"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.
Senior button accordion players a few years back at the All-Ireland competition. They were only on stage for about 6 or 7 minutes, and I was far back in the audience. So I drew each of them small and simple and set up the page as a contrast between them.
Forbes Magazine has a feature on artists who have generated millions of views, and a good income, doing YouTube videos, including Stan Prokopenko (above), Mark Crilley, and Scott Robertson.
Edit: Sorry, the Forbes site seems to have an ad-block-recognizer that creates a barrier to entry.
Charley Parker of the art blog "Lines and Colors" has written a review of the new book on Adolph Menzel.
"Adolph Menzel’s drawings are a prime example of an artist’s devotion to drawing as a tool, craft, art and source of understanding and inspiration. His beautiful gouache pantings are a testament to that devotion as a source for richly realized finished works. Adolph Menzel: Drawings and Paintings provides a valuable showcase for both."
Read the rest of the review and see lots of sample art
Blog reader Carla Gladstone asks about how outdoor painters cope with changing light:
"Although I am not an artist, reading your blog makes me curious about how artists work. The time required to create a plein-air painting appears to be long enough (particularly near dawn and sunset) that the direction and perhaps intensity of the light will change."
Good question, Carla. This is a big issue for anyone who spends more than a half hour or so on a painting. You're right: light changes especially fast near sunrise or sunset, and sometimes an effect lasts only a few minutes. Here are my ten tips for dealing with the moving sun.
1. Know where the sun is headed.
In the northern hemisphere the sun moves from east to west, swinging through the southern hemisphere. If you're not sure which direction is south, remember that at noon, the sun is to the south. Orient yourself facing south, and point one hand where the sun is now and the other hand toward the western horizon. That's the direction the sun is headed. For every hour, it moves about the distance of the width of your hand held at arm's length. So project its position ahead in the number of hours you plan to be painting. There are probably apps for this, but you don't need apps.
2. Map the shadows early.
Here's one strategy. After you finish the preliminary drawing, take note of the boundaries of the shadows, either in pencil or paint. In watercolor you can paint the boundaries of the shadows early in the painting process.
3. OR Paint area by area.
Another strategy is to let the light change and paint each area as you see it. This will result in a painting with various light directions, but at least you're painting what you see at each stage. This strategy works well for a scene with separate elements that are likely to move, such as cars in a parking lot or Holstein cows in a pasture.
Some of the best light effects near sunset last only minutes. To capture those, your painting has to be all set up before the light effect comes. The problem is that you don't know exactly what the effect will be. So you have to be prepared. If you're working in opaques—oil, casein, or gouache, paint the scene as if it were in shadow—darker and cooler than it appears. When the late afternoon light hits the central feature of your scene, you'll be ready to capture it. After the effect passes, you have to train your memory.
Forest scene, 6 x 12 inches. Two-day motif. Light changes very fast in a forest.
5. Come back the next day.
If you have the luxury of painting in the same area for a few days, start a series of "two-day motifs". The idea is to work on several paintings for a series of days, painting each one during the best light for that scene. You don't have to finish in one session, just move to another motif and come back tomorrow to continue the first one. It's really satisfying to return to the same spot when the light is perfect after you've got a good start.
6. Watch out for building fronts in raking light.
If the sun direction is near to being tangent to the plane of a building that you're looking at, it's going to change very fast, either throwing it more into light or more into shadow and changing everything. All you can do is anticipate what it's going to do, and plan your painting strategy to suit.
7. Enjoy overcast days.
With sunlight diffused across the entire dome of the cloudy sky, the light will be amazingly stable throughout the session, sometimes for three or more hours. In overcast light, the color, hardness, and direction don't change too much. Get the weather forecast and if you know you've got a long period of overcast light, you can commit to a longer painting.
8. Paint a series as the light changes.
If you're interested in fleeting light effects, you can streamline your approach to paint extremely fast, doing each painting in a 15 minute window. Doing this means mixing the colors you'll need on your palette in advance. Draw the scene with the brush, mass the darks quickly and if keep a different brush for each main color. Most artists paint slowly because they waste time mixing the color for each brushstroke and then wiping the brush down to clean it for a new mixture.
9. Do the perspective drawing when the light sucks.
Setting up your easel can take a half hour or more. Then, the preliminary drawing can take an hour, and it's worth spending that time to get it right. By then the good light may have taken wing, and you'll be tasting the bitter fruit of despair. It doesn't matter so much what the light is doing when you're working on these foundational steps. Try to pick a motif where the light is getting better, not worse. That takes knowledge and experience.
10. Scout for the next day.
When you're in an area that you plan to paint the next day, be aware which subjects look best at which times of day. Make a thumbnail sketch during the peak lighting effect so you know what to expect. Then come back the next day early enough so that you can set up the painting. When the good light hits, you're ready for it, and you can capture it.
Do you have more tips? Or tragic tales of changing light? Please share them in the comments.
A documentary called "Graphic Means" is in the works for release this fall about how graphic design technology changed throughout the 20th century. (Link to Vimeo video) Most people realize that desktop publishing and the computer revolutionized everything, but it was changing incrementally in the decades leading up to the 1990s.
"For decades before that, it was the hands of industrious workers, and various ingenious machines and tools that brought type and image together on meticulously prepared paste-up boards, before they were sent to the printer."
Here's a video showing how I painted a street scene on location in Phoenicia, New York (link to video).
I'm test driving a new set of paints called ShinHan Pass Hybrid Watercolor/Gouache. The manufacturer voluntarily sent me a sample set to try out with no expectation of a review.
The set contains 48 plastic tube colors including primaries, "secondaries" and earth colors, Titanium white, and black.
When faced with a large assortment of pigments, I like to explore the colors in small groups and combinations. For my first experiment, I'm using just three colors plus white: Indigo, Vermilion Hue, and Yellow Ochre. The Vermilion gives me a high chroma accent in the warm red range. The other two colors are muted and harmonious.
The ShinHan paints feel similar to a lot of other brands of gouache paint nowadays. As with other brands, they use a water-soluble gum arabic binder. The colors are rich in pigment without a lot of extenders or fillers.
Gallery artists should note that many of the pigments are not lightfast. Eight of the 48 colors are rated with a "low degree of lightfastness," which means they will fade rather quickly if they're exposed to a lot of UV light. That wouldn't be as much of a problem for designers whose renderings aren't subjected to too much light exposure or urban sketchers working in sketchbooks.
UPDATE: I did a lightfastness test of all the colors, putting swatches in direct sun in a south window for three months, and compared them to the same swatches kept in the cool and dark. There was no discernable fading except one fluorescent pink (#870). The rest were fine.
The paints are advertised as non-toxic. That means no Cadmiums or other heavy metals, but rather substitutes like Naphthol reds and Arylide yellows. These non-toxic alternatives are a positive for those concerned about health and safety, but a serious omission for others who prefer the qualities of those traditional pigments.
Some popular colors such as Cobalt Blue and Viridian have the word "hue" after the name, which means a convenience color has been mixed from less expensive ingredients.
The paints vary in opacity, ranging from transparent to semi-opaque to very opaque. Some of the pinks and blues are tinted with titanium white to create opaque designer colors which will not behave like transparent watercolors.
The set comes with a valuable and informative color chart that rates each of the colors on a scale of opacity, lightfastness, and relative price, and a Composition and Permanence Table that lists detailed chemical descriptions for each color.
I can't review all the colors yet, since I've only sampled a few so far. I'll be exploring more of them in future experiments.
The whole set of 48 colors sells for around $180.00. This is a pretty good deal considering that these are 20 ml tubes, while most gouache tubes are just 15 ml.
This is probably a bigger set than most people really need, but if you're adventurous and want a big tray of goodies, it offers a lot of possibilities.
"May I ask how do you get your watercolor to spread so evenly on the paper? I always end up getting different concentrations of pigment or those pesky dark corner-concentrations."
Kaos, in my experience the evenness of watercolor washes depends on "The Four P's": the paper, the pigment, the prewetting, and the pitch (or tilt) of the board.
Paper
If the paper is gelatin-sized to accept the paint, the wash will spread more evenly. All proper watercolor paper should have sizing in it. Also, the paper should have some tooth, but not so much tooth that you can't get the paint into all the little valleys. Smooth paper (also known as plate finish or hot press) tends to take washes more unevenly than rougher, cold press watercolor paper. The paper should also be absolutely flat, which is why you want heavyweight paper, or a block, or stretched paper, which won't buckle when it's wet.
Paint
It's important to mix up a generous amount of paint and use a big brush, so that you don't run out of it in the middle of the wash. Also, the type of pigment can affect how a paint disperses. Finer organic pigments such as phthalo or quinacridone will disperse more evenly than some relatively granular inorganic pigments such as viridian. Also, paints vary in how they're formulated. Some have a dispersant additive that makes the pigment flow more evenly.
Prewetting
Prewetting an area with clean water before you add the pigment wash will aid dispersion. You can do this with a big, clean brush, applying the water evenly to the area where you want the wash. It should be slightly damp with no puddles. Then when you add the wash it will go down more smoothly. This method is especially good for a large area without too many detail cutouts, such as a sky. Painting a sky over a dampened paper also allows for the introduction of soft edges, especially around clouds.
Pitch Finally, and most importantly, the pitch or tilt of the board allows the wash to advance by gravity down toward the buildup of the "bead" of paint. You can keep advancing the bead downward as you develop your wash. The gravity will keep the wash from puddling backward (also called a backrun). Obviously you don't want the board to be so steep that the water breaks through the bead and drips down the board. The tilt the board can be anywhere from 10% to 40%, but it shouldn't be any moreHere's a previous post with photos of Ogden Pleissner's palette.
tilted than necessary. As you practice you'll notice that more watery mixtures will drip more easily than thicker paint mixtures. The need for a variable pitch to the board is why watercolorists need easels that can be set up at any angle, and ideally adjusted on the fly.
I have only my pencils with me, so I can't capture the noise, the motion, or the color of the midway at the county fair.
I look instead for the bones of the scene—the canopy with its fiberglass decorations, and the fanciful lettering that says ROLLER MAGIC and TICKETS and PLAY LAND.
On the far left is a High Striker game waiting for a strongman with a mallet. The carnival worker taunts, "Which of you boys are real men?" A Popular Mechanics article in 1935 showed how these games were sometimes fixed by controlling the tension of the wire leading up to the bell.
(releases there Aug. 17)
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. The manufacturer voluntarily sent me a sample set to try out with no expectation of a review.
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Blog reader Kaos No Kamisama asks:
Finally, and most importantly, the pitch or tilt of the board allows the wash to advance by gravity down toward the buildup of the "bead" of paint. You can keep advancing the bead downward as you develop your wash. The gravity will keep the wash from puddling backward (also called a backrun). Obviously you don't want the board to be so steep that the water breaks through the bead and drips down the board. The tilt the board can be anywhere from 10% to 40%, but it shouldn't be any moreHere's a previous post with photos of Ogden Pleissner's palette.
