Part 2: Shanghai Diary -- American School

Our host for the visit to China was the Shanghai American School (SAS), which has two campuses on opposite ends of the city, in the Pudong and Puxi districts. 

Over a six-day period at the two campuses, I gave 22 presentations to groups ranging from pre-K to high school seniors. I offered drawing workshops, dinosaur drawing demos, behind-the-scenes presentations on Dinotopia, and a creature design demo.

At SAS, a lot of the students are children of expatriate Americans and other nationals who are working in China and have brought their families to live there. 

Although the schools offer classes in Chinese history, language, and calligraphy, most of the classes are conducted in English by American expat teachers, and the vibe of the school resembles a well-endowed American private school. 

The Pudong campus, which we visited first, has an indoor Olympic-size swimming pool, a climbing wall, and an art room with skeletons, plaster casts, and an abundance of supplies. The Puxi campus has a film class, with production equipment. The weekend we were there was the annual Student 
International Film Festival, and storyboard artist Daniel Maslen was a guest lecturer.

The collection of the libraries of the combined campuses represents the largest collection of English-language books in all of China.
------

Wikipedia on SAS 

Official site for Shanghai American School 

Pre-K 4 Teacher's Blog 

Shanghai Diary Series:
Part 1: Getting There
Part 2: American School
Part 3: Old Town
Part 4: Jujiajiao
Part 5: Goat Man
Part 6: Sketching in Restaurants
Part 7: China Rising
Part 8: Chinese/Russian Drawing
Part 9: Sketching in Shanghai (Video)

Part 1: Shanghai Diary -- Getting There

Jeanette and I returned late last night from ten days in Shanghai, China. For the next week or two, I'll share some of the sketches and photos that we brought home. 

We took United flight 87 out of Newark, New Jersey. The flight took nearly 15 hours, never leaving daylight as it went nearly over the north pole.


When it arrived in Shanghai, we didn't need to change our wristwatches, because the time is exactly 12 hours opposite.

Visitors can't rent a car in Shanghai, so everyone uses a driver or a taxi. Here's a sketch from the back seat of our shuttle. Tomorrow I'll tell you what brought us to Shanghai. 

----

Shanghai Diary Series:

Part 1: Getting There

Part 2: American School

Part 3: Old Town

Part 4: Jujiajiao

Part 5: Goat Man

Part 6: Sketching in Restaurants

Part 7: China Rising

Part 8: Chinese/Russian Drawing

Part 9: Sketching in Shanghai (Video)

Expressive Drapery

This drawing by J.W. West from the Magazine of Art in 1895 shows the expressive power of classical drapery. 

Small halflock folds contrast with long pipe folds, which accentuate the gesture of the leaning woman. Some folds lie inert on the ground while others spiral and bunch up.

This sort of drawing is only possible if you observe real people in real costumes enough to get the feeling of what kinds of drapery effects are possible. At that point an experienced pen and ink artist can invent drapery from the imagination, but it never hurts to have a model or a lay figure for reference.

Sofie Eating

I sat on a fence rail at the farm recently and sketched Sofie, the draft horse, as she had her afternoon meal alongside Abby. They shuffled around lazily the whole time, exuding contentedness. 

The only one who wasn't contented was the barn cat, Handsome. Unknown to me, he was right below me when I shook out a big brushload of water. He jumped up like a thing possessed, but he never figured out where the sudden cloudburst came from.

After a quick lay-in, I laid in large tones in watercolor with a one-inch flat brush, then worked in water-soluble colored pencil (red-brown, ochre, and black) to define the forms a bit more. Finally I touched up along the back and the mane with white gouache.

Mick Ellison Talks About Paleoart

(Video Link) Mick Ellison, staff artist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, talks about his work visualizing extinct animals. 

Diner Soundtrack

Sometimes in a crowded restaurant or movie theater, I like to defocus my brain and try to listen to all the conversations going on around me at once.

Usually I can't distinguish more than phrases, snapshots. In this case, I sketched one group at one table, but the snippets of dialogue came from other people all around me.

Jotting down actual dialogue is good practice for writers, and it's a good way to get a sense of the zeitgeist.

Breadth

The term "breadth" was very important to 19th century painters, though it's rarely used today.

An 1847 manual of oil painting explains: “When the lights of a painting are so arranged that they seem to be in masses, and the darks are massed to support them, we have what is called breadth of effect, which is mainly produced by the coloring and chiaroscuro." 

Breadth is related to the word "effet" in French, and "massing" or "shapewelding" in English.

The painting "Blessing of the Young Couple Before Marriage" by Pascal Dagnan Bouveret is a good example of breadth. The white of the bride's dress joins with the table cloth, the shaft of light, and the other women's dresses to make a single large shape. Meanwhile, two groupings of dark-clad figures join to form larger masses.

The painting manual says that the quality of breadth applies to both design and coloring, and that it is indicative of a master. Indeed it's difficult to achieve, because one must overcome the natural inclination to separate and define shapes throughout the composition.

-------

Manual of Oil Painting

Previously on GurneyJourney: Shapewelding

Chroma in the Shadows

Often the shadow side of the form seems to have duller chroma than the light side, but not always. It all depends on the circumstances. 

In the case of this rock formation in Sedona, Arizona, the downfacing planes in the shadow were picking up warm reflected light from the ground.

The warm reflected light bouncing into the orange local color multiplied the effect, and increased the chroma. By comparison, the light side was distinctly grayer, because it was lit by both the white light of the sun and the blue light of the sky.

Forevertron

The Forevertron is a scrap metal sculpture in Wisconsin made in the 1980s by Tom Every. It's one of the largest found-object sculptures in the world. 

Mr. Every collected unusual castoffs for decades to incorporate into his magnum opus, including Thomas Edison dynamos, lightning rods, power plant components, scrap from an ammunition plant, and the decontamination chamber from the Apollo 11 spacecraft.

The backstory is that a Victorian scientist named Dr. Evermor built the Forevertron to "launch himself into the heavens on a magnetic lightning force beam." 

-------

Wikipedia on Forevertron

The full story at Roadside America.com

Thanks, Tim Fehr.

Art Books

I remember when I used to comb through new and used art bookstores looking for anything I could find on 19th century painters or Golden Age illustrators.

Here's a sketch from about 1985 of my wife Jeanette reading to me from a book on John William Waterhouse.

Before computers and the internet, finding a good art book was like uncovering a vein of gold. In those days, you couldn't find much on Bouguereau, Meissonier, Gerome, or Waterhouse. Sargent was just beginning to come into the light. It seemed worth spending $50 for a book, even if it had only two or three good color reproductions. I would stick yellow tags on the best pages, with the name of the artist written in small letters so I could find them again.

The casual availability of images now is both a blessing and a curse. It makes me treasure each image a little less, perhaps because I haven't spent so much effort on the hunt. Still, I'm grateful to be able to find so many digital images in cyberspace. But I have faith that there's much more to be discovered. The internet may be a million miles wide, but it's only an inch deep when it comes to some artists who have yet to arrive from obscurity.