Saturday, July 2, 2011

Day 1: Colored Light Workshop

We had a busy Day 1 on our three-day "Painting in Colored Light" workshop at Garin Baker's Carriage House Art Studios in Newburgh, New York.

 
The 17 participants arrived from as far away as Germany. There are six people from Canada, some of whom are professional storyboard artists who want to develop their painting and color skills. Steve, a frequent commentator on this blog, came all the way from Michigan, and Bill drove over in a semi tractor trailer from Fargo, North Dakota.

I started by covering some of the key topics in a slide show.



 And then I did an oil demo, painting a white plaster head lit by colored light sources. Here are two studies of Abe that I had done the day before.


The weather was perfect. Garin and Clara provided a lunch of salad and sandwiches, which we ate on the lawn outside the old stone house, accompanied by lots of art talk.

 
Then everyone spent the whole afternoon painting from the casts: observing the colors, mixing pools of the main colors with a palette knife, painting, and refining. In the evening we had a model in for another informal painting session.

All the effects of colored light are easiest to see on the white plaster form. Today we'll be applying that experience to working from the nude and costumed model.

Garin's Art Blog
More about the Workshop
Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Sounds like a lot of fun! Hope that we'll get to see some of the end results! :)

armandcabrera said...

Jim,

Great stuff. Do you have a set palette or does it change depending on the piece you want to do?

James Gurney said...

Rebecca, thanks, I'll show some photos of the rest of the class.

Armand, I use a basic group of about 10 tube colors and then mix pools of the predominant colors using a palette knife. Then I try to pull from those pools color for most of my mixtures, and freemix the rest.

Andrés Carrandi said...

Sounds great. I wish I had a little artistic talent and attended one of your classes!

Sir, I was delighted to see your interview in the Fantasy Art essentials magazine, in fact, *that* made me buy the magazine. It's always great to see your art. Admittedly, I've not followed your blog closely for the past few weeks, so I don't know if you mentioned it here, if so, I'm sorry, but still wanted to comment about it.

I have to ask: are you really working in the next Dinotopia book, or was it some quote from before Journey to Chandara?

All the best!

James Gurney said...

Andres, no problem, and I haven't talked about everything I'm working on. But sorry to disappoint you: I'm not working on another Dinotopia book right now. Haven't ruled it out, but I've just been busy with other projects.

I've been working on a bunch of things: writing articles and introductions, freelance illustration, and three other big book projects in various stages of development.

One thing I can mention---there will be a rereleased edition of the first Dinotopia book from Dover this fall with a new "making-of" section added at the back.

Andrés Carrandi said...

Great to know about it! Thanks for the reply!