The Kilauea Volcano

Kilauea, oil, 9x12”

When I visited Hawaii some years ago, the lava from the Kilauea volcano was cool enough to walk on. I set up my easel to paint a view across the moonscape. That’s a van and two scientists at left in the distance.

Book Review: Coby Whitmore: Artist and Illustrator

The Illustrated Press has released Coby Whitmore: Artist and Illustrator, the newest volume in its landmark series of art books immortalizing the leading 20th century illustrators.

America was booming and confident during the postwar era, and the women's magazines were overflowing with what they called "boy-girl" stories. 

Coby defined the look of glamour, along with his contemporaries Al Parker, Jon Whitcomb, Tom Lovell, and Harry Anderson. 

Born in 1913 in Dayton, Ohio, Coby was still a teenager when he decided to be an illustrator. He apprenticed with the mercurial but talented Haddon Sundblom in Chicago before moving to New York to work for Cooper Studios, a stable of top talent that did both advertising and editorial illustration.

Coby Whitmore, gouache on board, 15.25" x 20" Saturday Evening Post

Coby painted in casein and gouache, often combining well rendered face and hands with areas of flat color. His compositions were always fresh and surprising, with interesting cropping and color ideas inspired by one of his heroes, Edgar Degas.

The book is 224 pages, 9 x 12." After a brief introductory bio, the remaining 200 pages are devoted to color reproductions of the art itself. Some of of the reproductions are from the originals, so that you can see the colors and paint textures in detail. Other reproductions are taken from magazine tearsheets, letting you study how the art interacted with the headlines and type.

Here's the webpage at the Illustrated Press about the book, which comes in a standard hardcover edition for $44.95. It's limited to 900 copies, but don't wait, because other books in this series have sold out.

Publisher Dan Zimmer's next book will be about Haddon Sundblom.

Dinosaur Science Painting in Gold Medal Show

My oil painting "Kosmoceratops" will be one of the paintings in the Gold Medal Exhibition of the California Art Club, which starts this weekend.

The painting was published in Scientific American magazine and received a Jury Award at the Focus on Nature XIII exhibition in Albany, NY. It was also the subject of my first downloadable tutorial video, "How I Paint Dinosaurs."

(Link to video on Facebook)

The Gold Medal Exhibition takes place at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. The collector's preview and the artists' gala is Saturday, June 9 and the show opens to the public from June 10 through July 1.

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 Gold Medal Exhibition of the California Art Club
Tutorial: How I Paint Dinosaurs

Dinotopia painting to be exhibited in Los Angeles

"Light on the Water," an important oil painting from Dinotopia, will be part of the show and sale at the Gold Medal Exhibition of the California Art Club starting this weekend.



The painting was published in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara and Color and Light and has been exhibited in many museums exhibits around the USA and in Switzerland, France, and England.

(Link to step-by-step video on Facebook)

The Gold Medal Exhibition takes place at the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. There are a lot of wonderful paintings in the show, and I'm proud to have my paintings among them.

The collector's preview and the artists' gala is Saturday, June 9 and the show opens to the public on June 10.  I won't be able to attend the opening. The show will be up through July 1.

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 Gold Medal Exhibition of the California Art Club

Book Review: How to Survive and Prosper as an Artist

Are you looking for the perfect gift for that art school graduate in your life?

How to Survive and Prosper as an Artist: Selling Yourself without Selling Your Soul offers practical and encouraging tips to help a young artist build a career selling paintings.

The author began as an artist herself, and is a career coach and advocate for artists.

There are many aspects of running an art business, such as: creating presentations, promoting and marketing, handling public relations, pricing a painting, dealing with galleries, and applying for grants.

She begins the book talking about psychological blocks, a place where many people get stuck. She addresses being intimidated by others, feeling insecure, requiring validation, and overcoming rejection.

The book is mainly concerned with gallery art. She reminds young artists that they have a lot of leverage in negotiations, and she recommends having a written contract, rather than trusting to a handshake. There's a discussion of discounts, artist statements, market values, pay-to-play, and mailings.

No single book can cover every aspect of the art business. In this volume, there's not much coverage of illustration, concept art, or other studio or commissioned jobs. Also, the coverage of social media is not very thorough. It also doesn't get into much detail about publishing contracts or other legal matters. For that, I'd recommend Tad Crawford's Legal Guide for the Visual Artist.

The back of the book is has a very well-stocked Appendix of Resources, with a list of publications, organizations, websites, and mailing lists.
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How to Survive and Prosper as an Artist: Selling Yourself without Selling Your Soul 358 pages, $24.99 list.
Related Post: 72 Tips for sharing art on social media 
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Tip for Painting Efficiently in Oil

If you’re working in oil, you can premix pools of color that you’re going to use a lot. That way you won’t have to waste your time mixing the same color again and again.

Spend a few minutes at the beginning planning your color. Decide on the gamut (the range of colors in the scene). Which colors are in, and which ones are out, of your color scheme? Which colors show up the most? And what are the rare accents? 

(Link to video on Facebook)

Use a palette knife to mix a string of about four or five values of those frequently used colors. If you want to get a little variation in your color, you can mix a warmer and a cooler variation of each major color.

Siggraph 2018 Highlights

Highlights from the Siggraph 2018 technical papers offer a preview of tools that will be used by tomorrow's digital animators. (Link to YouTube)
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Via Cartoon Brew

Practical effects showreel

Visual effects in films and commercials these days aren't all digital these days. As this behind-the-scenes showreel by Scandinavia FX demonstrates, some firms are using miniatures, fluid tanks, explosions,  and even live animals, with cameras tracking on robotic arms.



Most of their shots are not entirely in-camera, though, relying on digital compositing to stitch together elements. (Link to YouTube)
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Related topic: Read an oral history of the "Dinosaur Input Device," an enhanced stop-motion technique developed by Phil Tippett and his colleagues while working on Jurassic Park.

Nicolás Uribe: Painting Our Lives

Nicolás Uribe paints the people and places he loves in Moleskine sketchbooks. Yesterday he launched a crowd-funded plan to translate his sketches into a facsimile art book.

Nicolás Uribe, oil

James Gurney: You've been painting a lot in sketchbooks lately. What makes sketchbooks so attractive to you from a creative standpoint?

Nicolás Uribe: I’ve always found the act of sketching both necessary and stimulating, but as of late, I’ve just understood my sketchbooks as a place where I can approach painting and drawing far more liberally. It’s become the place where I feel safe to try things out, to search, to attempt to understand, and more importantly to feel comfortable failing.

Gurney: What kinds of subjects or approaches do sketchbooks let you explore that you might not have explored on a large canvas?

Uribe: I think the size is essential. It puts me in a mindset where I can approach an alla prima painting session with enough commitment to know that I can “finish” a painting while being bold and expressive but also careful and sensitive. It’s a very intense couple of hours where every decision counts!

Gurney: Who are the people in your pictures, and what inspires you to paint them the way you do?

Uribe: They are people who, regardless of the nature of my relationship with them, are an integral part of my life. Some of them are very close to my affection - they are family, friends, people that I love. But among them there’s also strangers that I encountered for only a split second, people that I will probably never get to see again. I find it very poetic that the people that I love, share a space with strangers, objects, interiors, all of them painted with the same respect and sensitivity.

Gurney: What reference are you looking at when you're painting the portraits? Are there aspects of your picture-making procedure now that differ a lot from the way you were trained?

Uribe: I mostly work from photographs, but I also consistently work from life. During my training I was taught how to paint and draw exclusively from life. I’ve always stated that working from nature instructs every single decision that I take in my studio. Everything I’ve learned, every reflection I’ve made on form, structure, gesture, color or light has come from my direct interaction with nature. There is simply no substitute for it.

Nicolás Uribe, gouache

Gurney: Why have you chosen to use Instagram Stories for sharing live painting videos? What needs to happen for a successful live session?

Uribe: It’s a very direct channel for visual communication. In theory there are many other live channels, like youtube, twitch, or facebook, but the artist community is very active in Instagram. I also find that the default ephemeral quality of the live videos (they’re only up for 24 hrs), emphasizes the fact that you feel you have to be there when something is being painted. That same presence, that same sense of urgency is the one I feel when I have to execute a painting in two or three, one hour sessions.

Gurney: What did you learn from your 2017 Kickstarter campaign, and what approach are you going to take with your new Indiegogo campaign?

Uribe: Honest and active engagement with the people that follow and support us is absolutely vital. People want to feel like we are right there with them, that we are there for them, and that we work alongside them even if we’re separated by an ocean. If we all feel that each one of us is an essential part of a healthy community, we will build trust and selflessly work for each other. It is truly that simple.

Nicolás Uribe is a painter born in Madison, WI, currently based in Bogotá, Colombia. He graduated with Honors as an Illustration Major from School of Visual Arts in NY.

The fundraising campaign has already reached its fixed goal, but many of the pledge categories are still open. 

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Nicolás Uribe's Indiegogo campaign "Our Painted Lives"
Nicolás Uribe on Instagram

Four Freedoms Video

The Norman Rockwell Museum has produced a brief documentary telling the story of how Norman Rockwell interpreted Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" speech into a series of paintings that defined the WWII war effort.

Although inspired by the ideals of Roosevelt's speech, the lofty language stymied Rockwell at first. "It was so darned high blown," he said, "sometimes I couldn't get my mind around it." (Link to video on YouTube)