Overpass, Colby Kansas

Overpass over the I-70, Colby, Kansas, 7:30 AM, gouache

The spaces have opened up. Big empty vistas and long, long drives.

Ribbon Designs

from Ticket Writing and Sign Painting, 1916

Ribbon designs were popular design motifs in illustration and sign painting a hundred years ago. 

The book "Ticket Writing and Sign Painting" from 1916 advises to make sure to use them only when you have plenty of space to devote to them, and to use a little shadow to show which parts project forward.

Ribbon designs lend a grand storybook feeling. N.C. Wyeth uses them on this title page to give a feeling of heraldry. The continuous wrapping ribbon combines nicely here with the mix of capital and lower case letters of the lettering.

Maxfield Parrish uses them here as a boundary device and even a platform for the model, and he curls the ends rather than letting them flap away like a flag.

If you've got a dollar bill in your pocket, you've got a fine example of a ribbon design. Note how the parallel lines describing the edge of the ribbon give it dimension as it folds over itself.

Ticket Writing and Sign Painting, 1916

Indiana Theater

Yesterday I was standing on the sidewalk of Terre Haute, Indiana painting this watercolor of the sign of the Indiana Theatre, when a gentleman came up and identified himself as Rob Lundstrom, the owner.

I recorded his greeting. Hopefully this audio will play for you.

(Link to Soundcloud File)

It took about two hours to paint the image, and while we stood there, we met three other people, all artists. Two of them said they like to draw with their sons.

Here are four stages in the process: the pencil drawing, the big base colors, the shadows, and the finer details.

Jeanette here: Here's the sketch I did. A pencil lay-in, touches of watercolor with a waterbrush, finished with a Micron pen.  The short lady was squinting into the sun at us for the longest time, free model!

Best part was the tour of the inside of the Indiana Theatre. One of the ideas of John Eberson's "Atmospheric Theatre" movement was theming the rooms to the times of day, and making the ceiling of the auditorium feel like the night sky over a fantasy palace courtyard.

The Indiana Theatre doesn't do many movies, but the space can be booked for weddings, parties, reunions, and other events.

Four Ways to Combine Audio With Your Artwork

Yesterday I showed you my "Studies in Casein" exhibit, created with the new Google Open Gallery toolkit. Now, here's the link to my "Studies in Watercolor" Exhibit.

I set up this exhibit with the "immersive layout" option. This mode presents the art full-screen, with the video and audio on autoplay (adjust your volume). Clicking on the image thumbnail opens up the scalability feature and pauses the video/audio.

For sound recording, I use a Zoom H1 Digital Recorder. If you're interested in adding the dimension of sound to your artwork, you can bring this lightweight unit into the field when you go painting. It records stereo sound in MP3 or WAV formats, and gives you automatic or manual level control. 

Imagine being able to let your collectors hear the actual sounds of the crashing surf alongside your seascape painting. Or imagine letting your painting students know what you were thinking while you did your on-site demo. As artists, we can create not only paintings, but also various packets of other media: text captions, step-by-step photos, video clips, and audio samples, which we can reconfigure on various platforms, some of which are not even invented yet. At its essence, art is about lived experience, and an audio clip can add an evocative real-life resonance to what you've captured visually

There are at least four ways to combine audio with your artwork. 

1. You can add audio to your artwork by uploading the audio file to Soundcloud, and then embedding the Soundcloud file in a blog post. For an example, see my blog post about England. 

2. Or you can combine sound with your plein-air in a YouTube video, as with my 'Talking Portrait' above. This was edited in iMovie on a Mac laptop using "Ken Burns" camera moves. 

3. Or Apple's Keynote presentation software lets you add an audio clip.  Here's how. 

4. Finally, you can combine audio with an online exhibit using Google Open Gallery's toolset. 

Google Open Gallery is currently only offered by invitation, but you can apply here, and tell them I sent you.

Link to my Watercolor Exhibit on Google Open Gallery.

Previously on GJ: DIY hand knitted deadcat windscreen for the Zoom mike

Kent, Ohio

This morning we took a walk around the campus of Kent State and then I did this gouache painting at the corner of Water and Main Streets.

Colors: White, Cadmium Yellow Medium, Venetian Red, and Burnt Umber. In this set of colors, a tint of Burnt Umber looks like blue violet.

Gurney Casein Exhibit

(You can slide through the images on your trackpad or use arrow keys to navigate the embedded feature above. Click on an image and zoom in, or play the video. If it doesn't work in the embedded form, just link directly over to my exhibition website.) 

A while ago I received an invitation from Google to help them test a new toolset for artists and museums called "Google Open Gallery."

The online tools let you share your paintings in a scalable format, so visitors can zoom into the finest details. You can also combine your images into exhibits and enhance them with video and audio. I like the way a sound recording or a short video shot on location can bring a painting to life and make you feel like you're there.

I put together an exhibition of 20 of my plein-air casein studies, accompanied by 14 videos and 4 audio captures. To get the full experience, please follow this link to the James Gurney Casein Exhibit on Google Open Gallery.

Google is currently giving out the tools to artists for free, but it's by invitation only. If you would like to request an invite, or just explore other exhibitions, check out the main page at Google Open Gallery. Both my exhibit presentation and Google's design interface is a work in progress. Let us know how it's working on your player—or what questions you might have—in the comments.

I made a watercolor exhibit, too, and I'll show you that in a couple of days.

Your Roving Arts Reporter

We're on our way to Colorado and Wyoming, ready to cover events as they unfold. Our little car is packed full of gouache, casein, watercolor, fountain pens, coffee, and peanut-butter-flavored granola bars.

Modulating Greens in Watercolor

Blog reader Diego Conte says:

"I am a young self taught artist in Spain, and your books are probably the best resource I have ever found. And your watercolour video is amazing. I'm recommending them to every artist I know."

"I don't know if there is any article in your blog on this matter, but since there is a chapter on your book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter, I think it is not a bad idea at all to ask this question. How could I establish a good green harmony using watercolours? My mixes always end up looking muddy on the paper when I try to use green... it always look too cool If I need it to be warm or vice versa. I see a lot of great watercolor masters simply avoiding it using ochre or brown colour schemes instead. But I want to be faithful to my subject harmony. I don't know if it is an interesting topic for such a thing as an article, but any short tip or direction would be great."

Martín Rico y Ortega, watercolor

Thanks, Diego. Good question. Greens can be wonderful in watercolor, and it's a good goal to be faithful to nature.

The Spanish painter Martín Rico (1833-1908) is good to look at for how he uses greens. In this one he moves toward the blue-green hues. But it's not the hues, so much as the values that makes it work. He avoids muddiness by organizing the picture into three basic tonal areas: 1. light sky, 2. dark trees, and 3. middle-tone stream bank.

Simple, strong value schemes never look muddy. This is something Rico learned from Daubigny, one of the French Barbizon painters. 

Here's a small detail of the same painting. He uses a variety of greens, including blue greens, grey greens, and yellow greens. That doesn't mean he necessarily had a lot of separate green pigments on his palette. It just means he was conscious of varying the chroma and hue of the mixtures. Rico was also interesting in the way he left little white dots on the picture, which gives it a little sparkle.

Some artists leave green off the palette altogether and mix their greens from yellows and blues, because that way there's always variety in the mixture. In foliage there is variety of green in each leaf, variety in each small group of leaves, and variety from one tree to another, and variety from foreground to background. 

But all that variety must happen within those simple tonal areas, and that's what's a bit challenging.

Here's another watercolor landscape, this time by an English watercolorist namedHarry Sutton Palmer (1854-1933). Even though his range emphasizes yellow-green, he uses a subtle variety of colors, which would be more evident in the original.

One of the secrets to both this painting and the last one is that they chose not to paint a bright blue sky. A bright blue sky behind bright green leaves might look good in a photo, but it can often be deadly in a painting. However, green foliage against sky filled with a high white cloud layer can be very attractive.

Here's one last watercolor by Harry Sutton Palmer. Those greens are all composite mixtures, and none of them are too high-chroma. They're probably muted quite a bit from what he actually saw. And he obviously worked hard to simplify his values to the general midtone of the leaves, the light sky and distant area, and the dark areas of the tree bases.

Diego, I hope that helps. Good luck with your greens. Enjoy them while they remain before autumn and winter come.

Previously on GurneyJourney: The Green Problem

Prismatic Palette

Frank Mason (1921-2009) was a painter and teacher at the Art Students League who used a shelf-like palette arrangement for his oil paints called "The Prismatic Palette." One of Mason's students, Keith Gunderson, explained it to me this way:

Prismatic Palette by Leslie Watkins 

"The value scale was the essence of the shelf arrangements, with emphasis on “Orange Value” as the unifying tone of the lights. The shelves were arrayed with a string of greens made from “Parent Green”; premixed value strings of Blue, Violet, and Grey to calibrate atmospheric perspective; a shelf for pre-mixed tints for the sky; and a “Control String” of pure colors squeezed from the tube, arranged by value from light to dark."

"Modulating a color with it’s complement was often substituted by mixing grey or brown into that color... perhaps an influence of Frank’s teacher [Frank Vincent] Dumond (1865-1951) and Dumond’s teacher, [Jules Joseph] Lefebvre (1836–1911)."

I have also heard "parent green" referred to as "vegetable green," the color of transmitted light through backlit young leaves.

Landscape by Frank Vincent Dumond 

Here are a couple of paintings by League instructor and link to the French tradition, Frank Vincent Dumond, showing his very sensitive approach to color.

Dumond, Christ and the Fishermen, 1891 

Leslie Watkins, another Mason student, describes the prismatic palette this way:

From Pinterest via Outdoor Painter

"It clarifies several strings of colors into even steps, with the lightest or highest values descending to the lowest or darkest tones."

"The steps are based on pure colors from cadmium lemon yellow to alizarin crimson. The different strings of colors consist of grays, violets, blues and greens."

Another Art Students League teacher (and another Frank), Frank Reilly (1906-1965), also taught a value-based system of premixing palette colors, but it was different from Mason's. Reilly's lineage connects him to Gérôme, Delaroche and Boulanger.

Both systems are descendants of a common practice among painters before the 20th century to premix colors in sequences of stepped values, analogous to the keys and manuals of a pipe organ.

I'm obviously no expert on the League instructors' systems, so I welcome further insights and discussion in the comments.

Previously on GJ Premixing Color
More on the Prismatic Palette by Leslie Watkins at the Art Times Journal
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Edit: After reading the post and the comments, Mason student Keith Gunderson adds this:
"Thanks for an excellent post on the Mason prismatic palette."

"I might add though that although most artists that studied with Frank had these shelf boxes at the ready when they painted both plein-air and in the studio, this palette functioned more as a landscape palette, especially with a great gob of “orange value” violet as a harmony- orange value being the lowest form of light. This violet was often brushed over a dried venetian red ground and would infiltrate all the subsequent colors that were applied on top. Unfortunately this would sometime result in an overly chalky appearance in the coloration."

"The palette would be organized along a string of nine values (sometimes more)—the four upper values representing values in light, Yellow Ochre value at value 5 in the middle of the string or “the turning plane,” and the lowest four values representing shadow values. In this case, Cad Orange was the lowest value of light and Cad Red was the lightest value of shadow."

"Often times artists would arrange their color strings on the shelves to mimic the progression of horizontal landscape bands, for example the control string would occupy the lowest shelf with the grey above this shelf, violet above this, blue above this, and finally the light pinks occupying the top shelf (or shelves)."

"Greens would be modulated by inserting a bit of the blue, violet or grey dollop of paint (or a combination of the three) from the value string that was the equivalent value in the vertical position above or beneath that green value on the string. As I said before, this meant that there was an abundance of white being mixed into the paint, since white was mixed into the violet, ivory black, and ultramarine blue base from which these strings were mixed."

"Parent or “vegetable “green pure ( Cadmium Yellow Lemon with a touch of Phthalo green at the value of Cad yellow medium) was scaled up two values with White and then scaled down to Ochre Value through the addition of Cobalt Blue and finally scaled down to the darkest values with the mixture of an Ultramarine Blue-Alizarin violet. Modulating these already-mixed greens with the blue, grey, and violet tint mixtures was an issue as all this modulation tended to muddy the greens."

"Often, F.V. Dumond and Mason, in an effort to keep the green’s chroma intact would use the green string unmodulated which sometimes resulted in “garish greens”. Personally, I was always amazed at how Dumond’s earlier paintings done in Paris where more subdued when compared to the “electric greens” of his more Old Lyme influence period paintings."

"Finally, the notion that greens could be modulated with their complements (reds) was never really broached, since this system sort of replaced a more truly prismatic approach as evidenced in the teaching of Gruppe and Hawthorne."

"Well, I could go on and on but I think you get the gist of all this. Having studied with Frank for many years, I was able to glean much from this approach to color, although I find it now to be limited in certain respects. Frank’s teaching was very intuitive and sometimes I think he himself was always trying new theories . I think that ultimately this approach was devised, whether in the studios of Paris or in Old Lyme, as a way to think about color and that it was less about matching the correct color and more about the emotional equivalence that color evokes in the mind of the viewer."
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Thanks, Keith, for sharing all that valuable information. Check out Keith's Blog, "Classic Realism."

Ebb and Flow of Artists' Reputations

Norman Rockwell, illustration from 1917, "The Ungrateful Man," from the Google Art Project and the Norman Rockwell Museum

The reputations of Golden Age illustrators have risen and fallen over the decades. This Google NGram chart records the number of times their names have been mentioned in print.

Howard Pyle hit his first peak in 1900, but fell away after his death in 1911. He surged ahead in the 1920s, but I'm not sure why. Anybody know?

Norman Rockwell didn't enter the scene until around World War I. During his active career he was best known for painting 323 magazine covers for the Saturday Evening Post, ending that series in 1963. In all that time his renown never surpassed that of Maxfield Parrish. Rockwell's name was overshadowed by Pyle's until 1970, when Abrams published the book Norman Rockwell: Artist and Illustrator. The Norman Rockwell Museum started modestly in 1969, expanding to its current location in 1993, where it continues to build his reputation as his name became synonymous with small town life in America.

The names Howard Pyle, Maxfield Parrish, and Andrew Wyeth were mentioned about equally through the 1990s, but Dean Cornwell is not as well known. That makes it harder for museums and publishers to market books and exhibitions of his work.
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Wikipedia--more about the Google NGram Viewer
The Norman Rockwell Museum