Juice: Beston and Liljefors

This is another in a series called “Juice,” pairing a quote and a picture to stimulate discussion.

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystic concept of animals…For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings. They are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

Quote by Henry Beston (1888-1968) in The Outermost House.
Art by Bruno Liljefors. (1860-1939).

Birds on the Brain

Birds have been on my mind a lot lately.

Even before I heard paleontologists calling them “avian dinosaurs,” I had a hunch that birds were linked somehow to dinosaurs. The fine-grained fossils that have been pouring out of the Liaoning province in China show clear evidence of well-developed feathers.

When it came to illustrating small two-legged dinosaurs, all my old painter’s tricks for rendering scaly skin were not going to cut it anymore. My old paintings of Oviraptors look naked now.

I realized I would have to learn to draw birds. I would have to watch them like hawks to see how they behave. I hung out at zoos, pet shops, county fairs, and chicken coops.

Did dinosaurs have a preening ritual in a definite sequence as birds do? Did they have a preening oil gland near the base of their tail? Were their feathers for flapping or warmth or social display—or all three? Could they fluff up their feathers to look impressive or to release tension, as birds do?

I started wondering: what did dinosaurs look like during a moult? Did some dinosaurs have wattles and combs like roosters?

These are the questions that all of my friends who are paleoartists are asking, and it makes right now a very exciting time to be doing dinosaur art!

Cell Phone Talk

You won’t hear me complaining about strangers who talk loudly into cell phones in public. Like all artists and writers, I’m curious about people. I’m all ears.

If people want to put their innermost thoughts on parade, I will stand alongside the parade route, quietly jotting in my little book.

(Click on image to enlarge.)

Borrowing, Part 2

Yesterday’s “spot the swipe” challenge brought out some sharp eyes. Emilio, Jamin, Mark, John, and David picked up on the British painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Here’s a typical picture of his called "Expectations" with the classic Roman-style marble plaza by the sea.



Mark and David also noticed the Maxfield Parrish influence. Parrish loved to paint figure groupings in black and white polka-dotted or striped costumes. This painting is called “Florentine Fete.” Come to think of it, another artist known for black and white striped fabric was James Tissot, but his stuff wasn’t front-of-mind at the time.



The next one is a bit more obscure: William Merritt Chase’s “A Friendly Call.” I’ve always loved the pose, because it’s both polite and confrontational. Homage or rip-off? You tell me.



John and Cat were right about the guy pointing upward. That's me, all right. I was thinking of Raphael’s “School of Athens,” shown here in detail. David got that. You remember that painting. It’s the one every philosophy teacher trots out to contrast Plato's idealism with Aristotle's materialism. Aristotle is the empiricist gesturing down to the ground and Plato is the rationalist pointing up to the unseen world. When you read the Chandara book, the allusion will make more sense.



After I finished the painting, I remembered that DaVinci’s “Last Supper” also had the same pointing gesture, and it was painted around the same time as Raphael's, so I suppose it's fair that Meredith, Mark, and David should be given a point on that one, too. So by my tally, David is the winner with four points, and Mark a close second with three.

I don’t know if there are any conclusions to draw about borrowing. A guy coming out of the confessional should stay out of the pulpit. But I would propose for your consideration the following four rules:

1. It’s better policy to borrow from heroes who are long dead.
2. Don’t base anything on one artist; look at three or four.
3. Never assume your swipes will pass unnoticed.
4. Go ahead and look at the other fellow’s art, but at some point, put away the art books, pose your own models, and base your final work on that.


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Borrowing, Part 1

Borrowing, Part 1

Here’s a subject we all think about, but we don’t really want to admit to. When you’re doing your own picture, is it OK to look at another guy’s work and…what’s the word…Borrow? Lift? Swipe?


This is a painting called “Spotters and Liners” from the new Dinotopia book. Click on the image to enlarge. Let’s see if you can guess which artists I was looking at while I painted it. Post a comment if you think you know. Hint: there are four different artists—at least four that I'm conscious of.

In tomorrow's post I’ll reveal not only the artists, but the very pictures that I swiped (ahem) borrowed from.

Al Parker at the Rockwell

Yesterday Jeanette and I recharged our inspirational batteries with a visit to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The museum is hosting a major retrospective of American illustrator Al Parker called “Ephemeral Beauty: Al Parker and the American Women’s Magazine, 1940-1960.”

Curator Stephanie Plunkett showed us the actual fan letter that Rockwell wrote to his friend Parker in 1948, saying “While the rest of us are working knee-deep in a groove, you are forever changing and improving. You have brought more freshness, charm, and vitality to illustration than any other living illustrator.”


Over 80 works by Parker and his contemporaries demonstrate how Parker's compositional ingenuity and freshness of concept influenced all his peers. Parker originated the extreme close-up portrait, and created the acclaimed “mother and daughter” covers for the Ladies’ Home Journal between 1939 and 1952, which are collected in an array of tearsheets and original paintings.

Illustrators in particular will appreciate seeing Parker’s informal sketches, photo reference, tearsheets, and letters from art directors. The catalog includes a fascinating article by Alice Carter on the history of the American women’s magazines. Other essays explore how, after World War II, magazine illustrators like Parker played a powerful role in shaping the styles and aspirations of everyday Americans. The exhibition will be on view though October 28.

If you want to see more of Parker's work on the Web, don’t miss the fascinating Flickr collection by Leif Peng in Today’s Inspiration, as well as a good article with more links by Charley Parker in Lines and Colors (scroll down to Sunday March 11)

We’ll be back to the Rockwell Museum sometime this winter, because they’ll be hosting a groundbreaking graphic novel exhibition starting in November.

Four Kinds of Preliminaries

I admire artists who can dive into a blank canvas and pull off a great picture without any preliminaries, but most of the time I'm not so lucky. I have to do lots of sketches to try to solve different kinds of problems.


Here are some of the sketches for “Song in the Garden” (scroll down to see finish). On the upper left is the first concept, taken as far as possible without reference and used as a placeholder in the storyboard (see last post).

The second scribbly drawing is a “placement thumbnail.” The goal is to try to place elements in the scene and experiment with different compositional ideas. The heads can be simple ovals, and it’s OK to keep trying different positions for some of the figures, like the head of the Styracosaurus. It may take ten or more of these until the size and placement of elements feels right.

With that locked in, and with the other references at hand (photos of models, miniatures, scrap—all of which I’ll talk about in later posts) I try to establish a quick “tonal thumbnail,” (upper right). This serves as a map for the light or dark tones of the picture. It occurred to me during this step to make the background dark, rather than light, as it was in the original storyboard concept.

Not every picture gets this step, but I wanted to take a couple hours to paint a “color thumbnail,” (lower right). This step gave me assurance that the whole picture would really work out the way I was hoping before I committed myself to the labor of the final painting (below).

Storyboards

A couple posts ago I described how I experiment with a lot of different picture ideas by making speedy little thumbnail sketches. In a long-form picture book like Dinotopia, the final illustrations have to stand on their own as separate paintings, but they also have be part of an overarching story. A lot of time goes into planning the story, both in the form of a written outline and a storyboard sequence.


Once I have a lot of picture ideas that are starting to click, I sketch each one onto a storyboard blank. These storyboard blanks are custom-made layout forms that I print on card stock at about ¼ the size of the printed page.

It takes about 80 of these cards to make up a single Dinotopia book of 160 pages. I display them all at once on a slightly sloping wooden display board that covers a wall in the studio.

By keeping the storyboards on separate cards it’s easy to add or delete a page. I keep tinkering with the sequence all through the production of the book. This whole procedure is similar to—and inspired by—the way animated films are planned.

View from the Ladder

For a change of pace from Dinotopia, here’s a pencil portrait of my friend Bill, a retired tree surgeon.

Spending a lot of time on top of a ladder with a pruning saw has given him an interesting perspective on the world.

He believes the drawings of Pokemon, for example, are masterpieces of simplicity, “like something by Giotto or Botticelli. They’re at that level of quality.”

Compositional Speed Dating

What’s the first step in planning a Dinotopia picture? I like to fill a few pages with doodles or scribbles.

Here’s one made with a fountain pen. Don’t ask me what kind of dinosaurs those are. I don’t know yet. What time of day is it? What is the color scheme? Who knows at this point?


These drawings are smaller than a business card. Eight or ten of them fit on a single sheet of paper. Here’s one drawn with a blue fountain pen and a dried-out gray marker to give a little tone. This one won’t work because the dinosaur would be cut in half by the gutter of the book. So I leave it and move on.


Here’s another quick sketch done in pencil. I’m after the soft, moody lighting of a narrow street at night. I don’t know yet what sorts of figures are standing by the door.

These sketches pile up like leaves in the autumn, and I rake them together and pick out one that might have a spark of life. Which of these marker doodles of a throne room works best? Maybe none of them are quite there yet.

This is the artistic equivalent of speed dating. You have to maintain a balance of interest, detachment, and restlessness—always ready to try something else before getting married to one idea. Howard Pyle used to say that he had to do fifty thumbnail sketches for every illustration. Even if he felt confident of first one, he had to do the other 49 anyway just to be sure.