Rain and Watercolor

Rain is the death of watercolor. I knew I was in trouble when the clouds rolled in over the Crateri Silvestri in Sicily last month.


These cinder cones are high on the summit of Etna. I walked around their rims and gazed in, but the clouds closed in.


By the time I started a sketch, a steady drizzle started. The washes in the sky wouldn't dry. I leaned forward to intercept the drops. But you can see from the droplets in the sky that I couldn't block them. I just had to admit defeat and head down the mountain.

Drawing Shadows, Drawing Light

Because paper is white, the substance of drawing is shadow.

Shadow is what we look for when we draw. Once we establish the outline, we begin to shade the drawing. Only at the end of the process are the illuminated areas revealed.


The drawing at the left is a 20-minute study of a costumed model with a brush and black ink.

What if we could reverse that thinking and explore the structure of the light masses from the beginning? The second study uses brown paper and white gouache to define the areas touched by light. After a quick line drawing, I painted in the light shapes, in this case ignoring or downplaying variations in the light.

The shadow side of the form had to take care of itself, unless I placed a patch of light behind the model to define the shadow side contour.

This is a very good exercise for any painter or any student of composition, because the light masses should really concern you more than the placement of darks.

Christmas? Already?!

After all the big buildup, it's here.

This Christmas card, drawn with charcoal on cotton vellum, was from 1987, when our son Dan was less than a year old. Now he's a senior in college. We're happy because Dan, his brother Frank, and three of our nephews are all here with us.

We at the Gurney household wish you all the very best.

Tadema’s Marble Secrets

British painter Lawrence Alma Tadema (1836-1912) painted realistic scenes of the classical world for his fellow Victorians. He loved to paint images with big expanses of white marble.

This was a bit of a fantasy, because the Romans more often used cement and faux painted plaster, avoiding the cost and hassle of real marble as much as possible. But in Tadema’ vision, white marble was everywhere, and he was good at painting it.

What were some of his secrets to painting marble?

He often uses a red-brown iron oxide staining into the structure of the marble along the joins, and grey or black veining in both the surface and deep layers of some of the stones.

The veining works best if it's very subtle. It can be accomplished either with opaque mixtures or glazing, but ideally with a combination of both.

One secret of getting the marble to look translucent is to use lighting from above and slightly behind. This plays up the effect of subsurface scattering along the illuminated edge.

Remember that besides transmitted light, there’s a lot of light bouncing around from all directions, so save the dark accents only for deep hollows or pits in the stone.
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See a lot more Tademas at ARC virtual museum.
GurneyJourney post on subsurface scattering.

Sleeping Man

People compose themselves when they are sitting for a portrait. But when they're asleep, anything goes. This businessman was riding home on the Hudson Valley line from New York City.

Seven Inch Figures

How big should you make your figure drawings? When I was in art school they told us to buy 18 x 24 inch paper, and the figures were supposed to be about 21 inches tall, enough to fill the vertical page.


British academic painter Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896) made the case for drawing them about one third that size.

“In drawing a whole figure from nature we should be three times its length from it, to oversee it properly. If we draw normally, we must draw on the scale on which we should trace, if our sheet of paper were a sheet of glass held up, and if, instead of pencil, we traced with a diamond on this interposed pane you will find that a five-foot figure then comes about seven inches high on your glass, or its substitute, your paper.

On this scale the comparison is direct and not proportional. On this scale, and, largely, in accordance with this law, are drawn all studies from nature by masters of all periods. Of course, I am not speaking of cartoons. The studies I speak of could be squared up and enlarged to cartoons on any scale required for decoration in fresco, or on canvases.

Now, if Rubens and Longhi and Watteau and Fragonard and Ingres and Millet and Puvis and Keene, and all the company of the blessed drew on that scale, they probably knew what they were about.”

---As recalled by Walter Sickert, quoted from The Study of Drawing, 1910, reprinted in Apollo Magazine, 1996, page 47

More on Leighton at Art Renewal Center, link.
In reference to the distance to sit from the model, see previous GJ post: "Pyramid of Vision."

Note: "Cartoons" is used by Leighton in the sense of full size preliminary line drawings, not in the sense we use the word to describe small humorous drawings.
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Addendum: Blog reader Godo, who doesn't have an account for comments, sent an email with the sketch above, as well as the following interesting discussion:

Since several weeks I am reading your blog, a real interesting publication.
Maybe you are interested in what I wanted to say, so here is my contribution:

This is a problem of elementary geometry. The intercept theorem explains the relationship between the size of the figure (A), the distance of the painter from the figure (B) and the distance of the drawing paper or canvas from the painter’s eye (D) (see picture).

Sometimes I heard my students say: I cannot draw something different from what I see. What does it mean I wondered? In fact it was the case what Erik stated above: it is natural and the easiest way to draw. Sometimes you cannot approach a subject as you want. When I asked to “zoom” the picture they felt uncomfortable as they had to draw bigger than they “saw”.

“In drawing a whole figure from nature we should be three times its length from it, to oversee it properly. …..you will find that a five-foot figure then comes about seven inches high on your glass, or its substitute, your paper.

From this statement we can easily calculate, that the painter held his drawing paper at a distance (D) of about 21 inches (54 cm); this is approximately the length of the stretched arm.
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Thanks, Godo!

Life Before Facebook

Seventy years ago, during the last economic mega-downturn, smart young couples made friends by inviting over their neighbors to play cards.



Advertisers in 1938 pushed products with photo-comics. They didn’t mind harping on our insecurities. They still use the same psychology, but they’re not as obvious about it.
I'll be looking for that fresh, clean pack of Congress Playing Cards under the Christmas Tree.

Gate into Fes, Morocco

The gate into Fes, Morocco, known as Bab Boujeloud, was covered in scaffolding when I sat down to sketch the scene from a nearby café. The first thing I did was delete the construction clutter. The busy tilework would give me enough of a headache.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

Donkeys ducked into the arch, carrying loads of of animal hides bound for the tanneries. Red taxis disgorged tourists, but no cars ventured past the portal. Beyond the gate is one of the largest medieval pedestrian cities in the world.



The ornate blue tile work was too finicky to paint with a brush, so I scribbled a suggestion of the detail with a blue colored pencil. I’m no purist in watercolor. I mix in pencils or gouache or coffee stains whenever they serve to capture the something about the scene that doesn’t yield to traditional means.

Guess the Foreign Editions

Here are five new foreign editions of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. Can you guess which languages they're translated into?

The first person to guess correctly will receive a free bookplate and a signed dinosaur sketch by James Gurney. One guess per person, please. Employees of Dinotopia publishers not eligible.
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ADDENDUM. The answers are: 1. Romanian, 2. French, 3. Bulgarian, 4. Czech, and 5. Hungarian.

Thanks everyone. Vertumno was the winner. As I understand it, Bulgarian and Russian share the Cyrillic alphabet, so a lot of people, including Ruuhkis made a completely reasonable guess right away. Erin McGuire was right, but just a little late.

The publisher of the Romanian, Bulgarian, Czech, and Hungarian editions is Eastone Books, and the publisher of the French edition is Editions Fleurus.

Port of Tangier

The old city or medina of Tangier, Morocco looks like white crystals growing on the northernmost hill of the city, overlooking the modern port facility.

The ferry terminal building looks like a space station in the foreground of the scene. The view is from the rear deck of the ferry. Since the ferry took a long time to load, I had lots of time to do a watercolor painting.



Here's a pan across the scene and down to the sketchbook in my lap, with the sound of the public address system.



All those white mullions in the windows were a bit of a chore to paint around. You can see me fumbling around with the sable round. It would have been bettter to have a small chisel tipped flat brush for those square shapes.