Child Prodigy

Kieron Williamson is a seven-year-old in the UK who is becoming known for his paintings. In this link, he’s the subject of a Reuters news feature.

This kid makes me feel like a late bloomer. I didn’t do a lot of drawing until I was around 13, It wasn’t until about then I was starting to think about being an artist. I didn’t really get into oil painting and professional work until I was about 20. The blessing of those teenage years was that art was a private passion, something completely disconnected from commerce and recognition. I find that in my professional life I feed on those teenage years of drawing just for the love of it.

But I think young Kieron will do well. Both he and his dad seem to have their feet on the ground.

Photo and article at Lost at E Minor

Thanks, Dan, Mr. Kindergarten!

Quest for Immortality

Quick: what images do you think of when you think of N.C. Wyeth?

“Dear Papa,” N.C. Wyeth wrote in 1909. “All that I have done in the past, and all that I could do in the future (in illustration) would be utterly forgotten in a preciously few years except by a few friends and relatives perhaps. It is my purpose to create pictures that will last, like the works of men like Michelangelo, Raphael, Millet, and scores of others….Therefore, I am going to drop illustration.”

Wyeth wanted to get far enough ahead financially to devote himself exclusively to easel painting.

Two years after he wrote the letter he created the unforgettable paintings of Treasure Island.

Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe, and Robin Hood all lay before him.

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The Wyeths: The Letters of N.C. Wyeth, 1901-1945, edited by Betsy Wyeth, 1971, page 292.

Dead Tech: Proportional Scale

Before computers made it possible to scale things up or down by dragging a corner or typing in a number, the proportional scale was an indispensable studio tool.

It made it easy to calculate relative measurements when you needed to make enlargements or reductions.

It looks like a circular slide rule. The smaller inside wheel represents the size of the original, while a larger outside wheel measures the size of the reproduction. Each wheel is marked in a gradually increasing scale from 1 to 100 inches. The two wheels rotate independently, held concentrically by a grommet.

A small window marks the percentage enlargement or reduction. If you set it to a 24 percent reduction, all the relative measurements between the two wheels will be held at that relationship.

Knowing such measurements was necessary for making photographic enlargements, planning original art for a given print application, or specifying type. Although it may be obsolete for many of its original graphics art uses, it’s still a useful tool for modelmakers, craftspeople or anyone who needs to scale something up or down by percentages.

Phone Doodles

My wife Jeanette doodled this face with a ballpoint pen while she was on the phone yesterday. She was talking the whole time and she said she wasn’t thinking about the doodle. “I don’t know where he came from. I have no idea.”

Just curious: What sort of doodles do you do? Vote at left.
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Addendum: In the poll, faces were the big winner, with 89 votes. Creatures/Aliens, Boxes and loops got between 30 and 40 votes each. Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

"Genesis" Exhibition Opens Tomorrow

Thursday evening at 7:30 the art museum of the University of Wisconsin in Eau Claire will debut a new exhibit of the work of five author/illustrators.

The featured artists include Shaun Tan (The Arrival, above), William Joyce (Rolie Polie Olie and Dinosaur Bob), David Wiesner (Flotsam, Tuesday), Adam Rex (Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich), and me. I’ll have ten pieces in the show, all from Dinotopia, including several preliminary sketches, though unfortunately I will not be able to attend. Scroll down for more info.

Here’s my introductory essay for the catalog:

Many years ago, on the way to a camping trip to Maine with my wife and two young sons, I purchased a secondhand copy of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle. I read the book aloud to my family each night by the flickering light of a kerosene lantern. In the blackness beyond the curtains of our tent we could hear the muffled roar of the rocks holding firm against the breakers.

Pyle, the father figure of American author-illustrators, had us completely in his spell. His words and pictures transported us from the stormy coast of America to a sun-dappled England that he conjured completely from his imagination (he never made the trip there). It made perfect sense that the same hand created both the ornate pen pictures and the stately and intricate language. The two wellsprings of imagination merged in our heads as we absorbed each chapter.

The people represented in this exhibition all share Pyle’s love of both writing and picture-making as a kind of stereoscopic creative vision. One kind of vision involves lines and shapes and colors. The other mode of expression encompasses the realm of smell, touch, sound, dialog, and sequence.

Since each single storybook is the product of a single mind, it has a unity of effect often missing from author/artist collaborations. In Dinosaur Bob, William Joyce’s visual experiments in scale fits perfectly with extravagant phrases like “two peanut-butter-and-bologna sandwiches and 400 double Dutch chocolate cakes.”

Adam Rex, in his Frankenstein books, revises the way we think words and pictures should sit on the page. He switches from typeset lines of text to his own hand-lettering, splashing word bubbles and plastering headlines across the layouts with a magician’s virtuosity.

Two of the creators in this exhibition challenge our assumptions about what it means to be a writer, for some of their stories are presented entirely without words. When Shaun Tan created his haunting and lyrical bestseller The Arrival, he first envisioned the whole story in pantomime with the help of friends, who acted out the roles on videotape. The story recounts the experience of an immigrant, baffled by unknown scripts and unfamiliar customs. Part of the power of the presentation comes from its reserve, its silence and its grayness.

David Wiesner’s work in the wordless realm includes Tuesday, Sector 7, Free Fall, and Flotsam, all of which deftly unfold their narratives around increasingly mind-expanding revelations, rendered in the precise but unforgiving medium of watercolor.

People often ask each of us auteurs: “Which came first, the story or the pictures?” In my case, the two arrived together, like fraternal twins born squabbling and conspiring. Throughout the creative process of developing Dinotopia, a sketch begets a name, an outline begets a storyboard, and a painting begets a piece of dialog. It’s not as if story is finished first, as some suppose, and then I put on another hat and do the pictures. The two activities enrich each other all along the way.

That’s why I think all authors should be encouraged to draw, and all artists should be encouraged to write. Howard Pyle, in his famous summer classes in the Brandywine valley, insisted that his art students spend part of their time writing. I would almost rather look at Rudyard Kipling’s drawings from Just So Stories, or J.R.R. Tolkien’s portrayals of Middle Earth, than see the work of others who tried to climb inside their heads.

The two modes of expression are different only in their outward form, not in their source. They both derive from the same deep creative center. Hopefully they touch the reader at the same place. A picture book, whether it has words or not, is an attempt to conjure a half-remembered dream. Those dreams arise from a place in us too deep for either pictures or words.

The images in this exhibition, and the books from which they’re taken, escort us to the rocky shoreline of our imagination, where waves roll in from far storms and sunny kingdoms.
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Genesis • Jan. 28 to Feb. 18, with an opening reception on Jan. 28 at 7:30pm • Foster Gallery, Hass Fine Arts building, UWEC campus • FREE • all ages • 836-2328 • Website

Checkerboard Illusion

The recent colored cube illusion showed us how our brain compensates for a color cast, making hues seem constant, even when they’re really not.

Our visual system does a similar thing with tones, discounting the effect of shadows and grouping tones into meaningful sets.

This checkerboard is an example. I painted it using the exact same gray mixture for the dark square in the light area (1) as I did for the light square in the shadow (2).

Don’t believe it? Here are the exact same squares with everything else made white.

Why do the tones seem so different? The light square is surrounded by darker squares. This makes our visual system automatically conclude that the actual tone is light in value, and we group it with the other light squares.

We interpret the diagonal bars of darker tone as shadows for the following reasons:

1. They have soft edges, and soft edges usually belong to shadows.
2. Those edges are parallel, and cast shadows from the sun on flat surface are parallel.
3. The tones of adjacent colored squares gradate to an equal degree, just the way shadows do.

Our visual system is designed to help us determine the actual color of objects in the world. The fact that it seems to deceive us is not a defect of our vision. It’s central to our survival.

But we have to know about this mechanism of visual perception if we want to paint tones accurately.
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A related illusion from Edward Adelson’s website.

The Cal Arts Animation Program

California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, CA, was founded in the early 1960s by Walt Disney, who wanted to create a “Cal Tech for the Arts.”


The school developed a counterculture spirit in the 70s and 80s, taking on teachers like Judy Chicago, but it has recently become oriented more to the mainstream. It earned praise from several of the animation studios we’ve visited, who told us it graduates some of the best animation artists.

The 150 character animation majors show their short films in the annual “Producer’s Show,” which draws interest from the industry. Students own the rights to their own characters and stories.

When we visited in October, the spaces inside the building struck us as a bit confusing, with unmarked doors and volumes that were alternately cavernous and cramped. As visitors we needed a guide to find our way around, but everyone was helpful, and the students seemed well enough adapted, dividing some of the bigger rooms into beehives of ingeniously decorated work cubicles.

Above, with Steve Brown, who teaches animal drawing, and Maija Burnett, who is associate director of the character animation department. To my left is student Patrick Harpin.

The animation program builds on traditional skills. In the display case was a collection of character designs based on camels. Most of the animation students do the “cape assignment,” which involves fabric flapping in the wind, a harder challenge than it might seem.


The goal of the school, as originally expressed by Disney, revolves around the idea of cross-pollination of various disciplines, something he also tried to accomplish with Epcot, Imagineering, and Fantasia. The dream is to whip up a spirit of Gesamtkunstwerk, a marriage of creative disciplines, where dramatists, musicians, and artists build on each other’s creativity.

CalArts website, with QuickTime movies
Producer’s Show, 2009
Art of Jen, a student blog

Metropolitan Museum of Illustration

In 1907 The New York Herald invited N. C. Wyeth to write an article in support of “a movement in N. Y. city to have the Metropolitan Art Museum set aside a gallery for the best example of illustrations.”

The Herald solicited the opinion of Howard Pyle and a few other eminent illustrators to make the case. Wyeth acknowledged that “the men at the head of the museum are not at all in favor of it.”

It never happened. Contemporary narrative art was overlooked by the Met for a hundred years. Edwin Austin Abbey’s Daughters of King Lear was banished in hallways for years.

But the tide has turned. Smart museums, including the Met, are now welcoming art that tells a story. The exhibit “American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life,” which closed yesterday, brought together more than a hundred paintings that even New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl called “a great show.”

Meanwhile the Museum of Modern Art is hosting an exhibit of movie-related art by director Tim Burton (through April 26), focusing on his characters and stories. The show is so popular that visitors need advance reservations.
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American Stories Exhibit
Tim Burton Exhibit.
The Wyeths: The Letters of N.C. Wyeth, 1901-1945, edited by Betsy Wyeth, 1971, page 232.

Verne’s Right Half

Jules Verne’s manuscripts were written in longhand on the left half of the page. The right half was reserved for other purposes.

His publisher, Jules Hetzel sometimes wrote comments in the right margin, said Agnes Marcetteau, director of the Jules Verne Museum in Nantes, France.
The original manuscript for Paris in the 20th Century, which is kept in the city library, showed angry scribbling from the publisher.

“Unpleasant word,” wrote Hetzel. “Wrongly done. Especially for a start.” Another time the publisher commented, “No one will ever believe what you write.”

At one point Verne described a medical dissection in gory detail. “It is out of the question. It is shocking,” complained the publisher.

Ms. Marcetteau gently turned the pages of precious manuscripts for Mysterious Island and From the Earth to the Moon. The right margin was full of corrections, comments, diagrams, and mathematical calculations.

Around the World in 80 Days required careful reckoning, because the story was released in serial form. The count of the mileage and the tally of days fills the right margin. It all had to come out right for the story to work.

Jules Verne Museum

Cover Poll Results

The people have spoken! In the Color and Light book cover poll, there were 744 votes in all, and here’s how they were distributed.

So we’re going to go with the sleeping dino, which happened to be my favorite, too. For those of you who wanted the street scene, don’t be disappointed—we'll show it uncropped on the back cover. The lamplight, birdman, and sunset scenes will appear inside the book with about 300 other color illustrations.

It was an amazing experience to read all 114 of your comments. Perhaps because you’re all so visually sophisticated and articulate, you managed to verbalize all the vague hunches and considerations that were lying half-dormant in my brain, plus you pointed out many angles I never had thought of. The folks at Andrews McMeel were impressed with you all, too. So thanks again, and I’ll keep you posted.