Pluto vs. Flypaper

Pluto's tussle with a piece of flypaper in the Disney short "Playful Pluto" was a breakthrough in the art of animation when it debuted in 1934.

Norm Ferguson did the animation. He used Pluto's predicament to explore extremes of squash, stretch, tension, and recoil.

The flypaper sticks to various parts of Pluto's body, and each time Ferguson extracts the maximum comedy from the situation.

What made the sequence so influential was not just the extreme action, but the pauses between, where Pluto seems to be thinking his way out of the problem. As a non-speaking character, his thought process had to be conveyed entirely physically. The flypaper scene defined Pluto's character and made him a star.


(Link to video) To watch just the flypaper sequence, skip ahead to 6:00 minutes in. It lasts a minute and a half.

Horses, Dinosaurs, and Turnip Carts

The draft horses at the farm have their full winter coats, and I'm hoping Lenny will be hitching them up soon to pull the sleigh. 

Watching the draft horses working in harness always impresses me.  The horses have to respond to so many voice commands. Each horse has to recognize whether Lenny is talking to both of them, or just one of them. And they have to know the commands for forward, back, stop, right, left, and step sideways right and step sideways left. 

The experience of seeing how a driver communicates with draft horses inspired me when I painted this image of a Triceratops pulling a turnip cart. You'll note that there are no reins; the driver (and Bix) are using voice signals entirely to communicate with the Triceratops. The painting originally appeared in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara and later in Imaginative Realism. 

You can own this original painting. It is currently available for sale at the Daniel Maghen Gallery in Paris.

Previous posts on GurneyJourney:
Spokewheeling (compositional principle using this painting)
Ground Driving (me walking behind two of the Belgians)

Thanks, Damian

Google Open Gallery

Google just announced a tool called Google Open Gallery to help artists showcase their work in online virtual exhibitions. 

To set up an exhibition, you upload high res images and explanatory captions. The interface allows viewers a variety of ways to look at your artwork, including scalable views and a clever compare-and-contrast feature.

Viewers can sort the work by medium, person, place, date, or other parameters. All the exhibitions seem to fit within a standardized graphic design format. 

The promo video suggests that the tool might be used not only by artists and photographers, but also by museum directors and collectors who want to share their holdings. Whether hackers can delve into the code to extract the high res files is a question that I would wonder about. 

Here's the Google Open Gallery website, and an article in the LA Times about it. Right now the ability to set up a virtual gallery requires an invitation, which you can sign up for.

Thanks, Bryn

Diorama background painter on N.P.R.

National Public Radio did a feature about the passing of Fred Scherer, one of the diorama background painters for the American Museum of Natural History, and an associate of James Perry Wilson.

NPR: In the Background: Art You May Never Notice (with lots of pictures of the dioramas)
Direct link to audio player

The creepy art of Zdzisław Beksiński

Painting by Zdzisław Beksiński

Polish-born painter Zdzisław Beksiński (1929-2005) once said, "I wish to paint in such a manner as if I were photographing dreams." Despite the fact that he was raised in the rubble of World War II, and suffered personal tragedies, such as the suicide of his son, he was said to be a pleasant and humorous man.

He didn't frequent museums, was too shy to attend his own gallery openings, and didn't take inspiration from movies. He said his inspiration came from classical music, which he always had playing when he worked. 

He didn't put titles on his paintings, because he didn't want them to be misinterpreted. Although most people find his work disturbing, he believed his work was optimistic or even humorous. Unfortunately he was savagely murdered in his old age.

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For more images, see Zdzisław Beksiński's terrifying visions of Hell.

Wikipedia on Zdzisław Beksiński 

Virtual gallery of his paintings
Online biography on Culture.pl 

via Lazer Horse

Lionfish winners lionized

The winners of GurneyJourney's "Lionfish Shampoo" contest were featured in the December issue of ImagineFX magazine.

Congratulations, Candice Broersma, Katie Small, and Michelle Spalding, and thanks to everyone who entered.

Previously on GurneyJourney: Lionfish Shampoo Contest announced.

and see the many excellent solutions in the post Lionfish Contest Results.

IFX review of dino art video

The December issue of ImagineFX magazine published the following review of my video "How I Paint Dinosaurs."

★★★★★ "The generosity so many leading fantasy artists show in sharing their techniques is one of the most gratifying rewards of being part of this great community. James Gurney is a shining example, using books, blog posts and YouTube to demonstrate his working methods, so the prospect of a long-form video from him is a welcome one.

"How I Paint Dinosaurs focuses on the technical side of his illustration work in favour of his Dinotopia franchise, as he films the making of two dinosaur paintings for the eminent magazine Scientific American. The brief demands that James's creative decisions, from the environment to the creatures' anatomy and poses, are consistent with the latest research, which is a worthwhile benchmark for anyone depicting the fantastic.

"The presentation takes its cues more from a TV documentary than conventional training videos, with high quality filming and editing. James presents his workflow for each piece, from creating thumbnails and building wire and clay maquettes, to building up the painting. Despite essentially going through the same workflow twice, he avoids repetition by lingering on different stages, so that the second run-through informs the first.

"You wouldn't expect a relatively brief presentation of an entire workflow to offer exceptional depth, and many of James's techniques will be familiar to anyone who's followed him online or in print. The real value of this video is the sense of inspiration you'll end up with, after seeing the meticulous lengths James takes to ensure his paintings have a rock-solid foundation of observation.

"How I Paint Dinosaurs is over too soon; you'll wish it was double the length. Given the price difference between the available formats, the $15 high-definition download is a bargain; the $32 DVD is a treat.

"Topics covered: dinosaur research, creating thumbnails, building a maquette, painting the maquette, line drawings, colour and texture. Length: 52 minutes. Rating ★★★★★"  —ImagineFX
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More info about the DVD
More info about the download (credit card) and download (via Paypal) buy  
ImagineFX is the leading magazine for concept art, paleoart, and imaginative realism, both digital and handmade.

Book Review: Anders Zorn: Sweden's Master Painter

The new book Anders Zorn: Sweden's Master Painter is a career survey catalog published to accompany the exhibition that's now in San Francisco.


I hesitated to buy it (upper left) because I already have other Zorn books, but I'm glad I did. It's got faithful reproductions, well-written essays, and quite a few images that haven't been published before.

The text is by four authors, all Zorn experts, including a biographical essay by Johan Cederlund, director of the Zorn Collections in Zorn's hometown of Mora, Sweden. They discuss his experiences in America, his nudes, his portraits, and his place in Swedish culture. There's not much coverage of his technical methods or specific insights from an artist's point of view, unfortunately.


I was glad to see many of Zorn's watercolors included. Zorn painted exclusively in watercolor early in his career, and switched mostly to oil later on. Zorn picked the most difficult subjects for his watercolors, such as boatmen in open water, or portraits of children from life.

In Zorn's etchings, figures emerge from an atmosphere of slashing parallel strokes. The etchings were my first introduction to his work when I saw an exhibition of them back in about 1977. The etchings are well represented both in the exhibition and the catalog, with a chapter by James Ganz "Etching in the City of Light: Anders Zorn Among the Post-Impressionists."

The book is hardbound, 9x12 inches, 224 pages, with many large reproductions, something many art book publishers neglect to offer.
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RESOURCES:
Book: Anders Zorn: Sweden's Master Painter

Website: Anders Zorn "Complete Works" (1860-1920)

Exhibition: at the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco until Feb 2, and will then travel to the National Academy in New York, opening at the end of February, 2014.

Linking Darks

It's a design strategy you've probably heard of before, but it bears repeating:

If you link together your little dark shapes into bigger units, you can simplify your value organization and give your composition more impact.

Stanhope Forbes The Seine Boat

This is not as easy as it sounds, and it takes deliberate effort to do it. Note how Forbes doesn't use too many values when rendering the dark garments and the net. By keeping them flat and nearly uniformly dark, they join together to frame the important light shapes.

Edward Simmons Old Woman Peeling an Orange

Simmons connects the woman's dark shawl to the door and the wall behind her, giving her head and hands more importance. I sometimes call this "shapewelding," and others have called it "notan" or "massing." It was an idea that was current in academic painting and illustration between about 1880 and 1920.

John Singer Sargent Padre Sebastiano

Sargent links the hat to the coat on the bed at left and the priest's shirt to the garments and other dark shapes behind him. He also unifies the white papers to the sheets on the bed. Then he takes it a step further and concentrates an oval of illumination in the center of the composition.

This concentration of light brings attention to his face, and raises our awareness that he is gazing out of a window behind us, where, judging from the plants on the desk, there must be a garden. These design choices give psychological power to the portrait: Am I reading into it, or does it make him seem embedded, ensconced in his cloistered cell, reflecting on his inner and outer life? Sargent didn't find this composition, he made it.

All of these paintings are nearly monochromatic; you could copy them with black, white, yellow ochre, and burnt sienna....Except for that wonderful little dash of blue in the Forbes.
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"Shapewelding" is one of the compositional devices mentioned in my book Imaginative Realism. If you order a copy from me today, you can get it signed and shipped tomorrow. It's also available unsigned at Amazon. 

Waterlogue App

Tomorrow a fun new app for the iPhone and iPad will be released called Waterlogue. The app interprets a photo to look like it was painted in watercolor.

The developers let me play with an advance version of it. I started by taking a photo of our teapot using our iPad. Then Waterlogue started dissecting the image in real time, searching out contours, dropping in blotches of color, and applying watercolor-like effects, such as a wet-into-wet color bloom. Like magic, and it's accurate with ellipses!

It goes beyond typical Photoshop watercolor filters because it has more visual intelligence, and more of the feel of the real paint. But of course you can still sense the photo behind it.


Here's one based on a photo of me sketching on the streets in Shanghai. The app gives you several different painting styles to choose from. My favorites were Natural, Luminous, and this one, Travelogue. Like a sketch, it leaves unpainted lines at the top, and little white dots in the darks.

The app was designed by John Balestrieri and Robert Clair, who are readers and commentators on this blog. Of course it's no threat to traditional artists (unless the art that someone does is little more than an app), and no substitute for actual sketching. To my mind, it's just a fun new way to think about image-making.

You can pick up a copy of the app when it's released tomorrow, or sign up today for a reminder at the Waterlogue website.