Toy Collector Mel Birnkrant

(Video link) I paid another visit to Mel Birnkrant's amazing collection of antique comic character toys and made this short video about how he got started collecting.

Disney characters are ® and ©Disney Enterprises, Inc.

During the visit, Mel showed me some of his most precious and wonderful animated toys, including the one he calls "Toothy Mickey," an extremely rare wind-up tin toy that he hasn't operated in more than 20 years. On the video you'll see Mickey turn around as his eyes change and his teeth come out.

There's also a drummer Mickey and a dancing Mickey, and some unpainted wood crank-operated toys by Sonny Hatfield.

I have dreams about all these toys, wonderful, strange dreams that inspire me in new directions as an artist.
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Read more on Mel's website about:
Mickey Tin Toys
The unpainted wood animated sculptures of Sonny Hatfield
Little Sammy Sneeze and other one of-a-kind sculptures by Charles Ponstingl
The Bisque Pyramid (with the huge array of small figures)

Previously on GurneyJourney:
Toonerville Trolley Toy
Gus White's Puppets

Rockwell's Apothecary

People often say that Norman Rockwell painted an idealized view of American life, but some of his paintings portray a more Dickensian perspective with a social commentary that says "something's wrong here." 

His painting "Apothecary" or "Pharmacist" shows a druggist mixing medicine with dirty and broken implements lying on a tattered old reference book. The sick boy has good reason to look doubtful. The glass on the framed diploma is cracked and the guy is smoking. His long underwear is showing under his sleeve, he's missing buttons, and he's got a lot of junk stuffed in his pockets. The pharmacist is not a bad guy; he's trying to help, but perhaps he's having a rough time himself.

By 1939 toward the end of the Great Depression, America looked a little the worse for wear, and terrible things were happening in Europe.

Here is Rockwell's color study for the image, possibly painted over a photostat of the charcoal drawing, kind of a trial run to make sure the colors and values were just what he wanted.

Faces of Paranorman

ParaNorman - Faces of ParaNorman from Grow Film Company on Vimeo.
The artists at Laika Animation explain how they used 3D printing and replacement animation to create the smoothly moving faces in the stop-motion film Paranorman. (Direct link to video)


The newest trailer for their upcoming feature "Boxtrolls" (video link) is full of action set-ups like car chases and ballroom dancing that are hard to pull off in stop-motion. Even though there's some digital assist with green-screen and rig removal, it's still straight-ahead animation of physical puppets, meaning you start with frame one and move all the figures through all the frames with no going back to fix mistakes. Boxtrolls will release in September.

Adventure Comics and Illustration

When realistic adventure comic strips appeared in the newspapers, it was a big change from the line-dominated cartoon style that had prevailed until then.


One of the pioneers of adventure comics was Milton Caniff (1907-1988). Caniff used dramatic blacks, applied with a brush, providing an opportunity to sink some forms into silhouette, or present mysterious lighting effects. He took some of his inspiration from work he saw in book illustrations.

Milt Caniff's studio mate was Noel Sickles (1910-1982), who had drawn an adventure strip called Scorchy Smith. Sickles was always interested in dramatic, realistic storytelling. He showed Caniff "a set of illustrations by Harold Von Schmidt for Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop—employing lush black brushwork, defining objects by shadows as much as outlines—Sickles introduced ultra-realism and impressionistic linework to the comics." The quote is from America's Great Comic-Strip Artists, by Richard Marschall.


When Von Schmidt (1893-1982) undertook to illustrate the lavish 1929 edition of Cather's book, he took six months off his magazine illustration career and traveled to the American southwest to see the frontier settings of Cather's book. He produced over 60 black and white illustrations, using a brush and ink style where he grouped the cast shadows with the shadow side of the form to create mysterious shapes.

Von Schmidt was very proud of the book, and it influenced not only adventure comics but pulp illustration and European comics.

More examples of Von Schmidt's work at Jim V.'s Illustrators website
Death Comes for the Archbishop

17th Century Color Book

In 1692, Dutch artist A. Boogert made a one-of-a-kind teaching manual with over 800 pages of color swatches, meticulously cataloguing the many possible colors that he could mix from watercolors.

More at This is Collossal

Thanks to Roberto Quintano, Dustin Wilson, Tim Fehr, and Steve Gilzow for telling me about it.

High school assignment

Art teacher Matt Clark says:

"I teach at a small school in Central Florida where I routinely show my kids your blog. My tag-team art teacher and I decided to have our high school students do a copy of your Grinnell Light painting since you were good enough to provide photos of the stages you went through. These are 9th through 12th graders, so there is a range of ability represented here."

Animated Hair

In his 1925 stop-action cartoon "Animated Hair" (video link), a hand seems to draw a series of faces. Then chunks of hair migrate into other positions to create portraits of Christy Mathewson, John J. McGraw, George Bernard Shaw, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Samuel Gompers, Elsie Ferguson and Babe Ruth.

These short films by cartoonist Sid Marcus (who later co-created the Tasmanian Devil for Warner Bros) were wildly popular and cheap to create. Fifty one of them were produced between 1924 and 1927, and distributed by Fleischer Studios.
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More info from UCLA info sheet, page 3

Rooftops in Watercolor and Gouache

Here's a step-by-step sequence as I paint a rooftop scene on location using watercolor and gouache. 

I start by laying the main lines with a water-soluble colored pencil. I start the scene completely above eye level.

The ghost wash halfway done. I shift from cool to warm, keeping it all wet and blending, and dodging around those brightly lit roof areas. I hold the sketchbook at a 30 degree slope to let the bead of juicy color form along the bottom.

I drop in bright yellow where there will be backlit spring leaves. Note the warm to cool shift in the dormer. It's warm because the eaves are picking up bounced ground light and cool because the shadow planes are getting light from the sky. I don't like that uneven sky.

So to get a flatter sky tone, I mix blue with white gouache. A dry brush delivers the textures of the shingles. I drop in darks for the deeper shadows on the side of the building. 

Now I can get into the smaller details of the dormer windows and the tree at left using a medium sized round watercolor brush. I splatter paint from a loaded #10 sable round to suggest some of the leaves in the upper left. "Look out," I said to Jeanette. "I'm getting bold and free."

Next I work in the orange building at left, the wires, and the skylights. Two workmen appear and begin removing shingles.

A car parked in front of the scene, so I dropped it in. 

I shot a detail to show that many passages are a mix of transparent and opaque. For example, the yellow backlit leaves are a combination of: 

• yellow base colors that I painted around

• opaque yellow gouache added later, and

• light yellow colored pencil.

Here's a shot of the watercolor palette, an old pan set that I've refilled with tube colors: 

Top row: sepia, burnt sienna, burnt umber, Payne's gray (2), ultramarine blue (2), cerulean

Bottom row: permanent alizarin, cadmium red medium, raw sienna, cadmium orange (top half) and cadmium yellow (bottom half), scarlet lake, lemon yellow, permanent green, and viridian.

Plus I had tubes of white, yellow, and blue gouache.

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Check out my public Facebook page, where you can click through the step-by-step and see the changes more easily.

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The two wells at top have some cool and warm colors that I mixed in bulk for the ghost wash.

Art Supplies

Watercolor sketchbook
Watercolor pencils
Watercolors 
Gouache
Round and flat brushes
You can also get an empty metal watercolor box.

Happy Mother's Day

Elizabeth Nourse (American, 1859-1938). La Mère (Mother and Child), 1888. Oil on canvas, Cincinnati Art Museum.

Heavenly Rest Stop

It's a misty day outside the Heavenly Rest Stop cafe on Fifth Avenue in New York. After eating lunch at an outside table I paint this watercolor of the street scene. It's about 5 x 8 inches. 

I start by establishing the basic lines in a reddish brown water-soluble colored pencil. I cover most of the surface with large washes of low-chroma warm and cool colors (raw sienna and Paynes gray) with a #10 watercolor sable round.

Because of the misty weather, the washes take a long time to dry. The umbrella is bright red, but I keep it very low in chroma.

The area of this detail is about 1.5 x 2 inches. What I love about transparent watercolor is that you get all the soft blending transitions for free.

Art Supplies

Moleskine watercolor notebook
Caran D'Ache watercolor pencils
Schmincke Watercolor Pocket Set
Size 10 Kolinsky watercolor round brush
More about the Zorn show tomorrow.