Mentors

Every artist remembers the person in their life who first encouraged them to draw. My mentor was my big brother Dan. We shared a room when I was in second grade and we worked on the same drawings, usually sailboats.

Here’s a photo of Dan from earlier today at his home in Sebastopol, California. Here's his blog about teaching kindergarten.

One day Dan gave me a piece of advice that hit me like a thunderbolt: “Draw what you see, not what you think you see.” I had been drawing the symbols for the eyes and nose and not really paying attention to the way they actually appeared.

This began a sort of obsession for me. I wanted to draw things as accurately as I could, trying to make my eyes and hands work like a camera. When I was 13 years old, I set up this arrangement with a rocking chair, and drew it with a Rapidograph pen from observation. It’s diligent work, but a bit tedious, lacking entirely in feeling.

Dan also introduced me to the concept of silhouettes. I did this drawing the same year, 1972, when I was thirteen. It was for a poster contest promoting health in my hometown of Palo Alto, California. The message of the poster (cropped out here) was “On the Road to Better Health.” You can see the Norman Rockwell influence.

I was sure I’d get some kind of award or recognition, because I was at the top end of the 9 through 13 age category. But I didn’t win anything. Nothing. Not even honorable mention. Dejected, I asked if I could have the picture back, but they said it was the property of the contest and would be kept at City Hall and eventually destroyed.

A sympathetic lady made inquiries for me and found out that the judges rejected my entry because they decided that an adult must have helped me. But that wasn’t true! I did the poster all by myself and I spent weeks on it.

When my dad found out that I was falsely accused, he marched me down to City Hall. We found the office where the picture was stored, and a soft-spoken man found it and returned it to me. Once we explained the whole story to him, he was very kind and encouraging. I noticed his office had a drawing table and art supplies. The man explained that he was a professional illustrator. I had never met an illustrator before, and at that moment I decided I wanted to be one.

Texture, Part 2: Pretexturing

Recently we looked at the tactile quality of canvas or rough surfaced illustration board. But machine-made background textures can get a bit monotonous on their own. You can customize the surface by “pretexturing” before going into the final painting. Even if you work fairly thinly in oil in the final stages, it will appear to have lots of “impasto,” or rough painterly surface.

In the case of this image “Thermala: Alpine Hideaway” (page 76), I pretextured the entire board after the finished drawing was sealed with workable fixative and matte acrylic medium. To do this, you can use a mixture of modeling paste and matte medium (both acrylic based, and both fairly transparent). Brush this over the entire surface. The texture doesn't have to follow the details of the drawing very closely.

A good general rule is to build more impasto texture in the foreground areas and the light areas. Shadows and faraway misty regions tend to look better with a smoother surface.


Paint Texture Series
Paint Texture, Part 1
Paint Texture, Part 2
Paint Texture, Part 3

Tuggle in Action

My brother Dan, aka "Mr. Kindergarten," has tested out the Dinotopian game "Tuggle" with interesting results. Check out his new blog, which offers tips, techniques, and reflections from his 40 years of experience in the classroom. I'll be visiting him in Sebastopol tomorrow.

ILM and California Highlights

It's been a flurry of visits to art schools and movie studios over the last two weeks. I'm way behind on the blog!

We started off by giving the presentation at Rhythm & Hues, DreamWorks Animation, LA Public Library, Sony Pictures Animation and Imageworks in southern California.

Then in northern California we've had the privilege of visiting PDI DreamWorks and Academy of Art University. Today we went to Industrial Light and Magic in the Presidio region of San Francisco. We arrived early with an hour to kill, so we both did watercolor sketches of the Palace of Fine Arts, a remnant of the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition.

Then we entered the ILM complex. We blithely passed beyond guards, gates, cameras, flashing red lights, magnetic barriers, and a gurgling fountain surmounted by a bronze Yoda. I felt a little like Luke entering the Death Star. We set up the laptop in a cavernous state-of-the-art theater, and soon artists started arriving for the talk.

It was an honor to meet so many ILM legends, like Erik Tiemens, Carlos Huante, Darin Hilton, and many more whose work I greatly admire. Thanks to our host Josh Kushins (below with our folding hand truck), and to everyone who attended. And for those of you blog readers who are art students, ILM is an amazing place to work, justly famous for its Oscar-winning legacy, its spirit of innovation, its vast talent pool of about 1200 professionals, and its spectacular location.

And I haven't even mentioned the bookstores: Storyopolis, Linden Tree, Booksmith, and Cody's, where I got to meet Austin Madison from Pixar.

The full report on all the other studios and schools will have to wait a while until we catch up. Tomorrow: San Jose State!

Writing, Part 1: Words and Pictures

I’ve been blogging mostly about the artwork in my Dinotopia books, but the writing is just as important to me and deserves a little explanation.

Each picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. The pictures convey mood, atmosphere, a sense of place, and character. But the writing communicates everything else. Only the writing can deliver narrative sequence, continuity, backstory, dialog, interior thoughts, names, sounds, smells, and feelings. That’s a lot of work for a few words to do.

It’s a challenge to subordinate the written text to the pictures. It would be very tempting to give over more space to the writing, because writing is much faster to compose than artwork. A Dinotopia book could be finished up in half the time if the writing were allowed to take up the majority of the page space. But I think picture books work best when they sustain us primarily in a visual, dreamlike mode. Like graphic novels or movies, picture books suffer if they are too text-heavy. I end up writing about five times as much material as I have space for, and have to cut most of it out.

With words and pictures balanced in this way, there isn’t the novelist’s luxury to indulge in rich layers of motivation, backstory, and extended conversation. It’s a sacrifice I gladly make in exchange for the glories that only pictures can provide.

Although I have the plot worked out fairly carefully in the early storyboard and outline stages, there’s plenty of room for improvisation during the final art stage. The idea for the old musical conductor character named Cornelius Mazurka, for example, emerged while I was creating the paintings.

The running text comes last, so ideas that come up during the art stage can freely enter the story. I write the final text in the InDesign page layout program, with all the page elements in place. In this way I can be sure that the text comes to a full stop at the end of every layout. I want the reader to be able to pause and enjoy the artwork without being tripped up on the page turn. And I want the book to be as inviting to the casual browser as to the reader who takes the full train ride.

Paint Texture, Part 1

The artwork for Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara was shot in a special way to bring out the three-dimensional texture of the oil paintings.


The standard way to light artwork for photography is to set up two lights directly across from each other. This arrangement tends to flatten out the ridges and bumps in the paint surface. Photographer Arthur Evans placed the lights more directionally.


His approach more effectively simulates the way the art would look if it were displayed on a wall beneath a skylight. Above is a detail of the painting “Chasing Shadows,” showing a background texture of stretched linen canvas.

“Most people think of paintings as two-dimensional,” Mr. Evans told me, “but I like to see them as three dimensional.”
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Paint Texture
Paint Texture, Part 1
Paint Texture, Part 2
Paint Texture, Part 3

Ted Youngkin in Perspective

On the way up Highway 101 yesterday, we decided on a whim to try and visit Ted Youngkin, our favorite art teacher, who taught us everything we know about perspective (and a lot more that we’ve forgotten). I think of him every time I do a drawing.

Jeanette and I met in Mr. Youngkin's class 27 years ago. He was tough and scary back then, only because he demanded so much from us, and wouldn't stand for anything less than our best. He has been retired from teaching for a long time now. We have exchanged many letters and photos over the years, and I know that beneath that scariness is a real love for his students, based on a desire to see them do well.

It wasn’t easy to find him. I have never had his phone number, and he’s not listed. He has no email or website. No one at Art Center seemed to be in touch with him anymore. I had his address on a scrap of paper, and a guy in a gas station in Solvang found the street on a tattered map. When we got there, it was a gated community.

I rang the house from the gate, and amazingly he answered. At first he thought someone was pranking him. A minute later he met us in his driveway and I handed him a copy of the new book.

He and Martha graciously invited us in. Incredibly, he is still working every day, creating complex drawings of architectural facades in Pilot pen and marker, based on his travels all around the world. He has recent sketchbooks full of drawings, not just of architecture, but also of people.


He asked to see Jeanette’s sketches, and looked through her sketchbook page by page. An hour went by in a moment, but we had to go.

As we drove on north on the coast highway, Jeanette said something that really struck me, and I think she’s exactly right: “Perspective is the basis for all drawings, even figure drawings.”

Art Center

I must admit that I was apprehensive about my visit to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. It has been over 25 years since I was a student there (I was only able to stay for two semesters), and I wondered how it had changed.

In the early 1980s the Art Center illustration program was focused primarily on modern-art inspired “concept” illustration. Students were groomed for painting trendy magazine illustrations and album covers. The emphasis was on style. There was no encouragement for careers in paperback covers, children’s books, wildlife art, comic art, animation, movie production design or landscape painting. A few teachers demonstrated the skills of traditional realism, but they were in the minority, and some of the best of them ended up leaving to teach elsewhere.

Art Center is a different school now, and the changes are all for the better. The school is housed in a long black building set in the hills above Pasadena. But gone is the minimal, sterile look of the 1980s. Glass cases filled with student work now cover walls that once were blank. One display held a group of beautifully-observed paintings made in Gary Meyer’s class based on a live model wearing an interesting clown outfit.

Bob Kato is one of the new generation of teachers. He was taught by Dennis Nolan (the Hartford teacher). Himself a master draftsman and painter, Mr. Kato leads his students to a high level of proficiency. During the fourteen week term of his Sketching for Illustration class, he starts with line and value, follows with a model lit from a single light source, and ends with costumed models lit from multiple colored light sources. Bob Kato also hosts extracurricular sessions called The Drawing Club.

We visited Gary Meyer’s perspective class, where he was discussing fisheye distortion. Because of its industrial design component, perspective has always been a strength of the school, and Mr. Meyer is ably following in the very large footsteps of Ted Youngkin, now retired, who taught the likes of Syd Mead.

Much of the buzz about Art Center now revolves around its new entertainment design department, headed by Scott Robertson. His students were responsible for the recent book Skillful Huntsman, an exercise in production design that holds its own in print with publications by working professionals. Combining industrial design with illustration, students in this new major learn the skills they’ll need for visual development careers at the nearby movie studios, with classes often taught by instructors from DreamWorks, Disney, and Imageworks.

The school now has a prop room, filled with costumes, mannikins, musical instruments, and everyday objects to use for staging an illustration. Students can check them out to take home, or models can pose with them in school.

Every Art Center student learns how to use woodshop tools. Here’s a display of working pull toys.

Illustration chair Ann Field typifies the exciting new spirit of the school, keeping right up with the times, but respecting timeless tradition. She told me that she respects the school’s duty to provide a strong foundation in traditional drawing and painting skills that can outfit a graduate for success in any career direction. “Some things will forever be true,” she told me. No matter how art and styles change, “you will always need to know how to paint and draw.”

Shadows vs. Reflections

“You can’t cast a shadow over deep water,” says an old law of landscape painting. It’s usually true, but only when the water is clear. If the water is murky you can see cast shadows, but their edges are more diffuse than shadows cast over on land because the light transmits throughout the medium of the diffused particles.

What happens when a cast shadow on water crosses a reflection? That’s what I was trying to capture in this 8x10 oil sketch, painted on location of the bridge leading into Toledo, Spain. It was a mind-bending challenge of color mixing.

The simple answer is that the reflection “wins,” as you can see in the closeup. The light colors reflected from the stone piers (1) don’t get any darker where they cross into the shadow. But to the left, I observed the weaker reflections of the sky and the trees (2) became influenced by the deeper colors of the water in the cast shadow.

I used the light, color, and basic composition of this plein-air study as my source for the painting “Ruined Bridge,” in Journey to Chandara. The main change was to add a half-collapsed tower covered with vines and a makeshift house.
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By the way, let me express my regards and thanks to all at Rhythm & Hues, Art Center, LA Public Library, DreamWorks, Imageworks, and Sony Pictures Animation. I'm very grateful for your welcome. Meeting all of you fellow artists—and seeing your incredible work has been so inspiring to me that I have been walking on air. And to my readers, please be patient for the blog posts about those visits, because with all the travel it may take quite a while to catch up.

Museum of Jurassic Technology

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California, is a curio cabinet of obscure relics and extinct beliefs. "Jurassic" is metaphorical; no dinosaurs here.

We wandered in late on a drizzly day. No one else was there. A bearded attendant finally appeared from nowhere. He apologized for the smell of a dog-doo and incense (a dog had just had an accident). He directed us to watch an introductory slide show in a shrine-like alcove.

A voice began in sonorous tones describing how the word “museum” should be a place dedicated to the muses. We explored the dark, narrow rooms and hallways, passing through doorways framed with heavy Victorian curtains. The displays included.

• Micromosaics made from the scales of butterly wings.
• Stereo floral radiographs of Albert Richard.
• Vectography (an obscure 1940s technique for overlapping 3-D images)
• Microminiature figures carved by Hagop Sandaldjian, figures so small they easily fit inside the eye of a needle.
• A bell wheel, known as an arca musarithmica,
• And displays of forgotten folk cures, like two dead mice on a piece of toast given to a child to cure stuttering.

The strange exposition that the museum offered had its desired effect, and roused the muses.

“Teaching,” quoting 18th Century museum pioneer Charles Willson Peale, “is a sublime ministry inseparable from human happiness. The learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar - guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life.”
Fodor's Review of the Museum