Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Paint Texture, Part 1

The artwork for Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara was shot in a special way to bring out the three-dimensional texture of the oil paintings.


The standard way to light artwork for photography is to set up two lights directly across from each other. This arrangement tends to flatten out the ridges and bumps in the paint surface. Photographer Arthur Evans placed the lights more directionally.


His approach more effectively simulates the way the art would look if it were displayed on a wall beneath a skylight. Above is a detail of the painting “Chasing Shadows,” showing a background texture of stretched linen canvas.

“Most people think of paintings as two-dimensional,” Mr. Evans told me, “but I like to see them as three dimensional.”
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Paint Texture
Paint Texture, Part 1
Paint Texture, Part 2
Paint Texture, Part 3
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6 comments:

  1. Mark BehmDecember 4, 2007 at 12:52 PM

    Been a fan of your blog for a while. Saw your lecture at work on Monday. Awesome! Strangely, this link of a mummified dinosaur discovery just showed up. Here it is if you haven't seen it already...
    http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20071203/ts_alt_afp/ussciencepaleontology;_ylt=ArRfLnl8LUJ2Es9EZ7WUFJsPLBIF

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  2. SHANE PRIGMOREDecember 4, 2007 at 4:55 PM

    Fantastic. Your Dreamworks presentation was very very insightful and inspiring. So well presented. It was great to finaly meet you.

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  3. GabrielDecember 4, 2007 at 5:51 PM

    i totally agree with him. I sometimes find looking at painting on books frustrating because i can't really picture it's size (even with the dimensions informed, i must be disabled in some way), and i can't see how it was painted. It's much more enlightening to see the real thing live, that way i can figure out how it was done.

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  4. AnonymousDecember 4, 2007 at 5:56 PM

    good you point this out, because the way the painting photos offer some visual clue to what could be a tactile sensation really enhances the experience of "Journey to Chandara".

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  5. James GurneyDecember 5, 2007 at 7:10 AM

    Mark, I also saw the articles about the "perfectly preserved hadrosaur with massive buttocks that could run 28 MPH." But beware of hype. This announcement from Nat Geo came out before the peer-reviewed science paper (and coincidentally just before N.G.'s Sunday night's TV special). This is kind of a no-no in the paleo field, because the claims can't be tested.

    Thanks for the kind words, guys, and I hope we get the chance to visit more in the future.

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  6. Stephen James.December 7, 2007 at 12:45 AM

    I've often wondered about the same things. How I'll deal with this when I become an illustrator.

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