Sibley's Bird Guide Art

David Allen Sibley has released a second edition of his bestselling field guide, "Sibley's Guide to Birds," with 600 new images and revisions to almost half of the 7,000 bird paintings.

His paintings are in gouache, and their main purpose is to aid in bird identification. That means leaving out the background and downplaying form-modeling. Photographs are not effective for field guides because all that extraneous visual information makes it harder to perceive the key identifying features.


In a Wall Street Journal interview, Sibley said, "I wanted to paint what you would see through binoculars from 100 feet away, where the details blur together."

Even though he consults all sorts of reference images as he constructs each image, most of his illustrations are based closely on the postures and color impressions he notates in his field sketches.
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Read the online article: "Bird-World Star David Allen Sibley Releases New Guide"

Order the book: The Sibley Guide to Birds, Second Edition

Accordion-Fold Greeting Card

When I did this painting of Dinotopians riding through a field of flowers in 1996, I had to address two unique design constraints. On the one hand, I wanted to create a frieze-like composition for a horizontal poster, using the kids who won a national poster contest as models.

I also designed the image to work as an accordion-fold greeting card for Portal Publishing's "Streamers" line.  The card was printed the same on both sides and then die cut around the silhouettes.

When the card was all folded up, the silhouettes overlapped in such a way that faces could peek out in a surprising way.

Previous post about the kids who modeled for the painting.

Carpeaux Exhibition at the Met

The Metropolitan Museum in New York has opened an exhibition called "The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux," with 160 works, including sculptures, drawings, and paintings. The show will be on until May 26, 2014.

"The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux" at the Met

The Hidden Art

"The Hidden Art" is a new online publishing platform that focuses on the fields of illustration, concept art, and visual development for entertainment.


The website has a gallery of selected artists, including some of my favorites, such as Simon Stalenhag, Ian McQue, Robh Ruppel, Eyvind Earle, and Dice Tsutsumi—so I'm really thrilled that they chose to include my stuff, too.

Based in Barcelona, they publish in English and Spanish, and they plan to produce daily articles about the inspiration and the stories behind concept art.

The Hidden Art

1930 Stop-Motion Film: "The Tale of the Fox"

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(Link to short teaser video "Miaou Song")
One of the landmark early stop-motion films was called "The Tale of the Fox" (Le Roman de Renard) by Ladislas Starevitch, a Russian immigrant of Polish descent, living in France after the Soviet revolution. This teaser gives a sampling of the style of animation (note the lioness breathing at 1:57). The technique uses posable animal puppets in elaborately constructed sets, shot on film one frame at a time, with no ability to review footage until it was processed.

The feature-length film is usually listed with three different release dates: 1930, 1937, and 1941. This is because various versions of the soundtrack were added and changed during the thirties. By the time the full fledged version was available in wartime, its reception was overwhelmed by events in Europe. The film took ten years to make, and was mostly created by Starevitch and his wife.

The basic animation was completed three years before King Kong and seven years before Disney's Snow White, which often gets wrongly credited as the first animated feature. According to Steven Cavalier in The World History of Animation, it was “more fluid than the more celebrated King Kong released three years later."

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(Direct link to video, part 1)
Here's the first part of the full feature on YouTube. The stop motion puppets are beautifully constructed. I presume they used fur and fabric and latex skins over what must be fairly sophisticated metal armatures. He also used some real animal bones and feathers—not surprising, since some of his first stop motion work was done with dead insects.

I'm struck by the skillful timing and personality of the character animation, considering that there was little precedent for such artistry at the time.

(Continuing with Part 2 of 6)
(Part 3 of 6) Don't miss the "angel rabbits" at 1:22, and the hand-held camera effects during a dance sequence at 7:05.

Watercolors by Charles E. Dana

Here's a painting of a door in Friburg by Pennsylvania artist Charles E. Dana (1843-1924). He studied architecture in Munich, and then went to Paris to learn from Gérôme and Bonnat.


The iron grille in the window, with rectangular mullions behind it, would have taken considerable patience and skill to record in the subtractive medium of transparent watercolor.

A 1915 article described him "as a student always, living much in the past, searching out the works of old craftsmen. It is only natural that his subjects should have been for the most part along the lanes and by-paths where these interests led him. So we find his work quite removed from that of the painter of moods, and his pictures depicting and recording certain real things which were in themselves the expression of the artist-craftsmen of a bygone period."

Left: A street in Cairo by Charles E. Dana

Andrew Wyeth Documentary

Former Monty Python member Michael Palin has won a devoted following for his travel documentaries on BBC, and he has also presented a few shows about artists, notably about the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi.


(Direct link to YouTube video) In this hour-long video, he takes a look at the world of the American painter Andrew Wyeth.

With his characteristic humor and humility, Palin begins the story at the Olson farm in Maine where Wyeth created his enigmatic painting "Christina's World" and then travels to the locations around Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania that inspired the artist, including Kuerner's Farm and NC Wyeth's Studio.

The documentary presents archival family films of NC Wyeth, and of young Andy playacting in costume. Instead of limiting his interviews to scholars and academics, Palin talks to people who knew Wyeth: the son of his model Karl Kuerner, the farmer who buried him, as well as Wyeth's niece, and his son Jamie. Wyeth's widow Betsy apparently declined to participate.


Palin conducts a sensitive interview with Helga Testorf, the model for the extensive series of figural works that Wyeth painted secretly over many years. Was Helga his mistress? Helga answers the tongue-waggers: "They didn't know any better. They did not know our language. We were not talking that way." Helga says that Wyeth wanted the work to be revealed after the artist's death, and that keeping their privacy during the ensuing scandal was a challenge.

The video was nicely produced, but I found the use of selective "artistic" blurring to be distracting and annoying—and unsuited to Wyeth, whose art was more about sharp focus, selective cropping, and limited color.

Thanks, David Steimel

Maquette of Scroobious Pip

Rick Lovell, who teaches a class in Illustration Techniques at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta says:

"Your 'How I Paint Dinosaurs' video inspired me to have my students create maquettes based on Edward Lear's 'Scroobious Pip' poem." 

"I chose Pip because they don't have to be accurate as to anatomy- they can just have fun with creating an animal character." 

Rick continues: “'The Scroobious Pip' is an everything animal that the other animals couldn’t quite figure out. It was part insect, part bird, part mammal, etc. So I decided to make this a three-part project; 1; the students had to read the poem and do sketches of what they think Pip would look like, 2; they would create a maquette using a wire armature and polymer clay, and 3; they would use the maquette as reference for an illustration done with watercolors and acrylics."

"This is my demo so far. I plan on making this a regular project for my techniques classes. Thanks for the inspiration!"

Thank you, Rick! If other teachers have used my books or videos as a starting point for classroom assignments, please send photos and a description.

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Rick Lovell's blog 

Read Lear's nonsense poem "The Scroobious Pip" 

DVD 'How I Paint Dinosaurs' from the manufacturer or from Amazon

'How I Paint Dinosaurs' video download via Paypal

Classic Stern Steerers

The canvas was up and the runners were down again today. More than 30 ice yachts gathered on the Hudson River, almost certainly the last day of the season.

I set up my sketching stool in the midst of it all and tried to capture the scene in gouache. The Vixen, which gave me a ride last Sunday, is at the far right, and the gaff-rigged vessel at center is the Genevieve.

These are the classic stern steerers, restored by loving craftspeople who are reviving this popular sport that had its heyday more than a hundred years ago. The oldest iceboat out there today was from about 1870, and most were from around 1900.

This video, shot less than a week ago, captures the festive spirit. (Direct link to YouTube)

Put it where you can see it

There's an old rule that animators keep in mind: "Put it where you can see it." 

It's true for illustrators, too. When you're designing a picture, the parts of the pose that are important to the story should be in clear view, while the less important parts can be concealed.

For this illustration in Dinotopia: The World Beneath, I wanted to show Arthur Denison helping a young Giganotosaurus free his foot, which was trapped between some fallen logs. While I was planning the picture, I thought about what things I needed to show to explain what was going on: Arthur's face and hand, the dinosaur's face and the tip of his tail, his ankle, and the logs.

I didn't need to show the dinosaur's hands, Arthur's feet, or the details of plants on the ground, so those parts could be hidden or blurred. The greenish brown background tone helps to disguise unimportant edges at the bottom of the picture. 

Because Arthur's face was especially important, I contrived a lot of lines to radiate out from it, a compositional technique called "spokewheeling."

Read More

Book:Dinotopia: The World Beneath

More about the rule in the book: The Animator's Survival Kit

Previous post: Spokewheeling