Utopiales Poster, Part 1

I thought it might be fun to share a job-in-progress with you. So for the next few days, I invite you into my studio to see how a picture progresses from start to finish.

The Utopiales festival in Nantes, France, will take place Oct. 28 through Nov. 1, 2009. This year they invited me to contribute the artwork for the official poster.


Utopiales is one of the largest fantasy, comics, and science fiction festivals of Europe. The city of Nantes, where it is held each year, is the birthplace of Jules Verne. It’s also the home of the Royal de Luxe theater company (scroll down to the previous post).

So somehow the image has to weave together Jules Verne, giant mechanical creatures, and steampunk-flavored science fiction.

After a little Internet research I discovered that one of the famous places in Nantes is a town square called the Place Royale. I flashed on the idea of a huge insect aircraft departing from the town square. The scene could be set in the time of Jules Verne.

From these pencil thumbnails, I worked up three color sketches in oil and stuck them into the poster graphics from last year. From left to right, the titles are:
1. Arrivée Place Royale (Arrival at Royal Square)
2. Décollage nocturne (Nighttime Liftoff)
3. Départ pour Cigaleville (Departure for Cicadaville).

Tomorrow I'll let you know which one we chose and the next design steps.

Part 1: Initial Sketches
Part 2: Researching Insect Flight

Part 3: Maquette

Part 4: Lighting

Part 5: Pencil Drawing

Part 6: Washin

Part 7: The Painting

The Deep Sea Diver

Earlier this month, the gargantuan marionettes returned to Nantes in western France, this time with a deep sea diver (Le Scaphandrier) in search of his gigantic niece.


In the second half of this video you can see how the operators lunge off the moving platform to lift the legs for each step.

The spectacle was produced by the street theater company Royal de Luxe of Nantes, who brought us the Sultan’s Elephant.
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Image from Flickr user misterstf
Previous GurneyJourney post on the Sultan's Elephant, link.
Report on BoingBoing, link.
More Flickr images of the Giant Diver, link.
Wikipedia on Royal de Luxe, link.
Nantes municipal website with pictures and info, link.

Mystery Artist: Water Lilies

Can you name the artist who painted these water lilies? I'll send a deluxe Dinotopia map to the first person who guesses the correct answer.
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Addendum: Zelas correctly identified the Russian painter Isaac Levitan (1860-1900). The painting is 95cm x 128cm and was painted in 1895, before Claude Monet's famous water lily paintings.

More samples of Levitan at Athaeneum.org/Levitan and Wikipedia/Levitan

The Elgin Marbles and the Parthenon

Here’s the debate in a nutshell: the Parthenon is perhaps the most famous icon of Athens.

Between 1801 and 1812, during the Ottoman occupation of Greece, Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin removed many of the Parthenon’s sculptural elements and took them to London. The so-called Elgin marbles now reside in the British Museum.

Greece would like to have the Elgin marbles back, and has just opened the New Acropolis Museum in Athens to house them. The argument for returning them is more than simply an appeal to return art to its land of origin. As a single work of art, proponents, say, the Parthenon cannot be fully understood unless the pieces are seen together.

Why keep them in London? Some argue that their safekeeping in London has protected them from looting, weathering, and other damage that might have occurred in the intervening years. But the British Museum admits that they have suffered from the act of removal, from overzealous cleaning, and from the 19th century pollution of London.

It’s safe to assume that they would receive responsible curatorial care in either location today, and either way they would end up in a museum, not adorning the Parthenon itself. But museum officials are understandably reluctant to agree to all restitution claims, which would ultimately empty the museums.

What is your feeling on the issue? Where should the Elgin marbles live? Do they represent a different case than other works of art? Please vote in the poll at left and offer your thoughts in the comments.
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Wikipedia's gives the full story of their removal and both sides of the issue for repatriation, link.
NPR's radio coverage yesterday, link.
British Museum's official story and position, link.
New Acropolis Museum, link.
Issue blog "Elginism," with various angles on the story, link.
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Addendum: July 1: In the poll, 210 people voted on the question: "Should the Elgin Marbles Be Returned to Greece?" 47 (22%) voted to keep them in London; 150 (71%) wanted them to be returned to Greece; 13 (6%) voted for "no comment/other."

Church and the Mirror

I had supper last night with the great-granddaughter of Frederic Church at her home less than a mile from Olana. She said she found one of Church’s journals from his Near East expedition as she was exploring the attic a year or two ago.

“The reason I liked him,” she said, “is he seemed to have no fear.”


During his 1868 expedition to the lost city of Petra, she told me that Church was in mortal danger from the local Bedouin tribes, who had killed an artist in the region not long before. It was considered blasphemy to make graven images. But Church “hired a bunch of people to guide him. He payed them a great deal of money so they didn’t want to kill him.”

At one point the locals blocked his way and threatened his life. Church then asked to borrow a mirror, because “he realized a mirror was a sacred thing.” He took the mirror, and, while the Bedouins weren’t looking, he painted a crack on it. He then showed the cracked mirror to the angry men.

Then, announcing he would restore the mirror to its original condition, “he went behind the tent and erased the crack.” The men believed him to have divine powers, and they alllowed him to pass safely.

Blackfriar Pub

Here's a pencil sketch of The Black Friar Pub in London. What attracts me to a scene like this is the weird juxtaposition of elements. The wedge-shaped art nouveau landmark stands alone, surrounded with stark geometric postwar forms.

I used two grades of graphite pencils, an HB and a 3B. I sharpened the soft pencil into a chisel tip, which helped with the treatment of the window details..

Daguerre, Painter

Louis Daguerre is best known as one of the pioneers of photography, but he was first a painter.

In 1803 he became a pupil of Degotti, a scene painter for the Paris Opera, and soon began he working on panorama paintings. He created enormous realistic depictions of cities and historical scenes.

To add to the illusion of reality, Daguerre’s paintings were arranged in rotundas lit from above. In 1822 he invented the diorama, a form of scenic entertainment that combined the panorama with a “diaphanorama,” which used translucent oiled paper lit from the side in subtly changing vistas.

To audiences of his day, these spectacles must have held the same “gee-whiz” appeal of HDTV or 3D movies in our time.

Tor Gallery

Tor.com has just posted a set of my images in their web gallery. The TOR Gallery is a great place to survey what's going on in contemporary fantasy art. My pictures can be seen here, and all of these will be included in the upcoming book.

Rear View Tip

Here’s a handy way to get a fresh look at a painting. For just a few dollars at an auto part store you can get one of these stick-on convex mirrors.

They help you see your work in a new way because they both reverse and miniaturize your composition, making it immediately clear if you’re getting the Big Statement right.

Remember: objects in mirror are closer than they appear!

Related GJ post on getting a fresh eye and Lorrain mirrors.

Sal Westrich

Art students at Pratt Institute in New York will know Sal Westrich. He teaches history there during the school year and then spends the summers in southern France, enjoying the delights of tomates à la Provençale and salade niçoise. What could be a better life?