Prehistoric Times

Mike Fredericks, editor of the magazine Prehistoric Times announced yesterday that his readers voted Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara and Dinosaurs by Dr. Thomas Holtz and Luis Rey as their favorite prehistoric animal books of 2007. Mr. Fredericks received an equal number of votes for both books.


Congratulations to my friends Tom Holtz and Luis Rey, and thanks to the readers of PT. If you're interested in dinosaurs and ice age mammals, I recommend subscribing to Prehistoric Times. It’s the best overview out there for both the science and the popular culture of prehistoric life.

Mr. Hitchcock's Stony Library

It almost sounds like something from a fairy tale. A man named Edward Hitchcock creates a whole library of books out of thin pages of stone bound together with metal hinges.


The mysterious writing on those stony pages consists of birdlike footprints or, as he called them, "hieroglyphs" or “footmarks.” Some of these curious stone footprints were turned up by the plow of a farmer named Pliny Moody as early as 1802. Other pages were discovered by men who split sandstone for sidewalks or gravestones.


Today scientists recognize these footprints as the fossilized tracks of dinosaurs who scampered along the muddy lakeshore 190 million years ago in what is now the Connecticut River Valley. In October I reported about a funky roadside attraction with fossils from the same geologic formation.


But the finest specimens are on public exhibition at the nearby Amherst Museum of Natural History. They were collected between 1835 and 1864 by Mr. Hitchcock, third president of Amherst College, and its first natural historian, in an era when natural history was a science in its infancy.

The Museum’s Coordinator of Education, Steven Sauter, invited me and Jeanette to his office. He showed us the articulated footbones of an emu, about the same size and shape as those of the saurian track makers.

We went further into the basement of the museum, where the skeletons of a human and a gorilla hung silently side by side. Collections Manager Kate Wellspring showed us one of Hitchcock’s most extensive stony books. She carefully turned more than half a dozen sandstone pages, resting them on soft foam padding.



The track on the right is the actual footprint. On the left is the convex impression from the mud that filled in and covered over the print. The lakebed mud was so sensitive and delicate that raindrops and insect tracks are clearly visible.


My favorite fossil was from a squatting dinosaur that Hitchcock called an Anomoepus, basically a three-toed theropod about the size of a cassowary. The impression in the ancient mud shows the dinosaur resting on its keelbone (1) and haunches (2). Beside the right foot, the chestbone (3) also made a dent in the mud, accompanied by little lines that appear to be feathers—though Steve said that some scientists debate the feather interpretation.

I could easily imagine the little dinosaur resting for a moment at the edge of the lake to preen and nap.

Edward Hitchcock developed many of his ideas before the famous British naturalist Sir Richard Owen coined the word “dinosauria,” and before Darwin published The Origin of Species. Hitchcock's vision of nature was guided both by his religious faith and his keen empirical observation.

Richard Owen tried to convince Hitchcock that the creatures making the tracks were oversize lizards, but Hitchcock believed that they were some sort of giant birds. In the retrospect of current science, Hitchcock's interpretation was closer to the mark.


Museum docent and Amherst student Crystal Edwards showed me some of the more famous dinosaur skeletons. But the tracks are more vivid than the bones.

As I left the museum, I pondered Hitchcock's own words about his “stony volumes":

"Who would believe that such a register lay buried in the strata? To open the leaves, unroll the papyrus, has been an intensely interesting, though difficult work, having all the excitement and marvelous developments of romance. And yet the volume is only partially read. Many a new page I fancy will yet be opened, and many a new key obtained to the hieroglyphic record. I am thankful that I have been allowed to see so much by prying between the folded leaves.”

Depth of Field

If you look at almost any portrait or wildlife photograph, you’ll notice that the background is out of focus. The same is true of sports or action photos.

This shallow-focus quality, known to photographers as “depth of field” is a powerful way to control the viewer’s attention. For painters, controlling focal depth adds tremendous realism to close-ups, but surprisingly few artists use it.

This may be because our eyes naturally shift focus from near to far when we look at the real world. As a result, our minds construct the misleading impression that everything around us is in equally sharp focus.


The reason cameras produce a shallow depth of field is that when you photograph a subject with a telephoto lens or with the aperture wide open, the camera can only focus on one plane of distance at a time. Everything else is blurry, and the blur increases as objects get farther from the plane of focus. Very bright highlights burn out the film or digital sensors, and may appear as sharp-focused circles of various size.

These details are taken from oil paintings for Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara to show how I used this photographic effect for fantasy paintings. If you’re painting in oil, you can use larger brushes and a wet-into-wet handling to achieve this impression.

But don’t overdo it. Effects like this are like a spice or a perfume, better if they are sensed unconsciously by the viewer, rather than jumping out as an obvious trick.

Car Names

What we name our cars tells you all you need to know about where our heads are at, culturally speaking.

Even back in 2000, when I did this sketch, we had car names that basically said, “I’m pissed off with traffic jams so I’m gonna blow out of here and head off by myself down some dirt road.”

But there’s a civilizing side to nature, at least to judge by the second group of names.

Winter Painting Tips

Now that winter is here, only the crazy people go out to paint.

I learned how to survive winter painting from one of my crazy friends, Jim Cramer. He’s far more intrepid than I am. He does all his paintings outdoors, year round. You’ll find him out there in the teeth of a gale or beside a frozen river down to about ten degrees above zero.

I wimp out below about 25 or 30 degrees Fahrenheit or about minus 4 degrees Celsius. But I love painting snow because the colors of light and shadow are much more obvious, especially around the “golden hour.”

Here are a few tips, mainly on what not to do:

--Fingerless gloves keep your hands warm without losing your grip on the brush. Put your non-painting hand in a warmer glove.

--Don’t use a metal mahlstick like I’m doing here. A wooden one is much better.

--The glare of full sun on snow makes it hard to judge color. Try painting late in the day when the shadows lengthen.

--If you’re painting in watercolor in subfreezing temperatures, don’t replace the water with white wine, because that freezes, too. Use vodka instead.

--That white umbrella on the C-Stand is meant to cut direct sunlight from behind. If the wind picks up, the C-Stand should be weighted with a sandbag.

--Your feet and your fingers are the first to freeze. Wear insulated boots, and try standing on a carpet sample instead of directly on the snow.

School Superintendent

I did these sketches of our district superintendent during a school board meeting. He's a lively speaker, with great facial expressions. He was in constant motion, so I tried to pick a few characteristic expressions, just the way an animator might look for key frames.

As I sketched, I wrote down the quotes verbatim.

Rhythm and Hues

Creating lifelike digital animals is one of the greatest challenges for CGI artists. We’ve all seen film footage of real penguins, pigs and polar bears, so our eyes can instantly recognize anything that doesn’t ring true.

That makes the accomplishments of the team at Rhythm and Hues all the more remarkable.

Founded by John Hughes and Pauline Ts’o (below, left), they created award-winning special effects for films like Golden Compass, Night at the Museum, Narnia, Charlotte’s Web, and Babe. Rhythm and Hues is a complete digital studio, with not only post-production FX, but also CG animation (such as Happy Feet), and a range of design services.

We toured the campus, housed in a 70,000 square foot building in west LA, just north of the airport. The facility includes a sound stage, screening room, work areas for the animators, and conference rooms, all brimming over with works in progress. In the center of the building is a light-filled open stairway that serves as a mixing place for workers as they go about their day.

Huge rooms filled with humming computers do the vast amount of rendering work.

The founders, Mr. Hughes and Ms. Ts’o, are each a remarkable combination of business-person, technical-wizard, and art-lover. Their original art collection includes drawings by great Disney animators, Garth Williams, and Jules Feiffer.

They have clearly worked hard to attract and keep some of the best talent in the industry. Stacy Burstin, our host, travels to art schools and software conventions to recruit top talent. Animators are allowed to bring their dogs to work, so many of the cubicles have child gates with a canine companion at the artists’ feet.

After seeing a collection of gorgeous original production paintings and sculpted maquettes, I was a little disappointed to learn that both the painting and the sculpting have all gone digital, and physical sculptures of the characters are no longer necessary. But that seems to be true at all the movie houses we visited.

It was a real honor to meet so many of the artists and specialists after my Dinotopia presentation, and I congratulate them on their magnificent work.

Albino Frogs & Occlusion Shadows

Here’s a study from life of a giant albino bullfrog from an aquarium. The creature was the size of a plucked chicken, and about the same color. He held still for twenty minutes while I did this study.

I drew him in pencil on gray mat board, and then laid a milky wash of opaque watercolor over his whole body, saving the brightest whites for the accents and highlights. When the overall light wash was dry, I added the dark accents in pencil. These include the pupil of the eye and the places where forms push together in the folds and wrinkles.

Lighting specialists in the 3-D CG animation field call these dark places “occlusion shadows.”

Wherever two forms touch each other, or a form touches a floor, a dark line or accent results. You can see the effect by pressing your fingers together and looking at the little dark line where they touch. Not much light makes it to that point of contact. You’ll also notice it gets darker in the inside corner of a room where the walls meet.

Computer lighting programs don’t create this dark accent automatically. Until recently it had to be added by hand. But software pioneers have recently made lighting tools that can anticipate when the light will be occluded and such an accent will appear.

As a traditional oil painter, I'm fascinated by such new terminology and visual analysis developed my brother artists in the CG arena. I wonder if one of you who is familiar with 3-D CG lighting might be willing to comment on the challenges presented by occlusion shadows.

Home from Seattle

We finished up the Dinotopia tour in Seattle, returning the rental car and boarding a jet back home. From my window I could see America was completely covered from head to toe with a blanket of clouds.

A mix-up with the tickets put us into LaGuardia instead of Stewart Newburgh, so we had to rent another car and drive all night to return to Trusty Rusty.

She was buried somewhere under a foot of snow. Where did we leave her?

Now we're digging out from other piles at home. To our friends and family: I hope you'll understand if we don't send Christmas cards this year. To our mail-order customers: most orders already shipped today, and the rest will go out Saturday and Monday.

To all our hosts at bookstores, movie studios, and art schools: thank you for your hospitality and generosity, and please forgive us for not being able to linger longer. To all the readers of the Dinotopia books: I really appreciate your support; there would be no more books without it. To my wonderful publisher, Andrews McMeel, thanks for helping with all the myriad details of the tour.

And to all my fellow artists on this blog, both students and professionals: thanks for your interest in all the oddball topics of this journey and I'm grateful for your fascinating feedback. Even though I'm back in New York, the journey is not over, and I'll keep on blogging. I'll continue to do new posts and flashback reports about the West Coast.

Sony Pictures Imageworks

A cluster of seven unmarked buildings in Culver City is the home of some of the most eye-popping visual effects in the movie business. Sony Imageworks has created visual effects for films like Spiderman 3, Stuart Little, and Starship Troopers.

This is also the headquarters of Sony Pictures Animation, one of the major players in the field of CGI animation, who recently created Surf’s Up and Open Season. The animation division was set up starting in 2002 after the success of the ChubbChubbs.

As a fee-for-service post-production FX company, Sony does straight 2-D visual effects and 3-D character work, the latter including such tasks as creating a virtual Toby McGuire as a stand in for the real actor when he’s called upon to do dangerous stunts. Sony has also been a pioneer in the controversial technique of motion capture, or as they call it “performance capture” in such films as Polar Express and Beowulf, developing a new art form that bridges the boundary between live action and animation.

Sony Pictures Animation, or “SPA,” as it is known here, has its own in-house visual development department, which hammers out the story and crafts the look of the characters and environments. The rigging, animation, surfacing and lighting are then handled by the Imageworks team next door. Their artists have to cover the gamut from photo-real live action effects to the caricatured world of CGI animation. The huge demands on the computers to render all this material requires 4000 processors, and up to a petabyte of memory.

The talent pool thus ranges from artist/designers to software specialists. We toured both facilities before and after my presentation, and I had a chance to meet SPA’s visual development legends like Richard Chavez, Luc Desmarchelier, and Ron Lukas, who, along with Paul Lasaine, are busy creating environments and characters for a variety of new shows in development.

The visual effects team has developed sophisticated tools to create photo-real water, fire, and fabric, all of which has been a challenge to model convincingly in CG. For Surf’s Up, they not only had to create realistic breaking waves, but set up a control system so they could curl and crash on cue. In-house software engineers have developed proprietary tools for fur and fabric. “Cloth has come a long way, too,” said our host Steve Prawat.

Sande Scoredos, the director of training and artistic development, said that new hires spend two weeks in training, with a whole regimen of classes. They’re given a practice shot to animate, basically a digital puppet figure in a virtual room, and if they can meet the requirements, they get “crewed.”

Like all CGI animation companies, Sony works hard to keep its 900-1400 artists happy and learning. They offer free classes in life drawing and acting, bring in live falcons, take trips to art museums, and present lectures by cinematographers, classic animators like Chuck Jones—and author/illustrators like me. “We have a program in place for people who want to go up the career path,” said Mr. Prawat.

As I signed the artist wall, I felt honored to be a guest at a studio with such a respected artistic legacy. It’s an exciting career indeed for young artists to consider.

Some images provided by Sony Imageworks.