4000 Posts—Highlights of My First 10 Years Blogging

This is the 4000th post on this blog. What started as a simple journal of a book tour in 2007 has grown into a daily habit of learning that I enjoy sharing with all of you. For those of you who are relatively new to the blog, or who want to go back to visit some highlights, here are some of the most popular posts and series.

Lively discussions about the life of the artist  

Thoughts on Doing Live Demos (21 comments)
Pet Peeves about Art Videos (81 comments)
Using Photo Reference (33 comments)
Fine Art and Illustration (17 comments)
The Muse and The Marriage (31 comments)
Your experiences with curious spectators (110 stories)
Top ten ways to deal with curious spectators (24 comments)
Gorilla Portraits (46 comments and #1 on Reddit)
Unexpected Visitors (The day I sketched Jehovah's Witnesses—44 comments)

Mythbusting the Golden Mean

Part 1: Debunking claims about The Parthenon

Part 2: The golden mean and Leonardo
Part 3: How the golden mean caught on with artists
Part 4: The golden mean and the human body
Part 5: Last question about the golden rectangle

Media and Materials
Watercolor Materials
Gouache Materials List
Your Casein Questions

Painting in Wyoming with separate camera tripod

How to Video Your Art
Part 1: Camera Guide
Part 2: Microphones and Recorders

Water Reflections Series

Water Reflections, Part 1

Water Reflections, Part 2

Water Reflections, Part 3

Color and Light

Part 1: Wrapping the Spectrum
Part 2: Primaries and Secondaries
Part 3: Complements, Afterimages, and Chroma
Part 4: Problems with the Traditional Wheel
Part 5: The Munsell System
Part 6: Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow

Part 7: The "Yurmby Wheel"


Gamut Masking Method Series
Gamut Masking, Part 1
Gamut Masking, Part 2

Gamut Masking, Part 3

"Origins of Dinotopia" Series 

Part 1: Childhood Dreams
Part 2: College Obsessions 
Part 3: Lost Empires
Part 4:  Dinosaurs
Part 5: Treetown
Part 6: The Illustrated Book
Part 7: Utopias 
Part 8: Building a World 
Part 9: Words and Pictures 
Part 10: Canyon Worlds 
Part 11: Putting it Together
Part 12: Book Launch

Fire and Ice Series
Part 1: Fire and Ice: Rekindled
Part 2: Fire and Ice: Frazetta
Part 3: Fire and Ice -- Tom Kinkade
Part 4: Fire and Ice -- Ralph Bakshi
Part 5: Fire and Ice -- Living inside paintings


Eyetracking and Composition
Eyetracking and Composition, part 1
Eyetracking and Composition, part 2
Eyetracking and Composition part 3

Studio Lighting Series
Studio Lighting, Part 1: Equipment
Studio Lighting, Part 2: Key and Fill
Studio Lighting, Part 3: Edge Lighting

Note to new readers:

GurneyJourney is a daily blog that covers a variety of art-related topics: color, light, sketching, visual perception, portrait painting—and the making of my fantasy book series Dinotopia. There are also over 300 posts on Academic painting in the 19th century and more than 200 posts about the Golden Age of illustration.

The art instruction books grew directly from the blog posts, and from the comments that follow after them. To learn about a specific topic or artist, try the search box in the upper left.

If you have a specific question or something you'd like to add to the discussion, the best place to do that is in a comment string after a related post. I do read comments on older posts, and if I don't get around to answering your question, most likely one of other blog followers will.
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Linkology — Other ways to connect
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Twitter @GurneyJourney
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iOS app GurneyJourney Blog
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Do cultural factors influence how we look at faces?

According to experimental findings reported on LiveScience, the way we look at faces is not entirely hard-wired, and may be influenced by cultural factors, which vary between the east and west.

One study suggests that when reading an expression of a person in a group photo, Westerners zero in on the individual, while East Asians pay more attention to reactions of the other members of the group. Lead researcher Takahiko Masuda, a psychology professor at the University of Alberta, says "East Asians seem to have a more holistic pattern of attention, perceiving people in terms of the relationships to others," while "People raised in the North American tradition often find it easy to isolate a person from [their] surroundings."

In another study, illustrated above, cognitive neuroscientists compared the eye tracking data of Western and East Asian observers who looked at faces on a computer screen. The results suggest that "Westerners tend to look at specific features on an individual's face such as the eyes and mouth whereas East Asian observers tend to focus on the nose or the centre of the face which allows a more general view of all the features."

The author of the article, Charles Q. Choi, suggested the conclusion that "Westerners often concentrate on individual details, while East Asians tend to focus on how details relate to each other."

I'm a little skeptical about these findings, partly because there may be factors other than cultural ones that greatly affect how we look at faces, such as professional training and media exposure. For example, the way artists look at things, based on our training and inclinations, may supercede East/West cultural predispositions (see previous blog post on that topic). Also, I don't think eye tracking data alone can be used accurately to assess the degree to which people look at things holistically, since eye tracking can only record the path of the fovea, or center of vision. We need experimental data that can indicate to what degree the attention is focused on one spot versus a wider view.

Source articles: 
Culture Affects How We Read Faces
Face Recognition Varies by Culture

Linkology
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Ultramarine Blue

 

Why does the Madonna traditionally wear blue?

In the Renaissance, blue was reserved for the mother of Jesus because it was the rarest color, more expensive than gold. Originally it was made from lapis lazuli, a mineral mined in Afghanistan. Getting a supply required a long voyage ultramarinus, or "beyond the sea."

Contracts for paintings often stipulated that the artist use ultramarine, and sometimes the client was required to provide the rare pigment.

A synthetic ultramarine pigment was developed in 1826. Since then it has been an inexpensive staple of every artist's palette.

Happy holidays to all, and thanks for joining the fun.

Instagram @jamesgurneyart
Twitter @GurneyJourney
Facebook JamesMGurney
iOS app GurneyJourney Blog
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Free GurneyJourney App

In honor of this season of holidays, I'd like to offer you a gift: a free GurneyJourney iOS app.

It lets you access the Gurney Journey art blog directly from your iPad or iPhone without having to open a browser.



The app will give you all the latest posts updated daily. It's the ultimate pipeline to practical info for realist painters, sketchers, and illustrators, with 4,000 posts since 2007.

No connection? No problem, because the posts are saved offline. It also has a button so that you can read comments or add your own.

My son Dan coded the app, and he's freelancing his design services, so if any of you would like to commission him to build you a similar app, just email him at: gurney.dan [at] gmail.com
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Gurney Journey app for Apple iOS at the iTunes store.
Gurney Journey app for Android at the Google Play store

Dinotopia painting, step-by-step

Here's a quick video that shows the painting sequence for an illustration in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. In the scene, Arthur Denison meets a retired musical conductor, surrounded by dinosaurs and musical instruments.

Old Conductor, 13 x 14 inches, from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara

The drawing is pencil on heavyweight illustration board, sealed with matte fluid medium. Over the drawing, I start by lightly washing transparent oil paint, and then paint area by area, making sure I get the major faces and the statement of light the way I want them early on.

If you're getting this blog post as an email, you may need to follow this link to see the video on Facebook.
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The painting is from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara (signed from my web store) or from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara from Amazon
More about the steps in a picture like this in my book Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist (James Gurney Art)

Painting in the Conservatory

One way to escape the cold of winter is in a private conservatory, a glass-walled room that serves as a greenhouse and a sunroom.

Several 19th century artists explored this meeting place between exotic nature and civilized fashion. In a conservatory you can sip tea in the jungle, without the jaguars and mosquitos.

James Tissot (French 1836-1902)

"In the Conservatory" by
Frances Maria Jones Bannerman

John Atkinson Grimshaw
(English, 1836-1893) Il Pensoroso

Rivals (1878 – 1879), by James Tissot

Carl Blechen (German, 1798-1840)
The Interior of the Palm House on the Pfaueninsel Near Potsdam, 1834
Oil on canvas 52 1/2 x 50 in. (135 x 126 cm)

James Tissot, Lilacs, 1875

Build method for dragon or pterosaur maquette

Bluworm, also known as the Lone Animator, shows a method for building wing bones and membranes, using wire, latex, cotton, and plaster.

His build process would work well for a dragon or pterosaur. He's constructing a stop motion puppet, but his method would work equally well for a posable maquette that you could use for an illustration reference.
(Link to watch video on YouTube).
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Previously: Skybax maquette

Rackstraw Downes and the Rotating Viewpoint

Rackstraw Downes, "At the Confluence of Two Ditches Bordering a Field
with Four Radio Towers" (1995), 46 x 48 in. 

Rackstraw Downes (born 1939) has an interesting approach to perspective which often results in unexpected twisting of the lines in the scene, such as the way the catenary curves of the power lines above are conveyed with compound curves.

Downes points out that the early perspective theorists offered two competing ideas for how to translate the 3D world onto a 2D surface. One is the familiar straight-line perspective codified by Leon Battista Alberti in the early 1400s.

Jean Fouquet, Arrival of Emperor Charles IV...
1455-1460.

Around the same time, other artists explored a way to interpret perspective using curving lines. But curved-space perspective mostly fell out of favor for centuries, until recently.

360-degree panorama. Photo: Heiwa 4126

Curved space projections look familiar to us now, thanks to wide angle lenses and the rotating cameras that can capture a 360-degree field of view.

In many of his paintings, Downes uses a curvilinear perspective that's reminiscent of these photographic approaches. The painting below takes in more than 90 degrees. 

Albertian perspective requires holding the head in one line of sight, what Downes calls a "head-in-a-vise" system. Downes' vistas often take in a 180 degree view, which would only be possible if you turned your head from one direction to another.

Such head-turning is in some ways more natural. It's what we do when we look around in a scene. Downes wants to capture this experience "empirically," a word he uses a lot. He's not terribly interested in following a strict geometric system, but would rather interpret the scene each time as he sees it.



Sometimes the resulting paintings have idiosyncratic features. For example, in the scene above, the horizon or eye level is below the center of the image. That would normally require it to be cupped upward in a concave fashion. But instead, Downes sees the horizon as bulging upward convexly. This would only happen in a photo if you pointed a super wide angle lens downward and cropped off the bottom half of the image.

Downes also makes the line of the building at left leaning straight outward, rather than curving back into the scene at the top like a parenthesis, as a normal wide angle perspective would require. These idiosyncrasies of perspective might strike different people in different ways.

To me this one has a queasy, funhouse feeling, and also the sense that the city scene is on the surface of a small spherical planet.



Downes lays out the case for his approach to perspective in an essay called "Turning the Head in Empirical Space," which appears in the back of his book Rackstraw Downes, published in 2005 by the Princeton University Press.

Another good book is Rackstraw Downes: Onsite Painting, 1972-2008

Two sculptors create each other's portrait

In this demonstration, two master sculptors create clay portraits of each other in real time. The artists are Professor Sarath Chandrajeewa (Dean Faculty of Visual Arts at the University of Visual and Performing Prt in Sri Lanka) and Professor Cao Chang Xu (Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China).
(Link to view video on YouTube)
Via Best of YouTube

Plein Air Convention 2017

 
I'm looking forward to being part of the faculty at the Plein Air Convention and Expo coming up April 24-28, 2017 in San Diego. Above is a sampling of the over-60 person faculty.



The Plein Air Convention and Expo will be a combination of stage presentations, demos, networking, and outdoor painting opportunities. People bring their notebooks, business cards, and easels. It's a good opportunity for learning about new materials, techniques, and mindsets.

I'll also be one of the guests at the Spectrum Fantastic Art Live Convention in Kansas City just before. That's the place to be if you're interested in fantasy or science fiction illustration, concept art, and creature design. That event goes from April 21-23, 2017.