"This is the book that started it all" —Patrick O'Brien, MICA
James Gurney
This weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.
You can write me at: James Gurney PO Box 693 Rhinebeck, NY 12572
or by email: gurneyjourney (at) gmail.com Sorry, I can't give personal art advice or portfolio reviews. If you can, it's best to ask art questions in the blog comments.
Permissions
All images and text are copyright 2020 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.
However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.
A tangency happens when two objects in your drawing touch instead of overlapping. This can attract attention where you don't want it and confuse the sense of depth.
Sometimes a real scene is full of tangencies, as it was in this airport sketch. Normally you’d want to change the viewpoint or move elements around. But just for fun, I drew it the way I saw it. It’s so awkward I sort of like it.
Here’s a question in recognition of America’s traditional big shopping day. Where do you get most of your art supplies? Please take the poll at left. Multiple answers are OK. If I’ve missed a source, please mention it in the comments.
These drawings of baby heads by Andrew Loomis show the importance of careful construction, especially in foreshortened poses.
When the head tips upward, downward, or to the side, those center lines and equator lines really help to place the smaller forms in their proper relationship.
If a painting makes sense in pure black and white, it will also be effective in the full range of values and colors.
Put a painting through the “Threshold” filter in Photoshop (Image >Adjustments >Threshold) and see what happens.
William Liebl’s painting Drei Frauen in der Kirche (Three Women in Church), 1882, benefits from a strong and simple value arrangement. The book and the hands of the young woman fuse into the light of the near girl’s apron. The dark elements (dresses, head scarves, ceramic jug and carved pew) are all shape-welded together and kept in a mass.
Philosopher Denis Dutton shares his theory of beauty in this 15 minute TED lecture, illustrated with the white-board animation of Andrew Park.
Dutton dismisses the notion that beauty is in the eye of the beholder or is somehow connected to ideal form. Instead he takes a Darwinian approach, arguing that our response to beauty is wired into our human existence and our need to find mates.
He describes the ideal pictorial landscape as containing an open vista, with an element of water, a forked tree, and a sampling of wildlife, and a path or a road leading into the distance.
Above: Asher Durand.
This landscape, Dutton argues, is universally appealing across cultures because it appealed to our Pleistocene hunter-gatherer ancestors, presumably scanning for game to feed their mates.
Although I was impressed with Park’s animation, I didn’t find Dutton’s aesthetic theory particularly convincing, nor useful from an artist’s perspective. Part of the problem is semantic. As he says, we are impressed by skilled action, and we call it beautiful. It attracts the girls. Or vice versa.
But what skilled actions are we talking about? Do we include backing a trailer or skateboarding or card-shuffling? What about soccer? These things might be described as “beautiful” only in the loosest sense of the term. Most people wouldn’t include all of them in a definition of art.
And art does not include only skilled action. Many people regard as art certain objects that consciously exhibit a lack of skill: fauve, neo-primitive, and such.
Dutton doesn’t dig very deeply into the nature and the range of the core aesthetic responses, and why those responses might be evolutionarily adaptive. He makes rather unsupportable claims about how he thinks Homo Erectus responded to hand axes. How does he know the axes were art objects? Maybe they were used as money, not art. And how does he know Homo Erectus didn’t have language?
Dutton’s theory also proposes that natural selection provides for a repulsion reaction to such dangerous things as standing at the edge a cliff. How, then, would Dutton’s theory account for the experience of the sublime, as formulated by aesthetic philosophers such as Edmund Burke? According to Burke, we’re attracted, rather than repulsed, by unsettling and disquieting experiences. (Example above: Wanderer by Caspar David Friedrich.)
Far more convincing—and useful— is Tolstoy’s notion that art is the deliberate transmission of emotion. It applies to dance, theater, painting, music, and all other forms. And it is immensely practical to the working artist, because it provides a clear test for the aesthetic value of a particular work. Tolstoy’s theory is a rich topic, perhaps fodder for a future post.
----- Dutton’s TED lecture on YouTube Burke’s theory of the sublime Tolstoy’s essay: “What is Art?”
Related GurneyJourney post: Neuroaesthetics
Petar Meseldžija has started a blog. The second post starts with the proverb: “ There is no shortcut to the place that is truly worthwhile of being at.”
I did this portrait in a bistro while waiting for the salad. Christophe Curien is an painter/sculptor from Paris. He was concentrating on watching the drawing, so he has a rather serious expression.
I used two or three water-soluble colored pencils, and I painted the background with a water brush filled with fountain-pen ink.
Note to concept artists: If you’re designing a frozen world, consider the fact that ice can form on the inside of things as well as on the outside.
Here’s a bus in Siberia. The wipers scrape the outside of the windshield. On the inside, the dashboard is covered with frozen precipitation. The bus driver sees the lights of the dashboard through a layer of ice.
Moisture condenses on everything, just like the frost in your freezer.
If someone leaves a window cracked open, the snow blows in and forms drifts.
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Pictures from “Siberian Ghost Cities” on Dark Roasted Blend
