Studies for "Love's Baubles"

Byam Shaw,  (full name: John Byam Liston Shaw, 1872 – 1919) was a British painter known for his scenes of history and mythology. Like many of his Royal Academy contemporaries, he went to great lengths to make studies before he began the final painting.


For example, on one of his masterpieces, "Love's Baubles,"  he went to the trouble to make charcoal drawings of the nude figures beneath the costumes.
 
This makes a big difference for getting the action of the pose right, especially with voluminous costumes.
 


And the hair is not an accident either. Shaw did careful studies to work out the braids and the locks. It all shows in the final painting.
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Painting repro from "Preraphaelite Paintings"
More paintings by Byam Shaw on the same blog collection
Wikipedia on Byam Shaw
Black and white studies from "The Magazine of Art," vol. 22, page 633

Video Game Talk

Don’t you love the way people talk when they’re playing video games?


It’s a cascade of antic surrealism, of dying and coming to life again, of hippo people and apes on go-carts trying to kill you before you can find the magic acorns.

Viewed from the outside, the player is a picture of calm focus and attention. Inside he fights to live another moment and to fly to safety on the wings of rabbit ears.

Juana la Loca

In his painting Juana la Loca, Spanish painter Francisco Pradilla Ortiz (1848-1921) told an epic story worthy of a best-selling novel or a Hollywood movie:


“It is chronicled that Juana, wife of Philip de Borgogne and mother of Charles the Fifth, being distractedly in love with her handsome husband—a reputed flirt—became possessed of a superhuman jealousy which over-balanced her intellect.

“Philip meantime ‘shuffles off the mortal coil,’ and his unhappy Queen Juana, in a frenzy of grief, insists on accompanying the corpse to its last resting place, situated at the furthest extremity of Spain, Granada—then the burial place of the royalties—being five hundred miles from Burgos, where Philip died.

“The route lay through a wild, uninhabited country, utterly impracticable to vehicles of any description, so that the Court, the prelates, nobles, and knights, who made up the funeral procession, had a long trudge, her Majesty leading, behind the coffin.

“The pathetic scene given us by the painter takes place at the close of a bitter December day when three months had already been passed on the road; footsore and perishing from cold, the Court mourners spied the walls of a convent, hailing the prospect of hospitality contained therein with delight.

“The Queen, who felt neither cold nor fatigue, acceded to the request of her people, and the bier was taken into the church of the convent, the Queen in close attendance on her treasure, when suddenly a shriek was heard from the horrified Queen, who screamed ‘Out, out of here this instant!’

“Her majesty had unwittingly come into the camp of the enemy. The inhabitants of the convent were not —as supposed — friars, but nuns.

“The spectral figure of the worn-out queen, in whose gaze, fixed upon the coffin, can be detected the wanderings of a mind shaken by the mad jealousy which still consumes her, the coffin itself, illuminated by the light of a miserable campfire, the smoke of which is utilized by the painter to detach the sombre centre-figure, the well-disposed groups which crouch around, half dead with exhaustion, who had been so ruthlessly deprived of a warm shelter by the unconscious cruelty of an afflicted woman, are all remarkably finely rendered.

“The dawning light which illumines feebly the dreary scene—including the obnoxious convent—all combine to render the painting a drama in all save in theatrical accessories and get-up.”
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Quoted from International Studio, 1901.
Image from Wikipedia: Juana la Loca1877
Wikipedia on Francisco Pradilla Ortiz (teacher of Sorolla)

Bicycle Wheel Anemometer

How to make an spinning sound gadget from cheap stuff you can find around the house.


File it under the category of “Utterly useless eccentric devices for cheerfully driving your neighbor insane.”
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Direct Link to YouTube video

Piano Slim

My cab driver in Saint Louis was a guy who called himself “Piano Slim.” At night he parked the taxi and played the blues.

I sketched his portrait from the back seat. “The blues ain’t no more like they used to be,” he said.

Book Trailer Contest

When my last book, Imaginative Realism came out, blog reader GooGooSupreme suggested a book trailer contest, and you came through with fabulous entries. There was everything from a poetic image montage using pictures from the blog to some really cool animation by a high school film class and a claymation caricature of me, complete with the high gray socks.

 
Let’s do the same thing for Color and Light. It can be live action or animation. It can be a wacky gag or magic trick, a practical how-to demo, a poetic art piece, a group project by a film class, or a personal reflection about something you learned from the book. If you have a camera or a cellphone that shoots video, you've got all the tools you need. No experience necessary. It can be as simple as talking into your webcam, or it can be as fancy as a scripted, edited piece with music and sound effects.

Here are the rules: 
1. The contest is open to anyone of any age worldwide.
2. Videos must be three minutes or less.
3. It has to somehow relate to Color and Light, and it has to be something that you created. You don't even need to own the book; you can create a video that uses content from GurneyJourney blog posts if you want. But at some point it must either show the cover of Color and Light OR the presenter must mention the title on camera (not just voice-over).
4. Post your video on YouTube. Send the YouTube URL link to: jgurneyart@yahoo.com, subject line VIDEO.
5. Deadline is May 1, 2011.
6. Videos are exhibited on the blog on May 15, with links back to your website if you want.
7. Winners and runners-up will be chosen by popular vote on a blog poll; That decision is final.

Prizes
Everyone who enters will receive a signed and remarqued copy of the Color and Light poster. The two runners-up will each get their choice of one signed and remarqued book from the Dinotopia Store: (Chandara, I.R. or C&L or Drawing Made Easy). Winner will get the actual book that I decorated in “Painting Rainbows” as well as one other signed and remarqued book (in print) of their choice from the Dinotopia Store.

Good luck and have fun.
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Dinotopia Store
Previously: I. R. Book Trailer Results

Making of Painting Rainbows

A couple of you asked about the making of the book trailer video “Painting Rainbows” which aired yesterday.


Lighting and Effects
My wife Jeanette pulled the color cards and operated the smoke machine. There’s a shimmering light effect to the left of the camera path between :22 and :27. It’s a caustic pattern that I got by reflecting sunlight off an undulating surface of water on a cookie sheet, which bounced the light up onto a movie screen.

I filmed that caustic reflection in HD and then projected it from a digital projector (visible on the C-stand to the left of the studio photo below). The smoke effect was a blast from a Memorex fog machine (Thanks, Frank).


Camera
The HD film was shot on a Canon Vixia HV40 and edited in iMovie. I shot the tabletop flyover using a homemade suspended camera rig. The rig was mounted to the end of an extension arm that reached out from a C-stand strapped to a bicycle. By steering the bike I could fly the camera an inch or two above the tabletop, giving a dolly shot with some steerability (and some wobble due to the knobby tires).

The dissolve to the Chandara artwork masked the switch to a reset camera rig at the end of an extension arm on a circular pivot from a floor-mounted C-stand to the left of the table, rotated with my right hand as I reached for the box.



Sound
There are a number of “whoosh” effects added, along with some audio enhancement during the assembly of the toolkit, using gun cocks, lock clicks, and squeaks. All are copyright free sounds, as was the musical piece “Sanskrit,” which came with the iMovie suite (Thanks, Apple!)


 Brushes and Paint
The brush is a Winsor and Newton Series 995 3/4 inch held onto the Helix compass with a Tridon hose clamp. The rainbow block has six slots cut with a radial saw with a plywood blade set to a maximum depth of 1/4 inch and spaced apart to a full spread of 7/8 inch.

The paints are cheap acrylic paints, most of them $1.00 or $1.50 each at Michaels. They’re fairly close to YURMBY colors: American Bright Yellow, Michaels True Red, Folk Art Magenta, Craftsman Bright Blue, Aqua, and Holiday Green.

Total budget for the book trailer, about $9.87.
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Link to Painting Rainbows

What’s in My Bag?

Call it a waist pack, a belt pouch, or a man purse. But it’s how I carry around my lightweight sketching stuff.

BoingBoing founder Mark Frauenfelder asked me to dump it all out and explain each item. It's a new feature called “What’s in My Bag?”  Link to What's in My Bag?

Painting Rainbows

It's the final day of Video Week. Today the camera flies through my studio, ending with a demo of how I paint the rainbows in copies of my book Color and Light.



From now through the month of March, if you order a copy of Color and Light from the Dinotopia Store I'll do a similar sketch in your copy.

Tomorrow, I'll announce the "Color and Light" Book Trailer Video Contest.
Winners of the 2009 GJ Blogreaders video contest
 Get Color and Light at the Dinotopia Store
Direct link to video on YouTube
GurneyJourney channel on YouTube 

Ice Damage

Video Week, Day 5:

Make way for spring! It’s time to put an end to Old Man Winter.
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Direct Link to YouTube video
Previously: Ice Towers