Barney the Basset

Yesterday we stayed in a bed and breakfast in the Catskill mountains, whose proprietor Ben owns a basset hound named Barney.

I asked Ben if I could take Barney for a walk and sketch his portrait. Barney is a five-year-old rescue who was hit by cars three times until Ben offered him a new home.

Barney doesn't usually get to hang out in the parlor and receive such attentions, and he definitely rose to the occasion (as much as a basset can rise). Once Barney settled for a nap, I got out my watercolors and water-soluble colored pencils.


Here's what the sketch looks like as I begin to wet the colored pencils with a water brush. Note how the water alters the dry colored pencil. It darkens, softens, and intensifies the color.


Once I cover the light, warm areas, I add some blue from another brush pen that is filled with fountain pen ink. I am working quickly, because I'm expecting Barney will change position after 10 minutes or so—which he does. After that I work from memory.


Now the sketch is almost done, and if you scroll back up, you can see it finished.
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Materials used:
Caran D'Ache watercolor pencils
Moleskine Watercolor Notebook
Niji water brush filled with fountain pen ink
Waterman fountain pen
The place I stayed is called River Run Bed and Breakfast in Fleischmann's, New York.

Lionfish Contest

In this illustration from Dinotopia: The World Beneath (center), I tried to imagine how a Tyrannosaurus would look if it were designed in the style of a Chinese parade dragon. The idea was to portray how an unusual subject might have been interpreted by a different design vocabulary.

With that idea in mind, I would like to invite you to enter a GurneyJourney contest: How would an Art Nouveau designer (such as Alphonse Mucha or Henri Privat-Livemont) design a label for an imaginary product called "Lionfish Shampoo?" If you're not familiar with it, the lionfish is a remarkable looking (but dangerous) real fish, but you can take it in whatever direction you would like.

I'll be the judge, and the five best entries will be featured on the blog. First prize is a signed and remarqued copy of the expanded Calla edition of Dinotopia: The World Beneath.  Second prize is the ZBS World Beneath Audio Adventure with a signed bookplate. Third prize is a signed Dinotopia map. No fee to enter. Deadline is August 24. Winners will be announced August 26. Your entry can be a quick sketch concept—it doesn't have to be highly finished or rendered. Submit your drawing, painting, or digital art to gurneyjourney@gmail.com, subject line "Lionfish."
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Meanwhile, you can purchase a signed copy of Dinotopia: The World Beneath from my online store
Amazon:Dinotopia: The World Beneath: 20th Anniversary Edition
Listen to a sample of the audio adventure
Skull photo from Bone Clones

Breaking the foreground line

When composing a picture, it's sometimes effective put an element in the direct foreground, cropped by the bottom edge.

Here's an example by Henryk Siemiradzky (1843-1902), which doesn't break the foreground line. The bottom of the composition along the frame edge is empty. Nothing wrong with that, but it can make the picture feel a bit more formal, more like a stage play. Keeping the foreground line open like this is what artists have usually done. 

Let's consider some other possibilities. 

This is the "Proclamation of the code of Emperor Dušan, by Paja Javanovic. That one figure partially cropped in the center left foreground opens up the picture.

Harry Anderson portrays Coronado's men discovering the Grand Canyon (thanks, Jim). The foreground figure is cropped just above the knees, and his gesture involves us and implies that the rest of the group is behind us. "Breaking the fourth wall" like this is more suited to an illustration than a mural, perhaps.

Here's a landscape by James Perry Wilson. Not many painters would think of putting the bushes right smack in the extreme foreground, but that decision gives him a lot of depth. We can step around the bushes on the left and enter the world he has created. 

Wilson spent most of his career painting diorama backdrops, so he was extremely conscious of foreground/background issues.

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More about Wilson in the book Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History

Reflections on gently rippled water

In his 1903 book "Light and Water", Sir Montagu Pollock uses this photo to illustrate an observation of reflections on gently rippled water: "The gentle movement of water in the distance elongates and exaggerates the upright lines of the buildings. In the foreground, the individual ripples become visible, breaking up the reflection of the mountains horizontally."

He explains the elongation of the reflection of the buildings by setting up a series of mirrors to represent the far wavelets, and then tilting them toward and away from the observer. Since the area they reflect shifts vertically, they have the effect of stretching the reflected image downward.
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"Light and Water: A Study of Reflexion and Color in River, Lake, and Sea" by Sir Montagu Pollack, Bart (1903) is available as a free download from Archive.org

Hitchcock's Rule

Movie director Alfred Hitchcock articulated the following rule of filmmaking: "The size of an object in the frame should equal its importance in the story at that moment."


Orson Welles applied the Hitchcock Rule to the famous three-minute opening shot for his 1958 film "Touch of Evil" (video link). The first frame is filled with a ticking time bomb. Then the camera pulls way back to set the scene, and closes in on the main characters as they kiss...and then...well check it out.

Movie posters (and lobby cards) often follow the same basic rule, but in a poster the single image has to encompass the entire movie. The poster image needs to tell the viewer who are the main characters, and how much action, romance, or spectacle there's likely to be.

This illustration for "Solomon and Sheba" by Frank McCarthy uses the scale of each element to suggest what's most important: characters, romance, action, and spectacle.


Milton Caniff, like all comic artists, was influenced by film. He used the same principle Hitchcock was talking about when he planned the size of each character and element in this panel breakdown.
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More about Milton Caniff and other comic artists

Blain Brown explains Hitchcock's rule and much more in his excellent book: Cinematography: Theory and Practice: Image Making for Cinematographers and Directors

Why do artists prefer warm colors?

Here's a painting by Jasper Cropsey (1823-1900), who was known for his warm-tinted autumn landscapes. Cropsey's paintings in general tilted toward yellow and orange and red, and away from blue and green—even though blue and green predominate in the northeastern landscape most of the year 'round.

Cropsey was not alone among artists for warming his palette. A scientific study* compared the average warm/cool pixel distribution of random photographic images to average distributions among many artists' works, and the artists' color averages were distinctly warmer—much more yellow, orange and red, and much less blue and green than we see in nature. 

Why is this so? Are we as humans hard-wired to prefer a warmer palette? Do those colors remind us of sun or fire or spiritual realms? William James, in his book "The Varieties of Religious Experience," interviewed many people about the moments in their lives when they felt uniquely inspired, full of mystic revelation. He noted that many of those visions were tinged with golden colors, as are the interiors of many churches. But that doesn't really answer the question—it just poses another. 

Maybe some of you have ideas or anecdotes to shed some "golden light" on this discussion. 

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Wikipedia Jasper Cropsey (1823-1900)

*The chart is from a paper by Kun Zeng, Mingtian Zhao, Caiming Xiong, and Song-Chun Zhu.

Tree maquettes

How do you make a maquette of an ancient-looking tree for a fantasy painting? Trees are such complicated things that it would take forever to make all the branches and leaves from scratch.

What I did for Treetown in Dinotopia was to start with a real branch and use that as an armature for the tree. I attached the branch to a wood base, and then beefed it up with plastiline modeling clay modeling clay. Clay is cheap and can be reused when you're done with the maquette. I built the treehouse structures in the tree out of other sticks and cardboard held together with a hot glue gun. Chunks of styrofoam from a packing box served as rocks, and a mirror stood in for a lake.

The final painting didn't look much like the maquette, but building the miniature helped me to really imagine the world in three dimensions.

Order the original Dinotopia book signed by the author with a "making-of" afterword.
Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time from Amazon
Previously: Treetown (Part of the series on the making of Dinotopia)

The Toy Boat Problem

Here's a rule for you: When you're drawing boats on flat water, the horizon passes over every boat at the same height above its waterline.

The photo above shows several kayakers in a harbor. Each kayaker is overlaid with a graphic of a kayaker's silhouette multiplied three times to reach the horizon. Each of their boats is sitting about eight feet below the horizon. That's because the viewer is standing with the camera about eight feet above the water.

If you were drawing this scene, and wanted to add another kayak, whether close or far, you would have to make sure its waterline was also a little over three sitting man-heights below the horizon.
A boat placed at a given distance below the horizon must be of a certain size, and a boat of a certain size must be a certain distance below the horizon.

If you get this wrong, the harbor will be filled with toy boats. A lot of artists have made this mistake, even a lot of famous artists, such as Frank W. Benson (1862-1951). Mr. Benson has established that observer is about four feet above the water, because the horizon crosses about one head higher than the standing boy.

But if we apply that measure to the rowboat to the left, we have a problem. That rowboat now looks four feet long. If you stand it on end from bow to stern, it would just reach from the waterline to the horizon. The rower would have to be just one foot tall. And the figure in the the sailboat at right would have to be the size of a GI Joe.

Will you forgive my effrontery in revising Mr. Benson's perspective? Here's a corrected version. I raised the sailboat and also raised the rowboat and made it bigger. If you prefer that rowboat to be smaller for compositional reasons, that's OK, as long as it intersects the horizon in the right place.

Edit: Since so many people asked about the Loomis explanation of this principle using figures on land, I have added them here. Thanks, Ben!

Source for photo of kayakers

Related post: Tiny Train

Meissonier's prep work

Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891) did meticulous studies in preparation for his Napoleonic history paintings. Here is one of his oil studies from a model in an authentic uniform.

According to an early eyewitness, "he made a beautifully finished little wax model of a horse and a rider....Every detail was carefully reproduced from the real materials—the rider's cloak, hat, and spurred boots were miniature masterpieces—and in order to get the exact folds of the cloak it was dipped into thin glue and then placed in the wind so that it stiffened as it blew." This model is made of wood, wax, metal, leather, and cord, and measures about 8 inches tall. 

Here's a detail of one of his paintings, showing why the preparatory work was necessary. This conviction doesn't happen by accident or last-minute inspiration. Managing all the details and dynamics of even a single figure requires immense focus and effort, a lot like a modern movie director planning a complex visual effects scene.


And here is the entire painting, 1807, Friedland, which took him ten years to complete. You can see the painting at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, or download it in high rez from the Met website.

If you want to read more about Meissonier, I recommend Ross King's book The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism, which compares the fates of Meissonier and Manet.
Meissonier on Wikipedia 

Magicians from the Hokusai Manga

Japanese artist Hokusai first published his sketchbooks, or manga, in 1814. They contain images of animals, plants, landscapes, and a few dashes of magic. 

One set of pages shows the feats of magicians, as told in Japanese folklore. Here is a magician exhaling a horse.

Waves emerge from the palms of this master. The style of the water is similar to the Great Wave print, Hokusai's most famous work.

Here is some sleeve magic. Notice the freedom and simplicity of the little figures, who float upward joyous to be born into the air.

Why not some vanishing magic? The hands are stated so economically, but the pose is clear.

 ....and a face projected into the smoke. James Michener, who collected an edition of these sketches, says, "Some of the feats were common, practical tricks. Others would have been rather sensational in any age. But as might be anticipated, Hokusai feels no obligation to differentiate between the two."

This man is blowing out bees with his breath. (Thanks, Eunice) The sketches fill 14 volumes, all block-printed in black, gray, and flesh color.
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Wikipedia on the Hokusai Manga
The best print edition was edited by James Michener: the Hokusai Sketchbooks: Selections from the Manga