The Artistic Revival of Austin Briggs, Part 1

One of the most inspiring stories of a mid-career revival came from the mid-20th century illustrator Austin Briggs (1908-1973), who told how he rediscovered painting from nature:

"Some years ago," he says, "I became very discouraged with my work. I was studying the work of other illustrators, which, in the beginning, was very helpful."

"But my own work had no individuality. Every few months as I became aware of a new illustrator's work, my style changed and not one of my pictures looked as though it was painted by me — especially the backgrounds and the landscapes. What had happened was that my ability to observe and learn from nature was dying from disuse."

"Finally it dawned on me that I should get away from the influence of other artists and work directly from nature to develop my own personal reaction to the visual world. Having decided this, I took an immediate vacation and went to the Gaspé Peninsula in Canada for four months. There I sketched any and everything — from nature."

"During my vacation on the Gaspé Peninsula, I did this painting of sailboats. While painting many pictures like this, I began to experience a very personal reaction to forms and the play of light on them. In fact, I became so interested in landscapes that they became, and still are, an integral part of my work, almost a trade mark you might say."

"Here is another landscape done after returning from the Gaspé Peninsula. By now I knew that the points of view borrowed from other artists were not suited to my temperament. Indeed they were damaging and antagonistic."

"As you can see, in this landscape I began to realize a positive and individual reaction to nature."
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Tomorrow: Part 2: What happened next.
Quoted from Famous Artists Course (1954 Edition) Lesson 16.
Austin Briggs Flickr set by Leif Peng
Briggs Flickr collection by Matt Dicke

Your Gas Station Paintings

We had a tremendous response to the Gas Station Challenge. I put out a call a few weeks ago for you to paint a gas station on location in black and white gouache. One of the reasons I suggested that subject was because I figured no one would have any such painting already completed.

Thanks to everyone who took part. You braved biting flies, extreme heat, rain, and station owners who were suspicious or who thought you were crazy. Some of you painted outdoors for the first time, or painted in gouache for the first time. And there were some old pros stepping up to the plate. 

It was really hard to pick the winners, but here 'goes.

Grand Prize

The Grand Prize Winner is Randy Raak's painting of the "Dino Mart" in Golden, Colorado. I would have loved this one even without the dinosaur because it captures such a sense of place, with the new retail construction on the hills above the station. The perspective is really good, and the values are carefully observed. Translating bright colors into gray tones is a challenge. 

Randy says "The painting is 9" x 11" on 140# rough watercolor paper, completed 100% on location during five, two hour sessions."

 3 Honorable Mention Winners

Olivier Martin is one of three Honorable Mentions for this interesting study of a Parisian gas station. 

He had a lot of complicated forms and lettering to sort out, and he did so with real affection for the detail.

He said that it was hard to find a quiet place to paint in Paris, and that his position was a "little bit strange for people who pass on the street, but next to this tree I was in calm."

The second Honorable Mention goes to Eelis Kyttänen for his boat fueling station. He picked an unusual subject and viewpoint. He carefully observed the values of the shadow side of the building, which makes the lighting very convincing.

Here he is showing the painting from the bridge where he painted it.

But just to show that not all paintings have to be highly detailed, I'm giving the third Honorable Mention to Dave Lebow for this pump study (below). I like the way he described the curving forms of the modern pump catching the shimmery hot light from the surrounding environment. 

This is a good example of the selectivity you can get with gouache. He focused on the pump, and did some of his drawing over the opaque paint. He softened the edges of the distant buildings and trees. It's an artistic effect without calling attention to itself.

Soft edges take conscious effort in gouache, especially if you use full opaques in the hot sun. I also like the way he included a vehicle, knowing how briefly they stay next to pumps.

Pictures of Merit

Braelyn Snow did this study of a single pump. She chose to remove it from the surroundings so that she could spend her time focusing on the variety of surface textures, including the reflection of the hose on the chrome side.

She says, "While I was working at the vacant Apple Pie Inn, a van drove up beside me and the driver asked what I was doing. When I told her, she told me she was the owner and had been worried I was up to something suspicious. Apparently the other two pumps had been stolen. After I assured her I would not steal the pump, only paint it, she gave her blessing and drove away. This is why I like to call ahead when I know who to ask!"

Daniel New also chose to concentrate on a single pump. That way he could describe the decaying plastic covering the advertising sign, the bent metal pieces, and the eroded stickers.

In the part-way finished painting, you can see how he built a lot of those details over flat base tones. 

I was surprised how many of you painted from your cars, but judging from the droplets on the window, this was a rainy day.

Jared Cullum captured the full scene with all its detail: the signs, the plantings, and even the cars. The result gives a strong feeling of being there. 

He deserves special commendation for doing the painting while babysitting and adapting the stroller into an easel.

Matt Sterbenz painted this night scene. I find this study moody and compelling, with the solid black night sky on the right, and the glow of light under the canopy raising the values of all the darks. It feels like a weird space station, and it would be fun to go back there with full color.

Like a spy, Matt dresses in black and works from his car in a super portable setup. He's kind of a night-painting ninja who might strike anywhere anytime!

Evidently, Larry Kitchen has a lot of experience with gouache. He lays down those lines very professionally and gets the perspective right. 

Larry says, "There really is something great about going out on a cool summer morning to catch a scene."

This painting by Nicholas Elias picks up on the weird forms of the superstructure above the pump, with all those fire prevention nozzles. 

And it looks like he's got a cool palette rig to hold the sketchbook vertically.

Finally, Jeff Simutis, an experienced architectural painter, painted this old gas station. Nice relaxed handling throughout, with a lot of affection for that false front.

Jeff is using a gray scale called Rankin's Perception Kit that helps in judging values.

Thanks again to everyone for taking on the challenge. There are a lot more entries, and you can see them all at the Facebook event page. I'll be contacting Randy, Olivier, Eelis, and Dave about getting their "Department of Art" prize patches. 

By the way, does it work for everyone to upload your entries directly to a Facebook event page? That would save me a lot of work and make these more do-able for the future.

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Original contest announcement

Tip: Keep Gouache Fresh in Jars

Tip: Tubes of gouache stay fresh if you keep them sealed in big glass jars.
When you're in the field and you don't want to take glass, you can use those resealable faux-Tupperware containers , which are unbreakable, airtight, and they protect the paints from being crushed in your kit.
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Previously: Keeping Watercolors in Jars
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Own the 72-minute feature "Gouache in the Wild"
• HD MP4 Download at Gumroad $14.95
• or HD MP4 Download at Sellfy (for Paypal customers) $14.95
• DVD at Purchase at Kunaki.com (Region 1 encoded NTSC video) $24.50

Gas Station in Gouache Contest Deadline Tonight

Gouache billboard art from Charlie Allen's blog.

Today at midnight is the deadline for the "Gas Station in Black-and-White Gouache" assignment. I've been posting the entries so far on a Facebook event page, so you can see and comment on what everybody has been doing, all around the world. I'll add the rest of the entries by tomorrow morning.
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Gas Station Contest Announcement

Proposed Copyright Law Explained

Illustrator and artists'-rights activist Brad Holland explains the details of the proposed new copyright law. According to Holland, if this is passed, it would undermine the rights of artists in the age of the internet (link to YouTube video).

Here's a written article about the same topic by Brad Holland
Submit your letter here.
Sample letters.
Thanks, Will Terry, Bryn Barnard, and everyone else who mentioned this

The Artistry of Chuck Jones

(Link to YouTube) Film editor Tony Zhou presents this concise summary of what makes the cartoons of Chuck Jones so memorable. Jones developed from a good director to a great one by refining perfectly timed gags driven by memorable characters.

Animation is a medium of movement, and the characters' movements were always original and understated, based on observations of real life.
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The YouTube channel Every Frame a Painting analyzes the techniques of great filmmakers. Check out the episodes on Akira Kurosawa and Jackie Chan.
The book Chuck Amuck:  The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist, written by Jones himself, is a good source for his thinking.

Experiments with a Limited Palette

You can make a limited palette out of almost any two colors, as long as one is cool and the other is warm.

Catskill Roadhouse

For this painting I used ultramarine blue and cadmium red scarlet, together with white. It's basically red, white and blue, so you can call it the "American palette." 

Here's a video showing how the painting developed (Link to YouTube video):

With two colors that are near complements, it's fun to work over a surface primed with a color from the far side of the spectrum. I'm using blue and red over yellow. The yellow is about 95% covered up, but where it peeks through, it energizes the color scheme like a pinch of spice.

You might try orange + violet + white over a cyan underpainting, or yellow + cyan + white over magenta. You can also introduce black, either as an accent if you want to deepen the darks, or if you want to use it as a color of its own (such as black + orange + white over blue). 

A two-color-plus-white palette has some advantages:

1. It's extremely fast to set it up and get it running. (I was painting while Jeanette was still fooling with her umbrella.)

2. It's good for beginners because it reduces your choices to light or dark and warm or cool.

3. It puts you into realms of color that you would never think of if you had all the color choices available.

I was using casein, but this method would work for any opaque paint: gouache, acrylic, or oil. If you're doing the painting in gouache, the priming should be done with a paint that gives a sealed surface (such as colored gesso, acrylic, or acryla gouache) so that wet layers don't pick it up.

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Previously on GJ: Limited Palettes (with 53 comments)

Grayed CMY Experiment

The Zorn Palette 

Water Tower with a Limited Palette

Gamut Masking Method

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Own the 72-minute feature "Gouache in the Wild"
• HD MP4 Download at Gumroad $14.95
• or HD MP4 Download at Sellfy (for Paypal customers) $14.95
• DVD at Purchase at Kunaki.com (Region 1 encoded NTSC video) $24.50

GJ Book Club: Chapter 15: Balance

On the GJ Book Club, we're looking at Chapter 15: "Balance" in Harold Speed's 1917 classic The Practice and Science of Drawing. The following numbered paragraphs cite key points in boldface. If you would like to respond to a specific image or point, please precede your comment by the corresponding number.

The chapter called “Balance” might better have been titled “Opposition” because central to Speed’s philosophy is that the picture should contain a contrast between compositional forces. As he says:

1. In art we have the same play of opposing factors, straight lines and curves, light and dark, warm and cold colour oppose each other.

He points out that these opposing forces generally don’t balance evenly, especially in an exciting subject, where you want one side to be winning.

2. The opposition between straight lines and curves.
The first thing that came to mind was the drawings of the two Disney animation legends Bill Tytla (top) compared to Milt Kahl (bottom), the former made up more of rounded shapes, and the latter with more of a preponderance of straight lines. Both were master animation draftsmen, and if you look closely they both alternated straights and curves.


3. The rococo art of the eighteenth century is an instance of the excessive use of curved forms.
Speed’s view is that if you’re going to err on the side of straights or curves, it’s better to err on the side of more severe straight lines. (I kind of like rococo design, though).


3. Opposition between flat and gradated tones.
I thought of Maynard Dixon (top) vs. Thomas Hart Benton (bottom). Of course in the Dixon, the tones aren't all totally flat: there's some broken color and a gradation in the sky, but relative to the Benton, it's fairly flat. Note that the lines are straighter in the Dixon and rounder in the Beonton. 

Although Speed wrote earlier in the book about the importance of gradated tones, he said a painting can get messed up with too much ill-considered gradation and that a way to fix it is to replace the gradated areas with flat tones, kind of equivalent to the “Poster Edges” filter in Photoshop.

4. There should be some balance between the extremes of light and dark used in the tone scheme of the picture.

The Levels histogram in Photoshop shows this metric very clearly. Speed is suggesting that if you want to leave some space above the top end of the histogram, you should leave some at the bottom, too, so that the distance between the lightest lights and white is comparable to the distance from the darkest dark to black.

I had never heard before the old rule he refers to, “that a picture should be two-thirds light and one-third dark.” He’s certainly willing to challenge that idea.

5. Opposition between warm and cool colors. 
Speed says: “the further your colouring goes in the direction of warmth, the further it will be necessary to go in the opposite direction, to right the balance.”

This is similar to what our eyes do with chromatic adaptation. When we walk into a room lit by warm light, the “white balance” system of our eyes adjusts to even out the balance. In designing a color script for a film, we can temporarily upset the balance and plan a sequence that’s very much to the cool side, for example, but it should be followed soon after by a contrasting color scheme to provide relief.


6. Opposition between Interest and Mass.
Speed acknowledges here the psychological weight of certain objects, especially figures, which can often balance a large mass such as a tree or cloud.

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Harold Speed (Dover ed.)
The Practice and Science of Drawing is available in various formats:
1. Inexpensive softcover edition from Dover, (by far the majority of you are reading it in this format)
2. Fully illustrated and formatted for Kindle.
3. Free online Archive.org edition.
4. Project Gutenberg version
Articles on Harold Speed in the Studio Magazine The Studio, Volume 15, "The Work of Harold Speed" by A. L. Baldry. (XV. No. 69. — December, 1898.) page 151.
and The Windsor Magazine, Volume 25, "The Art of Mr. Harold Speed" by Austin Chester, page 335. (thanks, अर्जुन)
GJ Book Club on Pinterest (Thanks, Carolyn Kasper)
GJ Facebook page

Overview of the blog series
Announcing the GJ Book Club
Chapter 1: Preface and Introduction
Chapter 2: Drawing
Chapter 3: Vision
Chapter 4: Line Drawing
Chapter 5: Mass Drawing
Chapter 6: Academic and Conventional
Chapter 7: The Study of Drawing
Chapter 8: Line Drawing, Practical
Chapter 9: Mass Drawing
Chapter 10: Rhythm
Chapter 11: Variety of Lines
Chapter 12: Curved Lines
Chapter 13: Variety of Mass
Chapter 14: Unity of Mass
Chapter 15: Balance
Chapter 16: Proportion
Chapter 17: Portrait Drawing
Chapter 18: Visual Memory
Chapter 19: Procedure
Chapter 20: Materials

Crash Course on Light

Here's a quick overview of the science of light at the subatomic and astronomical level.

Crash Course. (Link to video) Thanks, Robnonstop

Six Greedy Loafers

Albert Dorne,, one of the founders of the Famous Artist’s School correspondence course, shared his thumbnail sketches for a magazine illustration called "Six Greedy Loafers."

The finished picture was used to illustrate a story about an old farmer on his deathbed surrounded by his six lazy sons.


1. In his developmental sketches Dorne first thought of the symbol of vultures sitting around the bed, and wanted to make the sons actually look like vultures with long, scrawny necks and beaky noses. His first sketch tried for that feeling of macabre whimsy.

He says: “As I studied the sketch, it no longer appeared very exciting to me. Despite the outstretched necks, the figures didn’t seem to be doing anything in particular.”

2. Then he thought of the sons as pallbearers alongside a coffin, but he worried that the arrangement put too much emphasis on the foreground, and spaced them out too equally.


3. He had a breakthrough as he decided to put the sons in a group leaning over the bed. They make a dark, angular mass that contrasts with the light, horizontal shape of the old man. He added the cat to frame the scene from the left. The bottle, the bedspread, and the folds of the bed are all related to the compositional movement.


4. In the next version, he got rid of the black cat and brought two of the figures to the left. Covering up the old man’s face adds to the feeling of mystery. But Dorne was now worried about the empty space in the middle and the feeling that the base of the picture was dropping off to the right.



5. In the final arrangement, (which like the others was drawn without reference to models or photography) he tightened up the elements, added the chest of drawers in the background and the rug in the foreground.

Done concludes: “For me, this job teaches an important point. And that point is: Choose an appropriate, effective symbol—here it was the vultures—and stay with it. Regardless of how much you rearrange or discard, never lose sight of the basic feeling or symbol you want to communicate.”

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Recent book, well illustrated and written: Albert Dorne: Master Illustrator
The sketches above are from the original Famous Artists Course Lessons 1 - 24, which you can still find on Amazon. The link takes you to a set from 1954, by far the best era of the course binders. One day of art school tuition buys the best art education in print you can get.