Patrick McCormack

This is Patrick McCormack playing the fiddle at Anderson's Thatched Pub, Carrick-On-Shannon, Roscommon, Ireland. 

He was a farmer who came in late from haying, with bits of hay still on his shoulders. Tired as he was he shared his music with us all and took time to show the young players a thing or two.  

My next article for International Artist will be about sketching in pubs and concert halls.

Street Painting Safety Gear

Street painting in Hudson, New York.

Painting a street view sometimes means standing in the street. The advantage of the street position is that the view isn't blocked by parked cars. But it's good to follow basic safety precautions. I like to use a traffic cone and a safety triangle (links take you to Amazon).

The safety triangle sits on a weighted base. The reflective triangle pieces fold down. I cut the "Department of Art" stencil to customize the traffic cone. You can also wear a reflective safety vest or even reflective suspenders over your clothes to allow cars to see you.

Edit: Joe Kulka made this sign after reading the post. Thanks, Joe!

Korean Edition of Imaginative Realism

There's now a Korean edition of Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist, published by Viz&Biz.

Shishkin's Print Albums

In addition to painting in oil, Ivan Shishkin (1832-1898) worked in pen and ink, etching, and engraving. 

He produced lavish albums of his prints with ornate title pages. His name (in Cyrillic letters) is written in the fenceposts seen through the arch.

Some of the etchings were interpretations of his oil paintings, but others were original compositions.

Below is one of the albums of 60 etchings showing the outer cover and the illustrated title page.

Read more about Shiskhin's print albums at the following link to Rarus's Gallery.

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Shishkin on Wikipedia

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Artists in the Royal Tree

The British Royal Family has for centuries included some devoted and accomplished artists.

A view of Windsor Town and Castle by Prince Ernest Augustus, 1780, Daily Mail

Royals have always had the benefit of travel and of excellent instruction, and the blessing — or the curse — of being free from commercial considerations.

Prince Charles is a devoted watercolor painter, but he's also the most articulate advocate of amateur painting since Winston Churchill. (Link to video) He hosts this BBC documentary charting the artistic apples on his family tree.

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Daily Mail: Long to frame over us: From Victoria's sketchbook and Elizabeth II's circus horse to a 'Leonardo', 350 years of a very artistic Royal Family

Thanks, Patrick.


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Call for Entries: Natural Science Art

Spear Lily by Mali Moir

Attention natural science illustrators: The Focus on Nature XIV exhibition is accepting online entries.

What is it? Focus on Nature is an international juried exhibit of natural history illustration. It has taken place every two years since 1990. Artists all the way from Australia to Argentina to Austria send their work, and some come to the openings.

Who is on the jury? The jury includes a scientist (evaluating the scientific merit) and an artist (evaluating the aesthetics).

What are the criteria the jury will be looking for?

• a high degree of technical skill
• scientific accuracy, including taxonomic definition
• aesthetic qualities, including composition
• a unique scientific and/or artistic viewpoint, techniques, medium, or format (organic depiction, schematics, diagrams, etc.) including traditional, mixed and multimedia, or computer-generated images
• a broad representation of artists

How many pieces may I enter? Up to two submissions in any one subject [but no limit on media]. No more than a total of four entries will be considered.

What's the deadline? March 16, 2016.

What does it cost to enter? Nothing! It's free to enter.

Where will the exhibition be? Roger Tory Peterson Institute in Jamestown, NY, December 3, 2016 – April 9, 2017. 

Official website: Focus on Nature

Entry Form 

In the comments, please let me know about other calls for entry (especially those that are free or cheap to enter) that you think GurneyJourney readers would be interested in.

Merry Christmas 2015

Santa Claus by James Gurney, Oil on canvas, 24 x 36.

Here's my idea of Santa: biker dude meets the Coke Santa. The model was the real Santa from our small town who worked by day in the hardware store.

All my warmest wishes to each of you during this festive season.

Basic Painting Tip: Palette Position

Here's the second in a series of brief videos called "Basic Painting Tips." (Link to YouTube).



The idea here is to lift up the painting as close as you can to your view of the subject, with the palette as close as possible to the painting. Both palette and painting should be approximately perpendicular to the line of sight (arrows). It's also important that palette and painting are in the same lighting. If the painting is in shadow and the palette is in full sunlight, judging color mixtures becomes needlessly difficult.

Pochade easels for oil painters, like the Open Box M above, place the palette just below the painting, while other systems such as the Parallel Pallette place it just to the side. With watercolor or runny paint, the palette usually has to be more horizontal. The homemade Lightweight Sketch Easel that I've been using lately uses a hinge system that lets you place the palette at any angle.

These short tip videos are intended for beginning painters, but I hope they will interest experienced painters, too. The idea is to grab an excerpt from my longer videos that can serve both as a stand-alone information piece and a teaser for my longer content, which covers both beginning and advanced material.

Future videos will include things like:
• Palette Arrangements (how the colors can be placed)
• Diffusers
• Brush materials
• Brush shapes
• Oil priming
• Overlapping edges
• Drying time
• Shadow colors
• Using enough paint
• Area by area
• Loose block-in
• Brush cleaning
• Brush storage
• Color isolators
• Unifying glazes

BASIC DRAWING TIPS
• Eye level
• Viewfinders
• Measuring lengths
• Measuring slopes
• Ellipses

Is there a topic you would like to see covered in a future video? Teachers, are there reminders that would help your students? Please let me know in the comments.
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On topic of palette position, you might also check out my previous blog posts:
• Using a sketchbook easel vertically
• Plein-air tip: Go vertical
PAINTING TIP #1: Large to Small)
Full video "Fantasy in the Wild" available in two forms:
Digital download from Gumroad (HD MP4)
DVD (NTSC Region 1)

William Hart's technique for studies

This unfinished Maine seacoast study by Hudson River School artist William Hart (1823 – 1894) gives an insight into his oil painting method.



It appears that he has pre-toned the canvas in the lower area with a thin layer of burnt sienna which was dry when he arrived the location. The gray area of the beach at lower left and the blue colors of the sea at right are laid opaquely over the warm underpainting.

Those blue colors are just a flat base coat that, had there been time to finish, would have been detailed with waves. The top area of the rocks are subdivided further and further with the brush, progressing from large forms to small ones.

William Hart, White Pine, Shokan, Ulster County, New York, c. 1850-'60

The idea of laying large, flat areas and subdividing them applies to Hart's watercolors as well. He lays down the entire silhouette shape of the tree mass in a flat, dull-green tone, preserving the white of the paper where he needs it. Then he systematically subdivides those green tones with smaller forms.
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Watercolor from Albany Institute
More insights on Hart on Mike Ettner's blog

Is Failure the Key to Success?

There's a recent bestseller called Fail Fast, Fail Often: How Losing Can Help You Win that is very popular in Silicon Valley lately.

Part of the idea is to give yourself permission to fail. So many people with good ideas never get started or take risks because they’re afraid of failing or being embarrassed. 

According to Pixar founder Ed Catmull in his book Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration, Director Andrew Stanton (Nemo) urges his staff to "fail early and fail fast” and “be wrong as fast as you can.” Working through problems makes sense in the animation business because the costs mount quickly as an idea moves through the pipeline.

Neil Gaiman says: “Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before.”

The BBC reported about a design college that divided a class into two groups, one that was told they would be graded on the quantity of what they produced, and another that was told they would be graded on quality. The quantity group produced not only more work, but more quality work. The quality group was stuck in the envisioning stage.

At Google, the mantra in their skunkworks is a little different. It's "Build fast, break stuff." They create lots of new ideas, and as a strong one emerges, they develop it, but they also actively try to kill it. If an idea survives that process, they keep going with it. 

As for me, I think it's important to allow a space for failure, but I think a person or an organization only wins by focusing on winning. I'm personally doubtful about the "fail fast, fail often" mantra. It definitely doesn't apply to enterprises where failures can be catastrophic, such as auto racing, aeronautics, or space travel.

But even in the relatively low-risk arena of picture making, I think focusing on failure as a goal is not terribly helpful. 

There's an interesting MIT study that looks at what goes on in the brains of monkeys when they're learning. It turns out that "brain cells may only learn from experience when we do something right and not when we fail." The study leader says: "We have shown that brain cells keep track of whether recent behaviors were successful or not." Author Deborah Halber continues, "When a behavior was successful, cells became more finely tuned to what the animal was learning. After a failure, there was little or no change in the brain - nor was there any improvement in behavior." 

The way I would describe my mindset is: Visualize the goal and start out with a playful, experimental attitude. Keep a low enough investment in any preliminary idea to allow yourself to let it go if it’s not working so you can find a better idea. Many ideas that turn out to be successful start off looking weak and unlikely at first. 

Once you’ve got a good idea and you’ve tested it and thought through all the ways it could go wrong, then the mindset has to change. Carrying a big idea to its conclusion requires a dogged, long-term commitment. Don’t let anything stop you until the final result is as good as it can be. 

Unsuccessful efforts are not failures. They’re only a real failure if you don’t learn anything from them. Each trial generates a nugget of value, even if it turns out to be off track. The successful final result, which may look to someone from the outside like a stroke of genius, is just the harvesting of little successes plucked from the abandoned prototypes developed along the way.

To boil that down: “Generate lots of ideas, test them, and then build on what works, always with an eye toward success.”

Read more
BBC: "How Creativity is Helped by Failure"
MIT Study: Why we learn more from our successes than our failures
The Verge: The Good Dinosaur is looking like Pixar's first box-office failure

Thanks to blog reader Paul Foxton and to Frank and Dan Gurney (all three of you).