How should you paint a maquette?

How should a reference maquette be painted? Here are four options to consider:

The first option is to paint it white, or leave it white, as in the case of this maquette bust of Dinotopia's Arthur Denison, which I sculpted out of Sculpey polymer clay. White is best if you're using it for direct observation, because you can really see the subtle plane changes and the effects of reflected light. 

Gray is the best color for photographing because it tends to stay within the range of the camera's sensor against normal backgrounds. White objects often exceed the sensor's range, leading to clipping. I generally use a matte gray spray primer because it's fast and gets into all the small cracks.

If your maquette has a variety of surfaces and textures, you can paint the maquette to look as real as possible. When you photograph or observe the polychromed surface, a lot of subtle color interactions become apparent. 

This maquette of Waterfall City is made from cardboard, styrofoam, modeling paste and two-part epoxy sculpting compound for the sculptural details. I used acrylic paint for most of it, and metallic enamel for the dome. 

For this one, I just used two colors of acrylic, tan and gray, with the gray stippled on with a big brush. It's made from foam-core board, cardboard, styrofoam eggs, modeling paste, gesso, and two colors of acrylic.

The silver Christmas tree ball provides a record of the entire surrounding light environment, a trick I learned from the world of visual effects, where they always shoot a mirror ball and a gray ball in principle photography to record the lighting information for the digital team in post-production. You need this lighting information to really understand the combined effects of various light sources on any given object in the scene.
------
The original archway maquette, along with the Arthur Denison and Lee Crabb sculpts are on view at "The Art of James Gurney is an exhibition of about 25 original paintings on the UARTS campus in Philadelphia, through November 16.
Dinotopia: The World Beneath from Amazon

Sea Monster, Part 3

Even though this illustration of a mosasaur had only about a six-day time window from start to finish, I spent the first two days making quick reference maquettes to help visualize the creatures in three dimensions. That investment of time made the final painting go much faster.

On the far left is an aluminum wire armature on a threaded bolt. The bolt is screwed into a pine base and bent to the side. The wire armature, loose as it is, fits within the measurements of the adjacent line drawing. It’s smeared with two-part quick-dry epoxy to hold it together.

To the right is the finished Sculpey maquette, painted with acrylic. The streams of water are represented by strips of flexible packaging foam hot glued to the fins.


I tried photographing the maquette in a variety of natural lighting conditions. Real outdoor light is almost always better than artificial illumination. The maquette is held in position on a C-stand, while I hold a white backdrop behind it. The digital SLR camera is mounted on a tripod, set for a small aperture to get maximum depth of field.


I also made a 2D-3D maquette of the Pteranodons, which made the foreshortening a lot easier to imagine. A little maquette like this, since it has bones made of aluminum wire, can be reused and repositioned many times for future illustrations.

------
Sea Monster, Part 2
Sea Monster, Part 1
2D to 3D Maquette on GJ

Utopiales Poster, Part 3: Maquette

When it comes to building a maquette, there’s always a little voice inside me that says, “You can skip this step. You’ve got a good enough idea where you’re going. You can pull it off.”

Sometimes I struggle to overcome that voice, especially with a pressing deadline. But I once I start sculpting, I always have fun, and later I’m always glad I did it. In the end it saves time and yields better results.

For this “Lepidopter” maquette (thanks for the name, Sean and Moai!) I had to decide between glue gun-and-cardboard or sculpted polymer clay. The former would have given it a more flat geometric look, but I wanted to get that organic insect look.

Here’s the armature, twisted together out of thin aluminum wire. It doesn’t look like anything yet, but actually all the lengths are carefully measured against the elevation drawing I showed you at the end of yesterday’s post.


Those four loops will hold the wings and allow them to be poseable. I start blobbing on regular white Sculpey until I bulk out the body.

As I get to the outer layer and the thin parts, like the tail and the legs, I switch to Effect Fimo. When this special kind of polymer clay cures, it become slightly translucent and flexible, about as flexible as a fingernail. That way a delicate part won’t break if you drop the thing (which I do often).

The window details are built up with little slivers of Fimo, using a toothpick and an Xacto knife as sculpting tools. The maquette is only detailed on the side I’ll see; the far side is not finished at all. I cured the fuselage in the oven before painting and assembling the wings.

Then I drew the wings on tracing paper and made two sets Xerox copies, forward and reversed, on card stock. I used a waxer on both sides and laminated the layers together so that the veining pattern lined up. With the intermediate layer of beeswax between the card stock sandwich, the wing will hold any airfoil camber.

Then I epoxied the wings onto the wing struts and painted the fuselage with craft acrylics—the cheap liquid kind you get at the big box craft stores. I actually like the opacity and flow of this stuff more than artist acrylics.

Here it is. The wings look too much like an actual butterfly right now, but I’ll change them a little to look like they were fabricated by the same mind that built the rest of the aircraft.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about lighting and photographing the maquette.

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

Interview about Science-Based Art

SciArt in America, a free online publication dedicated to science-based art, interviewed me recently, and they published the interview yesterday.

Here's an excerpt:

Raphael Rosen of SA: I know you primarily through Dinotopia, but I read that you used to illustrate scenes from ancient civilizations. How does illustrating archaeological scenes differ from paleontological subjects, if at all? Which one do you prefer?

Yes, I worked for National Geographic as an archaeologist-illustrator, and they sent me on assignment to Jordan, Italy, and Israel. These were dream jobs for me because I was an archaeology major in college. Archaeological and paleontological illustration are very similar in the way they develop from research to thumbnails to line drawings, to finished paintings, with consultants involved at every stage.

Captured Moche prisoners, illustration for National Geographic, oil

SA: What is your favorite medium, and why?

I can’t pick a favorite any more than I could choose a banana over an apple. Lately I’ve been concentrating on gouache, watercolor, oil, and casein. Switching between transparent and opaque media requires changing over to a very different mindset. Leaving the white of the paper in transparent watercolor takes considerable advance planning, the ability to visualize the finished effect from the start. As with all physical media, there is a sense of commitment and risk that I really enjoy, particularly when painting from life.


SA: In one of your YouTube videos, you state that you "come from a long line of mechanical engineers." Do you feel that that background has influenced your illustrations? If so, how?

Yes, because engineers use drawings to plan things they want to build. When I was developing Dinotopia, I wanted to include a lot of cutaways and machine diagrams. When I paint a flying machine or a steam powered walking machine, I imagine its entire walk cycle, and I try to figure out its working parts. A lot of the vehicles from Dinotopia are based on kit-bashed plastic models.


SA: In that same video, you state that your father used to say that, "If you can draw it, you can create it." Can you explain what he meant, and whether that saying has affected your artworks?
Most of my paintings try to make the impossible look inevitable. I like to think beyond a single work of art and imagine things from many angles, or imagine how they would look in a thousand years. What would happen if an object were picked up by an alien culture and used in a different way? Such leaps of imagination are what an engineer is doing all the time, and most science fiction people aren’t too far removed from that kind of thinking.


SA: I'm stunned by the detail and care you put into your maquettes. How would you explain to someone who knew noting about your work why you create them?

Inventing shapes and forms without using a maquette is not too hard, but where a maquette really makes a contribution is in allowing me to try out different lighting ideas. Good lighting is the key to believability. It’s rare for someone imagining poses to think of foreshortened forms, strange overlaps, and unexpected cast shadows.


SA: How do you make your maquettes? What are the materials? How long does the process take?

For dinosaurs and other prehistoric fauna, I make a small maquette, using Sculpey, an oven-hardening clay. I shape it over an aluminum wire armature, matching to a scale pencil drawing. After the maquette is cured, I paint it in acrylic and often glue feathers or other textures onto it. For a mosasaur leaping into the air, for example, I glued some strips of flexible packing foam to simulate water foam. I photograph the maquette in outdoor light using a single lens reflex camera on a tripod. This process allows me to experiment with a variety of lighting ideas and choose between front-lighting or back-lighting.


SA: I'm a great fan of fantasy illustrators, including Wayne Douglas Barlowe, who can depict alternative worlds in great detail. Can you tell me the challenges involved in this task, and how it differs from painting, say, a still life?

Wayne Barlowe was a big inspiration, and his parents, as well, who did illustrations for the Golden Guides of natural history. Any kind of imaginative realism: paleoart, concept art, wildlife art, or historical painting is totally different from a still life because you start with a hazy mental image and you have to provide the convincing details in stages.

I’m thoroughly old-school. I start with small thumbnail sketches in pencil or watercolor. If it’s an architectural subject or a dinosaur, I’ll build a maquette out of any material at hand.


If necessary I enlist models to pose in costume, usually friends or neighbors. I either take photos or draw tone paper sketches of the models. I have a large mirror mounted in the studio and often do action studies of myself posing in costume to get the basic pose. I also have a scrap file of color magazine photos that I use for texture and form ideas. If the painting requires scientific or historical accuracy, I consult with experts at every stage of the process and incorporate their suggestions.

After all these studies, I work up the line drawing—and sometimes a full charcoal drawing—and finally begin the final painting. People can follow the process in my videos “How I Paint Dinosaurs” or “Tyrannosaur: Behind the Art.”


SA: Do you feel that illustrators who focus on science topics, including paleontology, have an impact on their respective fields? If so, how, exactly?

I don’t know. I suppose you’d have to talk to scientists in those fields. But perhaps it’s fair to repeat the old saying that paleontological illustrators and moviemakers are the eyes of paleontology. New discoveries and new theories take on a physical, concrete presence when they are visualized well. And if they’re not visualized well, old, incorrect stereotypes can be reinforced.

I come from a Renaissance mindset where science and art are very closely allied. At its most interesting hypothetical core, science is a powerfully imaginative discipline, where the ability to visualize and to draw connections between disparate elements allows for great leaps forward. A similar kind of imagination, informed by fact, and tempered by skepticism, makes for memorable art.


SA: How closely do you work with paleontologists, and have your drawings ever changed how they thought about fossils and ancient life?
I’ve worked with many different paleontologists while working on science articles for Discover, National Geographic, National Wildlife, and Scientific American.

For each project like that, we typically work with just one expert, so that we don’t run into the need to adjudicate conflicting theories. My job for such a publication is to try to give visual form to their ideas. In the case of the “World of Dinosaurs” postage stamps for the US Postal Service, I worked with five different experts, each in a different field of study, because we had to look after a variety of fauna and flora. For the Australian stamps (“Australia’s Age of Dinosaurs,”) we had a principal consultant, Tom Rich, who introduced me to several of his colleagues, and each expert helped with specific questions.

SA: Can you tell me a little about how clients find you for their dinosaur-related projects?

Some opportunities have come from visiting scientists in museums or conventions. Other times I’ve gotten jobs as a result of sending samples to art directors. In the age of the Internet, I suppose art buyers find out about my work from my blog, my website, or my videos.


SA: Are there concerns or challenges particular to creating images for stamps?

Yes, definitely. Recently, Australia Post commissioned me to design a set of postage stamps showing six prehistoric animals in a panoramic landscape. The project took several months and required a lot of work behind the scenes. The research stage was especially important since Australian dinosaurs are known only from fragmentary fossils, most of them recently discovered. Some of the dinosaurs would have to be reconstructed from single bones, so a good deal of extrapolation would be required.

Before I went too far with sketches, I traveled to Melbourne to meet with the museum specialists. I spent more than a week studying the collection of the Museum Victoria under Tom Rich’s guidance. We looked at the bones not only of the dinosaurs, but also the large amphibian Koolasuchus and various insects and small mammals that lived alongside them.

I also visited the Royal Botanical Gardens and some forest parks near Melbourne to sketch the growth habits of plants that were analogous to those of the middle Cretaceous. During this period, southern Australia was just beginning to detach from Antarctica and it was still a polar climate.

Like the “World of Dinosaurs” stamps I did for the US Postal Service, this was a larger panorama with stamp subjects inside it. One of the challenges of this kind of layout is that each stamp has to make sense by itself when it is detached, but it also has to work in the context of the larger scene. The design also presents a challenge of relative size. Since dinosaurs came in greatly varying sizes, the larger dinosaurs had to be pushed farther back in depth in order to be able to fit into the stamp grid.

I also had to be aware of fixed requirements of the stamp design. Each stamp needed to include the word “AUSTRALIA,” plus the denomination and the name of the animal. In those areas there couldn’t be any dark shapes or busy detail.

Furthermore, the outer areas of each stamp had to be kept light in value and warm in color so that the helicon areas would read. Helicon is a security feature consisting of a phosphor material printed on the front of stamps which helps automated machines identify the presence of a stamp. I learned about the helicon requirement after doing the comprehensive sketch, so I had to do away with the dark values between Qantassaurus and Australovenator.


SA: Do you have any advice for aspiring illustrators who might want to specialize in a field related to science?

It’s important to be able to read the scientific papers yourself, and not to have to rely on someone to interpret them for you. Sketch constantly. Be alert to living analogues as inspiration, and watch a lot of wildlife videos. Paint outdoors. It’s the only way to understand lighting and color. Think about behavior at least as much as morphology.


SA: I also have one more, wide-ranging question: what are your thoughts about the relationship of science and art? Can one inform the other?

Painting a dinosaur is a lot like finding a fossil in the ground. You pick up broken fragments out of the dust. You fit them together and fill in the missing pieces as well as you can. Somehow, out of the decay of deep time, an image begins to form. Something long dead lives again. The bone grows flesh and skin and a living creature steps from the shadow into the light, and we can almost feel its hot breath on our necks.

Dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures live in the boundary zone between imagination and reality. After a picture leaves my easel, it begins its journey to the printed page. It will be published alongside the scientist’s article, and will reach potentially millions of people, and shape the way they imagine a world that they will never see with their own eyes.

My step in the process is to try to try to take a snapshot of world that we know once existed, but that no one has ever seen. This is why I love painting dinosaurs. It puts me on the knife edge between knowledge and imagination.
----
Read the full interview at SciArt in America

How Do I Make a Posable Maquette?

Robert Post asks: "James, I need to build a maquette that is flexible to pose as a model for paintings. What material do you recommend? "

Robert, it depends how much flexibility you want. If you just need your maquette to flex a little, there's a kind of flexible Sculpey that bends a bit after curing.

If you really need a model that you can pose, you can use the build-up technique, using soft foam and latex, as shown in the video above.

The easiest way to make a skeleton is to use an aluminum armature, and you can bulk out the forms with foam, as with the simple robot maquette above.

That's more or less how I made the poseable skybax maquette (right).

Or if you want an exact shape with a smooth outer surface, you can sculpt, mold, and cast latex or silicon, but those processes are a lot more involved. Stop Mo Nick has some pretty good videos on this.

Bill Wiist asks: I am planning to build posable human maquettes. Have you done a blog on articulation, best materials to use, etc.

Bill, I haven't done a blog post about articulated joints yet. The simplest solution is to build your person or creature over an existing action figure by grinding away material and then adding what you want to add with Magic Sculpt.

If you want to build a posable figure from scratch, you can get a metal stop-motion armature or use the cheaper one made of plastic called a Modibot. (above, right)


Finally, the small artist manikins have gotten a lot better since the old "jointed wooden doll" era. For example, the Color LILIJ male and female manikins shown at right are quite realistic, and not as expensive as they used to be.

From Niagara Falls to Waterfall City

A few days ago, in a previous post, I shared some of the preliminary sketches for the establishing shots of Waterfall City (below).

Waterfall City (1988), and Waterfall City: Afternoon Light (2002)

But there's only so much I can do from my imagination alone. To go beyond that, I have to "fill the bucket," which is what I call the process of gathering reference. One key step was painting at Niagara Falls.

I set up my painting gear on Goat Island with a bunch of kids watching. The studies help me understand how the water should look, something that's hard to get from photos. 

The following clip is from a documentary I produced about the making of Dinotopia. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by James Gurney (@jamesgurneyart)

Here's the full production if you haven't seen it. 

I also built maquettes. Below is a schematic maquette made out of styrofoam, cardboard, and a wood ball spray painted with gray primer. It helped me as a designer to keep Waterfall City visually consistent when it appears in various angles.

In a schematic maquette, you don’t have to sculpt every single building, just a few characteristic geometric forms. By looking at photos of those representative forms as you do your drawing, you can add details and multiply them into the full city.

The real benefit of such a schematic maquette is that you can swing it around at any angle and see how the light plays on it. This kind of model is a great help for entertainment designers or sequential artists who need to imagine a complex form consistently from a variety of angles.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by James Gurney (@jamesgurneyart)

I also built a more detailed maquette. This maquette is made from cardboard, styrofoam, and epoxy putty. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by James Gurney (@jamesgurneyart)

 It helped me imagine perspective and lighting on this near corner of Waterfall City, which appeared from many angles in The World Beneath and Journey to Chandara.

After studying the maquettes, I draw a tone paper study and do a small oil sketch to solidify my vision of how the city will look veiled in mist.

Dinotopia: The World Beneath

 

Titanoboa, Part 2

The next step in the painting of the giant fossil snake was to make a maquette of the snake and the croc out of Sculpey, painted in acrylic. It only took a few hours to do this rough model, but without this step I never would have understood how the forms needed to wrap around each other.

I set up the maquette in a tiny diorama, with a rock and some sticks that I found in the backyard.

The wrestling reptiles are sitting half submerged in a take-out food container which I painted black inside and filled with muddy water. The background is a piece of mat board.

I lit the maquette with a theater spotlight and shot it with a Canon Digital Rebel single lens reflex camera and printed out several variations.

With that information, combined with many photographs of living snakes, I proceeded with the final pencil drawing and then the painting. For more info on this procedure, check out these earlier posts “Technique Nuts and Bolts” “Utopiales Line Drawing.”

Here’s the painting in progress. The pencil drawing shows through in the lower area.

And the final painting, 14 x 19 inches, finished five days after starting the maquette. By contrast to the Cumberland painting, this painting went together pretty briskly. Inset in the painting is the page layout as it will appear in the October issue of Ranger Rick magazine.

I find that the greatest value of the maquette in a case like this is in providing little accidents of cast shadows, like the hand of the dying croc on the snake’s neck, and the tail’s shadow crossing the snake's body farther down. It also helped in the placement of the highlights, something that can be tricky to guess at on an organic form.

Those little unexpected nuances are almost impossible (for me) to invent out of pure imagination but they give the ring of truth that I believe is vital in a piece like this.

Painting Patagotitan

Patagotitan, oil on board, 10x13”. Maquette is epoxy clay. 

This sauropod is called Patagotitan, one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered. When I make a maquette I want to control the overall size and the relative proportions of the sculpt. 

To do that, I use a photocopier to enlarge the scientist’s skeleton drawing to the actual size I want to make the maquette. 

I take the maquette (with additional maquettes by David Krentz) outdoors and photograph them in actual sunlight. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by James Gurney (@jamesgurneyart)  

The relative scale and quality of light and shadows will look right regardless of the size of the object. I move the little dinosaurs around like chess pieces on the rough piece of rock, which looks like the bank of a little pond at the edge of the forest.

---

Watch the full video on YouTube

See the article in Ranger Rick Magazine

Amazon links: Model Magic, Magic Sculpt, acrylic.

Palace in the Clouds Maquette

Here's a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the maquette from the painting of the mountain citadel yesterday.

The maquette is made from mat board and foam core board for the buildings. The mountain landforms are made from plaster-impregnated burlap draped over chunks of styrofoam. The maquette has been exhibited in several museum exhibitions such as the Smithsonian and the Norton Museum of Art.

--

More about reference maquettes in my book Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist

Creating a Maquette to Visualize Borealopelta

Having an actual three dimensional maquette, even if it’s crudely sculpted, allows me to determine viewpoint angles, foreshortening, cast shadows, and highlights—all of which can be difficult to imagine without references. 

I use a hot glue gun to piece together a cardboard base for the maquette, then surface it with Model Magic, a children’s air-dry modeling material. I add the spikes later with a two-part epoxy modeling compound called Magic Sculpt. Then I paint the maquette with acrylic so that it looks more real when I photograph it outside in the sun. 

Here's a video of the process for this painting.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by James Gurney (@jamesgurneyart)

Link to Instagram 

Link to full YouTube video

Ranger Rick website