J.C. Leyendecker's Report from the Académie Julian

The 50th issue of Illustration Magazine is completely dedicated to Leyendecker, with a staggering collection of 162 illustrations of the life and work of both Leyendecker brothers, J.C. and Frank.

About 100 of those are of J.C.'s art, taken from high-rez scans of the original art and reproduced full page, making this one of the best collections of his work in print.

The biography by David Saunders is well-researched and well-balanced. One of the things that fascinated me most were the insights into the Leyendeckers' French training, and I'll focus on that aspect in this post.

J.C. wrote home to Chicago describing the work he was doing in the Académie Julian under Benjamin-Constant, Lefebvre, Bouguereau, and Laurens:

"Thoroughness is the principle upon which the French Art Schools have won their success. It doesn't take long to discover that style and dash will not make a drawing or painting go here as it will an illustration back home." 

"Serious work —getting right down to the foundation principles—is the demand which is laid upon every student over here. If I learned anything it was that a picture is really only valuable for the thought behind it. There is little talk of 'handling' and of the catch tricks of the trade, and much emphasis upon a deep and serious significance in everything attempted."

Students are accepted into the program without an entrance portfolio, but instead they are evaluated after attempting a study from life:

"Three models pose at the same time in each room, and the new pupil takes his materials and begins work upon the subject which attracts him. But some time in the first week the professor comes around and takes a first look at the beginner's study. That is an important moment, for if the teacher does not approve of it the nouveau is assigned to work from casts instead of from life."

"The mornings are devoted to class study from models and casts, and the afternoons to composition work. The subject of the composition is announced in the class, and it is briefly explained by the teacher. The students are not allowed to consult with any authorities bearing upon the subject, but must make their composition wholly from the meager data given them by the professor." 

"The pupil is at liberty to do his composition in his own atelier or combination lodging-room and studio. Saturday afternoon is looked forward to as the great occasion of the week. Then the compositions are brought to the classroom and the teacher passes from one easel to another giving his criticism to the pupils, who crowd around him, clambering upon chairs and stools to secure points of vantage from which to view the pictures."
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In the future, I'll share a couple other excerpts from this special issue. If you like this kind of stuff, pick up a copy before it sells out.

Illustration Magazine issue 50, which contains 112 pages and costs $15.00.

Harold Speed Chapter 7: Colour

Today we'll take a look at Chapter 7: "Colour" from Harold Speed's 1924 art instruction book Oil Painting Techniques and Materials.

I'll present Speed's main points in boldface type either verbatim or paraphrased, followed by comments of my own. If you want to add a comment, please use the numbered points to refer to the relevant section of the chapter.

Speed divides three approaches to color. They're listed in historical order, but without saying that one is necessarily better than another. Speed acknowledges the beauty of each way of looking at color, similar to the way that the smaller orchestras of earlier music produced sonorities as valid as the big orchestras of later composers.

1. Primitive colouring
"Consists in simply filling in the boundaries of objects and background with their local colour and expressing the internal forms by the introduction of a little shading." No cast shadows, no colored light. Examples: most Asian artwork, plus Giotto and Fra Angelico up to Botticelli in Europe.
Advantages: clarity of expression, but less impact of form and less realism.

2. The Brown School
Introduction of light and shade, 3D form. The brown tone is a convention that unifies the otherwise jarring contrasts. Joshua Reynolds (above) states that shadows should be brown color. I've heard this referred to as "brown soup." Many of the impressionists reacted against this brownish tone when they went outside and saw a more silvery or variegated light.

But in the credit given to the French Impressionists, other pioneers are often overlooked. The insights and practices of the late 19th century outdoor painters were anticipated decades or even centuries earlier by other artists such as Velazquez and Vermeer, as Speed points out. In the case of Velazquez (below), the colors are fairly quiet and neutral, and it is the organization of value and the handling of edges that contribute to the sense of unified vision.

3. Impressionist School
This is an outgrowth of the optical science of the nineteenth century. One of the key ideas is the dissociation of apparent color from the local color of surfaces.

Another set of ideas had to do with the science of vision, and the recognition that color is a phenomenon of perception as much as it is something external. Goethe was a pioneer in this.

Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, 1836 (Dusseldorf School)

In the realm of landscape, I would also add that early outdoor painters in Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, England, and America preceded many of the color innovations of the more famous French Impressionists.

Painting by Harold Speed

4. Importance of consistency
Speed points out the problem of putting a figure that is lit with indoor studio light into an outdoor background setting. (I don't have a good example of this offhand....any suggestions?)

Childe Hassam

5. Elimination of black from the palette. 
This is a topic that I've discussed in a previous series:

Part 1: Using black to darken a color

Part 2: Mixing your own black
Part 3: Using black in a painting
Part 4: Is Black a color?

Speed's coverage of it is nuanced, warning of the dangers of the "fruit salad" coloring, but also reminding us of the power of darkness and shadow, which was sometimes lost in impressionist coloring.

Next week—Chapter 8: Colour: Practical

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In its original edition, the book is called "The Science and Practice of Oil Painting." Unfortunately it's not available in a free edition, but there's an inexpensive print edition that Dover publishes under a different title "Oil Painting Techniques and Materials (with a Sargent cover)," and there's also a Kindle edition.
Get my book "Color and Light" signed from my website or from Amazon.

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Answer to a Concert-Sketching Question

In the next issue of International Artist Magazine (#107), I answer your questions about sketching in concerts. Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing some of those questions and answers.

For example—Tomas Quinones asks: “What about low light? Do you bring a small light?”

I don’t use reading lights because they’re too attention-getting. If I want more light in a concert hall, I sit closer to the front, where the stage lights spill over into the first few rows. The level of the house lights farther back depends on the venue, and you never know how dark it will be until the show starts.

The relative brightness between the bright stage lights and the dark house lights can be a problem. If that difference is too great, it can take a long time for the eyes to adjust.


If I’m sitting in very low light, I use a bold black shape vs. white shape technique. A black brush pen is good for drawing these shapewelding sketches, where you can see what you’re drawing even in near darkness.

Examples of brush markers are the Uchida Double-Ended Markers or Staedtler Mars Graphic Duo Brush Markers or Pentel brush pen. I like the ones with a broad tip on one end and a pointed tip on the other. But if you plan to use brush markers, you don't want to use one that has a strong smell, and check them out first on spare pages of sketchbooks and wait a few months to make sure they don't bleed through the paper. 

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You can pick up a copy of International Artist Magazine (#107) 

Breaking Up....And Coming Back Together

Here's a touching film about a breakup...and picking up the pieces. (Link to YouTube)

"Fantasy in the Wild" Reviews

The new tutorial video "Fantasy in the Wild: Painting Concept Art on Location" has been getting some enthusiastic reactions from professionals in various fields:

Darren Rousar, painter, publisher, and instructor of the sight-size method, says:

"The main focus of the video is Concept Art, something which Richard Lack and R. H. Ives Gammell would have called Imaginative Painting. This is where the artist invents a composition and then brings together real objects in order to paint what he or she imagines, while literally seeing a modeled version of it. Doing this helps give the painting more verisimilitude than would be likely when solely painting from one’s imagination. In James’ case, at times he brings his props out to nature, rather than bringing plein air sketches into the studio to combine them with maquettes. Seeing this was an “a-ha!” moment for me as I’ve always done the latter.

Read the full review at Studio Rousar

On his blog Art and Influence, Armand Cabrera says:

"You hear him talk about the backstory he invents as he visualizes each scene. We get to watch and listen while he creates pencil roughs, color studies, sketches from life of different elements and each of the final paintings on location. As he paints he describes his story motivations, his reasons behind his choices for color, shapes, values and brush calligraphy. When he changes his mind about something we see how he corrects it to improve the statement of the particular painting."

Read the full review at Art and Influence

Meanwhile, Lorin Wood, founder of the robot blog "Nuthin' but Mech," says:

"The other half that is mesmerizing is his continued gasp on analog tools. His mastery over the traditional media is wonderful, and if you are not excited about breaking out the easel and running to a picturesque, rustic New England township to paint floating cars at magic hour, then there is definitely something wrong with you. Seriously, I'm looking at plane tickets right now."

Read the full review at Nuthin' But Mech

Mark Frauenfelder, founder of the blog BoingBoing and one of the leaders of the Maker movement, says:

“James Gurney is one of the best book illustrators alive today. His work is in the league of N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle…James’ teaching style is so friendly and warm. I have met him a couple of times, and this video captures his personality perfectly.”

Read the full review on BoingBoing



Nathan Fowkes, Concept Artist for Dreamworks, Blue Sky, and Disney says:

“With the thousands of tutorials out there I'm not aware of any others like this. James Gurney shows how on-location inspiration is an indispensable part of imaginative painting and concept design.”
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Treat yourself to a New Year's gift.
"Fantasy in the Wild" is 71 Minutes long and is available for purchase as a HD video download for $14.95 from Gumroad or as a DVD at Kunaki. The DVD is also now available on Amazon.

Donut Jar

It's lunchtime at the diner. I get out the gouache. My eye is on the donut jar.

I squeeze out Prussian blue, burnt sienna, and white. I paint the thing without the highlights. They go on last, like the hat before you're out the door.

This 10 second video takes you from the donut jar to the sketchbook page. (Link to Youtube) 

"Gouache in the Wild"
• HD MP4 Download at Gumroad $14.95
• or HD MP4 Download at Sellfy (for Paypal customers) $14.95
• DVD at Purchase at Kunaki.com (Region 1 encoded NTSC video) $24.50

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New Tom Lovell Website

Fans of illustrator Tom Lovell (1909-1997) can now sample from an online gallery of more than 200 images spanning his remarkable career, from the women's and adventure magazines to National Geographic and Western art.

Lovell was an artist's artist who produced work that was consistently well crafted in terms of design, perspective, and figure work, and it always delivered the dramatic mystery required of a magazine illustration.

The website is an outgrowth of the magazine tearsheet archives of Jim Pinkoski, who has amassed similar collections of the published work of John Berkey and Harry Anderson.

Jim Pinkoski's Tom Lovell Collection
Previous GJ Posts on Lovell

Fiction and Nonfiction

Muirhead Bone, World War I reportage sketch, 1918 (source)

Here's a philosophical question for discussion:

We divide writing into fiction and non-fiction. Why don't we divide art that way?

The answer seems obvious at first. Art is fictive because the images are created, not recorded.

We might regard photography as the non-fiction equivalent of art, since photography appears to capture reality without substantial human intervention. Compared to artwork made by hand, photographs seem more objective, more "true."

Yet photography involves innumerable aesthetic choices. And in the era of Photoshop and CGI, the boundary between art and photography has been blurred. Photography no longer holds the privileged position as a record of fact or truth.

Beatrix Potter, 'Studies of nine beetles' watercolor ©Warne&Co.

But supposing we stay just within the realm of handmade visual art. Can't we regard some art genres as non-fiction? Surely reportage on the battlefield or in the courtroom presents itself as a witness to true events just as much as the courtroom reporter with a notepad does. And natural history illustration presents scientific understandings with more saliency and truth than a photograph can do.

Isn't the artist dealing more in the world of truth than the writer? Art is nature filtered through a human temperament, but so is writing. By its very nature, writing is highly abstracted from reality. A journalistic reporter must convert observations into symbols that are far removed from sensory experience.

We can hardly think of writing without facing the division of fiction and nonfiction. Walk into any library or bookstore, and the demarcation is very evident. In film, the line is usually drawn between movies and documentaries.

In recent decades, there have been more and more works in film and literature that explore the boundary line of the two existing categories, such as historical fiction, novels based on real events, and biopics. Oddly enough, the library classifies books on elves, faeries, folklore, and mythology in the nonfiction section. My own book, Dinotopia deliberately blurs the boundary by presenting a fantasy world as if it were non-fiction.

At its most objective, the art of painting can bring us to an experience of the world that is closer to pure objectivity than writing can do, while forms of art can be placed on a gradient taking us into realms of pure subjectivity and invention.

I'm not saying that we should invent new categories for art, nor am I proposing that we should do away with them in writing. But I believe it's helpful to remind ourselves that the conception of fiction and nonfiction in writing is an arbitrary and inconsistent social construct. In the same way, the divisions of literature into categories of children's, young adult, and adult strikes me as arbitrary and misleading.

Devdutt Pattanaik said, "Nobody knows why we're alive; so we all create stories based on our imagination of the world; and as a community, we believe in the same story. In India, every person believes his/ her own mythosphere to be real. Indian thought is obsessed with subjectivity; Greek thought with objectivity."

If you have thoughts about this, I welcome them in the comments.

Six Word Story Winners

We received a lot of entries to the Six Word Story Challenge. They were serious, funny, lighthearted and heartbreaking. It was hard to choose five to spotlight on the blog, but here they are:

Matthew Mattingly: "Seventeenth summer. Broadening Outlook. Escape Strategy."

I like the story, which suggests both past and future and a sense of personality. The pen style looks like an old fashioned engraving and fits perfectly with the words.

Kirsten Sander: "After Christmas, our sweets vanished rapidly..."

The artwork has an attractive sense of texture and color, and the story gives a fun twist.

Dougall Irving: "She told him they were edible."

Nice watercolor study, with a story that suggests a variety of possible outcomes. At first I thought she knowingly gave him advice to eat poisonous mushrooms, but then I realized that maybe she gave him trustworthy advice. Thinking back, I have eaten mushrooms that might have been poisonous on the advice of strangers.

Carolyn Allison: "I found it in the fridge."

I've played the role of a parent who searches for a child's lost toy, only to find it in a really strange place. It also made me think of a book like Corduroy, where there might be a whole story of this stuffed dog's adventures.

Casey Graham: "All I can be is me."

Casey's picture gives me the feeling of a young person coming into the awareness of herself as an artist and a person. I love the fact that not only are there just six words, but they're all one syllable, and they add up to just 13 letters.

Thanks to everyone who entered. Check out all the entries at the Facebook page: Six Word Story Challenge. 

To the five winners above: Please let me know which art tutorial download you want, and please send me your mailing address so that I can mail you a "Department of Art" embroidered patch. (Thanks to Steve for donating the patches)

Harold Speed Chapter 6, Tone Exercises

Happy New Year, everybody, and thanks for visiting the blog. Today we'll take a look at Chapter 6: "Elementary Tone Exercises" from Harold Speed's 1924 art instruction book Oil Painting Techniques and Materials.

I'll present Speed's main points in boldface type either verbatim or paraphrased, followed by comments of my own. If you want to add a comment, please use the numbered points to refer to the relevant section of the chapter.

The Selene Horse from the Parthenon (Image source)

1. "There is nothing better than simple, direct, solid painting."
By "solid" he means opaque. The opaque paint allows you to get smooth, flat, tones, but it requires you to be accurate in mixing those tones.

2. "Nothing is as good as a clean cast placed in a strong light and shade."
He's recommends doing studies from a plaster cast, probably of a classic figural sculpture, something without too much detail. Casts are available from companies like Masters International. If you'd like to recommend sources for casts in the comments, I'll add them here.

3. To paint accurately you have to see the world as if it were flat.
Speed says this isn't easy because we're not accustomed to ignoring the third dimension, due to our stereoscopic vision.

4. "It is a help to look at what you are going to paint through a rectangular hole cut in a card, across which straight lines have been drawn with cotton threaded through at equal distances, both ways, drawn tightly."
I've tried making a string-net viewfinder like he describes, and it doesn't work nearly as well as an acrylic sheet with a forehead spacer, as I demonstrate on my new video.

Speed says: "these mechanical helps should not be relied upon too much, and should be dispensed with as soon as possible, as they interfere with freedom of expression." He has a point. If any technique undermines your confidence or restricts your freedom to make aesthetic choices, it may not be helpful.

But it depends on what you want to accomplish with a given painting or study. If what you want to do is capture exactly what you see, why not start with an efficient method for doing so? It's not really any more mechanical than the "segment and slope" method. Sometimes dead-on accuracy is what I want to achieve. But other times I want to subtly change and alter what I see for expressive purposes.

While I respect artists who apply an absolute moral code to their studio practices, I am a pragmatist in such matters. I believe the results will always justify the method. My observation is that artists with fixed or absolute ideas about "right" or "wrong" methods or ideas about "cheating" will end up trapped within the walls that they have constructed. I do agree with Speed when he says: "Nothing is done on a canvas that has not first been conceived in the mind."

Albert Edelfelt academic study

5. (Process) 
a) "The first lay in should be as simple a map of these tone masses as you can reduce your subject to."
b) First lay down the tones of the light and the shadow each with a thin average tone, and then subdivide the large mass into smaller forms. In Creative Illustration, Andrew Loomis calls this the "Big Tone Approach."
c) Half-closing the eyes makes it easier to see the average tone. The eye is attracted to little accents at first, so this can be difficult.
d) Paint background first, just thick enough to cover solidly, but not too thick. Save your thick painting for later.
e) Keep the tones simple and flat, but spend time and attention on the halftones and transitions from light to shade. This is something Sargent and Carolus-Duran emphasized, too.
f) Scrape it out if it doesn't work. Also something Sargent did.
g) Don't keep patting it with your brush. Think first then add a stroke.
h) Speed talks about working in front of a window, but if you want absolutely controlled conditions, you can work under an artificial light. I have always preferred the changeability of window light.
i) After you've practiced with casts you can proceed to other still life objects of varying colors and textures, and then to the figure and to real life.

6. (Tools and Materials) 
a) Use a flat brush with rounded corners. Here's a website that discusses oil brush shapes. Silver brushes are good, but there are many brands available.
b) Use the largest brush you can stand.
c) Hold the brush as far up the handle as possible.
d) Speed recommends using raw umber as a good color for the first pass especially because it dries fast and is fairly neutral.

7. Lines down the form emphasize toughness and across the form softness, and in every direction mystery and atmosphere.
Andrew Loomis (above) talks about this too, in his excellent instructional book Creative Illustration, and I wonder if he got it from Mr. Speed.

8. The Mosaic Method
This is closer to the method taught by Carolus-Duran. I discussed this in a previous post on Carolus Duran's Method. He concludes by talking about yet another method of doing studies, where you let an underpainting dry and then glaze and scumble some semi-transparent color over it. This kind of method is discussed at some detail in Solomon J. Solomon's book, The Practice of Oil Painting and Drawing.

Next week—Chapter 7: Colour.

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In its original edition, the book is called "The Science and Practice of Oil Painting." Unfortunately it's not available in a free edition, but there's an inexpensive print edition that Dover publishes under a different title "Oil Painting Techniques and Materials," and there's also a Kindle edition.

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