Howdy from Yeehaw Junction

Here are some snapshots from the Journey to Chandara Road Tour.

We stopped at Yeehaw Junction on the long drive across in Florida to scrape all the dead bugs off the windshield.


Getting fueled up with bagels, coffee, and wireless at Einstein Bagels.


I did a taping of "Weekends with Marcia." The two cardinal rules of TV appearances are: always bring a copy of your own book to wave in front of the camera, and always wear a jacket and tie. Oops, I forgot both rules.


At the Vero Beach Book Center, I did some dinosaur drawings for the kids from St. Edwards School.

The kids from the Willow School had good interview questions written out in cursive in their notebooks. "Do you ever get frustrated in your work?" "How did you come up with the idea for your pictures?"


And I was caught again scribbling on the wall with markers, a hobby of mine.

P.S. Thanks for the mention on Moleskinerie, a fun blog if you're curious what other people do with those nifty little sketchbooks.

Suburban Archaeology

When I was in second grade, I was convinced that if I dug enough in my front yard I’d find the tomb of an Egyptian pharoah or the skull of a T.rex. Never mind that I grew up in Santa Clara County, California, the heart of suburbia. You can’t talk a determined archaeologist out of his steely determination. My dad couldn’t talk me out of it either.

I was the youngest of five kids, and by the time I came along, my dad pretty much gave up on yard maintenance. He didn’t mind too much if I dug test pits in the yard. The Tonka trucks stayed at it for months. All the neighborhood kids helped out. Eventually their moms banned them from coming over because they came home with their shoes and their pockets full of dirt.


National Geographic was the cause of my affliction. There was a set of the old bound magazines outside my bedroom door. I would read about Hiram Bingham discovering Machu Picchu. If he could find a lost city, why couldn’t I?


I charted my expeditions on the globe: first Palo Alto, then Persia, then Peru. My older brother Dan showed me how to draw sailboats and dinosaurs. Big dreams are born in little people, and I am always grateful to my school teachers, my parents and my older brothers and sisters for encouraging me--and letting me dig up the yard.

Pyle's Exploratory Thumbnails

Jeanette and I spent most of last Friday at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington for a presentation to K-12 art instructors as part of their teachers’ in-service day. Newpaper article here. Thanks to all who attended my talk and stopped by to say hello at the signing afterward.


We also had some time to pore over the extensive collection of paintings by Howard Pyle and his students. Curator Joyce Schiller then met us in the galleries to discuss the core of Pyle’s teaching and his methods of picturemaking.


Although Pyle did not leave behind a systematic theory or method in his own writings, many of his students kept copious notes of his spoken words. According to Dr. Schiller, there is no evidence that Pyle photographed costumed models for reference. There are only “fun photos of his students dressed in costumes as though they were preparing for Halloween.” Drawn figure studies are extremely rare.

What remain are many of his rough, exploratory sketches drawn from imagination.


Dr. Schiller kindly permitted me to share a few of these preliminary sketches, appearing for the first time here on Gurney Journey. They were made in preparation for “Kid on the Deck of the Adventure Gallery,” shown for comparison at the end of this post.

According to Dr. Schiller, “they are for compositional arrangement only and are not model studies or preliminary layout images. After Pyle made his composition decisions he went directly to the canvas.”


They have the flavor of a vision snatched from the ether, a snapshot from the swirling creative vortex, a half-remembered dream.

Although Pyle was both a proper gentleman and a respected scholar, he was also a mystic, following the beliefs of Swedenborgianism. This ecclesiastical organization was popular among artists in the 19th Century because of its associations with divination and theosophy. Picturemaking was for Pyle a process more mysterious than mechanical.

My thanks to Joyce K. Schiller. The foregoing images are provided by and copyright of the Delaware Art Museum, reproduced here with their express permission.

Postcard from Georgetown

Before we left Washington D.C. today, I did one last watercolor in the mini Moleskine.
First, here’s the street corner of 31st and M as it appeared to the camera.


Inspired by all of your kind comments on the October 15 post (grazie, Maurizio, mi fai tanti complimenti), I thought I’d try the idea of accentuating the lighting contrast to simulate the look of old photos.

So I laid in the broad shadow masses a bit darker than they appeared, and kept the light sides of all the forms a bit lighter than they actually appeared. The only pure white is the central building. White shapes in the center of a composition are a sure-fire eyeball magnet.


This time I remembered the fountain pen with the brown ink. It’s an old Waterman with a pump mechanism inside that slurps fountain pen ink right out of a bottle. The ink is water-soluble, so the line work has to be done after all the washes.


Jeanette uses a brown Micron with permanent ink so she doesn’t have to worry about dissolving her lines if she needs to add additional washes. But we both like to add line work and details last to avoid a “coloring book” look. Lines defining the light side of the form aren’t really necessary, and leaving them off gives a nice touch.

Cracking Paint and City Streets

Inspiration strikes in the most unlikely places.

As I was working on the new book, Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, I was trying to come up with a street grid—a city plan—for the city of Chandara. But I had wasted a whole afternoon making tentative scribbles like this one.

I had studied maps of some of the greatest cities, like Paris and Amsterdam, and there was some elusive quality of design to each one that appealed to me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

That evening, Jeanette and I went out for Chinese food. As we waited for the Moo Goo Gai Pan, the door of the Jade Palace Restaurant caught my eye.

I was intrigued by the pattern of cracking paint. The big diagonal cracks reminded me of avenues, and the smaller cracks looked like a maze of hidden alleyways, or "snickleways" as they call them in York, England.

I was down on my hands and knees staring closer and closer at the door. People walking by thought I had completely lost my mind.

Every city, in its old medieval section, has a pattern of streets that includes broad, straight avenues and little winding side streets. There is some deep law of nature at play in the cracking paint that also governs the layout of cities. I would like to live in such a city.

This was the breakthrough! The design of Chandara fell right into place. I went home and drew the map.


My fortune cookie said some trite nonsense, like “You will meet an interesting friend.” But what it should have said was “Stay open to possibilities.”

Mini Moleskine

We had the day off in Baltimore yesterday, so we spent most of the day in the Walters Art Museum. This is a must-see collection if you like 19th Century academic painting, and they also have a vast collection of Asian, Egyptian, and Roman stuff on display. And it’s free! Check out this gem “Figaro’s Shop” by the Spanish genre painter Jose Aranda 1837-1903.

I also inaugurated a new Moleskine mini watercolor sketchbook. The view is of Vernon Square Park from the steps of the Peabody Conservatory.


As usual, I picked a motif that was way too complex, so I was boggling my brain trying to sort it all out. I took a couple of shots in progress:

I tried to simplify things by using a limited palette: lampblack, ultramarine blue, yellow ochre, vermillion, and sepia. After a quick pencil drawing, the first step was to block in the main shapes with a ½ inch Winsor & Newton series 995 flat.

After this rough block-in I like to add the finicky details with a brown fountain pen. But I left it in the hotel room, so I used an Escoda 1212 Kolinksy round #4 instead. The water supply is from a clear 35mm film can. Remember film cans?

White Church

Here’s an 10 x 8 inch oil study of a church, painted from under a porch on a rainy day. What interested me was how the white color of the church resembles the tone of the sky, leaving the little dark shapes of the clock face and windows almost floating in air. You can see the warm underpainting peeking through the semi-opaque sky colors.



People often think the sky gets darker on an overcast or rainy day, but actually the opposite happens. It gets lighter in relation to anything else in the scene. Only the purest white snow can be lighter than an overcast sky.

Digging Dinosaurs

Paleontologist Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History spent part of last summer’s field season in the remote White Ghost Pagoda region of western China. The locals wouldn’t venture into these places for fear of evil spirits. Norell’s expedition team explored deserts that no dino hunters had yet entered. The sand was littered with artifacts from centuries-old Silk Road expeditions: coins, arrowheads, and bones of dead camels.


We met Dr. Norell last Thursday in his office in one of the corner towers of the Museum of Natural History in New York, overlooking the leafy vista of Central Park. He and staff artist Mick Ellison showed us some of the paleo art from the museum’s rich history: original dinosaur paintings by Charles Knight and exquisitely detailed ink wash drawings of fossils by Erwin Christman.


Mark Norell is one of the world authorities on feathered dinosaurs. He said that he is encountering more and more evidence of feathers on two-legged meat-eating dinosaurs, perhaps even T. rex. He is even finding a hint of light and dark barred patterns on some of the feathers.


Fossil preparator Amy Davidson showed us how she has been carefully removing the surrounding rock from a new Tarbosaurus skull. This T. rex relative shows some of the best detail yet of the central part of the cranium, revealing new information about the olfactory and optic areas. This work may shed new light on how well these creatures could see and smell.


We then followed a labyrinth of dim hallways to the “Big Bone Room,” supervised by collections manager Carl Mehling, seen with a beard in the previous photo. He showed us the massive sauropod bones resting on metal shelves, bones so heavy that a forklift is required to move them.


It is often said that artists are the eyes of paleontology. If so, the scientists and museum specialists are everything else: legs, hands, muscle, mind, and heart. They do their detective work with tireless zeal and imagination, usually on shoestring budgets, to help us bring the picture of these long-lost animals into better focus.

From Endor to Chelsea

Christopher Evans headed up the matte painting department at Lucasfilm during Return of the Jedi. He later rendered dozens of computer-generated illusions for Matte World Digital. But it was always his dream to have a one-man show of his oil paintings at a top gallery in New York City.


Yesterday Jeanette and I arrived from the pouring rain for the unveiling of “Open Space,” an exhibition of a dozen large landscape panoramas at the Fischbach Gallery in Chelsea. Mr. Evans’s mastery of light, air, and atmosphere were in full display here, with fleecy cumulus cloud forms and rolling California hillsides stepping back into luminous distances.


Mr. Evans, it may be revealed, is a founding member of the Slaves to Nature, seen here painting Fawn’s Leap along Kaaterskill Creek. I was working behind him in what appears here to be a tranquil section of the stream, little suspecting that disaster was about to strike. But that’s another story for another post.

Getting an Author Tour to Fly

Dateline: 10:10 a.m. Route 55, Poughkeepsie, New York

Sending an author around on a book tour is an expensive proposition for any publisher. I don’t know how they can justify the cost of air flights to and from dozens of cities, plus all the restaurant meals, hotels, and author escorts. Sometimes you fly into a city and you just sell ten books. How does that pay?

My publisher, Andrews McMeel, is incredibly supportive, but I had a feeling they could never afford to send me on a 30-city jet-set extravaganza for this book launch. I can’t blame them.

Rather than sit home and whine, I had a crazy idea. My wife Jeanette and I are empty-nesters now, with our youngest off to college. Why not head out in our old family van, “Trusty Rusty?” We’ve been hungry to hit the road anyway. We could visit the little bookstores that are too far from airports to lure the jet-touring authors. We could do a few lecture gigs to pay for gas and meals. I’ve been curious to learn what art students are thinking about these days, so I lined up speaking engagements at nine different art schools.

The publisher met us halfway. They agreed to pay for the hotels as long we took care of everything else.

Yesterday we dropped off our parakeet to the pet shop and returned all our library books. This morning we’re starting south on the first leg of the tour. Here’s a picture taken just minutes ago. Trusty Rusty is riding a little low on her shocks. She’s loaded down with boxes of books, a big drawing easel, sketching gear, a digital projector, a laptop computer, fountain pens, Verdi CDs, and granola bars.

We’re on our way into New York City, for a day of museums and galleries. For you art-tech-fanatics, I’ll post some practical art tips from time to time, but I’ll be less the professor and more the hobo for a few weeks.