Art By Committee: Transmogrified

On Wednesdays we cut loose a little with a group sketch game called "Art By Committee." I give you an excerpt from an actual science fiction manuscript and you come up with a picture to illustrate it.
This week’s quote was a bit more conceptual than usual. It brought out an amazing range of solutions: all clever, imaginative, unexpected, and beautiful. Thanks, everybody.

Robert M. Brown

Andrew Walker

Andy Wales

Christoffer Gertz Bech


Art Keegan

Rob Hummer

John York


Tony Upton


Jen Zeller

Roberta Baird

Kristina Carroll

.....and the one from the original Art By Committee sketchbook.

Here’s next week’s quote: “Snarking hell, Jensen, you damned near got us roasted.”

I hope you have fun with it. 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 10:00 AM Eastern Time USA.

Dinotopia at the Children’s House

Dr. Jo Ann Leggett, director of the Children’s House of Victoria, Texas recently completed a Dinotopia-themed project for the school’s summer program.


The kids got an opportunity to try a funny face contest, as well as dinosaur musical parades, and a “water ride down under.”

There were some brave efforts at plank walking. They played ping pong with Zippo and they designed t-shirts. Kids, parents, and faculty worked together to paint dinosaur murals.

A section by the back fence transformed into Treetown. A sprinkler in a tree became Waterfall City, and the kids put on their swimsuits and played under the water spray.

Bagels on dowels brought to life the Kentrosaurus Bakery from Journey to Chandara.

Dr. Leggett wrote in summary:

“I have been in business for 30 years and I have never experienced the response your Dinotopia has made on all assets of our program. The fact that you correlated all subject matter—art, science, social studies, music, and math in your book made our task of a progressive educational experience easy. Dinotopia is not just a book. It is an experience to be treasured for generations.”

To which I say, the success of the program is more of a tribute to Dr. Leggett’s amazing creativity and enthusiasm, along with her faculty, parents, and students. Without their imagination, Dinotopia would remain dormant on the page.

To other teachers planning your upcoming school year, I hope you’ll consider doing a Dinotopia curriculum theme. If you write me about your plans using your school stationery and include a self-addressed stamped envelope, I’ll be happy to send you a free list of suggested games and activities and a signed card to help you get the ball rolling.

James Gurney
Dinotopia School Event
PO Box 693
Rhinebeck, NY 12572

You can contact Dr. Jo at <doctorjoa@aol.com>

Small Touches

William Henry Hunt (1790-1864) painted this watercolor showing a girl plucking a chicken. Hunt (not to be confused with the PreRaphaelite William Holman Hunt) was known for closely observed studies using a stippling technique that took him over two weeks of patient effort.

Walter Sickert (1860-1942) said of Hunt:

“I was thinking how he had anticipated the Impressionist technique, in his multitude of small touches, building up a sensitive whole. I was thinking of this, and of Pissarro, and of how the extreme division into small touches in each case brought about this desirable result. The more touches, provided they are dictated by sensation and observation, the more frequent is the revision. Hence the juster sum.” (from A Free House).

The practice of working with small touches is certainly not restricted to Hunt or to the Impressionists. The greatest early champion was John Ruskin, whose writings were read avidly by many of the Impressionists. Ruskin advised his students to work slowly and delicately, using the point of the pencil or brush “as if you were drawing the down on a butterfly’s wing.”

This way of painting also shows up in some of Rockwell’s work, including this painting of J. F. Kennedy. In our own urgent era, which advocates bold and rapid execution, this method of small touches can offer a welcome alternative pathway.

The Ruskin quote is from The Elements of Drawing, Illustrated Edition, with notes by Bernard Dunstan, link.

More about W.H. Hunt, link.

Color Scripting

Picture books, like animated films, video games, or graphic novels, are sequential art forms. Each painting is part of a larger statement that unfolds across time.
In The World Beneath, the second Dinotopia book, I planned the sequences with a color marker storyboard, which I mentioned in a previous post. I also made a few pages of tiny oil sketches to establish the range of colors for each sequence. Each sketch is about the size of a postage stamp, and they’re juxtaposed so I can see how one color scheme will lead into the next.

In film, this kind of overall color planning is often called "color scripting."
I planned a few individual paintings more comprehensively, with color sketches about the size of a postcard. I mixed up a gamut of colors with a palette knife and laid them down quickly, almost abstractly, without thinking too much. This painting was intended to be a night scene lit by firelight with people and dinosaurs, but I wasn’t sure of the details.

Here’s another variation on the idea of an evening ceremony, this time with a skybax. This is one of many ideas that I explored in sketch stage that I later abandoned.

By this time I had established which of the paintings seemed worth working up to a larger size, and I developed those images a little more. These oil sketches are each about 1.5 x 4 inches. Juxtaposing the little sketches helped me to think of not only of the individual painting but also the adjacent sequences.
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Gallery of finished paintings from The World Beneath, link.

Scraper Sketch

A while ago I noticed this piece of heavy equipment sleeping on a job site and decided to sketch a picture of it. It’s a Caterpillar 637 elevating scraper.

For an oil study like this where I’m only interested in the object and not the surroundings, sometimes I start with a piece of masonite primed with white oil paint. A brush works as well as a pencil for laying in the shapes, and you can get to detailed rendering right away.

Here’s a video of one in action, link.

Realism and its Synonyms

We’re living in the midst of a resurgence of realism in painting. At the same time there’s a revolution in realistic CGI animation and digital effects. I thought it might be helpful to take a closer look at the various words that we use to describe art that looks real.

Trompe l'œil
Art whose purpose is to deceive the viewer into believing he or she is looking at an actual, dimensional scene. Above, museum diorama backdrop by James Perry Wilson.


Verisimilitude
The close resemblance between the object or scene and its portrayal. Also, illusionism. Above, detail by Ludwig Deutsch.


Realism
Art whose goal is to represent the real world truthfully and objectively, based on close observation of commonplace details and contemporary life. Above, portrait of a peasant by Ivan Kramskoy.

Naturalism
A movement in art to represent the world according to objective scientific principles.

Photorealism
The resemblance of a work of art to particular qualities of photographic representation. Above, a simulation from CryEngine 2.

Believability
The quality of conforming to the observer’s experience or understanding of the world.

Discussion
Versimilitude is the narrowest word, meaning simply holding a mirror up to reality. Trompe l'œil is a special kind of verisimilitude found in museum dioramas, sidewalk art, and still life. It always requires a specific viewing angle, size, position, and lighting to achieve its ideal effect.

Naturalism could be present in any kind of painting, including a fantasy image, but it depends on the adherance to rational rules of light and color found in nature, rather than contrived or artificial effects.

Photorealism, (used here in the broad sense, not just the art movement), refers to a kind of realism that borrows specific effects from photography, rather than simulating human perception. As blog reader Denis Loubet has pointed out on the recent GJ post on HDR photography, video games deliberately use photographic effects.

Believability is a subjective quality. A work is believable if it “feels right,” even if it’s not realistic in a photographic sense. The way cars explode in movies doesn’t happen that way in real life, but it’s more convincing than a film of the real event. Animators and caricaturists are primarily interested in this kind of non-literal truthfulness.

The word “realism” has the broadest, richest, and most contradictory meaning. Historically it includes Courbet and the Impressionists because of their insistence on painting the humdrum world around them. Ironically, despite their expressed intention to be scientific, the realism of the Impressionists departed more and more from verisimilitude and became increasingly subjective. The quality of realism that seeks out commonplace subjects lives on in contemporary paintings of telephone poles and fast food signs.

Central to the realist tradition is the reaction to Romanticism and Classicism and the resistance to schemata, conventionalism, and idealization. Instead, artists are encouraged to base their art on concrete, direct observations of the world around them.
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Sidewalk Illusion drawings, link.
Recommended reading: Realism by Linda Nochlin, link.
Lines and Colors post on sidewalk illusions, link.
CryEngine gallery of digital photorealistic effects, link.

Barocci’s Eight-Step Program

Old masters developed a thorough working method that helped them visualize scenes from history and mythology. Sixteenth century painter Federico Barocci (1528-1612) planned his paintings with a series of eight steps, according to his biographer, Bellori.

1. After deciding on his idea for a picture, Barocci made dozens of loose sketches to work out the gesture and arrangement of the figures.

2. He then made studies in charcoal or pastel from live models.

3. Next he sculpted miniature figurines in wax or clay, each draped in tiny costumes to see how they would look under various lighting arrangements.

4. He proceeded with a compositional study in gouache or oil, considering the overall pattern of light and shade.

5. With that completed he produced a full-size tonal study or “cartoon” in pastels or charcoal and powdered gesso.

6. He then transferred this drawing to the canvas.

7. But before proceeding with the painting he produced small oil studies to establish the color relationships “so that all the colours should be concordant and unified among themselves without hurting each other.”

8. Then he went ahead with the finished painting.

Barocci may have been more meticulous than some of his contemporaries, but his process was not unusual, and virtually every artist followed at least some of these steps. He was a big inspiration to Rubens and many others who followed after.

These basic steps have been followed all through the history of imaginative picturemaking, right down to William Bouguereau, Norman Rockwell, and Dean Cornwell.
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Wikipedia entry on Barocci, link.
Computer wallpaper, link.

Art By Committee: Goggles

Wednesday is the day for our group sketch game called "Art By Committee." I present an actual excerpt from a science fiction manuscript and you illustrate it.

This week’s challenge about goggles and a dust storm got you going in a lot of unexpected directions, with different concepts of character, story, and mood. Nice work, everybody. Click the images to enlarge, and follow the links to learn more about their creators.

Roberta Baird

Jared Shear

Meredith Randazzo

Scot Dean Vorwaller

Andy Wales

Tony Upton

Josh Billings

Christoffer Gertz Bech

Art Keegan

Michael Lobasz

Andrew Walker

Rob Hummer

Paul Bozzo

Susan Adsett

John Randall York

Anna Myers

And the one from the original sketchbook.

Here’s next week’s quote: “What surprised me was that I didn’t feel apotheosized, or transmogrified. Didn’t feel like much of a god. I was at the beginning of some process. Eons of further development lay before me, a…”

I hope you have fun with it. Please scale your JPG to around 700 pixels across and compress the heck out of it. 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 10:00 AM Eastern Time USA.

Impromptu Oil Portrait

Here’s a quick oil sketch of a guy I met at a friend’s house. It’s painted on an 11x14 inch piece of gray cardboard, which was first sealed with acrylic matte medium.

He was telling the story of one of his adventures so I knew he’d be there a while. I asked him to sit near a light and try to remember one position and return to it from time to time.

I’ve found most people are willing or even flattered to oblige such a request, and I cherish the resulting paintings far more than I would a study of a stranger from a sketch group.