E.H. Shepard’s Academic Studies

(Note to parents: there’s some minor artistic nudity on this post).

Last weekend some artist friends came by the studio: Barry Klugerman (left), an artist, collector, and connoisseur of illustrated books; fellow illustrator Mark Elliott; and muralist, portrait painter, and illustrator Mike Wimmer (far right). Mike was stopping by on his way home to Oklahoma after attending the Hartford Art School Illustration MFA Program.



Barry brought up his collection of academic figure drawings by Ernest H. Shepard. Better known for his Winnie the Pooh illustrations, Shepard won a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools in 1897, where he received rigorous academic training. At age 18, he was the youngest student there, but he was already good at drawing. Both his parents were artists, and they were close friends with the artists Frank Dicksee and Edwin Abbey.

These drawings were done in 11 sessions, 2 hours each (with breaks) in the figure class under proctors like George Clausen and John Singer Sargent. Once the pose was set by the visiting teacher, the students were not allowed to make suggestions, and they were absolutely forbidden to speak to the model. Male and female students worked and lived separately.

Nevertheless Shepard met the woman who was to be his first wife at art school. Her name was Florence Eleanor Chaplin, three years his senior, but at least his equal at drawing (her drawing above). Like many gifted female artists, she sacrificed her career for her responsibilities in a Victorian marriage.

Shepard soon was illustrating for the magazine Punch. According to biographer Rawle Knox, “knowing that he was a draughtsman rather than a colorist, he tried to get a footing as an illustrator and black and white artist.” The apparent ease and simplicity of Shepard’s Pooh illustrations belie the long hours of careful observation from his early training.

All images are copyright their respective owners.
Information from The Work of E H Shepard, by Rawle Knox, available at Amazon.

ABC: University

On Wednesdays we share in a group sketch game called "Art By Committee." I give you an excerpt from an actual science fiction manuscript and you come up with a picture to illustrate it.

I always try to stump you with a tough one. This one was, "It seemed as if the whole damned planet was a university." As always, you rose to the occasion with some creative solutions.

Michael Geissler
Chris Oakey

Andy Wales Tony Upton
Antonio Araujo

Art Keegan

…and the one from the original sketchbook, a group effort of artist friends at a coffee shop.

Here’s next week’s quote: “His left eye was swollen shut.”Please scale your JPG to around 700 pixels across and compress it as much as possible. Title it with your name, send it to: jgurneyart(at)yahoo.com, subject line ABC, and let me know your blog or website if you want me to link (even if you gave it to me before). Please have your entries in by next Tuesday at 10:00 AM Eastern Time USA.

Walking Vehicles, part 2.

This four-legged walking vehicle or “strutter” was a main character in Dinotopia: The World Beneath. It's based on the design of a ceratopsian, with the passenger seat built into the pelvis area, and the driver's seat between the scapulas. This is how it appeared after the head/windshield was bitten off by a T.rex.

I built the original reference maquette (below) by “kitbashing,” or combining parts from about four different Japanese robot plastic model kits and filling in extra shapes with two-part sculptor’s putty. The reference maquette was just a start in conceptualizing the design, but it gave me a lot of information, especially for unusual angles.

You can often find unbuilt plastic models at yard sales, and they make good raw material for kitbashing. The front section of the vehicle above was originally the torso of a humanoid Japanese robot.

Denison’s strutter was one of the toy prototypes made by the concept development team at Hasbro based on the illustrations in The World Beneath. This model shows the full strutter, complete with its head, and the windshield built into the frill. The prototype can walk...sort of—you can see the linkage bars behind the front legs—though the challenge with a real toy is to make it strong enough to be manhandled by toddlers.

Model builder Glenn Ludgate of Australia has built several scratch-built one-of-a-kind Dinotopia vehicles as hobby projects. Here's one of Arthur Denison's strutter in progress.
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More about the Hasbro Dinotopia prototypes, link.

Walking Vehicles, Part 1

Vehicles that move across the ground usually have either wheels, tracks, or legs. A walking vehicle has the advantage on uneven terrain. You can base a design concept on many living analogs, for nature has no use for the wheel.

Above is a scratch-built arthropod-based vehicle from Dinotopia: The World Beneath. The small maquette helped to visualize it in three dimensions and from various angles. The design is based on an extinct shrimplike invertebrate.

In the story, the vehicle, or “strutter” as it is called in Dinotopia, gets out of control and fights another strutter, while Arthur Denison and his friends watch in horror.

One reason wheels never arose in nature is the difficulty of designing a circulatory system that could work across a turning axle. Birds, humans, and a few mammals use two legs, but four, six or more legs are more common. Below is a full-size working model of a Japanese armored tech.



Engineers who design the drive mechanisms for walking vehicles usually have to solve three problems: how to translate the energy of the motor to the back and forth movement of the leg, how to achieve balance, and how to steer and change direction.

Tomorrow: part two, including Arthur Denison's strutter.
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Addendum: Blog reader Scibotic has suggested these awesome YouTube videos. Thanks, Ben:

Mondo Spider, homemade walking vehicle with driver: link
Walking Sculptures, passive wind-powered beach walker with many legs: link
Big Dog, a four-legged autonomous vehicle that recovers balance on ice and uneven terrain: link

Bleaching and Glare

When sunlight is extremely bright, the eye is dazzled for a moment. It takes a few seconds for the pupils to constrict. The cones are overwhelmed. Color response drops off in the brightly lit areas, and the shadows appear higher in chroma. This is the reverse of the normal rule of “color obtains in the light.”

Before Impressionism there was a movement called “The Glare Aesthetic” where artists used this bleaching phenomenon to convey bright light.
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GJ post: "Color Obtains in the Light," link.
Top painting is by William Paxton (1869-1941) called the Chinese Parasol (1908), link.
Bottom painting by William Picknell (1853-1897), Road to Concarneau, link.
Chapter on the glare aesthetic in American Impressionism by William Gerdts, link.

Ozark Rooms

On a cross-country trip some years ago I spent a week in Doniphan, Missouri. I met Dode Williams, an older gentleman with no teeth who lived alone in the Ozark Rooms in the middle of town. Inside his apartment was a bust of an Indian, a kerosene lantern, a horseshoe, an owl clock, and a shotgun.

I sketched the entrance to the Ozark Rooms with a pen and gray marker while sitting at the top of the stairs.

Dode took me down to what he called the “Sin Center,” a long smoke-filled room with eight billiard tables used for a game called “snooker.” Each table had a glaring fluorescent light above it. One wall was covered with the fox hunting trophies of Ernie Caldwell, who was then 93 years old. The rest of the old-timers sat on the benches behind the hand painted checkerboards, occasionally swatting flies.

Neuroesthetics

What is going on in your brain when you behold the Pietà by Michelangelo?

On one level your brain instantly perceives the shapes and contours, and it recognizes that the image on your computer screen is a photograph of a three-dimensional form. Even if you had never seen it before, you would recognize that the sculptural form represents human figures. You might observe that the sculpture is accomplished at the highest level of mastery. The subjects portrayed are not just any humans, but Mary and Jesus, with all the emotional and spiritual associations that go with that story. Perhaps you might recall the mentally disturbed geologist who vandalized the work with a hammer in 1972.

When I saw the Pietà in person, I was overcome by its beauty. I remember the feelings welled up inside me. I choked up, my eyes filled with tears, and I was unable to speak.

All these responses to a work of art can be studied using the new functional MRI (fMRI) mapping techniques. Corresponding with each level of response, there is specific and localized electrical activity going on in different parts of the brain.

Traditionally, the study of how and why we respond to beauty has been addressed by the field of aesthetics, a domain of philosophy. But today, a small group of scientists is working to understand aesthetic response in neurological terms, and this is part of a larger movement called “empirical aesthetics.”

One of the pioneers in this new field of neuroesthetics is Professor Semir Zeki. He coined the term, and he runs the Institute of Neuroesthetics at University College London. In his Statement on Neuroesthetics, he says, “Art is a human activity and, like all human activities, including morality, law and religion, depends upon, and obeys, the laws of the brain.”

Professor Zeki graciously responded to a few questions:

JG: Can we tell from brain imaging that the response to art is somehow special or different from the response to utilitarian or nonesthetic objects?

SZ: At present it is difficult to tell the difference between the response to an ordinary object (eg. a chair) and the response to viewing the painting of a chair. The same applies to faces. If, however, one were to focus specifically on the aesthetic value of what is being viewed, one would (I think) be able to differentiate between the two - assuming that the painting has greater aesthetic appeal. This is because, in that case, there would be greater activation of the orbito-frontal cortex.

JG: Tolstoy’s definition of art involves one person consciously infecting another with an emotion. When a subject reports that a work is beautiful or ugly, how is the brain’s emotional center involved?

SZ: Perceiving something as ugly or beautiful involves activation of the medial orbito-frontal cortex. Activity here is much more pronounced when pictures considered to be beautiful are perceived (in other words the activity is proportional to the declared experience of beauty).

JG: Walter Pater said that all of the arts aspire to the condition of music. Can we tell from fMRI studies how the response to visual art actually compares to the response to music or literature?

SZ: This is a question that I cannot answer at present. It is nevertheless an interesting question, worthy of future study.

JG: Does the brain respond differently to abstract versus representational art?

SZ: Yes, it seems to. Portrait paintings activate a specific part of the brain, landscapes another, and still lifes yet another. Abstract art seems to lead to very little activation, presumably because in the contrasts used to elicit the activation, the ubiquity of what is shown in abstract paintings (that is to say the features there that are also common to landscapes and still lifes and portraits) lead to activity being cancelled out in the subtraction process.

JG: How would you respond to critics who say that this line of inquiry is too reductive and diminishes the mystery and grandeur of the aesthetic experience?

SZ: I would say that they are misguided, because knowledge of the mechanisms involved in artistic appreciation and creativity does not in the least diminish the affective value of these works when we view them. I would also say that they are misguided to think that there can ever be a satisfying theory of aesthetics and beauty which does not take into account the neural activity which leads to aesthetic experiences. I would finally say that, whatever their concerns, science has now embarked firmly on a study of neuroesthetics, and there is no turning back.
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Professor Semir Zeki's blog and website. and his statement on neuroesthetics.
Wikipedia entry on Neuroesthetics, link
Association of Neuroesthetics website, link.
More about fMRI, link.
Image of brain from: www.psc.edu/science/goddard.html
More about the Pieta and its vandal, Laszlo Toth, link.

Guild of Natural Science Illustrators

The Guild of Natural Science Illustrators (GNSI) held its annual meeting this week in Ithaca, New York. This organization includes medical illustrators, bird, insect, and botanical artists, paleoartists, and illustrators who work for natural history museums.

A juried exhibit of art by Guild members is currently showing at the Cornell Campus in Sibley Hall, with about 60/40 digital/traditional media, with detailed paintings of fish, cetaceans, insects, dinosaurs, and plants. Here Michael Rothman appears beside his acrylic painting of a forest floor with flying insects.

The emphasis of the convention is the open sharing of practical skills and techniques. Young artists entering the field of natural science illustration report that they’ve learned a tremendous amount from the presentations of other members of the Guild.

Nearby the convention is the Museum of the Earth, which tells the history of life on earth, concentrating on the fossil heritage of the northeastern United States. The museum's director, Warren D. Allmon, was a keynote speaker at the GNSI convention. A highlight of the 8,000 feet of permanent exhibition space is the Hyde Park Mastodon, above, one of the most complete mastodon skeletons in the world.
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Museum of the Earth website, link
GNSI Conference, link.
History of the GNSI, link.

Art By Committee: Bored

Wednesday is the day for our group sketch game called "Art By Committee."

It's based on a sketchbook that I started when I was doing a lot of paperback covers. Whenever a line struck me as odd, I'd snip it out of the manuscript and tape it into a large sketchbook. I often bring the book with me when I have lunch with fellow illustrators, and while waiting for the food to come, we sketch a solution to the out-of-context excerpt. Blog reader Jen Zeller suggested we open it to the art blog community by sharing the same quotes that are in the original book.

This week’s quote: “The man looked bored” led to drawings that were anything but boring or predictable.

Dave Harshberger

Andy Wales

Nathan Furman

Jen Zeller
Roberta Baird

Michael Geissler

Art Keegan

John York


Chris Oakey
Scot Vorwaller Tony Upton
Liza Biggers

Joel West

And the one from the original sketchbook. Let me know if I overlooked your link.

Here’s next week’s quote: “It seemed as if the whole damned planet was a university.”

Please scale your JPG to around 700 pixels across and compress the heck out of it. Title it with your name, send it to: jgurneyart(at)yahoo.com, subject line ABC, and please give me your blog or website URL if you'd like me to link (even if you gave it to me before). Please have your entries in by next Tuesday at 10:00 AM Eastern Time USA.

Studio Mirror

Here's a studio tip.

This full-length mirror is about 24 inches wide by 5 feet tall, made from heavy plate glass. I got it at a yard sale. I attached it to a plywood panel with a wood moulding around it. The whole panel is firmly screwed to the wall of the studio with a very strong piano hinge along the left-hand side. This allows the mirror to be swung out from the wall at any angle.

I use this mirror in two ways. First, since it is about ten feet behind my drawing table, I can look back to check the reflection of a work in progress. In this way I can quickly spot any flaws in the drawing, and I can see if the tonal organization carries from a long distance.

Before I hung it on the wall, I used to put a big mirror on an easel behind me, but I backed up into (and broke) a couple that way.

I also use the mirror for quick preliminary studies like this one, where I posed for a figure carrying a bunch of bananas (I was too lazy to get real models). I took the pose, studied the action, and established the basics. The American illustrator Tom Lovell suggested this idea to me.
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Thanks, BoingBoing for doing a post yesterday about "My Friend the Cave Man," and thanks, Kyle, for telling me about it (I was literally staying in a log cabin in Ithaca cut off from everything for the last three days).

My Friend, the The Cave Man

Neanderthal humans may have been capable of modern speech, according to archaeologist Baruch Arensberg from Tel Aviv, who discovered the small hyoid bone (in circle), which anchors the tongue muscles.

When National Geographic asked me to paint a small illustration of a Neanderthal father telling a story to his son, the art director emphasized that he should look recognizable, “like a guy who stepped off the subway.” Only the heavy brow ridge should give him away.

Where to find a model? I racked my brain for who would fit the part. One guy I knew named Jim would be ideal. But how should I ask him to pose? “Hey, Jim, would you mind posing for a Neanderthal picture I’m doing?” I was afraid he might be insulted.

I managed to ask him, and he cooperated. Later I asked him if he minded being a cave man. “Not at all,” he replied with a smile. “My girlfriend says it gives me more sex appeal.”

Croquet Balls

What’s wrong with these croquet balls?

Well one thing you might notice right away is that they’re in pretty bad shape. That’s because they endured a good-natured grudge match between our 14-year-old and Ralph Bakshi at an artist party here a few years ago. Note the chunk missing from the yellow ball.

Here's another photo, this time of a green ball and a yellow ball. I was going to include the blue ball, but someone sent it deep into the woods, and it never showed up again.

By the way, these balls are set up indoors in a shaft of sunlight, and they’re resting on black velvet, so effectively they’re only lit by the sun and each other.

Well, of course you guessed it. The photos have been doctored in Photoshop. I know—my Photoshop skills are about at the level of the Iranian News Agency.

The thing that's wrong with the croquet balls is the color of the reflected light. I switched the left balls in the two pictures, but the ball that was there originally left its telltale color in the shadow of the yellow ball.

Look what happens when we set the balls up in that shaft of sunlight and let their reflected light spill over to an adjacent piece of white board. The light bounces up and to the right. Its influence drops off fairly rapidly as the distance increases from the balls, and the colors intermix in the intermediate areas.

Note, too that the reflected light from the green ball doesn’t have much influence on the adjacent red ball. Their complementary colors cancel each other out.

Here’s a whole color spectrum set up in the shaft of sunlight, again bouncing into the white board. The reflected colors softly gradate from greens on the left to reds on the right. The individual colors in the reflected light are most distinct and separated where the spectrum is close to the board. The yellow area of the spectrum is far from the board, and its effect is mingled with all the other colors into a neutral-colored light at the top of the board.

We can draw at least three conclusions about color in reflected light.
1. Colors of reflected light drop off quickly as you get farther from their source.
2. The effect is clearest if you remove other sources of reflected and fill light.
3. The color reflected into the shadow is a composite of all the sources of reflected illumination, combined with the local color of the object itself.

Painting High Peak

On a recent weekend I thought I’d try the idea of painting a landscape area-by-area instead of blocking the whole thing first. It’s kind of like paint-by-numbers, but without the numbers.

I set up the pochade box on an estate along the Hudson with a view toward the river and High Peak in the Catskills.

I took 20 minutes to draw in the tree silhouettes on an oil-primed 8x10 panel. Then I started painting in each area with a small bristle brush, working from background to foreground and trying to get a finished effect right away. This felt weird at first because I don't usually complete one area at a time, but then I pretended I was doing a cross-hatched pen and ink drawing.

Here’s the painting most of the way finished, with the real background behind it. I consciously enlarged the relative size of the mountains compared to the trees, and I cut that slot in the trees leading down to the river.

And here’s the finished painting. Just as I was signing it, a little gnat landed in the wet paint of the sky and got stuck with his wings stretched out in the exact position of a soaring red-tail hawk. I didn’t have the heart to scrape him off. I guess he didn’t die in vain.
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Earlier GJ post on area-by-area painting, link.

John Dillinger

In October of 1980, I was sketching the Sealtest ice cream sign on Broadway in Nashville, Tennessee when a man came up and asked me to draw his portrait.

He struck a pose but jerked around from time to time to look up and down the street. Then he eyed me narrowly. “You’re not a cop, are you?”


I assured him I wasn’t. He asked me where he could get a Thompson.

“What’s a Thompson?” I asked.

“You know, a submachine gun. A tommie gun.”

“Why would you want that?” I asked.

“I’m going to jack a bank.”

He said his name was John Earl Dillinger and that he just got out of the pen. He told me that he had spent time in solitary confinement in San Quentin and that he had been married three times. He asked that I draw a mustache on him so that he wouldn’t be recognized.

I didn’t know how much of his story to believe. The original bank robber named John Dillinger died in 1934, and looked nothing like this guy. Tommie guns were obsolete, even back in 1980. I had the feeling that parts of his story may not have been what he told me, but his face told a story of its own.

Every portrait is an attempt both to study the mask and to see beyond the mask, because every subject is trying to project a persona— at least if they’re aware of being drawn.

In any event, my meeting with “John Dillinger” in Nashville was a prototype for Arthur Denison’s first encounter with Lee Crabb in Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time.

Boulter’s Lock

Imagine that you were an artist from a hundred years ago, and this was the scene that met your eyes.

This is Boulter’s Lock, a popular gathering point for pleasure boaters along the Thames west of London. There’s a mix of personalities and a variety of watercraft crowded together waiting for the lock to be opened. Everyone is dressed for a fashionable day outdoors.

But what chaos! Everything is moving and changing. How would you design a coherent picture out of all these raw elements?

Here’s what Edward J. Gregory (1850-1909) exhibited in 1897, called "Boulter's Lock, Sunday Afternoon." It’s one of the masterpieces of Victorian painting, and today is the pride of the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool. But it’s hardly ever mentioned in art history class because it doesn't fit neatly into the streamlined narrative of most survey courses.

That’s too bad, because it’s a supreme example of composition. Note the clustering, spokewheeling and shapewelding in the main boat in the lower center of the picture. As a contrast to that crowded boat, the boats nearby have only single figures in a remarkable variety of postures and expressions, and those figures speak volumes about the social classes of the time. The Art Journal said, "it is in fact the three volume novel in art, the guide book and encyclopaedia of the manners and customs of the English people'."

Gregory worked on Boulter's Lock for about ten years. He was a remarkable painter. How many people would dare to paint reflections and cast shadows crossing in shallow water?
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More details about the real Boulter's Lock on Wikipedia and this local website, link.
Lady Lever Art Museum's page about the painting, link.
Art Renewal Center, three paintings by E.J.Gregory, link.

Art By Committee: Roasted

Wednesday is our day to have some fun with sketching game called "Art By Committee." The challenge is to illustrate an actual quote from a science fiction novel.

This week’s quote about a narrow escape from being roasted called to mind all sorts of images, from marshmallows to dragons. Each one has its own flair and shows how differently our imaginations work.

Roberta Baird

Robert Brown
Topher Sipes

Michael Geissler

Andy Wales

Kristina Carroll

Ryan Timm

Jared Shear

John Randall York

Susan Adsett

Arthur Keegan

Airan Wright

Rob Hummer

Andrew Walker
Paul Bozzo

…and the sketch by Jeanette, me, and a couple friends.

I wonder what strange and wonderful stories lurk beneath the surface of next week's quote: “The man looked bored.”
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 10:00 AM Eastern Time USA.

Atelier Autodidactique

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of this blog. I want to take this moment to thank all of you. I appreciate all of you who have taken a moment to share a funny thought, an encouraging word, a philosophical musing, or an expert insight.

Thanks too to all of you who have given your time and talent to the weekly Art By Committee contest. And thanks for linking or putting me on your blogroll. I wish I could link back to each of you, but my sidebar is already way out of control.

I am a firm believer in the value of self-teaching. Whether or not each of us has been to art school, we never get to a point where we know enough. Learning about art is a lifelong occupation.

Right now the history of art is at a remarkable crossroads, with a convergence of knowledge between digital effects innovation, vision research, a new realism in painting, and an outpouring of creativity in caricature, cartooning, and animation. As a result of all this cross-pollinaton, there’s a lot we can learn from each other, and I've been learning a lot from you by doing this blog.

I hope you’ll visit Gurney Journey from time to time over the future months. There are dozens of new topics lined up for future posts, with material on everything from reflected light to rainbows, silhouettes to spotlighting, interactivity to idealization—plus a few bizarre surprises along the way.

Image: Unused concept sketch for The Voyage of Argo, National Geographic, 1985.

Tone Paper Portrait

Here’s a portrait of my friend James Warhola, a children’s book illustrator best known for his autobiographical book Uncle Andy’s, as well as a frequent collaborator on the original Art By Committee sketchbook.

The sketch is from life, and it’s a quick technique that’s halfway between drawing and painting. I used a heavyweight gray-brown tone paper with a rough texture, and did the drawing first in soft pencil.

Then I washed in white gouache over the background using a bristle brush, leaving soft edges on the left side of the hair. For the light side of the face, I used a softer brush to lay down a milky-thin layer gouache, building it up a bit more for the highlights.

Louis-Léopold Boilly (1761-1845) used a similar technique for this self-portrait, where he indulges a shameless talent for gurning.

Greek Statues in Color

Seeing Greek and Roman statues painted up in bright colors may look a little bit unsettling at first, but archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann has made a convincing argument that they originally looked this way.

Garish? Gaudy? How could the same artists who carved those immortal forms prefer such a tacky treatment? If Brinkmann is right, we may have to revise our estimation of what constitutes good taste in sculpture.

Actually, the more I look at it, the more it makes sense. In fact I love it. Look out, Mount Rushmore, I’m on my way with my van full of spray cans.
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Smithsonian article, link.
Slide show of full-color restorations, link.
Boston.com article about traveling exhibition, link.
The standing figure is Augustus of Prima Porta. The Trojan archer is copyright Stiftung Archäologie, Munich

Happy 400th Birthday, Québec.

This July marks four centuries since Samuel de Champlain and his crew of 28 men stepped ashore from their little boats on the bit of land that was later to become Québec city.

Here is a croquis of Québec rooftops. I did this sketch while sitting in a dry bathtub, the only place in our hotel room with a good view. The hollow rattle of a horse's hooves on cobblestones floated up from the street below.

I started by laying broad watercolor washes with a ¾ inch white nylon flat over a light pencil drawing. The last step was to add the brown lines with a Waterman fountain pen. The copper roof was weathered to a gray-brown color under the cornice alongside the clock. I tried to suggest that effect by dragging my finger over a passage of wet pen lines.

Bonne Fête, Québec!
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See also the GJ posts on bronze weathering and the watercolor-with-fountain-pen technique

Free Dinotopia Podcast

Skeptics said that it was impossible to make an audio adaptation out of a picture book, but Tom Lopez of ZBS Productions proved them wrong. The Christian Science Monitor called the Dinotopia audio adventure, “a dazzling soundscape that does full justice to Gurney’s wondrous lost world…perfect family listening.”
You can hear for yourself in this free podcast, where audio wizard Meatball Fulton recalls the thinking behind the ZBS productions of A Land Apart from Time and The World Beneath. He shares a few samples of the productions with a full cast of actors, effects, and music by Tim Clark. You can order copies on CD or cassette from the Dinotopia Store or purchase the MP3 download directly from ZBS.

Don’t miss all the other great podcasts and audio productions from ZBS, which make evocative listening in the long hours of the artist’s studio.
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Free Dinotopia podcast, link.
CDs from Dinotopia Store, link.
Full Dinotopia MP3 paid download from ZBS, link.
ZBS’s new “Two Minute Noir,” link.
Bix sculpture courtesy Jim Henson's Creature Shop, link.

Impersonality

For the last two centuries, the art of the western world has been driven by the concept of individual expression. But it hasn’t always been so. Other notions have prevailed.

Hamilton Easter Field, in his 1913 book The Technique of Oil Painting made the case for another conception of the creative enterprise. He identified greatness in art, music and literature not with personal expression, but with impersonality:

“Impersonality is in no way the antithesis of personality, but its fulfillment. As a great man gets bigger and broader he drops a lot of his prejudices and meannesses, and his heart, like that of St. Francis, goes out in sympathy to all manner of men, to the birds of the air, and even to inanimate nature, until he gets to feel in harmony with the universe. Gradually he has passed beyond the personal into the impersonal. Whatever the hand of such a man finds to do will bear the stamp of his breadth of vision. It will remain personal because it will be true to his inmost self. It will, however, also be impersonal, because the man has so broadened in character that in his work he no longer expresses the emotions of one man, but those of mankind."

Is this just a rhetorical flourish or a genuinely fresh way for artists to think of their work? Is impersonality desirable, or even possible in our age of navel-gazing and psychoanalysis? Haven’t all the great works of art history, from Rembrandt’s self portraits to Beethoven’s symphonies been founded on a deep level of introspection and inner discovery?

What Field seems to be advocating is a way seeing beyond the limits of the self into the collective experience. Many of the greatest works of art have come from enigmatic individuals like Shakespeare, Vermeer, and Homer, about whom we know very little. And perhaps it doesn’t matter. The miracle of their work is that the range of their emotional expression seems to extend beyond the scope of a single person’s life. Each of these creators looked into themselves, but in so doing, they saw beyond themselves.

You can read Hamilton Field’s entire book online (it’s short, at 84 pages) Link
Thanks, Jason

Addendum
I found another expression of this idea in a letter from Australian painter Charles Conder to his good friend Tom Roberts, after a couple of blissful summers they spent painting together in Heidelberg, 1888-1890: "I feel more than sorry that these days are over, because nothing can exceed the pleasures of that last summer, when I fancy all of us lost the ego somewhat of our natures, in looking at what was Nature's best art and ideality."

--from Australian Impressionism by Terrence Lane.

Pyramid of Vision

Here is Jeanette Gurney using a homemade viewfinder to frame a composition for her sketch. The red arrows show the lines from the apex of her eye through the corners of the viewfinder to the scene beyond.

The “pyramid of vision” is the sector of the entire field of view that you have selected to represent in your picture.

In perspective class, they used to call it “cone of vision,” but I like “pyramid” better, because most pictures are rectangular, so a pyramid better describes the volume of space reaching out from your eye. "Pyramid" is also used now more frequently in the CGI field.


Even though the overall visual field takes in an angle of about 60 to 90 degrees, the ideal pyramid of vision for figure drawing or landscape painting in my experience is about 20-30 degrees. Any more than that, and the drawing will look distorted, because you have to turn your head to see from top to bottom or side to side. An angle much less than that puts the subject a bit too far away to see clearly.

Here is Jeanette’s watercolor painting from the scene.

To see other views of the motif, visit the Dalleo’s Deli post.

Art By Committee: Transmogrified

On Wednesdays we cut loose a little with a group sketch game called "Art By Committee." I give you an excerpt from an actual science fiction manuscript and you come up with a picture to illustrate it.
This week’s quote was a bit more conceptual than usual. It brought out an amazing range of solutions: all clever, imaginative, unexpected, and beautiful. Thanks, everybody.

Robert M. Brown

Andrew Walker

Andy Wales

Christoffer Gertz Bech


Art Keegan

Rob Hummer

John York


Tony Upton


Jen Zeller

Roberta Baird

Kristina Carroll

.....and the one from the original Art By Committee sketchbook.

Here’s next week’s quote: “Snarking hell, Jensen, you damned near got us roasted.”

I hope you have fun with it. 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 10:00 AM Eastern Time USA.

Dinotopia at the Children’s House

Dr. Jo Ann Leggett, director of the Children’s House of Victoria, Texas recently completed a Dinotopia-themed project for the school’s summer program.


The kids got an opportunity to try a funny face contest, as well as dinosaur musical parades, and a “water ride down under.”

There were some brave efforts at plank walking. They played ping pong with Zippo and they designed t-shirts. Kids, parents, and faculty worked together to paint dinosaur murals.

A section by the back fence transformed into Treetown. A sprinkler in a tree became Waterfall City, and the kids put on their swimsuits and played under the water spray.

Bagels on dowels brought to life the Kentrosaurus Bakery from Journey to Chandara.

Dr. Leggett wrote in summary:

“I have been in business for 30 years and I have never experienced the response your Dinotopia has made on all assets of our program. The fact that you correlated all subject matter—art, science, social studies, music, and math in your book made our task of a progressive educational experience easy. Dinotopia is not just a book. It is an experience to be treasured for generations.”

To which I say, the success of the program is more of a tribute to Dr. Leggett’s amazing creativity and enthusiasm, along with her faculty, parents, and students. Without their imagination, Dinotopia would remain dormant on the page.

To other teachers planning your upcoming school year, I hope you’ll consider doing a Dinotopia curriculum theme. If you write me about your plans using your school stationery and include a self-addressed stamped envelope, I’ll be happy to send you a free list of suggested games and activities and a signed card to help you get the ball rolling.

James Gurney
Dinotopia School Event
PO Box 693
Rhinebeck, NY 12572

You can contact Dr. Jo at <doctorjoa@aol.com>

Small Touches

William Henry Hunt (1790-1864) painted this watercolor showing a girl plucking a chicken. Hunt (not to be confused with the PreRaphaelite William Holman Hunt) was known for closely observed studies using a stippling technique that took him over two weeks of patient effort.

Walter Sickert (1860-1942) said of Hunt:

“I was thinking how he had anticipated the Impressionist technique, in his multitude of small touches, building up a sensitive whole. I was thinking of this, and of Pissarro, and of how the extreme division into small touches in each case brought about this desirable result. The more touches, provided they are dictated by sensation and observation, the more frequent is the revision. Hence the juster sum.” (from A Free House).

The practice of working with small touches is certainly not restricted to Hunt or to the Impressionists. The greatest early champion was John Ruskin, whose writings were read avidly by many of the Impressionists. Ruskin advised his students to work slowly and delicately, using the point of the pencil or brush “as if you were drawing the down on a butterfly’s wing.”

This way of painting also shows up in some of Rockwell’s work, including this painting of J. F. Kennedy. In our own urgent era, which advocates bold and rapid execution, this method of small touches can offer a welcome alternative pathway.

The Ruskin quote is from The Elements of Drawing, Illustrated Edition, with notes by Bernard Dunstan, link.

More about W.H. Hunt, link.

Color Scripting

Picture books, like animated films, video games, or graphic novels, are sequential art forms. Each painting is part of a larger statement that unfolds across time.
In The World Beneath, the second Dinotopia book, I planned the sequences with a color marker storyboard, which I mentioned in a previous post. I also made a few pages of tiny oil sketches to establish the range of colors for each sequence. Each sketch is about the size of a postage stamp, and they’re juxtaposed so I can see how one color scheme will lead into the next.

In film, this kind of overall color planning is often called "color scripting."
I planned a few individual paintings more comprehensively, with color sketches about the size of a postcard. I mixed up a gamut of colors with a palette knife and laid them down quickly, almost abstractly, without thinking too much. This painting was intended to be a night scene lit by firelight with people and dinosaurs, but I wasn’t sure of the details.

Here’s another variation on the idea of an evening ceremony, this time with a skybax. This is one of many ideas that I explored in sketch stage that I later abandoned.

By this time I had established which of the paintings seemed worth working up to a larger size, and I developed those images a little more. These oil sketches are each about 1.5 x 4 inches. Juxtaposing the little sketches helped me to think of not only of the individual painting but also the adjacent sequences.
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Gallery of finished paintings from The World Beneath, link.

Scraper Sketch

A while ago I noticed this piece of heavy equipment sleeping on a job site and decided to sketch a picture of it. It’s a Caterpillar 637 elevating scraper.

For an oil study like this where I’m only interested in the object and not the surroundings, sometimes I start with a piece of masonite primed with white oil paint. A brush works as well as a pencil for laying in the shapes, and you can get to detailed rendering right away.

Here’s a video of one in action, link.

Realism and its Synonyms

We’re living in the midst of a resurgence of realism in painting. At the same time there’s a revolution in realistic CGI animation and digital effects. I thought it might be helpful to take a closer look at the various words that we use to describe art that looks real.

Trompe l'œil
Art whose purpose is to deceive the viewer into believing he or she is looking at an actual, dimensional scene. Above, museum diorama backdrop by James Perry Wilson.


Verisimilitude
The close resemblance between the object or scene and its portrayal. Also, illusionism. Above, detail by Ludwig Deutsch.


Realism
Art whose goal is to represent the real world truthfully and objectively, based on close observation of commonplace details and contemporary life. Above, portrait of a peasant by Ivan Kramskoy.

Naturalism
A movement in art to represent the world according to objective scientific principles.

Photorealism
The resemblance of a work of art to particular qualities of photographic representation. Above, a simulation from CryEngine 2.

Believability
The quality of conforming to the observer’s experience or understanding of the world.

Discussion
Versimilitude is the narrowest word, meaning simply holding a mirror up to reality. Trompe l'œil is a special kind of verisimilitude found in museum dioramas, sidewalk art, and still life. It always requires a specific viewing angle, size, position, and lighting to achieve its ideal effect.

Naturalism could be present in any kind of painting, including a fantasy image, but it depends on the adherance to rational rules of light and color found in nature, rather than contrived or artificial effects.

Photorealism, (used here in the broad sense, not just the art movement), refers to a kind of realism that borrows specific effects from photography, rather than simulating human perception. As blog reader Denis Loubet has pointed out on the recent GJ post on HDR photography, video games deliberately use photographic effects.

Believability is a subjective quality. A work is believable if it “feels right,” even if it’s not realistic in a photographic sense. The way cars explode in movies doesn’t happen that way in real life, but it’s more convincing than a film of the real event. Animators and caricaturists are primarily interested in this kind of non-literal truthfulness.

The word “realism” has the broadest, richest, and most contradictory meaning. Historically it includes Courbet and the Impressionists because of their insistence on painting the humdrum world around them. Ironically, despite their expressed intention to be scientific, the realism of the Impressionists departed more and more from verisimilitude and became increasingly subjective. The quality of realism that seeks out commonplace subjects lives on in contemporary paintings of telephone poles and fast food signs.

Central to the realist tradition is the reaction to Romanticism and Classicism and the resistance to schemata, conventionalism, and idealization. Instead, artists are encouraged to base their art on concrete, direct observations of the world around them.
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Sidewalk Illusion drawings, link.
Recommended reading: Realism by Linda Nochlin, link.
Lines and Colors post on sidewalk illusions, link.
CryEngine gallery of digital photorealistic effects, link.

Barocci’s Eight-Step Program

Old masters developed a thorough working method that helped them visualize scenes from history and mythology. Sixteenth century painter Federico Barocci (1528-1612) planned his paintings with a series of eight steps, according to his biographer, Bellori.

1. After deciding on his idea for a picture, Barocci made dozens of loose sketches to work out the gesture and arrangement of the figures.

2. He then made studies in charcoal or pastel from live models.

3. Next he sculpted miniature figurines in wax or clay, each draped in tiny costumes to see how they would look under various lighting arrangements.

4. He proceeded with a compositional study in gouache or oil, considering the overall pattern of light and shade.

5. With that completed he produced a full-size tonal study or “cartoon” in pastels or charcoal and powdered gesso.

6. He then transferred this drawing to the canvas.

7. But before proceeding with the painting he produced small oil studies to establish the color relationships “so that all the colours should be concordant and unified among themselves without hurting each other.”

8. Then he went ahead with the finished painting.

Barocci may have been more meticulous than some of his contemporaries, but his process was not unusual, and virtually every artist followed at least some of these steps. He was a big inspiration to Rubens and many others who followed after.

These basic steps have been followed all through the history of imaginative picturemaking, right down to William Bouguereau, Norman Rockwell, and Dean Cornwell.
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Wikipedia entry on Barocci, link.
Computer wallpaper, link.

Art By Committee: Goggles

Wednesday is the day for our group sketch game called "Art By Committee." I present an actual excerpt from a science fiction manuscript and you illustrate it.

This week’s challenge about goggles and a dust storm got you going in a lot of unexpected directions, with different concepts of character, story, and mood. Nice work, everybody. Click the images to enlarge, and follow the links to learn more about their creators.

Roberta Baird

Jared Shear

Meredith Randazzo

Scot Dean Vorwaller

Andy Wales

Tony Upton

Josh Billings

Christoffer Gertz Bech

Art Keegan

Michael Lobasz

Andrew Walker

Rob Hummer

Paul Bozzo

Susan Adsett

John Randall York

Anna Myers

And the one from the original sketchbook.

Here’s next week’s quote: “What surprised me was that I didn’t feel apotheosized, or transmogrified. Didn’t feel like much of a god. I was at the beginning of some process. Eons of further development lay before me, a…”

I hope you have fun with it. Please scale your JPG to around 700 pixels across and compress the heck out of it. 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 10:00 AM Eastern Time USA.

Impromptu Oil Portrait

Here’s a quick oil sketch of a guy I met at a friend’s house. It’s painted on an 11x14 inch piece of gray cardboard, which was first sealed with acrylic matte medium.

He was telling the story of one of his adventures so I knew he’d be there a while. I asked him to sit near a light and try to remember one position and return to it from time to time.

I’ve found most people are willing or even flattered to oblige such a request, and I cherish the resulting paintings far more than I would a study of a stranger from a sketch group.