Painting a Pelican at the Pember

Yesterday we stopped at the Pember Museum of Natural History, a collection of old natural history specimens that is still displayed in Victorian-style glass cases.

The small museum is in Granville, New York, near the border with Vermont. They have about 10,000 taxidermy birds, mammals, and insects, as well as birds' eggs, nests, and minerals. 

I painted the American white pelican in watercolor and gouache. The colors were white, ultramarine blue, yellow ochre, and burnt sienna. 

The specimen has the large growths on the top of the beak that occur temporarily during breeding season, which gave me ideas for pterosaurs.

I recommend the museum to artists who want to sketch. Nearly everything is on display. They welcome artists, and they even provide comfortable wood chairs. 

Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote about the wonder of the 19th century cabinets of curiosity, and the different assumptions they present about imparting natural history knowledge:

"The display of organisms in these museums rests upon concepts strikingly different from modern practice, but fully consonant with Victorian concerns: Today we tend to exhibit one or two key specimens, surrounded by an odd mixture of extraneous glitz and useful explanation, all in an effort to teach (if the intent be maximally honorable) or simply to dazzle (nothing wrong with that either). The Victorians, who viewed their museums as microcosms for national goals of territorial expansion and faith in progress fueled by increasing knowledge, tried to stuff every last specimen into their gloriously crowded cabinets — in order to show the full range of global diversity. . . . You can put one beetle in a cabinet (usually an enlarged model, and not a real specimen), surround it with fancy computer graphics and pushbutton wwhatzits, and then state that no other group maintains such diversity. Or you can fill the same cabinet with real beetles from each of a thousand different species — all of differing colors, shapes, and sizes — and then state that you have tried to display each kind in the country."

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Pember Museum, Granville, New York.

More about the white pelican on Wikipedia

More about the Victorian concept of museums and Gould's quote.

Previously: Museum of Jurassic Technology

Rare Video of Illustrator Arthur William Brown

Here's a rare archival sound film from 1949, showing Golden-Age illustrator Arthur William Brown (1881-1966) as he tells the story of his career and the principles behind his pictures. (Link to YouTube)

He says: "I think I was one of the first to realize the advantages of the camera, whether to get natural attitudes, telling expressions, and quick accidental poses that a model couldn't hold long enough for an artist to get on paper. Today, with a few exceptions, every illustrator uses the camera in some way. We don't copy the photograph. We use it as a guide."

"If I were giving advice, I would say, be sincere in your work. If you admire the work of a great illustrator, learn from him, but don't imitate. You won't last long if you do. And if you really want to be popular, make your girls beautiful. Then you can't miss."

Sorry the quality isn't any better. I added subtitles to make it a little clearer. It has been duplicated a few times, and I'm not sure if the original film even exists.

The footage was shot by Frank Reilly, part of his "Artists at Work" series. According to Reilly himself, the purpose of the film "is to impress upon us the accomplishments of those among us now and to perpetuate their memory for the inspiration of those who are to follow."

If you like this, you might also like the ones on Dean Cornwell and Harvey Dunn

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Wikipedia on Arthur William Brown

Tone Paper Studies

I drew this study from a live model in charcoal and white chalk on brown wrapping paper. It was made in preparation for a National Geographic illustration. 

I drew the study instead of taking a photo because it's faster. In 20 minutes I had all the essential information I needed. Getting a pre-digital photo printed out would have required driving to the one-hour-photo place at the mall or shooting a Polaroid (which I never used). 

Here's a detail of the figure in the final painting, along with other figures that were also based on charcoal studies from models. The model for the guy working the lever on the ground is ski instructor Mike Rogan, back when he was still in high school.

Iron smelting at ancient Populonia, from The Etruscans, National Geographic

Tone paper studies are one of the oldest of old-school methods, and it's still one of my favorite ways to develop reference for multi-figure work, not only because it's efficient, but because it allows me to immediately begin selecting significant details and making a statement. 

Previously: Doing a mirror study for Kushite King
More old-school methods in my book: Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist

H. Septimus Power's Horse Paintings

Septimus Power, The End of the Day

H. Septimus Power (1877-1951) was a New-Zealand-born Australian artist who was always fascinated with horses.

H. Septimus Power, Horse Cart, Watercolor

He got an early job painting animal heads on butchers' delivery vans, and later worked for a veterinarian. 

He studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and then moved to London, exhibiting at the Royal Academy. Arthur Streeton said of him: "One is impressed first by a tremendous display of colour and a dauntless feeling of optimism … He displays remarkable knowledge and vigour in his paintings of animals."

H. Septimus Power, Bringing Up the Guns

In World War I he worked as a war artist, specializing in scenes with horses. The biplane is almost a ghost in the distance.

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HSP profiled in the Australian Dictionary of Biography

Bio of HSP 

Yakovlev's Citroën Expeditions

 Alexander Yakovlev (1887-1938) Mirza Dolik

One of the works in the upcoming Sotheby's auction of Russian pictures is this portrait by Alexander Yakovlev.

Portrait of Mirza Dolik (detail) 

The drawing is 20 x 14 inches, and it was drawn outdoors from life in 1931 using sanguine and pastel on paper. 


Alexander Yakovlev (also spelled Alexandre Iacovleff or Jacovleff) did the drawing as the official sketch artist of a motorized expedition across Asia.


The vehicle was a Citroën with a half-track in back. It drove across regions of the Asian continent that had no roads and very little petrol. Along the way the motor caravan overcame incredible obstacles, including warriors, mountain passes, and raging rivers.


Yakovlev was born and trained in Russia at the Imperial Academy of Arts under Kardovsky, and he lived later in France and America.

He was involved with two Citroën expeditions through Asia. The team traveled through Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Mongolia and China. He also went on an expedition through Africa, crossing the Sahara to Equatorial Africa.


His portraits bear the intensity of the encounters between cultures unfamiliar with each other. In many regions, his lifelike portraits provoked awe, and the people seeing such drawings being made regarded him as a form of conjurer.

Alexander Yakovlev Salek Ibn Mohamed 
sanguine and pastel on paper 29x21.5 in.

According to Sotheby's: "The clothes of the present sitter suggest that Salek Ibn Mahomed was a Baghdadi Kurd, a people whose proud and dignified air Yakovlev found very attractive and markedly different to the rather more simple appearance of the Kurdish nomads in the north. ‘If I hadn’t known that the Baghdadi Kurds who came to pose for me were just porters handling supplies for the expedition’ Yakovlev wrote, ‘I could easily have mistaken them for descendants of the princes of One Thousand and One Nights’"

Read More

Alexandre Jacovleff / Alexandre Yevgenievich Jacovleff on  Wikipedia
Sothebys "Russian Pictures," June 2 at Sothebys London
Exhibition catalog with essay
Read a French website about portfolios of these portraits.
Tate Gallery has one of his works
Book: Great Adventures With National Geographic: Exploring Land, Sea, and Sky
Print articles:
"From the Mediteranean to the Yellow Sea by Motor," by Maynard Owen Williams, National Geographic, November 1932 

"Through the Deserts and Jungles of Africa by Motor: Caterpillar Cars Make 15,000-Mile Trip from Algeria to Madagascar in Nine Months," by Georges-Marie Haardt, National Geographic, June 1926.
Related Posts on GJ:
Josep Tapiro's Ethnographic Portraits
Eugene Burnand's World War I Portraits

GJ Book Club, Chapter 7: "The Study of Drawing"

On the GJ Book Club, we're studying Chapter 7, "The Study of Drawing," from Harold Speed's 1917 classic The Practice and Science of Drawing.

The following numbered paragraphs cite key points in italics, followed by a brief remark of my own. If you would like to respond to a specific point, please precede your comment by the corresponding number.

I look forward to your thoughts, and I enjoyed the discussion last week.

1. Line drawing vs. mass drawing
In this short chapter, Speed hammers home his thesis about how there are two basic approaches: line drawing and mass drawing. This distinction is so important to the book so far, that I tried to see if I could diagram how clusters of ideas group with each point of view:

Line Drawing————Mass Drawing
Line—————————Tone
Shapes———————Masses
Edges————————Planes
Pencil————————Brush

2. Squareness may be looked for in the drawing

In general, I agree with Speed, who captions this diagram with the point that "flatness gives strength to the forms." I've always thought of this in term of how planes and straight lines give vigor to form. Also, using straight line segments is a useful drawing method as an early step for achieving accuracy.

But the diagram confuses me a little bit. I can see that he is interpreting the Rubens drawing in terms of short, straight line segments, but someone could also interpret it in terms of round lines and bulging forms. So why is he looking for "squareness" in this drawing?

3. The student should study simultaneously from these two points of view....And the qualities of each point of view should be studied separately.
In other words, you can't just do a line drawing and hope the tone will work out later. These are two fundamentally different ways of seeing and the student should pursue them as a different set of challenges.

He points out that students, before they get to painting, should have some elementary tone exercises under their belts. Form expression with tone requires some comfort with the elements of tonal language that Speed is talking about in the book so far.

I hope I'm not missing any big points in this small chapter, and I look forward to your comments about it.

Harold Speed (Dover ed

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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)
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GJ Book Club Facebook page  (Thanks, Keita Hopkinson)
Pinterest (Thanks, Carolyn Kasper)

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

Nearly-Notan Gouache with Yellow Underpainting

I ask Jeanette if she wants me to help her in the supermarket, and she says, "Really, I'd rather not. Why don't you go do a sketch?" I know what she means. I'm always distracting her with other topics while she's thinking about food.

Behind the VW Dealership, gouache, 5 x 8 inches

I've got 45 minutes and two tubes of gouache, white and black. That's OK, because I'm in a film-noir mood today. I walk over to the edge of the supermarket parking lot and there is a white van parked behind the VW dealership. I like the way it's halfway in the light.

The sketchbook page is already primed with a bright yellow acryla gouache underpainting. I did that to cover up a flubbed diner sketch (can you see the outline of a ketchup bottle just to the left of the van?). 

Over that dry priming, I draw some perspective guidelines with watercolor pencil. The "acryla" part of acryla gouache seals the surface against later wet layers of regular gouache, so the yellow won't pick up with what comes next. 

I like the bright yellow because it forces me to use opaques, and it makes me paint across edges. I lay down the big masses of near-white and near-black tones, using a flat half-inch brush, with no attempt at detail yet.

I'm interpreting the scene as a "Nearly-Notan" statement. By that I mean two families of tone: "very-dark-plus-black" for what is in shadow, and very-light-plus-white" for what is in direct sun.

I can allow myself a little definition within each of those principalities, but I want to avoid middle tones. There should be a deep valley in the middle of Histogramland.

I move to smaller brushes for details. A guy comes out on break and sits to the left of the van to check his cellphone. The sun goes behind clouds for the whole rest of the session, so I have to remember the lighting.

Jeanette has finished the grocery shopping. I've got to wrap. I use black watercolor pencil for the wires. 

I'm nearly done, but I want to add a little more glare to the sky. I add a little white artist's chalk in the area adjoining the sky and rub it in with a soft cotton cloth. If you scroll back up to the top, you can see the subtle glare effect with the chalk.

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Acryla gouache (this is like regular gouache, with some acrylic medium)

Regular gouache for the black and white

Watercolor sketchbook
White artists' chalk
Water soluble colored pencil — for this one just black

Shishkin Landscape

The landscapes of Ivan Shishkin (Russian, 1832-1898) are notable for their truth to nature. He knew a lot about botany and painted outdoors on a regular basis. This autumn landscape in oil is about 16 x 26 inches.

 A detail suggests three things to my eye.

1. The sky must have been dry or nearly dry from a previous session, rather than painted all wet together. If it was previously painted, it then have been "oiled out" with a very thin layer of painting medium to make it receptive.

2. He must have had a wide variety of brushes, and switched between them as he built up the foliage and branch textures. A big old, splayed brush, dabbed against the canvas, could have provided the foliage textures.

3. The branches are painted with a very thin round brush, and some of the lighter branches in the lower right of this detail seem to be scraped out of the wet paint with a knife or a brush.

4. The foreground leaf masses are laid on quite thickly. The full effect is loose and direct, but not "brushy"—that is, it doesn't look like a collection of brushstrokes.

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The Shishkin painting is Lot #1 in an upcoming Sotheby's sale of Russian pictures in London on June 2.

Dinotopia: The World Beneath—Final Episode

The time has come for the final episode of Dinotopia: The World Beneath. You can hear the episode at this Soundcloud link, or by pressing the play button below.




The dramatic conclusion with biomorphic walkers and apex predatory dinosaurs is brought to life through audio alone, which has more imaginative power than movies — though it's done on a budget.

Will and Arthur Denison, from Dinotopia: The World Beneath

This audio adventure was produced by ZBS Productions. Producer Tom Lopez and composer Tim Clark created many layers of sound to make Dinotopia come alive to the ears.

The Christian Science Monitor called this production "A dazzling soundscape that does full justice to Gurney’s wondrous lost world… perfect family listening.”

The final episode arrives in a week. Each short episode will only be live online for one week, and then it will disappear.

If you'd like to purchase the full two-hour World Beneath podcast right now and hear all fifteen episodes back to back in a feature-length production, check out The World Beneath at ZBS Foundation website for the MP3 download. It's also available as a CD.

The Book
You can also order the original printed book from my web store and I'll sign it for you. (It ships via Media Mail within 24 hours of your order. US orders only for the book, please). The book is also available from Amazon in a 20th Anniversary Edition with lots of extras.

The Museum Exhibition
Many of these paintings are now on view at the Dinotopia exhibition at the Stamford Art Museum and Nature Center through May 25.

The Backgrounds of "Ghost in the Shell"

The animated film "Ghost in the Shell" was released in 1995, and the backgrounds were produced with physical paint.

Observer K Huitula described the technical process: "They were painted with about 30 different colors of bottled poster color [a liquid form of gouache, also known as tempera]. On wet paper, first the basic color surfaces and tones are painted with a bigger brush, after which you move on to smaller details little by little."

"The straight lines are painted with a brush, taking support from a ruler and a stick gliding on its groove.


Here's an example of such a grooved-ruler device in action (thanks, Todd Bowlin)

"A paintbrush [airbrush?] is used only very seldom to achieve some certain effects, still most of the painting is done with a traditional brush. Hair-dryers are also used for drying the painting when needed."

"While not working on a precise project, all the free time is used for making painting exercises, taking advantage of the studio library consisting of various books on nature and photography. Also different variations are being done from the same painting, varying the colors and the impression of lighting."

Ghost in the Shell was based on a manga by Masamune Shirow. The film was produced by the company Production I.G., and the crew of about 200 people was directed by Mamoru Oshii. The backgrounds were the work of Hiromasa Ogura and his team. 

The original film cost 5 million dollars to make. For the upcoming Hollywood live action remake, the fee for actress Scarlett Johannson alone is said to be 10 million.

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Thanks, K Huitula!

43 samples of Ghost in the Shell backgrounds