Fresco Botch Job

(Watch on YouTube) The botched restoration job on the Spanish fresco gets a review from Stephen Colbert.

Looking forward to IMC 2013

I'm pleased to announce that I'll be participating in Illustration Master Class again. IMC will take place June 10-16, 2013. I will be there for two days of the class. This is the week-long fantasy art workshop that happens every June on the Amherst College campus in Massachusetts.

I'll be joining the core faculty of Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, Rebecca Guay, Donato Giancola, Greg Manchess, Dan DosSantos, Scott Fischer, Irene Gallo and special guest Mike Mignola.

The 80-90 students come from all over the world, and with all levels of ability, but all come with a thirst for hard work and pushing the boundaries. I'll be lecturing, demoing, signing books, and circulating to see what people are doing. It's a great learning environment because it's task-based, so everyone is in the middle of creating a new image, including most of the instructors.

Be sure to sign up early, because the spaces fill quickly.
Illustration Master Class 2013

Satire on the side

Pier Francesco Mola (Italian, 1612-1666) drew these pen and ink caricatures of priests and clerics to amuse himself and his friends.


His unguarded satirical humor has a special edge, since Mola owed much of his success to important portrait commissions from members of the Church, including the pope.

From the exhibition: The McCrindle Gift: A Distinguished Collection of Drawings and Watercolors, at the National Gallery of Art, through November 25.

Mola on Wikipedia

Article on Vehicle Maquettes

The new edition of International Artist magazine, on the newsstands now, has a special article that I wrote about building materials for scratchbuilding vehicle maquettes.

I show several examples made from polymer clay (Sculpey), cardboard, and kitbashed plastic model parts.

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More kitbashed models by Juliano Redigolo

International Artist magazine

Caricaturing Conan

(Video link) In this video produced by the National Portrait Gallery, artist John Kascht shares the thinking behind his caricature of Conan O' Brien.

"I don't think about caricature as distortion. It's magnification. There's a big difference. It's precisely because I am going to amplify someone's features that I do care about clarity."

Thanks, Peaceartist.

Maquette Magic

(Video link) Here's a new video which features some of the original reference maquettes that I've built for Dinotopia. I shot them so that they line up with the final paintings.

Many of these maquettes—and the resulting paintings—can be seen in the Lyman Allyn Art Museum exhibition, which opens today in New London, Connecticut.

Photos of the maquettes also appear in the behind-the-scenes supplement that's part of the new edition of Dinotopia: The World Beneath, published this month by Dover/Calla.

The long pull-back shot was done with the motorized Lego dolly on an 8-foot run of PVC pipes.

I'll be at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum on October 13. The exhibition will continue through February 2, 2013. Preview more art from the show at the blogs Lines and Colors or Underpaintings.

You can order a signed copy of The World Beneath at jamesgurney.com
Previous book trailer about writing with dip pens.

Kids Riding Dinosaurs

In 1996, Storyworks magazine sponsored a national poster contest inviting school kids to portray an answer to the question "If the residents of Dinotopia came to your hometown, how would you welcome them?"

I selected the six winning posters out of hundreds that were submitted. The grand prize winners, it turned out, came from all across the USA.



The prize for each of the six winners was not only a signed book, but a chance to pose for a new Dinotopia painting. My original idea was to show the six kids riding around in a dinosaur version of a merry-go-round or carousel, maybe flying through the air with a blue sky background. That's my concept sketch above.

From the beginning, I knew that the logistics of transporting each of the winners and their parents to my studio would be impossible, so I would have to take the risk of working from reference that they provided.

I asked them to find a parent or helper to set them up with a "Dinotopian" costume and to take a few dozen photos, facing to the right, and not looking at the camera. The photos were even better than I expected, and the costumes and expressions were really fun to work from.


It dawned on me, though, that it made more sense to show them on real dinosaurs instead of on a carousel. So I switched the concept when I did the final painting, a large oil panorama.

• Read about the experience of Kathryn Noel of Utah, who appears on the left
• Some of the reference photos, as well as the final painting will be part of the Lyman Allyn Art Museum exhibition "Dinotopia: Art, Science, and Imagination" http://www.lymanallyn.org/exhibitions.htmlopening on September 22.
• More about the exhibition on the blogs Lines and Colors and Underpaintings

• The final painting appears in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara

• The art also appeared as an accordion-fold greeting card, but I'll show that in a future post.

Nina's Alaska Sketchbook

Earlier this year, Nina Khashchina read on this blog about a unique artist residency opportunity in the Alaskan wilderness.

Her application was accepted —Go Nina!— and she undertook the adventure earlier this month. She sketched from sea kayaks, hiked on remote trails, and braved hungry mosquitoes and pounding rain for rapturous visual encounters with bears, salmon, and wild forests.

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Nina Khashchina's Alaska sketchbook on Flickr

Voice of the Wilderness opportunity -- Nine days in Alaska

Plein Air Painter Brian Stewart

(Video link) Brian Stewart of Minnesota left a career in advertising to focus on plein-air painting and guitar playing. The short video is by Steve Niedorf, part of a series he's doing called "By Hand," about people who do things with their hands.

Via, PleinAir magazine
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If you live in Georgia, I'll be speaking at SCAD Atlanta today (Thursday, 9-20). The illustrated talk is at 11am, Event Space 4-C

Lectures in Atlanta

If you live near Atlanta, Georgia, please come to my free lecture and demo today at Kennesaw State University at 1:00. And tomorrow I'll be at SCAD Atlanta.