Fractals, Reverie, and Biofeedback

We humans are curiously attracted to abstract forms of an organic, fractal character. When you sit there looking at these forms it leads to a pleasant state of mind.


Consider how fractal-based forms are associated with daydreams, fantasy, and even worship.
1. Marbleized paper in an old book of poetry (above left).
2. Ornate movie palaces from the 1920s (above right).
3. Cathedral architecture (think of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona).
4. Limestone dripstone formations (below).
5. Roccoco gold picture frames.
6. Bird’s eye wood grain or patterns in marble.
7. The fluid, languid smoke of incense or pipe smoke.


In the absence of these forms, the human spirit can wither. Think of the bleak rectilinear spaces such as parking garages. Or prisons. These lack organic character, and are scalebound, that is, lacking the large and small forms repeating at different levels of magnification, one attribute of fractal geometry which can lead to a sense of worlds within worlds.

What happens when these fractal patterns are set into motion? Nothing is more compelling than watching the flicker of firelight, the swirl of smoke in a still room, the cycling of ocean waves, waterfalls, rapids, or stream eddies. Time lapse has allowed us to see the mesmerizing beauty of a plant growing or a cloud forming.



Computers offer new ways to experience such forms. Computer-generated music visualizers are getting better and better and doing what the Disney animated film Fantasia did by hand. Below, a still from from the open source visualizer program "MilkDrop."


I believe we’re on the threshold of a major new art form using computers to create visualizers as changing visual spaces into which we can project our consciousness.

Imagine a “biofeedback Rorschach” system, where the computer monitors the brain response when we begin to see a face in a cloud, and then manipulates the forms to accentuate the effect. A computer could shift in and out between abstraction and representation, suggesting grass blowing in the wind or a figure dancing, or scary faces wired to our own unconscious fear response.

Depending on the program, and the sensibilities we bring to it, it could bring us into the heart of dreams or nightmares, and give artists and digital filmmakers a profoundly powerful tool. 
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Yale website on Fractal geometry
Examples of fractal patters in nature
Wikipedia on Music Visualization
Wikipedia on MilkDrop
Sagrada  Familia on Wiki 
Image sources:
Frame via Carver’s Guild
Movie palace via The Clay Board
Limestone formation
Marbled Paper

Kazuo Oga

I’ve probably put way too much emphasis on American and European artists, overlooking painters from other great traditions. So let’s take a minute to appreciate Kazuo Oga, the painter who helped create the forest in Hayao Miyazaki’s animated film My Neighbor Totoro.


On ConceptArt.org, Mr. Oga said: "Basically, I use poster- color. Because as we have to paint much, we can't use expensive paint. Poster colors can show brightness or depth of color and, above all, it is easy-to-use."

 In the landscape below, I love the way he alternates empty areas, such as the sky, with busy areas, such as the hanging laundry. He also alternates the parallel stripes of the cultivated areas with the wild shapes of the foreground.


Look at how he builds gradually toward the mysterious dark under the tree. He keeps the grouping of far trees in the center of the picture close in value.

The result, for all its complexity, is quite simple in tonal and coloristic design, an important consideration for animation backgrounds, which must be understood quickly.
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My Neighbor Totoro trailer on YouTube
Studio Ghibli on Wikipedia
Background painting from My Opera.com
List of Studio Ghibli Films
Photo and quotation from Monisawa Blog

Activating Your Imagination

A student in an academic atelier recently asked me the following question:

Dear James, 

Do you have any advice on how artists can keep their imagination active while studying things like anatomy and observational drawing of casts and models?

I've noticed recently that I've become really scared of sketching things off the top of my head, which I used to do without much thought.

I find myself thinking "where's my photo reference?" or nitpicking every little flaw in a throwaway sketch when I should just be trying to have fun.  

Sincerely, Stumped Imaginatively

Dear Stumped,
You said it! This is a common feeling! Every pro has had it from time to time.

Anyone who works in the field of concept art or science fiction or fantasy has a passion to turn our dreams into something tangible. But most of the time the images always start out as hazy and hard-to-capture. The reality of the model or the photo is much more compelling.

When you set out to paint a scene from the imagination, like the scene above from the Slav Epics by Alphonse Mucha, you’re facing a whole different bunch of challenges than you would if you were painting a portrait or a landscape from observation.

Here are some suggestions to keep your imagination active, and to develop your ability to draw scenes totally out of your head.

1. When you do a painting from the model, for a change from the usual straight observational approach, try to imagine a story driving the pose. Add something to bring out the story: paint a forest background, a set of angel wings, or re-imagine the figure as a robot.

Howard Pyle used to have his students do that. He said: "Don't paint the model," Instead, "make a picture."

2. Keep a sketchbook just for image generation, rather than observation. Use it not only for creature designs and other stuff from your head, but also for quick copies from whichever old masters you like.

3. Try not give in to the desire for photo reference too quickly. Keep an idea in pure sketch stage as long as possible. Shoot (or better yet draw) your reference studies to fit your mental image as much as possible. Dean Cornwell used to project up his rough poses and mental-image composition onto the final canvas before he sought out models.

4. Learn to draw a mannequin figure out of your head. The Famous Artist’s Course from the ‘50s has a good mannequin formula made up of tapered cylinders. “How to Draw the Marvel Way” has another good system. Copy the figure work of comic art masters like Winsor McCay, Hal Foster, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Jack Davis, or Mort Drucker. These systems help improve your imaginative drawing so that the ‘nitpicker’ guy in your head shuts up.

5. Work on memory drawing. Observe a face or a figure or an architectural façade and try to reproduce it only from memory later in your sketchbook. This is superb training for good imaginative work.

6. Since you’re in an academic program, remember that the original 19th C. Ecole and the ateliers weren’t just about drawing what you see. The students did a lot of sketch practice for the Prix de Rome, which was all about doing multi-figure compositions from the Bible and Greek mythology. Those students could draw the cast or the figure brilliantly, but they were always experimenting with sample multi-figure story assignments.

7. Remember the words of Howard Pyle: "You should not need models. You know how a face looks. How an eye is placed and the form of it and you should be able to draw it from your knowledge. That is very difficult with students from other schools. They say ‘That is a good draughtsman.’ Yet ask him to draw without the model and he is utterly helpless. He has learned nothing of real value, for you cannot draw until you can be independent of the model. And so I would advise you to draw your figures and carry them as far as you can without the model then get the model to correct by.”
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Alphonse Mucha and his Slav Epics on Wikipedia

Prehistoric Times

What do you get when you cross a guinea pig with a rhinoceros?


The new Winter issue of Prehistoric Times magazine has two new features that I wrote: “How I Painted Titanoboa” and “The Making of a Giant Rodent.”






Each article has a behind-the-scenes look on how I reconstructed an extinct animal. In each case, all I had to start with was one or two bones. The rest took a lot of educated guesswork—and you guessed it....maquettes!
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If you love extinct animals, check out the print magazine Prehistoric Times

Guillermo Del Toro

The new issue of the New Yorker magazine has a long feature on the movie director Guillermo Del Toro, with a description of his man cave that he calls "Bleak House," with a collection of fantasy art that rivals that of his hero Forrest Ackerman. 

 
On the walls beside him are eerie antique portraits by Travis Louie, who didn't seem to be credited. The article mentions the ups and downs of development work on New Line's Hobbit (which, alas, Del Toro didn't end up directing), his work on Frankenstein (with a mention of illustrator/concept artist Bernie Wrightson), and Del Toro's recent work on the Lovecraft story "At the Mountains of Madness" with concept artists Allen Williams, Peter Konig, Wayne Barlowe, Keith Thompson, and Guy Davis.
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Guillermo Del Toro on Wikipedia
Travis Louie's website 
Bernie Wrightson's website
Photo from Viva La Geek
New Yorker article excerpt at NewYorker.com
Huffington Post article with a video showing Del Toro's sketchbook process.

Bronze Torch Holder

I just had a weird intuition that one of you out there in Blogland needs some reference for a dragon torch holder.


Maybe you’re a concept artist or a fantasy illustrator or a set designer. Maybe you’re working on a design for a castle of vampires or a lair of dragon tamers. Anyway, here it is for the taking. The piece is from Siena, Italy, and I found it in on page 395 of an 1887 edition of the Magazine of Art.
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Download the 1887 Magazine of Art from Google Books

Yemen Embassy Art Returned

Yesterday an art courier returned my painting called “Hudson Highlands” from the United States embassy in Sana, Yemen, where it has been hanging for three years.


Meanwhile, the New York Times reported yesterday that longtime president Ali Abdullah Saleh announced sweeping concessions, facing growing opposition from protesters.


I thank the Art in Embassies program of the U.S. State Department for allowing my painting to play a small role as a form of visual diplomacy in that troubled region, and I hope that peace and justice will prevail in Yemen and other countries in the Arab world.
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Image from MinnPost
Previously on GJ: Art in Embassies Program
Guidelines for submitting art to the U.S. Art in Embassies Program

The Sky’s Dual Gradations

You may recall this painting of an oak tree, below. It is painted over a 'sky panel', a prepared sky gradation recorded from observation on a previous day.


If you take a section of color from each corner of the sky, you can see how the sky is created with four different starting colors. The sky gradated in two directions:

1. From top to bottom, as a result of “horizon glow,”
2. From left to right, “solar glare.” The sun is to the right in the painting, so the colors are lighter on the right swatches.


Both gradations are going on in this landscape by Jean-Ferdinand Monchablon. The sun is also coming from the right in this scene.


Here again, Monchablon gradates his sky both ways. His paint is very thin, probably stippled with the end of a brush.

Monchablon’s skies retire back from the plane of the canvas, allowing the viewer to travel into the painting for miles and miles. This is a great and very difficult achievement. It’s easy to make a sky look like paint. It’s hard to make it look like a radiant veil interposed over infinity.

For more on painting skies, pick up the new Feb/March issue of International Artist magazine, where I begin the first of a ten part Masterclass series on atmospheric effects.
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Previously on GJ: Sky panels, Sky Blue
International Artist magazine
J.F. Monchablon on ARC

Year of the Rabbit Starts Tomorrow

Happy New Year to all my Chinese friends around the world. Rabbits are good luck, right?

“If You Please, Sir, a Lion Have Come”

Nineteenth-century animal painter Briton Riviere was wise to live near the Zoological Gardens in London, for the authorities there were kind to him.

According to an 1896 article in the New Windsor magazine:

“When the beasts die they courteously send the bodies over in a cart to the painter. One morning, when he was at breakfast, a servant entered the room with the remark, ‘If you please sir, a lion have come.’ Mr. Briton Riviere stepped out into the street, and there, sure enough, was a lion upon a truck. The beast had died during the night.

But a limp, dead lion is a very different object from the splendid living beast, with every muscle taut and radiant with the symmetry of limb and motion that delight the painter’s heart, so the dead animal is merely utilised in the way that medical students study the subjects of the dissection-room....Tame creatures, such as horses, dogs, and donkeys, Mr. Briton Riviere admits to his studio. They enter from a large stable door, and sit, or rather stand, patiently upon a bed of straw.”

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Image from Art Prints on Demand
Previously on GJ: Briton Riviere's Studio (photo showing big cat skins)
Enchantment Symposium (with another repro of Riviere)