Dino Art Workshop

ImagineFX is the premier magazine for fantasy art instruction. In the new April 2008 issue, there is a special feature on dinosaur art. Alongside Greg Broadmore, Daryl Mandryk and Bob Eggleton, I offer 25 of my most helpful tips for reconstructing dinosaurs.


On Gurney Journey every Thursday for the next five weeks, I’ll be sharing those dino-art tips five at a time. To get the full impact, go out and pick up the magazine, which comes with a free DVD tutorial disk. Here are the first five dinosaur art tips:

1. Go to museums
If you live near a natural history museum, start there to gather your research. Sketch and photograph the skulls and the mounted skeletons. Most photos in books show the standard side-views of skeletons, but if you’re standing next to the real things, you can choose unusual perspectives, as well as getting a true sense of scale.

2. Talk to paleontologists
Paleontologists are nearly always willing to share their expertise with artists. In my experience they’ve been very accessible, and they’ll answer any questions you might have. Call the natural history museum in your area, or the local university’s paleontology or geology department for contacts.

3. Learn from animal analogues
Use wildlife photos laterally rather than literally. Even though the basic anatomy of modern animals is totally different from dinosaurs, you can glean a lot of information from pictures of elephants, rhinos, crocodiles, and birds. Start a reference collection, either digitally or from photos torn out of wildlife magazines. Stick up a lot of related photos to give you ideas for wrinkles, scaliness, and specularity.

4. Study wildife films
It helps to visualize a pose as a part of a continous motion. Looking at still wildlife photos helps to a degree, but there’s no substitute for studying a slow-motion action sequence on a DVD or YouTube. The recent BBC documentaries are a treasure-trove. They will give you fresh ideas for things like nesting, parenting, flocking, flying, and attack and kill sequences.

5. Feathered friends
Putting feathers on dinosaurs is a fad these days. How could it not be, with the incredible fossil material coming out of the Liaoning Province of China? But sticking feathers on every dinosaur is an understandable pet peeve of many critics. If you want to be conservative, you’re safe feathering most of the small theropods. There’s less likelihood that the larger-bodied animals and the plant-eaters were feathered.

ImagineFX link.
Wildlife photos from Wikipedia Commons

Tomorrow: The Windmill Principle

Art By Committee: 'Wind' Results

On occasional Wednesdays, we’ve been playing a sketching game called “Art By Committee,” where I share a line and you share a sketch.

This week’s results, based on the sentence "A wind—not moving air but currents of force—rose up and tore at her," were as inventive, intelligent, and irreverent as ever. Thanks to all who sent in your solutions, and here are the results.

Topher Sipes

Rob Hummer

David Harshberger

Jason Peck

Jen Zeller

Arthur Keegan

Susan Adsett

Sarah Stevenson

And finally the one from the original Art By Committee sketchbook. Links to the previous ABC posts are here, here, and here. Next week we'll grapple with a new challenge.

Village Books

On the way back through Pennsylvania we stopped off in Milton to pay a visit to Randall Jessup at Village Books. He’s the antiquarian book dealer who sold me Arthur Denison’s Chandara journal several years ago.


It was fun to show Mr. Jessup the finished edition of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. He said he’s been both sorry and glad that he sold the original manuscript to me.

He opened the glass case behind the counter and I was tempted by a gorgeous 1870 edition of Lear’s Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica, but I couldn’t afford it. Although his books are a bit pricey, I recommend his establishment to any serious collector who likes rare editions, especially of travel and adventure classics and original manuscripts (link).

Tomorrow: Art By Committee: Wind

Confetti

Twentieth century illustrators have used the term “confetti” to describe the small, colorful paint strokes that resolve into suggestive detail in the viewer’s eye.


Dean Cornwell sprinkled confetti-like strokes throughout his painting of an eastern procession. On the left is the full composition; on the right is a detail showing the riot of floating shapes behind the camel’s back leg.


Another master of confetti is the contemporary science fiction illustrator John Berkey. A detail of one of his spacecraft improvisations appears next to the full composition. Dots, squares, and dashes hover by themselves or in clusters.

Berkey’s approach to confetti balances two-dimensional abstraction with three-dimensional plausibility. The strokes are always arranged in perspective, with attention to lighting.


Contemporary photorealists like Richard Estes (detail, above) create miniature abstract compositions in the midst of their realistic canvases.


Before the impressionist and abstract movements offered realist painters the impetus to think of strokes as having their own existence as pure shapes, detail areas usually tended to resolve into recognizable forms. Here’s a bustling crowd scene by Beraud.


As we zoom in on one small section of the picture, we can make out what’s going on with each of the tiny figures. It’s as if the smallest atom of a picture is always representational, rather than abstract.


Even Canaletto (detail above), whose paintings are a bustle of activity up close, always keeps his strokes tied to intelligible forms: here a head, there a jacket, there an oar.

Personally, even though I’m a realistic painter, I welcome the contribution that abstract painting has made to our pictorial toolset, and I indulge in a sort of confetti, though my own preference is to stop short of strokes that draw too much attention to themselves. Of course, this is a matter of individual taste, and there’s room for a wide range of handwriting.


Here’s a detail of the crowd in the distance in Dinosaur Parade. The figures were blocked in with a square bristle brush. The detail is handled a bit like a mosaic.


To finish up, one last detail from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara: a scene of a festival in Jorotongo. In the closeup, you can see how I sketched in the singers in terms of simple confetti-like shapes.

Related GJ post: Clustering
More images by John Berkey, Jean Beraud, Dean Cornwell

Color Corona

An extremely bright light, like a setting sun or a streetlight, is often surrounded by region of intense color, which I like to call the color corona.


In photography this effect is generally known as a lens flare. A halo of light often appears around a very bright source, caused by the internal scattering of light within the lens elements. That halo or corona takes on the native color of the source, even if the source has burned out (or “clipped”) the film or the sensor to pure white.


Photographic lens flares often include starbursts, rings, or hexagons.
These photographic lens artifacts can be added with Photoshop to give a fantasy painting—either digital or traditional—a realistic effect, but beware: if they’re overstated they can quickly become a gimmick.

A similar effect happens when a bright light travels into the human eye. Light scatters in the eyelashes, cornea, lens, and aqueous humor—the jellylike liquid inside the eye. The light then hyperactivates a region of the cones around the central spot of light.


The color corona also forms around the reflections of the light source on a specular surface like water. This close-up is from a painting from Dinotopia: First Flight. The color corona floods out from the bright water reflections and melts all adjacent silhouettes. A color corona can help to make a source seem brighter than the white of the paper, and actually make a viewer squint involuntarily.


This painting by Peder Mønsted capitalizes on this idea of an intense color corona adjacent to the setting sun. The mountains seem to be taking on fire from the sun, rather than retiring to a cool distant hue.

Related GJ post: reverse atmospheric perspective.
Wikipedia entries on aqueous humor, lens flare.
ARC entry on Peder Mønsted

Animals are not Fauvists

Around 1900, Henri Matisse and Andre Derain began a movement of painting called “Les Fauves” (which means “wild beasts”) in order to describe their wild brushwork and raw color.



It's worth noting that elephants, who are possessed of an eleven-pound brain and 30,000 muscles in the trunk alone, can paint a representational portrait of a fellow elephant (or is it a self-portrait?), and that they do so not wildly or randomly, but with extreme care and deliberation.

The elephant is trained, and this is a commercial enterprise, you might say, but couldn’t the same be said of us all?

Related Gurney Journey post: Gorilla Portraits
Thank you, Daniel M.

Park Bench

This on-the-spot sketch from the early 1980s was made with a brush pen on drawing paper. Everything in shadow goes to black, and everything in light goes to white, ignoring the contour lines bounding the light side.
The technique is a good way to simplify detail. Each figure is an edge-lit silhouette. I worked from left to right, completing each man before starting the next, because I anticipated that the subjects might come and go unexpectedly.

Related posts: high-contrast shapewelding, edge lighting, two values

Bernstein on Metaphor

I know that this is an art blog, and not a music blog. But there are at least two reasons why I can’t resist sharing this clip from Leonard Bernstein’s legendary Norton lectures of 1973: 1. He was one of the best explainers on the planet, and 2. His thoughts on metaphor are universal enough to apply to those of us who draw pictures and write stories.

More from the Bernstein website, link.
New York Times review of the DVD release, link.

Krøyer’s Hip Hip Hurra!

The Arken Museum in Copenhagen is presenting an exhibition called “The Skagen Painters —In a New Light,” currently on view until the first of June, 2008.

The principal work in the show is called “Hip Hip Hurra!” by the Danish/Norwegian painter Peder Krøyer, the ringleader of a group of genre painters who gathered in the fishing village of Skagen.

Krøyer, like the Juste Milieu painters in France and the Newlyn painters in England, blended the insights of Impressionism with the skills of traditional academic craftsmanship, which he perfected in Leon’s Bonnat’s atelier in Paris.


The small color study above shows how the design looked as it was almost fully crystallized. Between this sketch and the final painting he removed the hat from the man with the glasses, and he added a man with a light jacket leaning into the picture at right.

The current exhibit in Denmark examines how Krøyer achieved the feeling of a spontaneous, offhand composition in “Hip, Hip, Hurra!”, which in fact was carefully staged and arranged. The painting took him over four years to complete.


The detail of the final painting shows a principle Krøyer would have learned from Bonnat, namely to be careful not to violate the lights. The large light area composed of the tablecloth, the girl’s dress, and the woman at right is skilfully shape-welded together, with no dark accents interrupting it. This unified structure makes a strong, simple mass that holds the painting together despite a prodigious amount of detail.


Here I’ve taken the final painting and exaggerated the underlying tonal structure. The light shape is an abstract unit that looks something like a butterfly. The light woman’s arm extends upward from it at right, and the dark woman’s arm comes into the shape at left. These two gestures are given compositional salience and they help us recognize the theme of the picture immediately.

Two smaller light shapes float like islands in the dark background of foliage: the head of the woman at left, and the cluster of revelers in the distance.

Further Reading
Related Gurney Journey Posts: Shape Welding, Juste Milieu, Color Sketches
More on Skagen painters, Link.
More on the exhibition, Link.
OutdoorPainting.com feature on Peder Krøyer, Link.
Thanks to Armand Cabrera for telling me about the Skagen painters.

Art By Committee: Wind

On previous Wednesdays, here and here, we’ve played a game called “Art By Committee,” where I give you an excerpt from an actual science fiction manuscript, and then you have a week to illustrate it.

Here’s an example from the original Art-By-Committee sketchbook. Please click on the image to enlarge.

The new excerpt for you is: “A wind—not moving air but currents of force—rose up and tore at her.”

Tomorrow: Krøyer’s Hip Hip Hurra!