Bladesmith

Here's a portrait sketch of Jacques Louis David, a bladesmith who works with Tony Swatton of The Sword and the Stone. 

 

Swatton makes swords, weapons and armor for movies, pop stars, and re-enactors. He made the steampunk goggles that I borrowed for the new profile picture.

Tonight he's going to rework my pencil box (formerly the Mac iBox) to make it look Dinotopian.

We're at the Mission Inn in Riverside, California, where about thirty artists are gathering for the Baby Tattooville Fifth anniversary celebration.

Previously: The new Mac iBox

Dali interviewed by Mike Wallace

(Video Link)  I’d have to score Mike Wallace with the win here. Dali tries to be audacious, but ends up sounding incoherent. He came off much better on “What’s My Line.”

Unusual Artist’s Names

In this age of googling artist names, it's a real advantage to have an unique name. But it's hard to beat some of the really cool and memorable artists' names in history.

First off, there's the great Disney animator T. Hee. 


And here's a portrait of Illarion Pryanishnikov.

And let's not forget Hercules Brabazon Brabazon.

Would you like to nominate some artists for the most interesting or unusual names? Out of your suggestions in the comments, I’ll pick my top ten favorites, and then we’ll put it to a poll.

Wikipedia on T.  (Thornton) Hee

Portrait Noir

“I’ve never seen an October rain like this in all my years in LA,” says my friend David Starrett as we arrive for lunch yesterday at Gus’s Barbecue in South Pasadena. At the back door we drop our umbrella in a bucket full of other half-dead umbrellas.

David was one of my art teachers when I was a student out here. Later he was the model for Lee Crabb in Dinotopia. He’s the nicest 82-year-old gentleman you’ll ever meet. His ear is the model for “subsurface scattering” on page 155 of the book “Color and Light.” He’s also a natural actor, and he obliges me by being a character actor while I sketch him.



He orders barbecued ribs and I order coffee. I unholster my colored pencils. Robert Johnson’s blues pour out of the speakers. Rain gushes out of the gutters outside. David turns up his collar. I squeeze the handle of my black Niji brush pen. A drop of Higgins Eternal bleeds out of the tip.



Somehow he starts to look like a hard-boiled film noir detective, the kind of guy who works best after hours on rainy nights when the rest of the guys have gone home. “That’s when they dump the evidence,” he mutters, as he saws loose a rib.

Berkey’s Painting in Perspective

John Berkey is best known for his paintings of spacecraft in the 1970s and 1980s. His approach to painting was both loose and precise. He used water-based opaque paints, usually casein or gouache, which he kept in cups near his workstation and stirred with a dental drill. He lived in Minnesota. I visited him there in 1983.


This painting of Henry Ford’s auto assembly line was an impressive feat of execution. Each square inch of the painting is a masterpiece of abstraction. It shows him at the height of his powers. All the strokes are in proper perspective.

Although he probably had prepared a careful drawing to establish the main forms of the room, the car, and figures, based on whatever existing photos he could find, he didn’t pre-draw all the smaller wires and widgets. Those details he found in the paint.

To paint in this way requires the willingness to cover up your underdrawing in the early stages and “find it in the paint.” It helps to think of painting as a form of drawing, of discovery. The brush is really a drawing tool, and you can rig up straightedges to pins placed at vanishing points to get all the painted lines in perspective. 


This was painted in 1976, around the same time he was illustrating the Death Star for marketing the first Star Wars. This kind of painting requires both accuracy and improvization, like playing a cadenza on a Mozart piano concerto.

Have a look at a huge collection of Berkey’s work at the website of collector Jim Pinkowski. Thanks, Jim.

Bill Watterson’s College Comics

Online College Courses has assembled a list of top ten college comic strips:

 “What did Bill Watterson do before creating the beloved Calvin and Hobbes? He drew cartoons for his college newspaper, of course. As a student at Kenyon College, his work appeared in The Kenyon Collegian, revealing a well defined style even in his early years as a comic. Be sure to check out the collection of his college work and enjoy a slice of 70′s American college life.”

More samples of Watterson’s college work at Comics Alliance
Online College’s list of Top Ten College Comics

How to turn a girl into Abe Lincoln

Instead of using the Gallery Flambeau to get rid of a sub-par oil study, I painted over it.


I started with a fairly thin, dry scumble to partially cover the old paint. Then I drew the new subject with a brush. Then shadows, halftones, reflected light, and background.

Painting a new study of an old one is an old tradition. Sargent did it often with his oil landscapes. One reason for doing this (apart from being a cheapskate and reusing old panels) is that the old painting suggests random colors and textures that are fun to build over.

One caution. For finished work, it’s not really conservationally sound because of the risks of pentimenti, but it’s OK for studies.

This was a sample demo for my recent workshop on painting in colored light.
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Previously: Painting in Colored Light
Gallery Flambeau

14-year-old artist

This watercolor was painted by a 14-year-old artist. Any guesses who?
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Addendum: Congratulations to Connor de Jong of the Water Street Atelier. You've got it. It’s John Singer Sargent  (American, 1856–1925) from his "Splendid Mountain Watercolours" Sketchbook, 1870. Sheets: 11 x 16 in.


Link to the Met website, where, thanks to an intuitive image interface, you can scroll through the image and see amazing closeups of all his works in the collection.
 Charley Parker of the blog Lines and Colors calls it: "likely the best major art museum website in the world."

LA Lectures This Week

Just a reminder to those of you in Los Angeles. I'm heading out there today for a series of lectures, and there are still spaces available at the two public ones, Korpus and LAAFA. Please note that the two lectures cover different topics:


Wednesday, October 5, 7PM-10PM
LAAFA Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art
This lecture looks at composition in a completely new way, beginning with what we know about how we look at pictures from current eye tracking data. We then look at storytelling and how that influences design decisions, and we concentrate a lot on tonal organization, one of the most important elements in good composition.

The workshop will also include a "Q&A"discussion, a demo of various composition sketching and observation sketching techniques. Book-signing to follow.
Tuition: $75. Open to all levels.

Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art
16926 Saticoy Street
Van Nuys, CA 91406
818.708.9232
More info at their website
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Thursday, October 6, 7PM-10PM
Korpus School of Art + Gallery
“Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist” + “Color and Light in the Landscape.” Even if you’ve got the books, these talks go deeper, and the color talk will emphasize what landscape painters need to know. I’ll answer questions and do a quick demo of the watercolor pencil sketch technique. Book-signing to follow.
Tuition: $75. Open to all levels.

Korpus School of Art + Gallery
1300 Factory Place, Unit 308
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Email: korpus.info@gmail.com
Phone: 213-228-2014
Web: www.korpus-la.com
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Part 5. Fire & Ice: Living inside Paintings

You can probably see foreshadowing of Dinotopia in some of the backgrounds I did for Fire and Ice.


I enjoyed the camaraderie of the movie studio, and I have missed that feeling since. Every couple weeks Tom and I brought in a three-foot high stack of art books from the library and spread them out on the counters in the background room. One by one all the animators and layout people would come by during the breaks and we’d fire up about art and look through each other’s sketchbooks.


Once in a while we would cram paint lids into the regulators of the oxygen airbrush tanks and shoot the lids across the room like a cannon, right through a foam-core target of Mickey Mouse.

At the end of the production, the animators packed up their things and moved on like gypsies to other projects at other studios. Bakshi Productions shrunk down to just a small crew. The effort shifted to editing, sound, and and marketing. But there were still just a few background paintings to finish.


At Bakshi’s request, I brought them home to finish in my own apartment in Highland Park. It was lonely working on those backgrounds at home instead of in the studio.

One thing I loved about the film work was the feeling of living inside my paintings. It was always  a charge to assemble in the editing room and watch the dailies. When I saw my pictures projected on the screen with action and music, it really felt like I was inside the world I was painting, not just looking at flat compositions. Howard Pyle always talked about jumping through the picture frame and breathing the air you just painted, and that was the first time I completely experienced that feeling.

I never saw the movie during its theatrical release because I was traveling at the time, and it came and went quickly. Maybe it will get a boost from the live action reboot.

Blog reader Kurt asked what ever happened to all those original backgrounds. A few of them were sold in galleries, I understand that a few survive in private collections, but most are lost. Ralph Bakshi told me last year that they were all destroyed at some point when they were being transferred from one indifferent holding corporation to another.


That’s the story of filmmaking. It’s a hard-won battle to assemble people and materials for a moment in time, in order to cast a few shadows on a wall. When it’s all over, there’s nothing left but the shadows.
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All backgrounds copyright Ralph Bakshi Productions. Thanks, Ralph and the rest of the crew! And best wishes to Robert Rodriguez and the Reboot Gang.
Fire and Ice, Part 1: Rekindled
Fire and Ice, Part 2: Frazetta
Part 3: Fire and Ice -- Tom Kinkade
Part 4: Fire and Ice -- Ralph Bakshi

Wikipedia on the original Fire and Ice.