lab, link.

Related GurneyJourney posts:
Colored Light and Form, link.
Golden Hour lighting, link.
Warm and Cool Colors, link.
Key and Fill Light, link.
Character Maquettes, link.

Palette Poll Results

Your votes are in on the palette poll, and the top 16 most-used colors are:

Ultramarine Blue 180
Titanium White 172
Yellow Ochre 161
Cadmium Red 158
Cadmium Yellow 150
Burnt Sienna 150
Alizarin Crimson 141
Burnt Umber 126
Black 98
Raw Umber 97
Raw Sienna 81
Cerulean Blue 79
Cobalt Blue 73
Viridian 64
Naples Yellow 60
Sap Green 56

Ultramarine was the runaway favorite, not counting white, which would have scored 245 if you counted flake and zinc. No greens made the top ten, though I think permanent green would have scored fairly high; I just forgot to include it.

The results are quite different from the results in Jason Peck’s original poll (link), which scored highest with white, black, burnt sienna, and vermilion. As a couple of you observed in the comments, you could paint almost anything with the top four colors in the survey of blog readers.

This week we’re polling your favorite paint brands. If you use a variety of manufacturers, you can vote for more than one. Thanks, Jason, and thanks to everyone for participating.

Illuminated Foreground

The traditional rules of composition are passed down from teacher to student like commandments, and it’s a healthy exercise to question them from time to time. One old rule among landscape painters is to place the foreground in shadow.

Frank Wootton (1914-1998) strictly follows the convention. The shadow gives the viewer something to step over, and it makes the light in the middle distance seem more brilliant. In European and American landscape painting, this device has become so commonplace that most landscape painters do it without a second thought.

What happens if you do the exact opposite of the rule? What if you put the immediate foreground in light, load it with detail, and then throw the middle distance into shadow?

A few painters in 19th Century Russia followed the unusual practice of illuminating the foreground rather than darkening it. Ivan Shiskin (1832-1898) presents a vista of an oak in a wide valley. But we begin the journey into the picture on our hands and knees like a child, inspecting a lovingly detailed miniature landscape of weeds and grasses.

One of Shishkin’s students, Fiodor Vasilyev (1850-1873), used a similar device in his masterpiece "Wet Meadow," said to be painted from memory just before his untimely death. The cheerfully lit foreground lends added power to the stormy passage in the distance.

More on Shishkin at Olga's Gallery, link.
Fyodor Vasilyev on Wikipedia, link.

Two Day Motif

Many people assume that outdoor paintings are always done alla-prima, or all in one session. There is an undeniable beauty to a painted surface that is kept all wet together. An efficient painter like Bierstadt, Church, or Sargent could interpret a whopping amount of information in just one sitting of an hour or two.

But I believe that many of the legendary studies from nature that we associate with artists like Asher B. Durand were created in two or three consecutive sessions. There would be no other way to complete a study of this complexity. Durand’s letters and journals make a few references to returning to a given location to continue a previous day’s work.

This 18x23 inch study entitled “Study from Nature, Stratton Notch,” appears to be a composite view, combining separate elements from separate locations. We know from his son John’s reports and from his own writing that he often extracted elements from a given scene. I believe in this case he painted the distant mountainscape in one location and then overpainted the backdrop with a fallen log that he found somewhere else.


In my experience, a two-day motif is one of the most satisfying and productive ways to work. As one example, here’s a 10x8 inch study painted on a narrow sidewalk in the city of Clonmel in Ireland. I worked for two hours on the first day to establish the basic drawing and to lay in the sky and the big tones of the buildings. By then the light had utterly changed, and there was no point going on.

By using Liquin as a medium, the oil paint surface was dry within 24 hours. I came back the next morning to find the sunlight just as it was at the beginning, and spent the next two hours working my way from background to foreground through the complex details of the scene.

Never Forget a Face

According to a recent study by Kim Curby and Isabel Gautier of Vanderbilt University, we can remember faces far better than, say, wristwatches or cars.

“Our results show that we can store more faces than other objects in our visual short-term memory,” says Gauthier. “We believe this happens because of the special way in which faces are encoded… Being able to store more faces in VSTM may be very useful in complex social situations.”

Addendum May 17
I was intrigued by Erik's comment about hair and beards, and noticed the lack of them in the pictures that were used for the experiment, so I asked Dr. Gautier the following: "Have you factored in the role that hair or beards play in facial recognition? Does it code or store differently from other features given that it can be more variable?"

She replied: "In general, our work and that of others focuses on mechanisms that appear to distinguish face processing - the internal features of faces are processed in a more holistic manner (not as parts, but as a whole) than other objects. In the context of experiments where we only use a limited number of faces, hair might be SO helpful that people would rely on it entirely and we could not study how internal features are processed - so they are generally excluded."



Vanderbilt University report, link and article in Science Daily, link.

Art By Committee: Alien Castle

On Wednesdays we do a group sketch game called "Art By Committee.” Last week I presented an actual excerpt from a science fiction manuscript and you have come up with a portfolio of magnificent pictures to illustrate it.


The quote was: "It may have been a castle, but it was unlike anything you'd see in history books. An alien hand had drawn the blueprints; I was willing to bet on that."

If you scroll down to the end of the post, you’ll see the picture in the original sketchbook, as well as next week’s challenge.

Jen Zeller

Dave Harshberger

Jared Shear
Arthur J. Keegan

Anna Myers

Roberta Baird

Jess Elwood

Susan Adsett


Rose Dawson

Christine Walker

Todd Norris
And the sketch in the original book by James Warhola

Here’s next week’s quote.
If your sketch comes out a bit more macabre than usual this time, that’s OK.

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.

Sunbeams

Beams of sunlight coming from the sky can be an inspiring effect when you see them in nature.

I painted this scene from observation on a cloudy day at the Mamaroneck Harbor in New York State. The rays seem to radiate from the area of the sun, but actually they’re essentially parallel, and we’re looking at them in perspective.


The effect should be used sparingly in fantasy paintings, because it can easily become a tired cliché. Maybe that’s because it is so often overused to suggest the glory of heaven, or because it shows up in paintings when the conditions aren’t completely suitable.

Beams of light occur when the following three conditions are met:

1. A high screen of clouds, foliage, or architecture is punctured by a few openings. The canopy must block most of the light to allow a darker backdrop against which the sunbeams can be seen.
2. The air is filled with dust or vapor. The smaller the particles, the more there will be chromatic scattering, making the light source seem more yellow or red (see link). Watery mist won’t affect the color of the light as much as fine dust.
3. The view is toward the sun. Large droplets scatter most of the light forward at small angles to the direction of the light. When you’re looking away from the light source, the beams become invisible.

The conditions might exist in a circus tent, a ruined building, or a dark forest interior. As with dappled light, the farther away the aperture, the more the edges of the beam become diffused by the time they reach the ground. You won’t see a sunbeam from a far cloud making a small spot of light on someone’s lawn.

Keep in mind, too, that sunbeams from a cloudy source, like the Bierstadt above, are shining through an uneven aperture, making three dimensional columns of light with an amoeba-like cross-section. This has the effect of making the edges and amounts of light extremely variable.

I used the sunbeam effect in Dinotopia: The World Beneath because I really wanted the scene to look magical, and I wanted the humans at left to be at a disadvantage, looking into a bright illumination.

Note that the sunbeam affects the shadow values of the forms even more than the values of the light side. You could accomplish this in acrylic by airbrushing a light tone where the beams appear, but white pigment overlaid will tend to make the colors look chalky.

In this oil painting, I premixed one string of colors for the areas inside the light beam, and a whole separate string for the colors of the darker unlit forest.

Related GJ posts on dappled light, link and chromatic effects of dust, link.
Albert Bierstadt from the San Antonio Museum of Art, link.

Tomorrow: Art By Committee

Understatement in Illustration

An old man sits up in bed, startled by a noise from downstairs. He reaches for the door, listening.

Even in a simple spot illustration, Frederic R. Gruger (1871-1953) tells a story by showing only what he needs to show: the rumpled bed, the modest bedframe, the doorknob, the key, and the lock. He leaves out unnecessary details, like picture frames, lamps, or windows.

What he does show, he understates. The forms and edges of his left arm are swallowed up by a simple shadow shape that leads us to the even darker dark of the open doorway. The virtues of economy and understatement are one of the benefits of working solely from the imagination. Gruger rarely used models.

A close look at the head, which is only about an inch high, shows that Gruger defined the form gradually, tentatively, erasing and blending until it emerged in his mind, and then adding the more definite lines of the Wolff pencil last.

As Joseph Pennell said in 1925, “All art is illustration.” And a good illustration is like a good novel or a good movie: it tells a story as much by suggestion as by definition.

The Palette Project

Jason Peck is a color detective. For the last few weeks he has been surveying famous oil painters and digging through dusty libraries trying to find out exactly which colors the leading artists squeeze out on their palettes. In case you have ever sat there with an art supply catalog wondering what in the heck to buy, you may be surprised to learn what the Group Mind prefers.

We’re lucky to have Jason as the guest author of today’s Color Sunday post. Before you read on, please take a few seconds to contribute to the related poll at left. Take it away, Jason!

The Palette Project/ Statistics Chart, by Jason Peck

“Many years ago, I decided to collect the palettes of various old masters as well as many great modern day artists and illustrators, some living and some recently deceased. I chose a mix of portrait artists, landscape artists, and plein air artists.

My initial goal was to compare these palettes to see which colors were most favored by artist then and now. I also hoped to explore the reasons why some of these artists used a limited palette as opposed to what I'm calling an expanded palette. I decided that a chart or graph would be the best way to explore this.


“To begin formulating my chart, I first picked 14 artists whose palettes I had collected, and then listed their names across the top of the chart. The artists of the past include Carolus-Duran, Monet, Alma-Tadema, Bouguereau, and Sargent, and the contemporary masters include people like Allan R. Banks, Marvin Mattelson, and Graydon Parrish,



Down the left hand side of the chart I listed the colors that I found on their palettes. Under each artist’s name I put a check next to the colors that they used. I then counted the checks for each color, and then wrote in the totals. The results told me a lot and were a bit unexpected. Besides black or white, burnt sienna totaled the highest of all colors. The results below only show the colors that scored the highest.

1. White=14
2. Black=12
3. Burnt sienna=10
4. Vermilion=9
5. Venetian Red=8
6. Cobalt Blue=8
7. Yellow Ochre=8
8. Raw Sienna=7
9. Raw Umber=7
10. Alizarin Crimson=7
11. French Ultramarine Blue=6
12. Naples Yellow=5
13. Burnt Umber=5
14. Viridian=5
15. Rose Madder=4
16. Manganese Blue=4

“Of the 82 colors on my chart, all the rest totaled 3 and below. It was most surprising to see that the cadmium colors scored so low.


“I also mentioned above that I wish to explore why some of these artist used a Limited Palette as opposed to a Expanded Palette.

“After researching and diligently studying the palettes of old masters and great artists and illustrators of today, I have reached some conclusions and a few self truths.

“Conclusions and Self Truths about palettes: I have concluded that there are two types of palettes, the Limited Palette of 6 colors or less, and the Expanded Palette of 7 colors or more.

“Limited Palette and the artists who use them
I believe that the artist who chooses to use a Limited Palette does so for many reasons:

1. They are familiar with the colors they choose and can mix nearly every color they encounter with ease.
2. They enjoy the activity of mixing the colors they may encounter, as opposed to buying the color already mixed, such as orange.
3. They prefer the lesser cost of using a limited palette, as well as less baggage when traveling.
4. They like harmony that one can achieve from using a limited palette, and still there are many more reasons.

“Expanded Palettes and the Artist who use them
I believe that the artist who chooses to use the Expanded Palette, does so for many reasons:

1. They probably have a working knowledge of the Limited Palette, but prefer having certain colors already mixed, such as black.
2. They prefer to buy tube colors rather than continually mixing a quantity of a particular color, such as orange.
3. They may be under time constraints, and simply find premixed tube colors help to speed up the working time, and still there are many more reasons.

“Some Self Truths
Lets face it: It’s the earth colors, yellowish colors, and bluish colors that can greatly increase the number of colors on one’s palette. The Limited Palette user will probably only use one red, one yellow and one blue, whereas the Expanded Palette user will probably use two reds, a yellowish red, and a bluish red, and so on. Although the earth colors aren't necessarily needed, and can be mixed easily with the Limited Palette, it is, in the mind of the Expanded palette user, much easier to just buy the tube color they know they want or need rather than having to mix them continually. I don't believe that the Expanded Palette user is necessarily lazy; quite the contrary, I think it’s simply a matter of choice and experience.

“In conclusion: I now believe that there is not one universally accepted palette as the primary palette to use. One should choose and use whatever colors he or she is most comfortable working with, after all, art is about one’s self-expression.

“However, after all my research and study, I know strongly believe that all students should have a good understanding and working knowledge of a Limited Palette before using an Expanded palette. I also believe that when considering an Expanded Palette, one should consider which yellowish colors, and bluish colors are going to be of the greatest benefit to the palette. For instance, it would be senseless to purchase two yellowish reds, and no bluish red. So one yellowish red and one bluish red would be most favorable.

“And as Forest Gump once said, ‘Well, that’s all I have to say about that.’”


Thanks for contributing, Jason. Here's the link to his blog and to his Art-By-Committee sketch. I'll tabulate the voting in the blogreaders' color poll next Sunday. Oh, and sorry I left off cadmium orange, naples yellow, permanent green, Winsor red and many others. Once I launched the poll, I couldn't change it.

Sketching vs. Knitting

I sketched my wife one evening when she was knitting a sweater. I like to ask people what they’re thinking about when they’re busy with a task. She said: “I’m establishing the pattern row for my first Aran sweater.” Later, as the pattern started to emerge, I realized that what she was doing took a lot more concentration than doing a sketch.

“I wouldn’t say it takes more concentration,” she said. “It’s a different kind of concentration.” Knitting is more mathematical and irreversible, while drawing is more fluid, and organic.

Tomorrow: Jason Peck's Palette Project

Subsurface Scattering II

Yesterday we took a look at the way light enters the skin and scatters below the surface, creating an unmistakable glow.

Sculptors who create hyper-real figures know that in order to fool the eye, the surface layer of skin has to be somewhat translucent. That’s why the figures in wax museums look more real than painted plaster. Your eye instantly spots the difference.

This was always a problem for Duane Hanson’s (1925-1996) figures, which were made from cast fiberglass and polyester resin. They were realistic in every other way, but the skin often had an unnatural opacity.

In the earlier days of movie animatronics, such as “Gremlins,” above, the skin was made of cast latex, which was a little too opaque, but now visual effects wizards generally use silicone when they need the surface to transmit and scatter more light.

Thomas Kuebler’s amazingly lifelike figures are made with a secret process using silicone. Note the subsurface scattering at the edge of shadow along the nose.

Ron Mueck, who makes realistic larger-than-life figures, uses silicone for babies, whose skin scatters light even more readily than adult skin.

The field of 3D animation and digital effects is developing the theory behind subsurface scattering. In the early Toy Story and Shrek films, it wasn’t possible to convey the effect, but now it has become a standard practice, and was used effectively in "Lord of the Rings."

Here are two images by Henrik Jensen, the first without subsurface light transport.

To get it right, computers have to be taught to consider density variations, form thickness, and light direction. Artists in the 3D animation field often get plenty of credit, but here we have to pay our grateful respect to the mathematicians, scientists, and programmers.

This is one of the reasons I’m glad to be a painter right now, and not in some past age. There’s a cross-fertilization of knowledge and technique happening between all these fields of art and science.
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Ron Mueck, link.
Thomas Kuebler, link.
Gremlins copyright Amblin Entertainment, link
Gollum copyright New line Cinema, link
CGI examples by pioneer Henrik Jenson (Thanks, Mr. Atrocity), link

Subsurface Scattering I

A section of orange and a plastic cow lit from the front are approximately the same color.

That’s because we’re getting roughly the same volume and quality of light bouncing off the surface in what’s called diffuse reflection. This accounts for only part of the light that touches the surface of the forms. What happens to the rest of it?


If we turn things around so that the light is coming from behind, everything changes. The cow is darker because the dense plastic absorbs the light on the far side and there’s not much ambient light or reflected light filling the shadow on the near side.

The orange section is practically incandescent. Light enters the transparent skin on the far side and bounces around inside the fruit, eventually reemerging through the surface. Note that the glow is brighter where the wedge is thinner.

This effect has the fancy name of “subsurface scattering.” It shows up most strikingly when three conditions are met: translucent flesh, small forms, and backlighting. It’s also present on the lit side; it’s just not as obvious.

If you hold your hand up against the sun or against a bright flashlight at night, light traveling subcutaneously turns the spaces between your fingers bright red.

Subsurface scattering is what makes a person’s ears turn crimson when they stand contre-jour. The effect is similar to transmitted light, which describes light traveling through thin membranous surfaces like leaves.

Artists have known about this property for centuries. Peter Paul Rubens rendered skin not as an opaque surface, but as a transparent, glowing, luminous layer.


When academic students who have begun their training on plaster casts transition to the live model, they’re often amazed by the way skin glows, especially in the fingertips, nostrils, and ears.

Tomorrow we’ll see how subsurface scattering gives realism to sculptures, animatronics, and 3D animation.
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Related GJ posts: Transmitted Light and Contre-Jour Lighting
The Rubens is thanks to the Fine Arts Museum in Belgium, link:

Art By Committee: Simian Results

Wednesday is the day for our group sketch game called "Art By Committee,” where you illustrate an actual excerpt from a science fiction manuscript.

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

Everyone has come up with amazingly clever results, and I encourage you to follow the links to each of the artists’ websites and blogs. Be sure to scroll down to the end of the post for next week’s challenge.

Roberta Baird

Arthur J. Keegan

Anna Myers

Joshua Hendry

Sarah Stevenson

Rob Hummer

Tyler Davis

And finally the drawing in the original “Art By Committee” sketchbook.

Here’s the challenge for next Wednesday. "It may have been a castle, but it was unlike anything you'd see in history books. An alien hand had drawn the blueprints; I was willing to bet on that."


Have fun! 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: Subsurface Scattering

Seventeen Year Cicadas

It has been twelve years since our local brood of seventeen year cicadas crawled up out of the ground and flew in dizzy rapture to the treetops.

For a few weeks the air was filled with a buzzing, bewildering mob of giant insects. Individually they were defenseless, but there were so many of them that the predators gorged themselves and left them alone.

Five years from now, their offspring will do it all over again. How does a bug count to seventeen? And why seventeen? Apparently, scientists don’t really know the answer. Link

Tomorrow: Art By Committee

John Berkey

I just learned the sad news that John Berkey died on April 29 after a long illness. His semi-abstract casein paintings of space cruisers adorned paperback covers, calendars, and movie posters. His shining example inspired many young artists—me included—to embark into the field of science fiction illustration.

He didn’t travel much, and as a result, not many people got to meet him. When I was just starting out in the early 1980s, I contacted him in the middle of a cross-country drive, and he was gracious enough to let me visit his studio in Minnesota. I was struck with his serene and thoughtful manner and his keen awareness of his surroundings.

He had a state-of-the-art stereo behind his worktable. Microphones strategically positioned around his woodland property brought the sound of any bird or squirrel in a 200-yard radius directly into his work area. With these ordinary environmental sounds piped into his headphones, he traveled to far distant galaxies.

John was a believer in strengthening the imagination by means of plein air painting. His outdoor sketches were fresh revelations. He was self-taught, and completely original in his outlook.

For a biography on Lines and Colors, link.
Tributes on Irene Gallo’s site, link.

Origami Mystery

Last week in a bookstore near Amherst, Massachusetts I noticed a tiny origami crane sitting on a shelf of dinosaur books.

I hardly gave it another thought until the next day, when I saw another one perched on the napkin dispenser in a diner.

Later, in the Bela restaurant in Northampton I saw three more miniature origami cranes next to a flower vase. I asked the waiter how they got there. “I don’t know,” he said. “They just appeared. We love them. But no one knows who put them there.”

At the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, five more cranes appeared on the corner of the table where I had just been signing books.

No one claimed them, so I put them in my sketch pouch. Where were they coming from? Did they reproduce spontaneously, like the road kill kitties? Or was there some sweatshop in the Pioneer Valley staffed by nimble-fingered elves?

What was I supposed to do with them? Did someone want me to disperse them in public spaces? Was I an unwitting pawn in some vast culture-jamming, shopdropping conspiracy? I felt more befuddled than ever. But I sensed a call to action.

I glued thin wires under them so that they could fly. I placed one in a grocery store near the taco mix. I put another one on a display of Mentos gum.

Three more origami cranes are in my sketch pouch waiting to be set free. Maybe you’ll discover them in a convenience market, a big box store, or a donut shop.

The Mud Debate

Is there such a thing as a muddy color? There are two very different schools of thought on this issue, with great painters and teachers on both sides of the fence. Please consider both arguments and share your own opinion in the comments.


The “Beware of Mud” School
Some oil painters are wary of overmixing colors to avoid colors that look “dead” or “dirty.”

Virgil Elliott, in his popular new book Traditional Oil Painting writes, “a clearer color sensation is possible with a single pigment than with any mixture of two or more.”

Daniel Parkhurst, a student of Bouguereau, said in his 1903 book, The Painter in Oil, “Over-mixing makes color muddy sometimes, especially when more than three colors are used. When you don't get the right tint with three colors, the chances are that you have got the wrong three. If that is not so, and you must add a fourth, do so with some thoughtfulness, or you will have to mix the tint again.”

Partially mixed colors, he says, are more apt to yield harmonious variations in the final painting. He goes on to recommend that the artist keep the palette scrupulously clean and use a lot of brushes.

Another cause of mud, some artists believe, is having too many colors on the palette. Teachers say that art students tend to use browns or black habitually for toning or graying color. They recommend using only pure primaries as the only source colors, especially when learning to mix colors. The primaries could be warm and cool variations of blue, yellow, and red, plus white.

Some watercolorists use only primary pigments laid over each other transparently in varying amounts to achieve all other colors. Other painters, in the name of achieving purity of color, set the palette with many different tube colors, so that they don’t have to mix as many component colors to achieve the colors they want.


The “Mud is a Myth” School
On the other hand, there’s a group of equally sensitive colorists arguing that there’s no such thing as a muddy color mixture. There are only muddy relationships of color in a given composition. Grays are the artist’s best friend. A given color either works in its pictorial context or not. The effect of drabness or dullness, they would argue, comes from poor value organization more than from bad mixtures or bad mixing practices.

As Richard Schmid puts it in Alla Prima: Everything I Know about Painting, “There are no ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ colors. ‘Muddy’ colors are simply mixtures that are the inappropriate relative temperature for the area in which they are placed.”

Kevin MacPherson, in his book Oil Painting Inside and Out, recommends scraping up unused paint on the palette, stirring it together, and putting it into empty paint tubes that he actually labels “MUD.” He uses these tubes of gray instead of white for mixing a medium value color. “These grays are in harmony with your primaries,” he writes, “since they are a mixture of all of them, and most of nature is made of grays.”

These artists might point out that a given color can be mixed from many different constituent colors. A neutral gray can be blended from red and green, or from blue and orange, or from all the colors on the palette. It really doesn’t matter to the painting how you arrived at a given mixture.

And you don’t necessarily have to wash your brush all the time or use a lot of different brushes unless the painting calls for saturated tints. A “dirty” brush is infused with unifying grays or browns (which some artists affectionately call “sauce”) that can help bind a painting together.
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What have you been taught? What has been your experience? What practices do you follow to get luminous color? Start mudslinging—but please, no criticism of living artists.

Tomorrow: The Origami Mystery

Barbara Bradley, 1927-2008

It is with great sadness that the illustration world mourns the passing of Barbara Bradley yesterday from a car accident. Barbara was a veteran of the Cooper Studios and the Merrill Company Publishers. She was recently featured in Illustration Magazine, and was still active as a beloved teacher at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.
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Read her recollections in the blog "Today's Inspiration," link.
Website "Thank You Barbara Bradley," link.

Spokewheeling

Lines converging on the center of interest of a picture are like spokes around the hub of a wheel. Since this design device needs a name, let's call it “spokewheeling.”

For centuries, artists have used converging lines to attract attention to a face or an eye.

In this picture of a Triceratops pulling a turnip cart from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, the lines point to the eye of the dinosaur.

Here is Goldsworthy Marlinspike from Chandara. There are a lot of lines converging on his left eye. The lines come from the top of the window, the telescope, both of his arms, and the top of the map.

Spokewheeling turns up everywhere. Jean Leon Gerome used it to center our gaze on the face of the victim of the masked duel. Click to enlarge.

And here, sans arrows, is a painting by Dean Cornwell. Look at all the spokes converging on the the left eye of the seated figure. There's the doorway, his left shoulder, both lapels of his jacket, his red necktie, his right arm, the gunman's belt, the leg of the fallen man, and the blue line on the building. The chair leg and the man's own leg almost align.

By the way, this piece is a nice example of shape welding, too.

Tomorrow: The Mud Debate

Black is Light, White is Dark

Are these swatches labeled correctly?
Of course not. The swatch on the left isn’t black. It’s a mid-range gray, and so is the one on the right. The swatch in the middle isn’t white. It’s darker than the other two.


What if I told you that the swatch on the left is black acrylic paint, the sample on the right is a jet-black dress shirt, and the swatch in the middle is a white newspaper?

The x-factor is sunlight and shadow—and the pesky tricks that our visual systems play on us.

The samples were all lifted straight out of a single photo taken in my sunny front yard yesterday morning. I was sitting in front of a refrigerator carton painted black.

Even when the tones are adjacent (between 2 and 3), our minds tell us that the “white” is lighter. It's good to keep this in mind when we're painting.

The visual cortex uses context cues to override the luminance information from the retinas. Professor Edward Adelson of MIT developed the “checkershadow illusion” to show that the white square (B) in shadow is equal to the black square (A) in light (click to enlarge).

Here’s a rule to remember: In bright sunlight, a newspaper in shadow is darker than a black shirt in the light.

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For more about the checkershadow illusion, check out Dr. Adelson's website and this interactive demo.
More on GJ about that painted backdrop, link.
Thanks to Professor Adelson.

Tomorrow: Spokewheeling

Dino Art Tips 5

For the last few weeks, I’ve been doling out tips from the dino art workshop in the current issue of ImagineFX Magazine. Here are the final two that I'll share on the blog. If you want the whole workshop, you’ll have to grab the magazine.


Five foot eye level
In scientific paintings of dinosaurs, you obviously can’t show humans for comparative size, but you can imply a human scale of reference. We’re accustomed to seeing photos taken from about a five foot standing height. If you set the viewpoint at five feet above the ground, you’ll give an implicit sense of how big the dinosaur really are.

When I painted this diagram for a National Geographic story on Argentinian dinosaurs, I used two ghosted figures and a grid of meter squares to show relative scale.

Separate the light and shadow
If you’re painting a dinosaur on a sunny day, don’t underestimate the separation in tone between the light side and the shadow side. It's almost always greater than you think. Understating the separation between light and shadow is one of the most common mistakes of paleoart. It happens when we’re not totally sure of the form, so we’re hesitant to commit to what’s in light and what’s in shadow. Maquettes are a big help to solve this problem.

Photographers often measure the difference between light and shadow as at least two F-stops, depending on how much fill light is available. If you're counting steps on a value scale from one to ten, you might typically see five steps of tone from light to shadow. The separation between light and shadow would be less if you have high clouds, hazy atmosphere, or a lot of light bouncing up from a light-colored ground surface.

More GJ posts on dinosaur maquettes, link; and fill light, link.