Oil Painting Sequence

Here's a step-by-step sequence from a plein-air oil study I painted a few years ago. All through the two hour process, I was eager to paint in the tiny flecks of foamy bubbles and the highlights along the waterline, but I held off on those until the end. (Link to video on Facebook)

The painting appeared in my book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter available on Amazon or signed on my web store.

Previously: Color in Mountain Streams

Tenggren's Concept Art

During the 1930s, Walt Disney evolved the look of animation from simple black and white cartoons to richly imagined worlds that seemed to leap from the pages of illustrated books.

Disney's interest in illustrated children's books intensified after a trip to Europe where he bought many books illustrated by artists such as Dulac and Rackham. 

Disney hired Gustaf Tenggren, often called the "Arthur Rackham of Sweden," to join the studio as a concept artist. Tenggren's dramatically lit concept paintings influenced the look of Snow White (above) and Pinocchio (below). 

Other artists at Disney remembered that Tenggren didn't really join the team; he remained aloof and didn't talk much.  

It was Disney's practice to hire a few artists whose sole job was to produce fully-realized production illustrations, as well as innumerable loose idea sketches, with the hope that their work would inspire artists down the pipeline in layout, color, story, and animation. 

Elaborate miniature design studies for the animated short The Old Mill

Some of Tenggren's watercolor studies are loose and small, yet brimming with mood and drama. His sketches, sometimes called "atmosphere sketches" also inspired the look of Sorcerer's Apprentice, and several shorts such as The Moth and the Flame and The Old Mill. 

Tenggren also worked on a planned adaptation of Wind in the Willows, (which later was absorbed into The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad), but those sketches have been lost. 

A new book called They Drew as They Pleased: The Hidden Art of Disney's Golden Age brings together rarely-seen work of Tenngren, as well as three other concept artists: Albert Hurter, Ferdinand Horvath, and Bianca Majolie. The book is over 200 pages long and with hundreds of color reproductions, mostly of work that doesn't appear in other Disney art books. There's a short bio of each of the featured artists written by Disney expert Didier Ghez. 

This is just the first volume covering the 1930s. Others in the series have come out or are on the way, including They Drew As they Pleased: The Hidden Art of Disney's Musical Years (The 1940s - Part One) and They Drew as They Pleased Vol. 3: The Hidden Art of Disney's Late Golden Age (The 1940s - Part Two). (Thanks, Matt)

I would recommend these books to anyone interested in animation art or movie concept art, or any artist who wants to use their sketchbooks as incubators of visual ideas. 

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They Drew as They Pleased: The Hidden Art of Disney's Golden Age
The book is a companion volume to the earlier book on Disney's concept art: Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists

The Lonely Rectangle

A rectangle searches for another shape to be its friend.

Only when the shapes join together does the story have a happy ending. (Link to video) 

Preview of CGI Tech at Siggraph 2017

(Link to YouTube) Every year at the Siggraph conference, pioneers in the field of computer graphics share their new technology.



This geeky preview highlights the technical accomplishments that will filter down to the visual effects we see in movies and animated TV commercials. Some of the innovations are ever more complex interactions of particles and fur, and dissimilar materials flowing or melting.

Multispecies simulation of porous sand and water mixtures

Some additional highlights include:
1:30 A text-to-video synthesizer that can make Obama (or anybody) say anything.
1:50 Video of a face talking can be remapped to match a given drawing or painting style.
2:00 A deep-learning method to turn crude cartoons into 3D sculpts.

Via BoingBoing

New Book on Bernie Fuchs

Bernie Fuchs was a living legend when I entered the illustration world in the late 1970s, best known for the golden, glowing effect of his oil rub-out technique.



What I didn't appreciate until later was Fuch's versatility. He painted in various media and styles, always with arresting approaches to color, composition, and viewpoint.

Bernie Fuchs (1932-2009) got his start in the midwest and soon was hired by Detroit as one of the background artists for car ads. When he arrived in the New York illustration market, he rose quickly to the top and was the youngest to be honored in the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.

 

Dan Zimmer, publisher of Illustration magazine, continues his series of illustrator monographs with the first comprehensive book on Fuchs, spanning all the diverse artwork he produced over a long and successful career.

The 240-page book has more than 300 illustrations, and it begins with a 28-page bio by David Apatoff, author of the "Illustration Art" blog.

Most of the reproductions are from original paintings and drawings, along with quality reproductions of preliminary drawings, sketches, and vintage tearsheets.

A low-resolution preview lets you check out all the art in the book. You can now preorder the book directly from the publisher for $44.95. It will ship in July.

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You can follow the book's author, David Apatoff, who is now writing about illustration art for the Saturday Evening Post. Here's an article about the William Heath Robinson exhibit in Wilmington, and here's another free online article about how magazines became an important patron of the arts in the 20th century.

Bernie Fuchs (1932-2009) on Wikipedia.

Teoh Reviews the Sketchbook App

Teoh Yi Chie of the "Sketch with Teoh" channel shares a look at our new sketchbook app: "Living Sketchbook, Vol. 1: Boyhood Home." (Link to YouTube) 

The Boyhood Home app is available for iOS on Apple phones and tablets at the App Store
and for Android devices at Google Play.

The second app is called "Living Sketchbook, Vol. 2: Metro North." 

Three versions to suit your device:
• App for Apple iOS phones and tablets from the App Store
• App for Android devices from Google Play
• For laptop and desktop computers, or people with old phones or tablets, a "PDF+ Edition" including all the art plus all the audio and video in HD.

Text-to-Image Synthesis

Novel photo-real images generated by an adversarial network of computers
based solely on a written prompt, without human intervention or photo cues.
Low resolution version on top row iterated to higher res on bottom row.
via Olivier Grisel on Twitter

In the ten years of this blog so far we've witnessed startling advances in the ability of computers to create and interpret images.

We've seen systems that can (links to previous posts):
• Re-render a photo in the style of any artist.
• Identify faces and objects, no matter the lighting, angle, or context.
• Render a photo in a painterly way that puts more detail in psychologically salient areas.
• Paint a generalized portrait that's typical of the style of Rembrandt.
• Generate captions for images describing at a higher level what's going on in a given photo.
• Analyze the abstract elements of a target image and then locate other abstractly similar images.

Despite these advances, most of us human picture-makers can still pride ourselves in our unique ability to create a photo-real image based purely on a written description.

Suppose, for example, you were asked to paint a picture of "a small bird with a pink breast and crown, and black primaries and secondaries." Could you do it? And could you render your picture so believably that someone else might mistake if for a real photo?

Computer generated images courtesy CreativeAI.net

Computers are figuring this out, and they're starting to get good at it. Scientists are approaching the problem of text-to-image synthesis by means of a deep-learning technique called "generative adversarial networks" or GANs for short.

This GAN strategy pits two separate computer networks against each other. The goal of the Generator one is to create images that fit the text prompt, and the goal of the Discriminator is to distinguish synthetic images from real ones.

As the Generator tries to create images to fool the Discriminator, it gets harder, because the Discriminator keeps learning, too. Exactly what the computer "knows" about the structure of form or the aptness of illustrative problem-solving is hard to say because it wasn't taught by a human; it figured it out on its own, in its own way.


Related video: Image Synthesis From Text With Deep Learning

The resulting images are not an average of existing photos. Rather they're completely novel creations.

Furthermore, GAN image synthesizers can be used to create not only real-world images, but also completely original surreal images based on prompts such as: “an anthropomorphic cuckoo clock is taking a morning walk to the pastry market.”



How good are these synthetic illustrations?

So far the images are small (about 64 x 64 pixels) and for the most part, they still won't fool any humans. But watch out: you're just seeing just baby steps.

GANs currently do pretty well generating plausible pictures of birds and flowers, but they have limited success with complex scenes involving human figures, or generalized text prompts such as "a picture of a very clean living room."

They're a bit garbled and incoherent at the moment, but they will develop rapidly. In a few years, advanced A.I. image-creating tools that can illustrate any text prompt in any style will be available cheaply to art buyers everywhere.  

Geek out: 
• A scholarly PDF: Generative Adversarial Text to Image Synthesis
• Related scientific paper about texture synthesis: Precomputed Real-Time Texture Synthesis with Markovian Generative Adversarial Networks
• More images at Creative AI

View from Seat 20F

What I saw when I lifted the window cover....(an homage)

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Materials

Schmincke watercolor set
Gouache
Pentalic 5" x 8" watercolor book
Noodler's Ahab fountain pen
Higgins sepia ink

Workshop at DreamWorks Animation

Yesterday I gave a slide presentation at DreamWorks Animation about imaginative realism and worldbuilding. 

Afterward, about 18 DreamWorks artists joined me in the Artistic Development room to pick up some art supplies and we headed outside to do some plein-air concept art. 

Each artist brought a toy figurine of their choice, and the challenge was to enlarge the toy and place it in a real-life scene. 

Jasmine Truong did this drawing of a giant cat, quietly overlooking one of the other artists. 

Hejung Park with Beargguy on the Jack-in-the-Box

The artists were from various departments, including visual development, lighting, story, and matte painting.

Nicolas Weis with a Collecta Guidraco popping out of the Jack-in-the-Box

We sat in the shadows of an alley behind a fast-food restaurant and exchanged sketching tips. I think I learned just as much from them as they did from me.

Visual Development Artist Iuri Lioi's frog giant rules the drive-up window.

This is a famous Jack-in-the-Box, referenced by Frank Zappa in the lyrics of the song "Billy the Mountain." According to Zappa, it is positioned "right over the SECRET UNDERGROUND DUMPS —right near the 'Jack-In-The-Box' on Glenoaks..."

Onesimus Nuernberger's giant mech outside the Carl's Jr.

"...— where they keep the POOLS OF OLD POISON GAS, and OBSOLETE GERM BOMBS." Perhaps that explains the where the oversize fantasy characters are coming from.

Sondra Verlander's plush bear waiting for takeout.

A few local business owners and residents came over to check out what we were doing as we worked for about an hour and a half.

I brought along my little stop-motion character named Otis the Ocelot, propping him just above the sketch easel so that he'd be in the same light as the background.

Here's my demo painting in gouache over a casein underpainting. 

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Thanks to all the artists for sharing your amazing creativity and sense of fun, and thanks to Anneliese of Artistic Development for making this dream-working magic possible.

Man and Phone

Another trip to the coin laundry last night. No paintings this time, just a quick sketch of a guy immobilized by a mobile device.
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Noodler's Ahab fountain pen with Higgins sepia ink.