BLUECANVAS Interview

The worldwide artist network known as Bluecanvas has just released an exclusive interview that I did with them.


(Video Link) The interview explores how Dinotopia came into being and the relationship between art, science, and imagination. Interview by Shana Nys Dambrot.
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Visit the Bluecanvas website
Subscribe to the Bluecanvas magazine
Dinotopia: The World Beneath 
Dinotopia exhibition at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum.
To read the complete interview, and to see the full range of images, you'll have to pick up Issue 14 of Bluecanvas magazine, which will be available in late November.

Cast Shadows and Form

One way to define the contour of a landscape is by means of cast shadows. In late afternoon, the shadows from trees or utility poles wrap over hills, jump up walls, and drop down over curbs.

Creating bands of light and dark adds a great deal of depth to a landscape, and it gives you something to place light or dark figures against.

Mucha in Iowa

Blog reader Amber Wallin recommends the museum exhibition
Alphonse Mucha: Inspirations of Art Nouveau  at the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She said it was worth the six hour drive from St. Paul, Minnesota.

She says, "I hadn't realized how large a format his litho prints were, and that--of course--reproductions of his work don't begin to accurately convey his palette! The man apparently frequently used metallic inks that are brilliant in person but turn flat and dull when reprinted. They also feature dozens of his family and model photographs pulled from glass negatives. Given the limitations of photography compared to today's, he was just as talented a photographer as he was a painter!"

The show is up until the end of December.

Thanks, Amber.

Falter's tracing pad

John Falter (1910-1982) painted over 200 scenes of the American experience, which appeared as covers on the Saturday Evening Post.

In "Snowy Ambush" from 1959, a dad returns home from work to find his kids waiting for him, half-hidden in trenches of snow.

It's natural to assume that Falter found this idea readymade somewhere, but he had to construct it first in his imagination using a tracing pad.


Here is how another idea looked at sketch stage. A group of planners hold up a drawing for a highway cutting through a hill. Surveyors drive in stakes in the background. The old farmhouse is in the way.

The figures are drawn very simply, with very little detail. Falter is not hiring models yet.


He places another page of tracing paper over the first sketch. Falter changes his mind and explores another concept. He's still working from his imagination. The old house changes to a one-room school. The planners hold up a drawing of a new district school.


For the final cover, he returns to his original concept of the new highway threatening the house.

The final painting is not as successful as "Snowy Ambush." Perhaps the problem is that the characters aren't developed, so it's hard to tell how Falter feels about the situation. Also, he accurately shows the engineers using a blueprint, but blueprints don't read quickly enough to make immediate sense on a cover.

All these problems need to be solved at the tracing pad stage. It's worth spending tireless effort on the early sketch stages, because no amount of rendering will fix a problem that lurks on the tracing pad.
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Falter's widow donated his studies to the collection of the Nebraska State Historical Society , along with many objects and furnishings from his studio.

Addendum: I posed the question:
"I was wondering how Rockwell would have approached this whole situation. I imagine he would have focused on the plight of the property owner whose place has been condemned by eminent domain. That could have been done with poignant humor and sympathy." 

....and Matthew Mattin suggested this example, which I had forgotten about. Thanks, Matthew!

Wikipedia on John Philip Falter

Markers for Underdrawing?

Oscar asked: I've been playing with the technique of an early cartoon layer to start an oil painting, and, since drawing's my druthers, I've been trying out Sharpies and similar pens as a replacement for ink/thin black paint. Do you have any tips for this? Are markers likely to cause trouble in terms of paint reaction, color fastness, etc? 

Oscar, Yes, beware of markers for underdrawing. You are safest with pencil, charcoal, or India ink. Once a long time ago, I used a black Sharpie marker for a preliminary drawing under an oil painting but I discontinued that idea because the dye had a nasty habit of bleeding through to upper layers. Covering the drawing with clear-coat layers doesn’t necessarily cure the problem of dye migration.

 

Markers are also prone to fading and color shifting. This is often a problem with drawings done entirely in markers. If you use different brands in the same drawing, they often shift in different ways. I did this marker drawing of a horse drawn milk wagon in 1981 but luckily it hasn’t faded too much because it was kept in the dark. Cool, dark storage slows down these processes, which happen at a molecular level.  

Markers vary a lot in their dye and vehicle formulations — some are pretty stable— so the best thing to do is try out all kinds materials and procedures on scraps and put them in a hot, south window to test how they fare over time.

Dip pens and Dinotopia

Dinotopia: The World Beneath has just been rereleased in a new expanded edition from Calla Editions, an imprint of Dover Publications.

(Video link) This video describes how I decided to re-letter the captions by hand to make them look more authentic. (Note—I got the Lego camera dolly working better!)

The story follows Arthur Denison as he leads an expedition deep into the mysterious caverns beneath the island of Dinotopia, where he discovers clues about ancient civilizations and hidden treasures.

Meanwhile his son Will continues his training as a pilot on a giant pterosaur known as a skybax. The story itself is 160 pages, fully illustrated in color. 

The publisher made all new digital scans, and the colors are now truer to the original art than ever before. The quality of the paper and binding is incredible, and I have no idea how the publisher produced the book for the same price that the original book sold for back in 1995.  

In the back section of the book is an archive of behind-the-scenes sketches, storyboards, photos, and maquettes to show exactly how the book was conceived and created. 

We just received our shipment here at the Dinotopia Store, so you can order a signed copy today. If you follow this link, we can handle orders from the USA (shipping only $4.50), or from anywhere worldwide ($35 for shipping).

LINKS

Order a copy of Dinotopia: The World Beneath signed by the author.
Find the book at your local bookseller or at Dover.

See a web gallery of artwork from The World Beneath

Check out my other videos or subscribe to the GurneyJourney YouTube channel so you can see new videos before anyone else.

Mark Crilley's Realism Challenge

(Video link) Mark Crilley tears up a playing card and then creates a matching trompe l'œil in time lapse.
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Crilley also does a lot of how-to Manga videos,
From Best of YouTube

Focus on Nature exhibition

Yesterday in Albany, New York, we attended the artists' reception for the exhibition of natural science illustration called "Focus on Nature."

Many of the artists attending talked a little about their paintings. Beverley Irwin described how she was able to observe this specimen of Brush-tailed Rock-wallaby near her home in Toowoomba, Australia. 

In addition to being an artist, Elayne Leighton has been a high school teacher and farmer. She noticed this relatively rare wasp-like fly (Physocephala tibialis) and rendered it with colored pencil and gouache on frosted mylar drafting film while observing it through a stereoscopic microscope. 

"I'm like a little kid who never grew up," Elayne said. Encouraged by her aunt, Elayne did sketches of animals so that she could take them home and share them with others.

Trudy Nicholson won a jury award for her scratchboard rendering of a sycamore tree in various growth stages throughout the year. It's hard to convey the intricacy of the 14.5 x 18.5 inch drawing on the web, but it's full of beautiful gradations and textures.

Milly Acharya of Ithaca, New York, painted this watercolor portrait of a garlic plant, with great attention to positive and negative shapes. What makes this painting different from a strictly aesthetic work of art is that it clearly displays the diagnostic features of the plant form, the qualities that botanists would be looking for.

Kathryn Chorney, a teacher at Sheridan College in Toronto, painted this graphite and watercolor portrait of a Great Horned Owl in a Silver Maple in winter, noting that the pattern of snow on the tree is closely matched by the camouflage of the feathers.

Watercolor is the dominant medium in the exhibit, but just about everything else is represented, including oil, acrylic, graphite, colored pencil, and digital.
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I have two paintings in the show, "Mud Trap" and "Elasmosaurus."
Focus on Nature will be on view at the New York State Museum through December 31st, 2012.
View the whole catalog as a PDF, with artist commentaries and contact info.

Dinotopia at the Lyman Allyn

Yesterday a truck picked up the artwork for the Dinotopia 20th anniversary exhibition coming up next month in Connecticut.

This exhibition of about 100 works will be by far the largest and most comprehensive showing of my original artwork. It will feature never-before exhibited works from all four Dinotopia books, including, for the first time, Dinotopia: First Flight. 

The curators took a special interest in the creative process, with a detailed examination of preliminary sketches, hand-made maquettes, reference photos, and plein-air studies. Plus there will be a few non-Dinotopia landscape paintings, National Geographic illustrations, and science fiction works.

If you've already seen the Dinotopia exhibitions at the Norton, the Delaware, or the Norman Rockwell art museums, this show will feature a completely different set of work, most of which has never left the studio.

There will be a whole slate of special programs, including book creators Walter Wick and Bruce Degen, presentations on dinosaurs, and an American Girls Tea Party. I'll be doing a presentation and book signing on October 13.

"DINOTOPIA: Art, Science, and Imagination" will be at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, Connecticut from September 22, 2012 through February 2, 2013.

Ironclad Cutaway

We all need a breather after yesterday's post! 

So here's a simple one. Smithsonian magazine has a new Fall newsstand issue devoted to the U.S. Civil War. It includes my cutaway paintings comparing the CSS Virginia (Merrimack) to the USS Monitor.