Watching Television

People hold still when they’re watching television, and that’s a big help to the portrait sketcher.


A few days ago in Pittsburgh I had lunch at a restaurant with some friends. There was a TV set hanging from the ceiling near our table. A golf program captivated my friend’s son. He gazed upward with an angelic look and didn’t move until his hamburger came.

In 2003 my son sat like a statue at a diner while waiting for his scrambled eggs.

Next time you find yourself in a waiting room or a sports bar, pick the seat near the TV looking back at the watchers. You’ll have your choice of models. If they glance at you, just smile and say “I’m sketching your picture,” and they’ll go back to watching.

Lovell's Soldier

When American illustrator Tom Lovell (1909-1997) painted the standing soldier for The Continental Insurance Company, he researched the weapons and costume at a museum and did a charcoal study from a nude figure to understand the pose. The studies appear surrounding the finished illustration in this page from an article in North Light Magazine.

Here's how Lovell himself described the process:

The requirement here was to create an heroic, slightly larger than life embodiment of a man who could be identified with dependability and authenticity and at the same time be real. This was done to replace the original trademark figure used for many years by the Continental Insurance Company.

Before consulting a model, I drew this basically strong figure, to be certain he would not be overpowered by his equipment. Research in depth was done at West Point Museum under the guidance of Col. Frederck P. Todd, then curator. The painting later won a gold medal at the Society of Illustrators Annual National Show.

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Image is trademark of the Continental Life Insurance Companies.

Leif Peng's excellent illustration art blog "Today's Inspiration" has been doing a feature this week on Lovell , drawing from the 1956 American Artist profile by Norman Kent.

The material in this post was drawn an article "Tom, The Unswervable Lovell," in the North Light Collection, Volume 2, 1979, a compilation from the North Light Magazine.

Lines and Colors tribute to Lovell, link.

Columbus College of Art and Design

Columbus College of Art and Design, better known as CCAD, occupies several quiet blocks behind the city art museum in downtown Columbus, Ohio.


Jeanette and I pulled up in Trusty Rusty, right beneath the famous “ART” arch.

The school offers four-year major programs in many art and design fields, but we visited mainly with people from the illustration department.

The school has a world-famous faculty. Chris (C. F.) Payne, who heads the illustration department is one of America’s most celebrated contemporary illustrators, known for his gentle humor and dead-on characterization.

He recently painted the portrait of Barack Obama for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year issue.

He posed while I did a quick portrait demo in water-soluble colored pencils.

Mark Hazelrig teaches three dimensional illustration. He showed us his latex bust of a female satyr, which he described as a cross between Uma Thurman, LeAnne Rimes, and a sheep. She has cast resin horns, glass eyes, and a light beard, applied one hair at a time.

If male satyrs knew about her, they would never have bothered with nymphs!

CCAD has all the classes you’d expect on color theory, figure drawing, composition, digital techniques and concepts in illustration. Some courses allow them to draw from costumed models, sketch at the zoo, and design comics.

Mark Sullivan (second from right below) is a multitalented alumnus of CCAD and visiting lecturer. He is an Oscar-nominated matte painter for Lucasfilm and Imagemovers who made the transition from his traditionally painted mattes (Bugsy) to digital work on Polar Express and the upcoming Christmas Carol.

He also has a love for traditional stop motion effects. He is in the process of creating this Dimetrodon model out of foam-rubber over a jointed metal armature.

Stewart McKissick (at right in the photo above) also teaches illustration. He’s constantly updating the curriculum to make it relevant to the changing market, and to reflect the growing interest in CG animation, visual effects, character design, and conceptual design for movies and video games.

“Kids want to swim in the pop culture soup they grew up in,” he said.

What struck me about CCAD was that the whole school seems serious about keeping up with the evolving art world as well as staying rooted in the basic skills of drawing and painting—all the while having fun doing it.
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Home Website for CCAD, link.
Thanks, Stewart for a bunch of those photos, since my camera died!

Flashy Princess

We came back from Columbus to discover that Flashy Princess foaled while we were gone.

Lenny Miller is the caretaker of all the unusual horses at Southland Farm in Rhinebeck New York. He said the Belgian filly weighed 137 pounds at birth on April 2.

She is still a little wobbly, but can break into a run at a second's notice. Sofie keeps a watchful eye over her.

Princess, as she's known for short, is in love with life and eternally curious, feeling the fuzzy texture of my sketchbook cover with her soft lips.

Previous post about the expectant mother, link.

Dinotopia Exhibit in Newcastle

The exhibition "Return to Dinotopia" opened on April 4 at the Centre for Life in Newcastle (UK).

Patrick Gyger, director of Maison d'Ailleurs, supervised the installation. Here’s how the room looked before the exhibition was fully in place.

Jeanette and I are looking forward to visiting Newcastle-upon-Tyne this summer to see the museum and to visit some schools in the area.

The Dinotopia exhibition consists of about 50 original oil paintings from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara (2007). The show will continue for the whole summer, after which it will travel to Nantes in France for the Utopiales festival.

If there are any other museums in Europe that might be interested in hosting the “Return to Dinotopia” in 2010 and beyond, please contact Patrick Gyger, link.

Centre for Life Dinotopia page, link.

Academy of Realist Art

The Academy of Realist Art in Toronto teaches its students the skills of careful observation based on classical methods.


One of the principal instructors, Fernando Freitas, recently took me through the building to explain the course of study.

The curriculum is based on the book by Charles Bargue and Jean Leon Gerome, which was originally produced in the mid-nineteenth century for the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.

There is no portfolio entrance requirement. Students come from all different backgrounds and ages. Each student follows the same series of steps or levels. They move ahead to the next step whenever they’re ready.

The first skill to master is to reproduce a two-dimensional drawing. The goal is to learn to capture shapes and to understand the division of light and shadow.

The next stage is a vine charcoal or carbon pencil study to understand the effect of light and shade on a plaster cast. The drawing and the cast are set up side by side in the same light and checked until they match perfectly.

This so-called “sight size method” takes a lot of floor space because you have to back up from the subject and see the drawing and the model in one view. Two students generally work side by side from the same cast.

They then move to painted studies of casts, still life studies, and painted studies from the nude model. Some studies can take 30 to 60 hours of work.

Mr. Freitas also encourages students to learn from the classic texts on drawing and painting by Harold Speed. He has produced an instructional DVD called Drawing the Figure, which follows the process of creating a tonal drawing of a standing figure from start to finish.

“We’re more an academy than an atelier,” Mr. Freitas said, “because we are based on an objective, classical approach rather than the working methods of one individual master.”

The atmosphere of the school is focused, energetic, and collaborative, more like a martial arts academy than a free-form art school. It feels like entering the dojo with a clear mind, focused on the task at hand, leaving behind your worldly concerns. One easel was emblazoned with a sign “I SEEK EXCELLENCE.”

The way of learning art at ARA is very different from other schools, and I know that not everyone agrees with it. I’ve heard the criticism that the sight-size academic method it leads to uniform results, or that it amounts to passive copying.

I think those views misunderstand the objectives of classical training. The purpose is not to teach style or personal expression, but rather to give each growing artist a solid foundation to build on, and to offer them a deep familiarity with classical models and timeless standards. Drawing and painting at that level of sensitivity is a very active process indeed. It deeply engages every fiber of a student’s being.

The ARA is not trying to be everything to everyone, and I believe that is their strength. The results that are framed up in the hallway are nothing short of breathtaking, and the sense of shared purpose among the students is palpable.

There is much every art school can learn from the example of the ARA. I believe that every art student should have the chance to go far beyond the 20 or 30 minute poses that are common in many art schools and to see how finely they can tune their response to the visual world.
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Official Website for the Toronto school (with a new campus just opened in Boston, MA), link.
Freitas video on drawing the figure, link.
Bargue book on Amazon, link.
More about the sight size method, link.

Edwin Austin Abbey

I've been a bit out of reach from the Internet, so let me just offer a picture by one of my favorite overlooked masters, Edwin Austin Abbey. Abbey was an American expatriate artist famous for his pen and ink illlustrations, his murals at the Boston Public Library and the Harrisburg, PA capitol, and also for his unsurpassed illustrations from the plays of Shakespeare.

He was good friends with Lawrence Alma Tadema and John Singer Sargent, who taught him to paint after age 40. It helps to have teachers like that! The painting is called "Fair is My Love," from 1900.
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Lines and Colors post about Abbey, Link.
Bio on Butler Art, link.
Ciudad de la Pintura, Link.

Mighty Andar

We're in Pittsburgh now on a rainy spring day. Here's a drawing done by Andrew Wales from the last post. His comic alter ego is "The Mighty Andar."

Comics in the Classroom

Talk about a cool elementary school teacher. This is Andy Wales, art teacher for the Lynch Bustin School. We had dinner with his family and I did this sketch of him between the pasta and the cheesecake courses.

Andy Wales showed me his art room, which has a rack of comics that students are free to browse. He did his masters thesis on the value of using comics in the classroom, not only to tell stories, but to explain all sorts of topics. One of his heroes is Scott McCloud, the author of Understanding Comics.

In preparation for my visit, the K-5 students made a plaster dinosaur, clay maquettes, and drawings of scenes with people and dinosaurs interacting.

One dinosaur, called a Fraction Dinosaur helps out with math concepts.

Heading Out to Pennsylvania and Ohio

Today we leave for another junket, starting with the elementary school of Andy Wales, frequent blog commentator and Art-By-Committe contributor. He has been teaching his students how to draw dinosaurs and design fantasy worlds. Link for his art teaching blog.

On Monday, April 6 I'll give a digital slide presentation "Dinotopia: Behind the Scenes" at the Columbus College of Art and Design. The event is open to the public is sponsored by the illustration department, and it runs from 11:00 a.m. to 12:30 pm in the Joseph Canzani Auditorium. Link for more info.