South Bend to Three Rivers

Yesterday morning was ideal for sketching, with fleecy clouds rolling in. We set up our chairs on the front lawn of a medical office and got to work with the watercolors: Jeanette with her Lukas set, and me test-driving a new Schmincke mini set (thanks for the recommendation, Dennis Nolan).

I was trying to capture the effect of contre-jour lighting, which meant painting around the little sparkly bits of edge lighting. I probably could have used Maskoid or Liquid Frisket for this task, but didn’t have any.

I tried to blend various colors into the shadow areas, while keeping the intensities muted. Colors are more saturated or vivid when the sun is at your back, and more neutral when you're looking toward the sun. I also avoided putting too much detail or linework in the picture, which would weaken the simple backlight effect.

On the drive up old highway 31 from Indiana into Michigan, there were plenty of gloriously tacky roadside artifacts, like this classic motel sign.

Up in Three Rivers, Michigan, I did a presentation at the Carnegie Center for the Arts, which hosted a Dinotopia original art exhibition ten years ago. Tom Lowry of Lowry’s Books arranged this booksigning event. The great thing about a road-trip book tour is that you can visit towns like Three Rivers that just don't get visiting authors because they're too far from the big city airports.

Readers of this blog will be interested to know that Amy (above, center left) and her family came all the way from Dearborn. Amy was one of the two winners of the “Art History Simplified” contest a few days ago!
I also was honored to meet Sean, who started writing me fan letters more than four years ago. We’ve exchanged quite a few letters since then. Sean’s copy of the original Dinotopia book gets the prize for “most loved.” Thanks, everybody for coming and making the event a success.

Capturing a Cumulus

Here’s a 16x20 inch oil study of thunderheads on a warm July day.

I was amazed as I worked over a two hour period how fast the scene changed from minute to minute. Watch this time lapse video of a similar cloud formation boiling away. As soon as you have the shapes established, you have to paint the details from memory. But you can keep studying the scene for the overall color relationships.

The brightest whites and the sharpest details are reserved for the emerging billows at the top. The purer white colors of the closer clouds transition more toward warm pink or dull orange as the clouds go back in space. Light that has traveled farther has lost more of its cool wavelengths through scattering.

Whenever you paint these attention-grabbing "cumulus castellanus" thunderheads, look also for the shreds of old clouds sheared off by wind currents and dissolving back into the air. These often-overlooked “fractus” or “scud” clouds are the other side of the cloud’s life cycle of growth and decay. They lack the compact density of the billowing clouds, and are never as white.

Valparaiso Viewpoints

Jeanette and I paused in Valparaiso, Indiana to recharge our art batteries. Valparaiso is the county seat of Porter County, but not many tourists come here. The library has a fabulous collection of art books and there’s an art museum on the university campus of that we’ll check out tomorrow. Today it’s time for sketching.

We picked this streetcorner: a shoe store in a brick building with a round turret. Here’s how it looked to the camera.



I tried a sepia sketch in the mini-Moleskine watercolor book, using a few washes of tone and then some brown Waterman ink sketched with a fountain pen. Then I added a wet wash here and there to melt the linework, releasing its inner red tone.

Here’s Jeanette to describe her painting: “I did a pencil sketch in my sketchbook (laid-finish paper), then put down some watercolor. I went back in with a ballpoint pen when the color was dry.”

Our fingers got cold from the November weather, so we tucked into a wi-fi café for soup and coffee. An elderly fellow sat near me and hauled out his laptop. Sitting duck, thought I.

Science, Art, and Fantasy

Elementary school teachers Teresa Moucha and Alice Toepel at the Carl Traeger Elementary School in Oshkosh, Wisconsin started planning their author visit almost six months ahead.

They wrote a grant proposal and a curriculum plan. The idea was to bring art and science together using the fantasy of Dinotopia. Mrs. Moucha and Mrs. Toepel, with the blessing of principal Janna Cochrane, below right, asked their fourth and fifth graders to create their own utopian worlds.

The Oshkosh Public Museum’s assistant director Mike Breza, at the center of this picture with his daughters, coordinated the "Return to Dinotopia" museum exhibit in town and worked with the public library to develop a reading list. He received grant money to allow school kids free admission to the museum, which includes not only Dinotopia artwork, but costumes to try on and four full-size dinosaur skulls.

The students at Traeger sketched actual plants and taxidermied animals. They invented an animal character that talks, a plot conflict, and a plausible fantasy setting. During the two and a half months counting down to my visit, they designed maps, landscapes and architecture and wrote stories about their imaginary worlds.

The results included “Dragontopia,” “Gerbiltopia,” “Fishtopia,” and “Dogtopia.”

When I arrived on Friday, I gave a quick digital slide show about how I work, and then they performed the “Garden Chorale.” Then I visited four classes to talk in more detail with them about their projects and to share my Magic Marker presentation.

The day after the school visit, Mrs. Moucha handed me a beautiful handmade book with thank-you notes tucked into secret compartments. One student named Kaitlyn wrote a note that brought me tears of joy: “Thank you for coming to our school. You really changed my thinking about art.”

Here's a link to a newspaper story from the Nov. 4 Oshkosh newspaper, and a report in the District Newsletter.

Grey Hair or None?

Answers to Art History, Simplified

Here are the solutions to the art history puzzle from a few days ago. You may not agree with all the answers (I guessed wrong on a lot of them), and there’s plenty of room for debate.

Modigliani, for example, was as famous as El Greco for his elongated forms in #2, and the starched ruff in #4 really could have been Rubens as well as Hals.

The Gericault solution was a bit conceptual, based, I suppose on the Raft of the Medusa. Starhorse actually guessed Norman Mingo for #24. Way to go! Mingo was the artist famous for painting Alfred E. Neuman.

Begging your indulgence, I’ll stick with the solutions as they were provided in the version I ran across. Credit goes to the early guessers, who paved the way.

By my count—and check me if I'm wrong—the high scorers were:

• David, honorable mention, with 16 correct answers;
• Kristel, Mark Hudgins, Michael L, Meredith D., Lekola, and Larin, the runners-up with 17;
• and Amy Stegner and Starhorse, the winners with 18.

If that count is right, I'll ask Amy and Starhorse to please email your mailing addresses to jgurneyart@yahoo.com, and we’ll send you the signed Dinotopia map and bookplate. Thanks again to all who took part.

Oshkosh Opening

Today the Oshkosh Public Museum opened its exhibition of 49 original paintings from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

Here’s the sign outside museum. There were also buses with Dinotopia banners, local school events, a signing at the Apple Blossom Bookstore, and reading lists at the library, thanks to the tireless organizing efforts of the museum’s assistant director Mike Breza and members of the community here in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Performers from the Cirque du Soleil were present in costumes that matched the “Liners” illustration from the Dinotopia book. Here they are posing next to the original painting “Spotters and Liners.”

The stiltwalkers made an impressive sight as they walked nimbly up and down the grand staircase, while jugglers managed up to five pins in the lobby.

Thanks to everyone at the museum and to all of you who came to say hello and have your books signed. I’m especially grateful for those of you who drove from far away to attend the opening.

Studio Lighting: Part III: Edge Lighting

A couple of posts ago the topic was lighting equipment and the basic relationship of the two basic sources of light: key and fill. The third light source, entirely optional, comes from behind.

Often called an edge light, it lights up the fringes of the form, separating it from the background. It’s also called a “rim” or “kicker” in the TV business, and it usually requires a source that’s stronger than either of the others. The form has more snap if the edge light doesn’t overlap too much with the key light, leaving the dark turning of the form (sometimes called the “core” or the “hump” of the shadow) intact.


This oil study from the model has the key and rim lights placed just far enough apart so that you can see the core of the shadow on the forehead.

If you want to introduce an edge light source, it should be a different color from the key. By applying contrasting gels to the key and edge lights, you can generate some interesting effects with skin tones. On this portrait I used a warm key light and a cool edge light.


On a future post I’ll suggest some painting methods to make it possible to do these quick oil studies in the standard 20 or 30 minute poses that you get in most sketch groups.

Road Kill

Whenever I see a road kill I want to look away. But I also want to look.

What kind of critter bit the dust? Did he suffer?


I saw this one on County Route 16. Did a double then a triple take. Something was wrong. Nothing has blue guts.

Close inspection revealed it was a stuffed animal. Cat, most likely.


Which set me to pondering. What was a stuffed animal doing crossing the highway? Was his stuffed-animal family waiting in the bushes, crying for him? Is there a whole village of stuffed animals in quilted calico houses hidden there past the swamp?

Hmmm. Material for a story. You take it and run.

Art History, Simplified

OK, all you art history geniuses. Let’s test your Art IQ. I ran across this chart, where each famous artist from history is distilled to his or her essence. See if you can come up with the missing names to go with the numbers. I’ll send a Dinotopia map and bookplate to the person who gets the most correct names before the answers are posted on Sunday.
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added later:
Here are the answers