Rain and Neon

One of the virtues of oil paint is that you can paint in a drizzle or a downpour. Don’t even think of trying it in watercolor. In 100 percent humidity, watercolor washes won't dry.

Here's the setup I was using for a painting of a storefront scene. The umbrella was a cheap beach umbrella that came with a plastic clamp. It attached to the top of the pochade box. It kept the worst of the water off the painting, but instead an icy river flowed down my neck.

It poured for six hours with no let-up. You can see the painting here in its lay-in stage, drawn in loosely with a bristle brush using burnt sienna thinned with turpentine.

It was fun painting the puddles, but I had a devil of a time with the neon drug store sign, as you can see in the final painting. The neon is an intensely saturated color. But it’s also high in value. It’s impossible to capture in both the intense chroma and the high value in the same single paint mixture.

If you go for the bright red chroma, the value or tone of the paint goes lower, and if you try to capture the lightness, you can’t also suggest the color. Analyzing the photo now after the fact, I suppose the trick would have been to show the bright halo of intensely saturated color directly adjacent to the near-white neon tubes.

Art at SUNY Fredonia

The art school at the State University of New York in Fredonia is an undiscovered gem.

The campus adjoins a tree-shaded small town in the rolling farmland of southwestern New York State. Jeanette and I spent the morning painting watercolors on a nearby Amish farm, accompanied by the sounds of a creaky windmill and a horse-drawn manure-spreader.

Fredonia has a fully restored 1891 opera house where the college’s animation majors can screen their capstone film projects. The school recently expanded its illustration program to include animation, under the leadership of the new illustration/animation chair Jill Johnston-Price.

Because of her expertise, most of the illustration majors develop a love and awareness for the moving image, all of them beginning the traditional way with a pencil and a light table or with stop motion before moving into digital tools.

Dr. Alberto Rey, who heads up the drawing and painting major, was born in Cuba. A gifted watercolor painter and fly fisher, he brings his painting students outdoors to work directly from life. A row of French easels is available for anyone to borrow for their landscape painting exercises.

“We try to get the students out of the sterile environment,” he said. “When they go outside, they have to learn to compose. Otherwise they get too structured and too dependent on photography.”

The focus of the curriculum is on fundamental hands-on skills. Drawing and painting students get the chance to hand-sculpt a figure in clay to deepen their understanding of the form of the figure.

There’s a room set up for intaglio printing and stone lithography, as well as a whole workshop for welding.

One of the assignments involved drawing a life-size self portrait nude in charcoal, which meant scaling up a drawing in the traditional way and very carefully modeling the tones. All the painting students learn how to make their own stretcher bars in the woodshop and stretch and prepare their own canvases.

But Dr. Rey believes that the thinking is equally vital. “It’s important that the students develop intellectually and conceptually,” he said, and part of the work of the painting majors involves writing their own artist statements.

One of the strengths of the art school at Fredonia, apart from its reasonable tuition costs, is the fact that it is part of a larger university, rated twelfth overall in the US News ranking for public institutions in the north. The college is strong in early education, music, performance, and public health. We met one art student who is combining her love of art with nursing and anthropology, with the goal of working in the field of art therapy. Another double-major that we met wants to go into teaching art to schoolchildren.

“It’s exciting conceptually for an instructor to work with the students,” said Dr. Rey. “The students are all different.” As different and unique as clay pots, I thought to myself as I surveyed a display of hand-thrown ceramics laid out on a counter overlooking a stand of maples in their full autumn finery. Such passion for teaching helps direct and fire the destiny of each of these young artists as surely as the potter shapes the clay.

Photo Reference

Photos are a big help, but you can’t take them too literally.

I wanted to paint a picture of an elegant gentleman scrubbing the teeth of a Baryonyx. But all I had available for a model was myself. So I grabbed some baggy pants and a long jacket and stood on the driveway with a push broom.

On its own, the photo is pretty unimpressive. The shadows are too black. The legs appear too short. The coat hangs straight down in wrinkles that don’t describe any action. The pose needed a better sense of action and a clearer silhouette. Every photo is just a starting place, and the fun begins when you make departures from the facts they present.

The Laundromat & the Non-Motif

I welcome being stuck at a laundromat because it means finding a “non-motif.”

You know how it is when you’re driving along looking for a picturesque subject to sketch. You never find it. Everything rushes by too fast as you look out the car window. Being plunked at a laundromat forces you to make the most of wherever you find yourself. Instead of a typical artistic motif, like a barn or a fishing boat, you have the chance to paint a non-motif, which is always more interesting.

Yesterday we spent a couple of hours at Benny’s Coin Laundry in Geneva, Ohio. All sorts of magnificently ordinary subjects presented themselves. Jeanette did a pen sketch of the Hong Kong King Buffet across the street.

I followed the ninety degree rule and faced toward a cell tower and a telephone pole. A guy came out of the laundry and said, “I’ve lived here 25 years, and I’ve never seen an artist painting the CVS.” He told us about how the old dance hall above the general store still has its parquet floor and gas lamps, but it is going to be cut up into apartments.

I used a Kuretake water brush pen. It comes in several sizes and has a tip of nylon fibers. I filled the clear plastic handle not with water but with the same Waterman brown ink that I use in my Waterman fountain pen, which I used for the line work. A second Kuretake holds a lighter tone of ink.

I had never really studied a cell tower before. This was the self-supporting kind, unlike the monopole or the guyed tower.

As we drove away, everything looked paintable, and I had to tear myself away from this one, a fast food sign in front of an abandoned Carnegie library. Non-motifs are all these candid vistas we take for granted in our everyday surroundings. They're attractive not because they are ugly or beautiful, but simply because they're there. They are the ubiquitous universe that we look at but rarely see.

Gallery One

Here I am on my way to a day’s work at Gallery One in Mentor, Ohio, one of the premier galleries for art prints and originals. I gave my Magic Marker presentation to a very smart group of young people. Last night I shared the behind-the-scenes PowerPoint show.

This is Kyle, who told me, “I want to be an illustrator by day and a boxer by night. In the afternoon I can rest.” I drew a picture of a T.rex versus a strutter in his book, while he sketched up the clash betweeen Godzilla and Space Godzilla.

A fun surprise was meeting the one and only Azonthus (of the Dinotopia Message Board) and her husband Greg. They showed us great photos of their wedding album.

And why do you suppose I'm smiling? Because Sue gave me a beautiful fossilized animal dropping, known as a coprolite. It was about 20 million years old, so it had turned to stone, but it looked as real as something you'd find in the park, and a lot of the kids didn't care to touch it. Of all the kinds of direct evidence of dinosaurs and ancient mammals—bones, footprints, even skin impressions—coprolites really make them come to life. Thanks, Sue!

Skybax Model

This painting from the Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara shows Will Denison flying through the mists of Waterfall City on his giant pterosaur Cirrus. I wanted to give the painting a feeling of lightness and airiness, so I stuck to pale tones in the distance, and a warm palette of color overall. It’s another example of the weird principle of reverse atmospheric perspective brought on by edge lighting in a moisture laden environment.


To figure out how the edge lighting would appear on the architecture and the flying figures, I put my maquettes to work in real sunlight. Here’s a little model of Will flying on Cirrus that I've used many times before. The pterosaur model is made from a variety of materials: Sculpey, wood, pipe cleaners, and cardboard. It has poseable wings, which are made from a pair of old stockings that have been painted with latex to give them a membranous surface.


With the model set up in the real sunlight you can see clearly how the top side of the near wing picks up the cool of the sky, while the far wing is warm from the transmitted light shining through it.

Dead Air Syndrome

We stopped at a breakfast place along U.S. Highway 20 called the Country Table. It was filled with guys with plaid shirts and women with dyed hair. Whenever there was a booth occupied by a group of men or a group of women, they were always huddled close, chattering happily away.

But whenever a husband sat with his wife, silence prevailed. There were no words, just dull chewing. It's the same everywhere, not just here. How is it possible to share a whole meal with someone without talking?

Before I got married I used to worry that after a few decades my wife and I would run out of things to say. But so far that hasn’t happened. Our conversation probably isn’t that interesting. We repeat ourselves endlessly. But so far at least we don’t suffer from "dead air syndrome."

South Bend to Three Rivers

Yesterday morning was ideal for sketching, with fleecy clouds rolling in. We set up our chairs on the front lawn of a medical office and got to work with the watercolors: Jeanette with her Lukas set, and me test-driving a new Schmincke mini set (thanks for the recommendation, Dennis Nolan).

I was trying to capture the effect of contre-jour lighting, which meant painting around the little sparkly bits of edge lighting. I probably could have used Maskoid or Liquid Frisket for this task, but didn’t have any.

I tried to blend various colors into the shadow areas, while keeping the intensities muted. Colors are more saturated or vivid when the sun is at your back, and more neutral when you're looking toward the sun. I also avoided putting too much detail or linework in the picture, which would weaken the simple backlight effect.

On the drive up old highway 31 from Indiana into Michigan, there were plenty of gloriously tacky roadside artifacts, like this classic motel sign.

Up in Three Rivers, Michigan, I did a presentation at the Carnegie Center for the Arts, which hosted a Dinotopia original art exhibition ten years ago. Tom Lowry of Lowry’s Books arranged this booksigning event. The great thing about a road-trip book tour is that you can visit towns like Three Rivers that just don't get visiting authors because they're too far from the big city airports.

Readers of this blog will be interested to know that Amy (above, center left) and her family came all the way from Dearborn. Amy was one of the two winners of the “Art History Simplified” contest a few days ago!
I also was honored to meet Sean, who started writing me fan letters more than four years ago. We’ve exchanged quite a few letters since then. Sean’s copy of the original Dinotopia book gets the prize for “most loved.” Thanks, everybody for coming and making the event a success.

Capturing a Cumulus

Here’s a 16x20 inch oil study of thunderheads on a warm July day.

I was amazed as I worked over a two hour period how fast the scene changed from minute to minute. Watch this time lapse video of a similar cloud formation boiling away. As soon as you have the shapes established, you have to paint the details from memory. But you can keep studying the scene for the overall color relationships.

The brightest whites and the sharpest details are reserved for the emerging billows at the top. The purer white colors of the closer clouds transition more toward warm pink or dull orange as the clouds go back in space. Light that has traveled farther has lost more of its cool wavelengths through scattering.

Whenever you paint these attention-grabbing "cumulus castellanus" thunderheads, look also for the shreds of old clouds sheared off by wind currents and dissolving back into the air. These often-overlooked “fractus” or “scud” clouds are the other side of the cloud’s life cycle of growth and decay. They lack the compact density of the billowing clouds, and are never as white.

Valparaiso Viewpoints

Jeanette and I paused in Valparaiso, Indiana to recharge our art batteries. Valparaiso is the county seat of Porter County, but not many tourists come here. The library has a fabulous collection of art books and there’s an art museum on the university campus of that we’ll check out tomorrow. Today it’s time for sketching.

We picked this streetcorner: a shoe store in a brick building with a round turret. Here’s how it looked to the camera.



I tried a sepia sketch in the mini-Moleskine watercolor book, using a few washes of tone and then some brown Waterman ink sketched with a fountain pen. Then I added a wet wash here and there to melt the linework, releasing its inner red tone.

Here’s Jeanette to describe her painting: “I did a pencil sketch in my sketchbook (laid-finish paper), then put down some watercolor. I went back in with a ballpoint pen when the color was dry.”

Our fingers got cold from the November weather, so we tucked into a wi-fi café for soup and coffee. An elderly fellow sat near me and hauled out his laptop. Sitting duck, thought I.