Ian Ballantine

“There is no problem in the world that a book can’t solve,” said Ian Ballantine (1916-1995).

He was the founder of Ballantine Books, and he published the first authorized paperback editions of Lord of the Rings. He was a tireless promoter of science fiction and fantasy books and visually-oriented books for adults.


In his retirement, he was a mentor to me during the early development of Dinotopia. After I had completed the paintings “Waterfall City,” (1988) and “Dinosaur Parade” (1989), I proposed to him the idea of a picture book about a lost island of humans and dinosaurs. He encouraged me to write the book as well as illustrate it. His wife Betty served as editor for Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time, which was published by Turner Publishing in 1992.

To commemmorate his faith in books, I asked him to pose as the model for Nallab (complete with resplendant eyebrows), the third assistant librarian of Waterfall City. The head librarian is a Deinonychus named Enit, seen in the upper right of this illustration from Dinotopia: The World Beneath, 1995.

“Enit” and “Nallab” spelled backwards is “Ballantine.”

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Wikipedia entry on Ian Ballantine, link.
"Nallab" on the Dinotopia Wiki, link.
Gallery of art from A Land Apart from Time, link.
Dinotopia books available from the Dinotopia Store, link.

Induced Color

If the color temperature of a fill light tends toward a certain hue, our visual system compensates by making the key light appear to be composed of the complementary color.

On a camera, this is the result of “automatic white balance.” Scientists call it “chromatic adaptation.” Artists call it “simultaneous contrast” or “induced color.” These are all related ideas, and they’re fun to experiment with.

I set up a little plaster head over a green-colored table surface, which bounced the fill light into all the shadows. The greenish shadows made the light side appear reddish or warm. I painted the study with strings of color based on viridian for the shadows and venetian red for the light. Note that the bounced light within the keylit side (like under the brow) is warmer than the shadow side.

Then I took my little plaster horse head and set him up over a reddish source of reflected light. Now the same key light appeared to shift toward a more greenish hue.

I set up this maquette with a neutral surroundings to eliminate the chromatic contrast between the light side and shadow side, and painted it with white and umbers. This is more the standard practice in atelier training, but it's a real eye-opener to explore color effects along with tonal modeling, even with ultra-limited palettes, as I've been using on all these studies.

Leave your casts or maquettes white if you’re going to be observing them directly with the eye, because these color effects are more pronounced. Paint them a 30% gray (flat spray primer works well) if you’re going to photograph them, because otherwise the bright tones will burn out on the top end.


Here’s a concept sketch for a science fiction paperback cover. Cool light with warm shadows isn’t used as often as “golden hour” lighting. It conveys a weird, artificial feeling, because only unnatural environments have cool, direct light coming from below.

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For a fun optical illusions demonstrating chromatic adaptation, link
and Duke University's Dale Purves "see for yourself" lab, link.

Related GurneyJourney posts:
Colored Light and Form, link.
Golden Hour lighting, link.
Warm and Cool Colors, link.
Key and Fill Light, link.
Character Maquettes, link.

Palette Poll Results

Your votes are in on the palette poll, and the top 16 most-used colors are:

Ultramarine Blue 180
Titanium White 172
Yellow Ochre 161
Cadmium Red 158
Cadmium Yellow 150
Burnt Sienna 150
Alizarin Crimson 141
Burnt Umber 126
Black 98
Raw Umber 97
Raw Sienna 81
Cerulean Blue 79
Cobalt Blue 73
Viridian 64
Naples Yellow 60
Sap Green 56

Ultramarine was the runaway favorite, not counting white, which would have scored 245 if you counted flake and zinc. No greens made the top ten, though I think permanent green would have scored fairly high; I just forgot to include it.

The results are quite different from the results in Jason Peck’s original poll (link), which scored highest with white, black, burnt sienna, and vermilion. As a couple of you observed in the comments, you could paint almost anything with the top four colors in the survey of blog readers.

This week we’re polling your favorite paint brands. If you use a variety of manufacturers, you can vote for more than one. Thanks, Jason, and thanks to everyone for participating.

Illuminated Foreground

The traditional rules of composition are passed down from teacher to student like commandments, and it’s a healthy exercise to question them from time to time. One old rule among landscape painters is to place the foreground in shadow.

Frank Wootton (1914-1998) strictly follows the convention. The shadow gives the viewer something to step over, and it makes the light in the middle distance seem more brilliant. In European and American landscape painting, this device has become so commonplace that most landscape painters do it without a second thought.

What happens if you do the exact opposite of the rule? What if you put the immediate foreground in light, load it with detail, and then throw the middle distance into shadow?

A few painters in 19th Century Russia followed the unusual practice of illuminating the foreground rather than darkening it. Ivan Shiskin (1832-1898) presents a vista of an oak in a wide valley. But we begin the journey into the picture on our hands and knees like a child, inspecting a lovingly detailed miniature landscape of weeds and grasses.

One of Shishkin’s students, Fiodor Vasilyev (1850-1873), used a similar device in his masterpiece "Wet Meadow," said to be painted from memory just before his untimely death. The cheerfully lit foreground lends added power to the stormy passage in the distance.

More on Shishkin at Olga's Gallery, link.
Fyodor Vasilyev on Wikipedia, link.

Two Day Motif

Many people assume that outdoor paintings are always done alla-prima, or all in one session. There is an undeniable beauty to a painted surface that is kept all wet together. An efficient painter like Bierstadt, Church, or Sargent could interpret a whopping amount of information in just one sitting of an hour or two.

But I believe that many of the legendary studies from nature that we associate with artists like Asher B. Durand were created in two or three consecutive sessions. There would be no other way to complete a study of this complexity. Durand’s letters and journals make a few references to returning to a given location to continue a previous day’s work.

This 18x23 inch study entitled “Study from Nature, Stratton Notch,” appears to be a composite view, combining separate elements from separate locations. We know from his son John’s reports and from his own writing that he often extracted elements from a given scene. I believe in this case he painted the distant mountainscape in one location and then overpainted the backdrop with a fallen log that he found somewhere else.


In my experience, a two-day motif is one of the most satisfying and productive ways to work. As one example, here’s a 10x8 inch study painted on a narrow sidewalk in the city of Clonmel in Ireland. I worked for two hours on the first day to establish the basic drawing and to lay in the sky and the big tones of the buildings. By then the light had utterly changed, and there was no point going on.

By using Liquin as a medium, the oil paint surface was dry within 24 hours. I came back the next morning to find the sunlight just as it was at the beginning, and spent the next two hours working my way from background to foreground through the complex details of the scene.

Never Forget a Face

According to a recent study by Kim Curby and Isabel Gautier of Vanderbilt University, we can remember faces far better than, say, wristwatches or cars.

“Our results show that we can store more faces than other objects in our visual short-term memory,” says Gauthier. “We believe this happens because of the special way in which faces are encoded… Being able to store more faces in VSTM may be very useful in complex social situations.”

Addendum May 17
I was intrigued by Erik's comment about hair and beards, and noticed the lack of them in the pictures that were used for the experiment, so I asked Dr. Gautier the following: "Have you factored in the role that hair or beards play in facial recognition? Does it code or store differently from other features given that it can be more variable?"

She replied: "In general, our work and that of others focuses on mechanisms that appear to distinguish face processing - the internal features of faces are processed in a more holistic manner (not as parts, but as a whole) than other objects. In the context of experiments where we only use a limited number of faces, hair might be SO helpful that people would rely on it entirely and we could not study how internal features are processed - so they are generally excluded."



Vanderbilt University report, link and article in Science Daily, link.

Art By Committee: Alien Castle

On Wednesdays we do a group sketch game called "Art By Committee.” Last week I presented an actual excerpt from a science fiction manuscript and you have come up with a portfolio of magnificent pictures to illustrate it.


The quote was: "It may have been a castle, but it was unlike anything you'd see in history books. An alien hand had drawn the blueprints; I was willing to bet on that."

If you scroll down to the end of the post, you’ll see the picture in the original sketchbook, as well as next week’s challenge.

Jen Zeller

Dave Harshberger

Jared Shear
Arthur J. Keegan

Anna Myers

Roberta Baird

Jess Elwood

Susan Adsett


Rose Dawson

Christine Walker

Todd Norris
And the sketch in the original book by James Warhola

Here’s next week’s quote.
If your sketch comes out a bit more macabre than usual this time, that’s OK.

Please scale your JPG to around 700 pixels across. Title it with your name, send it to: jgurneyart (at) yahoo.com, subject line ABC, and let me know in your email if you want me to link to your blog or website. Please have your entries in by next Tuesday at noon.

Previous Art By Committees, Link.

Sunbeams

Beams of sunlight coming from the sky can be an inspiring effect when you see them in nature.

I painted this scene from observation on a cloudy day at the Mamaroneck Harbor in New York State. The rays seem to radiate from the area of the sun, but actually they’re essentially parallel, and we’re looking at them in perspective.


The effect should be used sparingly in fantasy paintings, because it can easily become a tired cliché. Maybe that’s because it is so often overused to suggest the glory of heaven, or because it shows up in paintings when the conditions aren’t completely suitable.

Beams of light occur when the following three conditions are met:

1. A high screen of clouds, foliage, or architecture is punctured by a few openings. The canopy must block most of the light to allow a darker backdrop against which the sunbeams can be seen.
2. The air is filled with dust or vapor. The smaller the particles, the more there will be chromatic scattering, making the light source seem more yellow or red (see link). Watery mist won’t affect the color of the light as much as fine dust.
3. The view is toward the sun. Large droplets scatter most of the light forward at small angles to the direction of the light. When you’re looking away from the light source, the beams become invisible.

The conditions might exist in a circus tent, a ruined building, or a dark forest interior. As with dappled light, the farther away the aperture, the more the edges of the beam become diffused by the time they reach the ground. You won’t see a sunbeam from a far cloud making a small spot of light on someone’s lawn.

Keep in mind, too, that sunbeams from a cloudy source, like the Bierstadt above, are shining through an uneven aperture, making three dimensional columns of light with an amoeba-like cross-section. This has the effect of making the edges and amounts of light extremely variable.

I used the sunbeam effect in Dinotopia: The World Beneath because I really wanted the scene to look magical, and I wanted the humans at left to be at a disadvantage, looking into a bright illumination.

Note that the sunbeam affects the shadow values of the forms even more than the values of the light side. You could accomplish this in acrylic by airbrushing a light tone where the beams appear, but white pigment overlaid will tend to make the colors look chalky.

In this oil painting, I premixed one string of colors for the areas inside the light beam, and a whole separate string for the colors of the darker unlit forest.

Related GJ posts on dappled light, link and chromatic effects of dust, link.
Albert Bierstadt from the San Antonio Museum of Art, link.

Tomorrow: Art By Committee

Understatement in Illustration

An old man sits up in bed, startled by a noise from downstairs. He reaches for the door, listening.

Even in a simple spot illustration, Frederic R. Gruger (1871-1953) tells a story by showing only what he needs to show: the rumpled bed, the modest bedframe, the doorknob, the key, and the lock. He leaves out unnecessary details, like picture frames, lamps, or windows.

What he does show, he understates. The forms and edges of his left arm are swallowed up by a simple shadow shape that leads us to the even darker dark of the open doorway. The virtues of economy and understatement are one of the benefits of working solely from the imagination. Gruger rarely used models.

A close look at the head, which is only about an inch high, shows that Gruger defined the form gradually, tentatively, erasing and blending until it emerged in his mind, and then adding the more definite lines of the Wolff pencil last.

As Joseph Pennell said in 1925, “All art is illustration.” And a good illustration is like a good novel or a good movie: it tells a story as much by suggestion as by definition.

The Palette Project

Jason Peck is a color detective. For the last few weeks he has been surveying famous oil painters and digging through dusty libraries trying to find out exactly which colors the leading artists squeeze out on their palettes. In case you have ever sat there with an art supply catalog wondering what in the heck to buy, you may be surprised to learn what the Group Mind prefers.

We’re lucky to have Jason as the guest author of today’s Color Sunday post. Before you read on, please take a few seconds to contribute to the related poll at left. Take it away, Jason!

The Palette Project/ Statistics Chart, by Jason Peck

“Many years ago, I decided to collect the palettes of various old masters as well as many great modern day artists and illustrators, some living and some recently deceased. I chose a mix of portrait artists, landscape artists, and plein air artists.

My initial goal was to compare these palettes to see which colors were most favored by artist then and now. I also hoped to explore the reasons why some of these artists used a limited palette as opposed to what I'm calling an expanded palette. I decided that a chart or graph would be the best way to explore this.


“To begin formulating my chart, I first picked 14 artists whose palettes I had collected, and then listed their names across the top of the chart. The artists of the past include Carolus-Duran, Monet, Alma-Tadema, Bouguereau, and Sargent, and the contemporary masters include people like Allan R. Banks, Marvin Mattelson, and Graydon Parrish,



Down the left hand side of the chart I listed the colors that I found on their palettes. Under each artist’s name I put a check next to the colors that they used. I then counted the checks for each color, and then wrote in the totals. The results told me a lot and were a bit unexpected. Besides black or white, burnt sienna totaled the highest of all colors. The results below only show the colors that scored the highest.

1. White=14
2. Black=12
3. Burnt sienna=10
4. Vermilion=9
5. Venetian Red=8
6. Cobalt Blue=8
7. Yellow Ochre=8
8. Raw Sienna=7
9. Raw Umber=7
10. Alizarin Crimson=7
11. French Ultramarine Blue=6
12. Naples Yellow=5
13. Burnt Umber=5
14. Viridian=5
15. Rose Madder=4
16. Manganese Blue=4

“Of the 82 colors on my chart, all the rest totaled 3 and below. It was most surprising to see that the cadmium colors scored so low.


“I also mentioned above that I wish to explore why some of these artist used a Limited Palette as opposed to a Expanded Palette.

“After researching and diligently studying the palettes of old masters and great artists and illustrators of today, I have reached some conclusions and a few self truths.

“Conclusions and Self Truths about palettes: I have concluded that there are two types of palettes, the Limited Palette of 6 colors or less, and the Expanded Palette of 7 colors or more.

“Limited Palette and the artists who use them
I believe that the artist who chooses to use a Limited Palette does so for many reasons:

1. They are familiar with the colors they choose and can mix nearly every color they encounter with ease.
2. They enjoy the activity of mixing the colors they may encounter, as opposed to buying the color already mixed, such as orange.
3. They prefer the lesser cost of using a limited palette, as well as less baggage when traveling.
4. They like harmony that one can achieve from using a limited palette, and still there are many more reasons.

“Expanded Palettes and the Artist who use them
I believe that the artist who chooses to use the Expanded Palette, does so for many reasons:

1. They probably have a working knowledge of the Limited Palette, but prefer having certain colors already mixed, such as black.
2. They prefer to buy tube colors rather than continually mixing a quantity of a particular color, such as orange.
3. They may be under time constraints, and simply find premixed tube colors help to speed up the working time, and still there are many more reasons.

“Some Self Truths
Lets face it: It’s the earth colors, yellowish colors, and bluish colors that can greatly increase the number of colors on one’s palette. The Limited Palette user will probably only use one red, one yellow and one blue, whereas the Expanded Palette user will probably use two reds, a yellowish red, and a bluish red, and so on. Although the earth colors aren't necessarily needed, and can be mixed easily with the Limited Palette, it is, in the mind of the Expanded palette user, much easier to just buy the tube color they know they want or need rather than having to mix them continually. I don't believe that the Expanded Palette user is necessarily lazy; quite the contrary, I think it’s simply a matter of choice and experience.

“In conclusion: I now believe that there is not one universally accepted palette as the primary palette to use. One should choose and use whatever colors he or she is most comfortable working with, after all, art is about one’s self-expression.

“However, after all my research and study, I know strongly believe that all students should have a good understanding and working knowledge of a Limited Palette before using an Expanded palette. I also believe that when considering an Expanded Palette, one should consider which yellowish colors, and bluish colors are going to be of the greatest benefit to the palette. For instance, it would be senseless to purchase two yellowish reds, and no bluish red. So one yellowish red and one bluish red would be most favorable.

“And as Forest Gump once said, ‘Well, that’s all I have to say about that.’”


Thanks for contributing, Jason. Here's the link to his blog and to his Art-By-Committee sketch. I'll tabulate the voting in the blogreaders' color poll next Sunday. Oh, and sorry I left off cadmium orange, naples yellow, permanent green, Winsor red and many others. Once I launched the poll, I couldn't change it.