Painting a Magical Light Effect

There's a second painting covered in the upcoming video Fantasy in the Wild: Painting Concept Art on Location.

The painting is called "Incident on Kelly Street."



The actual scene I'm looking at is lit evenly, so I have to consciously change the the light so that it only strikes the house. The car is based on a model that I buy at the drug store.



Through the course of creating the painting and shooting the video, all sorts of strange, surreal things happen around us, including a dog wearing a dress and another dog carrying a skateboard in his mouth.



Here are the casein paints I use for the painting. The video covers familiar tutorial topics like paint technique and perspective, skills that apply to painting in any medium.

But I think what makes the video special is that it explores the intersection of imagination and observation. How do you develop your science-fiction concepts and hang onto them in the face of the tsunami of information from the real world?

This is also definitely not an "abracadabra" video where I make everything look easy. It doesn't happen that way. I screw up, hit dead ends, and change gears several times. If anything, one of the themes is how to recognize an idea that's not working and how to keep trying until it gets better.

Fantasy in the Wild: Painting Concept Art on Location is 71 minutes long, and will be available as an HD video download ($14.95) or a DVD ($24.50). It will be 10% off on the day of the release, this Wednesday, December 16.

Cubebrush Launches Today

Journey by Marc Brunet, founder of Cubebrush

Cubebrush.co, a new marketplace for digital art tutorials, goes live today. I interviewed the founder, Marc Brunet, who is also a concept artist for Blizzard Entertainment.

Gurney: How did you get started with Cubebrush, and how can you find the time to run it with all your other professional responsibilities?

Brunet: Cubebrush started as a YouTube channel a little over 3 years ago as a way to help spread artistic knowledge via video tutorials. It quickly grew and it became impossible to interact with everyone via the comments section, which led me to start a website based around a big art forum: cubebrush X (cubebrush.com).

This was finally a place where everybody that was really interested could hangout and help each other, and the platform allowed me to start inviting other artists to participate with lessons - it wasn't only me anymore and that was great for everyone. This was probably the turning point when I started to think about cubebrush.co and how awesome it would be to have everybody with awesome content all in one place. That was a little over a year a go, and here we are now about to launch that very platform.

Now, how I find the time to run all of this while still working full time? It comes down to 3 things: my wife is amazing at helping me out and taking care of the kids when I can't, I work with the best team ever who help support the project in amazing ways, and lastly, I don't sleep!

Gurney: How would you describe the community of artists that has grown up around Cubebrush?

Brunet: The first word that comes to mind is "inspiring". I'm constantly amazed at how helpful towards each other, welcoming and nice our community is. We've seen a number of users go from average artists to working professionals in the span of the last 18 months and those that have not yet made their pro debut have improved tremendously with the help of everyone. With all the negativity that you can find online, it's great to see none of it has been able to pollute the Cubebrush community.

Gurney: What makes your store different from other online tutorial marketplaces?

Brunet: Cubebrush is the only marketplace dedicated for artists in the game, film, media & entertainment industry (and of course hobbyists and students) where you can find a wide variety of art resources ranging from tutorials, 3D assets, textures, brushes, plugins and more.

We do a few things differently like screen our sellers to maintain a high quality of content but we have no strict guidelines or restrictions after that. They are free to create and sell whatever they see fit. Our sellers also make the highest share of revenues of any marketplace out there, they are provided with what we think is the best store UI available and we simply go by the idea that the best experience will attract the best talents. Happy sellers, happy customers, everybody wins!

Gurney: In general, what are your pet peeves about video tutorials, things you'd wish could be done better?

Brunet: My biggest one is that a lot of content creators underestimate the importance of good editing in how well it helps the end-user assimilate the content. Too many artists will speed up the video so fast that it becomes impossible to follow, or record their audio next to a jet engine, or talk too slow and bore the audience to death. Finding how to do the basics properly is just a few free YouTube tutorials away, this should never be an issue!

Gurney: When you look at a lot of student portfolios, in general, what skills are not getting covered well enough in art schools?

Brunet: I think the biggest problem with art schools is that they are too disconnected from the real world. There are of course some hidden gems, but what I notice the most in portfolios is the lack of direction in the content. The majority of the art industry works the opposite way, where you'll generally focus on a few skills and get really good at them if you ever want to make it. There's just not enough time to try to master everything. This is always a sure way of getting passed by others who specialize more.

This has to be the tip I give away the most - have a focused portfolio that shows your passion for a certain art form. Not only that but be aware of the industry you are jumping into, do your research, it's super important. Schools definitely drop the ball often when it comes to that.
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Cubebrush.co. Please check out my page there and vote to recommend it.

"Fantasy in the Wild" Coming Wednesday

The reason I'm at the police station talking to officers in yesterday's post is that I'm painting their police car (below right), and I want to talk to them to understand how they might deal with a situation like this. 

Aftermath, casein, 12 x 16 inches, by James Gurney

They tell me their first concern is to make sure all the people are accounted for and to see if there are any injuries. They also need to control the scene to prevent further injury or damage and they have to call in fire, ambulance, and utility first responders to deal with the downed power lines, fire hazards, and the traffic. 

The painting is part of a new video called "Fantasy in the Wild," which will be released this Wednesday, December 16. We'll take the easel to the streets to paint two imaginative scenes entirely outdoors. 

The robot painting takes me to several locations, including a construction site and a fast-food streetscape. I spend some time doing gouache studies of the excavators to understand the mechanics.

The video thoroughly documents two imaginative paintings all the way from the first sketches to the final paintings, using a practical and entertaining “driver’s seat” perspective. 

 

You’ll learn how to:

• Sketch thumbnails and comprehensives.
• Build a flexible maquette from construction foam.
• Get maximum inspiration from the location.
• Recognize when an idea isn’t working and how to fix it.
• Create a viewing grid for an accurate line drawing.
• Imply a backstory with selective details.
• Use casein paint for fast-drying opaque rendering.

John-Paul Balmet, Concept Artist at Lucasfilm describes it as a “fascinating look into a master illustrator's creative and technical process.”

The 71-minute video will be available both as an HD download ($14.95) and a DVD ($24.50). On the release date, Wednesday, December 16, they'll both be 10% off. Tomorrow I'll talk about the other painting.

At the Police Station

What does this police officer want with me and my painting? Answer to come soon—stay tuned.

More clues coming on my other channels:

GurneyJourney YouTube channel
My Public Facebook page
GurneyJourney on Pinterest
JamesGurney Art on Instagram
@GurneyJourney on Twitter

Matt Gaser's "Fantastical"

Visual development artist Matt Gaser has released a compilation of his personal artwork called "Fantastical: The Art of Matt Gaser." It's a full-color book loaded with sketches and digital paintings of monsters, robots, giants, floating cities, and spaceships.

Matt has worked as a concept artist and illustrator for Lucasfilm video games, so all of his paintings suggest stories and scenarios behind the imagery. The gallery includes subchapters with Gaser's science fiction and fantasy worlds, including Metakron, Oasis, Edmund & Hunter, and Dr. Zammsy.



His approach is surreal, whimsical, and colorful. As Christian Alzmann says in the introduction, "Where science fiction is often notoriously grim, the future bleak, even Matt's darkest work hints at goodness with a light and playful quality."
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Fantastical: The Art of Matt Gaser
Hardcover, 11 x 8 inches, 112 pages, full color, Cameron & Co.
Matt Gaser's website

Harold Speed, Chapter 4: The Painter's Training

Today we'll take a look at Chapter 4: "The Painter's Training" from Harold Speed's 1924 art instruction book Oil Painting Techniques and Materials.

I'll present Speed's main points in boldface type either verbatim or paraphrased, followed by comments of my own. If you want to add a comment, please use the numbered points to refer to the relevant section of the chapter.

1. The traditional way of teaching painting is to teach Drawing first, then Painting. It's better to divide the problem into three interrelated elements: Form, Tone, and Color.

By Form I think he means both outline and modeling of 3D bulk. By Tone he means light or dark value, both tone as a function of design and tone as a function of defining 3D. Color presumably means both hue and saturation, but Speed points out it can't be seen separately from tone. Speed suggests that in the French academic schools, tone was overemphasized.

I'm still a little confused by this. I don't see how Form and Tone can really be separated.In Speed's scheme, then, when does the student make the switch to painting, and what are they doing exactly at each stage? I haven't reviewed the chapters ahead yet, but I suppose this will become clearer.

Lilian Braithwaite by Harold Speed

2. Systematic training isn't much help for design (or composition).

This comment, made in passing, struck me as an important one, and it's why I resist the idea of writing a book with any kind of authoritative tone on composition. Unlike the fields of color and light, which are full of verifiable facts, composition is elusive. Speed says it's unteachable, and not a subject for hard drilling. Still, I think it can be addressed in a classroom setting on an individual and a picture-by-picture basis by a mentor figure, the way Howard Pyle did.

The minute someone says that here are "The Five Laws of Composition" or "The 20 Don'ts of Design," I start thinking of masterworks that are exceptions to those laws. Composition by statute leads to sterile, conventional, and forgettable pictures.

Morelli, Temptation of St. Anthony

3. "Before you can express anything you must feel something to express."

Here's another comment made in passing that is essential to the study of picture-making. Speed criticizes work that is solely an excuse for an "unimpassioned rendering of the appearance of things." The works that stick in our minds are the ones that are both deeply felt and masterfully painted, and as a result the feelings transmit to the viewer.

4. "The English language is not very rich in terms that express aesthetic things."

So true, and a good reason why painters have had to learn foreign vocabularies for words like effet, which were so central to foreign training. French and Italian languages have a great many words that have now been adopted in many painting ateliers, but that's another topic for a blog post.

5. "The heightened effect that there is in all artistic work, and which is in a way a departure from cold accuracy, must not be made the excuse for careless and slovenly work."

I've noticed that the words "creative" and "expressive" are often used nowadays as code words for sloppy work, but they shouldn't be.

6. Western art is more concerned with naturalistic outward appearances than Eastern art, but in the great Western works, there are "variations from strict accuracy."

And Speed points out that these subtle expressive enhancements and aesthetic choices in realist painting have escaped critics. That's more true now than ever because most mainstream art critics are so visually unaware. As Speed says, realism makes the work "persuasive to the beholder" but it's only the first objective in doing something with lasting meaning. The expressive quality is more valuable, and he reminds us that a strongly expressive work that is executed with some rough technical edges may be preferable to a technically polished work that is empty of feeling.

7. "Nature is not one of those who disclose their best to a shallow observer; she only reveals herself fully to those who seek her reverently."

This is because it takes a lifetime to learn to see. And it's not just a matter of seeing optically with the eyes. It's about apprehending with compassion and insight. One has to perceive what is fine in a subject and bring that out. Speed reminds us that we need to call up from memory the fine things one has seen in art and nature and bring that out in what one is painting.

8. "If you cannot paint what you see, you will find yourself handicapped in trying to paint what you imagine."

This is why it's so important for fantasy artists and concept artists to paint outdoors. What you can paint from your imagination will only be 75% as convincing as what you can paint from nature.

"Vast themes seem to demand simple language for their expression."

You can insert any Rembrandt painting here.

Speed finishes the chapter with more thoughts about Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, but hopefully we covered that ground in the last few sessions.


Next week—Chapter 5: Tone Values

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In its original edition, the book is called "The Science and Practice of Oil Painting." Unfortunately it's not available in a free edition, but there's an inexpensive print edition that Dover publishes under a different title "Oil Painting Techniques and Materials," and there's also a Kindle edition.

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GurneyJourney YouTube channel

My Public Facebook page

GurneyJourney on Pinterest

JamesGurney Art on Instagram

@GurneyJourney on Twitter

Pit Brow Wenches and Cat Flayers

Arthur Munby with Ellen Grounds,
a "pit brow wench," 1873

The first thing that comes to my mind when one thinks of jobs for Victorian lower class women are domestic jobs: kitchen and washing and that sort of thing.

But Victorian women also worked in rough, dirty jobs outside the home that one would think were suitable only for men. For example, the so-called "pit brow wenches" worked at the top of coal mines to shovel the chunks of coal into waiting railroad trucks.

They wore trousers and would come home black with dirt. Other women worked inside the mines, crawling on their hands and knees, pulling mine carts with chains attached around their waists.

The work of these women might have been largely forgotten were it not for Arthur Munby, who had a fascination and an admiration for them. He convinced many of them to pose in photographic studios, as cameras in the 1860s couldn't function in the low-light conditions that prevailed at the worksites.

He also carefully documented them in interviews and notes, leaving behind a rich sociological record.

Munby even courted and eventually married a servant woman named Hannah Cullwick, but he had to keep the relationship secret from his family for 20 years.

The reality of life for Victorians is evident from the dirty and ragged appearance in Munby's photos. Here are some "tip girls" from Wales. Munby insisted on photographing these women "in their dirt."

Paintings of Victorian working women were rare, and tended to show a sanitized view with soft hands, a smile, and a bright white apron. In 1859 Munby had lunch with John Ruskin, telling him about his project, and suggesting that "some one ought to paint peasant girls and servant maids as they are —coarse and hearty and homely — and so shame the false whitehanded wenches of modern art." But nothing came of it.

Some of the strangest trades for women could be found in the dark alleys of London that upper-class people rarely saw up close, much less photographed. James Greenwood reported in his book Low-Life Deeps:

"Strange trades are carried on in these slums, and occupations are followed which in civilised parts are never dreamt of:, except it be in exceptionally bad dreams.... There is an awful little alley, for instance, in the neighbourhood of Hales's tallow factory, consisting of about twenty houses, inhabited almost entirely by folk who collect the ordure of dogs, which is used for tanning purposes." 

"There are but few left there now, I am informed, but not very long since the residents of this delectable spot consisted chiefly of "cat-flayers" - whose sole means of living was to go out at night with their sacks and sticks, hunting for cats to be slaughtered for the sake of their skins...It is unfortunate... that to be saleable the hide must be taken from the body of the animal while it is in existence, and still more so that the villainous cat-flayers are not deterred by this difficulty. I was further informed that the neighbourhood used to be scandalised by the presence of the flayed carcasses of poor grimalkins lying about, but that now that indecency is avoided by an economical arrangement on the part of the flayer. He now puts his dead cats in the copper, and makes further capital of their bones and fat."

Above quote from Victorian London.
Book: Victorian working women: Portraits from life by Michael Hiley
Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick on Wikipedia

Tour Guide Harmon Simmons

I enjoy sketching people when they're talking and moving around. This is Harmon Simmons (1931-2013), a tour guide at the Vanderbilt Mansion in New York, back in 2001. 

He described himself this way: "I'm Irish, Dutch, English, and Indian—Duke's mix. Open the can and I come out."

Doing a sketch of a highly animated person means choosing a characteristic expression and locking that expression in the short term memory as the person moves around.

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Harmon Simmons obituary

Happy Birthday, Adolph Menzel

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the German artist Adolph Menzel.

Adolph Menzel’s drawing supplies accompanied him everywhere, whether on a short walk or a long journey. He was always prepared to draw. One of his overcoats had eight pockets, each filled with sketchbooks of different sizes. On the lower left side of his coat was an especially large pocket which held a leather case with a big sketchbook, some pencils, a couple of shading stumps, and a gum eraser.

His personal motto was “Nulla dies sine linea” (”Not a day without a line”). He drew ambidextrously, alternating between the left and the right, sometimes on the same drawing. If he was ever caught without drawing paper, he sketched on whatever was available, even a formal invitation to a court ball. Whenever he was spotted at a social event, the whispered word went abroad that “Menzel is lurking about.”

Adolph Menzel, Sleeping Youth, The Morgan Library

He was known to interrupt an important gathering by pulling out his sketchbook, sharpening his pencil, casting an eye around the room, and focusing on a coat, a chair, or a hand. This sometimes brought the proceedings to a halt until he finished. He preferred to draw people unawares, often catching them in unflattering moments of eating, gossiping, or dozing. Once his friend Carl Johann Arnold awoke from a nap to find the artist busily drawing his portrait. “You just woke up five minutes too early,” Menzel told him.

The above teaser excerpt is taken from an introduction that I wrote for a book on Menzel's Drawings and Paintings that will be coming out next year. About that, more later. But for now, There's an exhibition at the Stiftung Stadtmuseum in Berlin to mark the occasion.

If you do a sketch today, do it in honor of Mr. Menzel. It's always good to have his ghost on your side.

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Adolph Menzel on Wikipedia

White Cloud Worlds 3

The third collection "White Cloud Worlds" has just shipped to its Kickstarter backers.

The book is a beautifully illustrated collection of artwork by New Zealand concept artists. I had the honor of writing the following introduction for the book:

Many of us as kids spent an afternoon sitting on the grass looking up at the white clouds, where our imaginations reshaped them as elves and snow people. These are the “white cloud worlds” that everyone experiences, but there’s something about New Zealand, the “Land of the Long White Cloud,” that has nurtured a special crop of dreamers.

The artists in this book do such daydreaming on a daily basis. They’re all humans who inherited the DNA that allows them to appear as adults on the outside, but remain young on the inside. They have each found a way to channel the pure stream of youthful energy into a river of creativity. They all know that inspiration is for amateurs. Professional artists have to show up for work each day and put in the hours.

Most of them have done their time working for top movie directors to help dream up spacecraft, creatures, robots, and aliens. Their names roll by among the hundreds of credits at the end of mainstream motion pictures. While they have thrown their hearts into their day jobs, each of them has ideas of their own that keep them up late at night. As Ben Wootten describes, working with a big team of creative people on a gigantic project can be exciting, but it can also leave an artist feeling like a small cog in a machine. Each of these talented individuals has skills beyond their professional specialties. Their imaginations are teeming with so many characters and stories that their skulls can barely contain it all.

Some, such as David Tremont, of them build 3D maquettes, either from spare parts of other models that they put together in new ways. Or, like Garry Buckley and Peter Kelk, they sculpt their creations from polymer clay. Others, such as Stuart Thomas, use digital wizardry to engineer a single frame from what looks like a continuous movie that’s playing in their minds. And some, such as Nicholas Keller, rely on the physical tools of pencils, brushes, and paint to conjure the living appearance of their creations. All of them share not only their artistry, but their writing as well, giving us a window into the infinite labyrinths of their minds.

What makes this volume special is that the artists share their life stories, the tale of how their characters came to be and why they need to paint them. Paul Tobin and Ben Hughes tell how creating their own worlds is almost like an addiction that consumes them. Tom Simpson relates how the writings of Joseph Campbell and Friedrich Nietzsche inspired him. Rebecca Kereopa describes how her artwork explores both the vulnerability and the strength of femininity.

For most of them, their rare specialty grew out of the exposure they had as kids to the pop culture stew of books, movies, games, and stories. Others spent hours of undirected time exploring nature, or making forts or treehouses with their siblings. For Nicholas Blazey, the muse arrived on the wings of the wind as he sailed along the coast of the Northland and the Hauraki Gulf. Ruby Lee remembers how when she was very young, she was paid for her faerie drawings with paper-craft currency. Few of them expected they would become professional concept artists, a term and a job description that scarcely existed when they began to dream of being an artist.

This book will be a lifeline for young people growing up now who have that same strand of DNA, and for their parents who might be glad to know that there's a place in this world for people who see things in clouds.

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White Cloud Worlds 3 Kickstarter Page
Volume 3 is not available yet to those outside the Kickstarter campaign, but you can get the original edition of White Cloud Worlds on Amazon.