Salmagundi Club Show Opens Tomorrow

This Dinotopia painting will be on view at the American Masters exhibit starting tomorrow October 8, 2018 at the Salmagundi Club in New York City. (link to FB vid)

"Flight Past the Falls" 20x24 inches, oil on canvas over board.

Boldini's portrait of Sem

Giovanni Boldini, portrait of the caricaturist "Sem" (Georges Goursat, 1863–1934)

In 1876 Boldini visited Holland, where he studied paintings by Frans Hals. Afterward he developed a style that featured boldly slashing brushstrokes and subjects in informal, offhand poses. A 1933 article in Time magazine called him "The Master of Swish."

Artists were always painting and sketching each other when they got together. Sem caricatured his friend Boldini in return.

Making a Hollow-Mask Illusion

The "Hollow-Mask Illusion" involves tricking the viewer into thinking a negative form is positive.

Creating this effect involved:
1) Making a negative mold from the face of the original sculpt (which is by Jake Hebbert). I used Magic Sculpt for this.
2) attaching that to a positive sculpt of the base
3) Lighting everything in the scene - except the hollow face - with a light from the upper right. I used a gobo on a wire to block light on the hollow face.
4) Lighting only the hollow face with light from the lower left, using an oval mask to shield everything else.


A computer generated version of this is called the "Rotating Mask Illusion."

You can make your own interactive version of this out of paper. 
Magic Sculpt

12 Principles of Animation

YouTuber Kaptain Kristian lays out the 12 principles of animation, as formulated by Disney veterans Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas. Their book, The Illusion of Life, is a valuable collection of wisdom about design, layout, storytelling, and animation. (Link to YouTube)

Painting a Lobster Wharf

Here's the last painting from our trip to Maine: a painting of a wharf at New Harbor.

Lobster Wharf, 5 x 8 inches, gouache

The air is foggy, which is good, because it means that the light won't change too much, and I can paint for three or more hours.



Lobster boats come up periodically to offload their catch, as you'll see in this video (link to YouTube).

Four steps in painting Lobster Wharf: 1) Watercolor pencil, 2) Overall
wash and darks, 3) Far distances, (chowder break) and 4) Opaque detailing. 

Here's an overview of the steps in the painting.
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PDF of Gouache Materials List
Pentalic watercolor sketchbook
Travel brush set
Water-soluble colored pencil
Water cup
CAMERAS
Canon PowerShot Elph (point-and-shoot)
Canon M6
BOOKS
Color and Light: A Guide for Realist Painters
Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist
Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time

Art Student's Questions

An art student named Ross asked to interview me on a few topics to help him write an artist statement.

How did you get started?
I grew up in a creative family, but they were engineers more than artists, and I didn’t take art classes because no one seemed intense enough about it. I wanted to figure it out for myself and I went to the library to dig up the way they did things decades earlier. All through my youth, I never got to watch anyone else drawing or painting from life (somehow I even missed the TV show artists). Once I arrived at art school and started meeting other artists, I was completely captivated with how other people made a picture. I was fascinated with how they moved their hand and brush, but more than that, I wanted to learn what they were thinking as they worked. I believe that drawing and painting are an intensely magical act, like a form of conjuring. What I’m trying to do with my art, books, and videos is to try to explore the source of that magic.

What do you expect from your audience? 
Social media has put us in contact with people who follow our work. I think that's a good thing overall, but I'm not sure. That contact is certainly very stimulating for someone of my generation who was accustomed to singing in the dark. We can't help but recognize that our followers support us both emotionally and financially. No question, the internet has forever changed the art business by making us accountable to our audience. 

Should a professional artist learn about business?
Yes, if you're going to be independent, you've got to know something about business: marketing, contracts, accounting, publicity, graphic design, and video production. In this age of the creator-producer, it’s important to know about distribution, and sales. If art schools don’t offer this, you can pick it up on your own. I’m always trying to learn new things about how to make what I love to do pay for my living. That said, I try to keep business considerations or audience considerations from driving what I do or how I do it. I just want to have fun doing the very best quality work I can. I’m glad that the internet lets me share what I produce and what I learn with others. I have faith that enough people will support me to keep me doing it.

What artists influence you?
The artists who influence me the most are the ones who combine observational work with their personal imagination. Sketching from life definitely builds my visual vocabulary, which helps when I’m trying to conjure a fantasy world from thin air. I often dig into my sketchbooks for poses, rock formations, trees, landscape effects, or other details. That’s one of the reasons I like to draw everything. As Adolph Menzel put it: “alles Zeichnen ist nützlich, und alles zeichnen auch" (“All drawing is useful, and to draw everything as well.”)

Which artists inspire you?
Continuing from the last answer—there are the usual favorites: Golden-Age American illustrators such as Norman Rockwell, Tom Lovell, John Berkey, plus a lot of the Academic painters of the 19th century. I also love the painters who combined academicism with impressionism, such as Sargent, Sorolla, Krøyer, Repin, and others. There are also the landscapists such as William Trost Richards, Ivan Shishkin, and Peder Mork Mønsted. I also admire cartoonists and animators, such as Winsor McCay, Milt Kahl, so this list could go on forever: I love them for their process and philosophy as much as their style. None of them took shortcuts. I think the best advice for a student is to forget about style. Try to learn from the real world with close observation and humility. Make master copies from time to time, and go to museums, but put truth to nature first. And don’t model your work after any living artist, illustrator or animator. Ignore current trends, or your work will look like everyone else's. If you must study the work of other artists, pick ones from the past, and look at many different ones, not just one.

How do you use color to speak to your audience? 
Just about any subject needs to be simplified if it is going to communicate an emotion forcefully to the viewer. That's true of tone, line, detail, light, and color. Your color schemes start to communicate emotions when you leave colors out of the color scheme. That's the basic approach of gamut masking, which is especially important in color scripting in animation and comics.
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More:
John Berkey fan site
Rockwell on Rockwell: How I Make a Picture
Tom Lovell—Illustrator
Previous Post Series: Gamut Masking Method

Francesco Paolo Michetti's Use of Photography

The use of photography was a big turning point for for Francesco Paolo Michetti (Italian 1851-1929). 

With photography, "I stole from nature more than a secret," as Michetti put it, so much so that it gave me "a new vision of art and life."

Michetti made excursions to villages around Naples specifically to acquire photographic reference, capturing countless human types on film: from peasants to priests, children and women with their innumerable expressions, from laughter to tears, from joy to melancholy.

A trove of photos by Michetti and his artist friends came to light in 1966, discovered in a former convent-turned-studio. Many of the photos document village festivals or daily life "in the wild" in rural Italy. 

Other photos by Michetti show models in the controlled conditions of the studio. He shot not only still photographs, but also stereoscopic images, and a film (now lost) 

For Michetti, the archive of photos provided a sense of authenticity and naturalness that he was not able to achieve any other way.

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Online Articles: Francesco Paolo Michetti: Photography as an Aid in Painting

Wikipedia on Francesco Paolo Michetti
Francesco Paolo Michetti Fotografo

Previously: Shishkin and Photography
Using Photo Reference
Book: Francesco Paolo Michetti: Dipinti, pastelli, disegni (Italian Edition)

Wyeth's Rockland Paintings

The Farnsworth Art Museum is currently exhibiting a group of paintings that Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) produced in Rockland, Maine, where the museum is located.

Andrew Wyeth, Rockland Harbor, 1954

The paintings show a variety of water media techniques, including scratch-through, wet-into-wet washes, and scumbling. Many of the painting are framed up and shown here for the first time.

Wyeth, detail of Harjula's Airport, 1964

Wyeth takes great care in drawing and perspective, but he's very selective, focusing only on the part of the scene he wants to show. This biplane is only a small area of the overall composition, and it is carefully observed but efficiently described.  

Here's a detail of "The Slip," showing a two-masted schooner in dry dock, surrounded by grass. The painting is listed as a "drybrush watercolor," a term popularized by the Wyeths to include some opaque white gouache passages. The term is a little misleading, because the pigment isn't necessarily applied dry.



There's also an exhibition called NC Wyeth: Poems of American Patriotism at the nearby Wyeth Center, part of the Farnsworth Art Museum.
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Museum website: Andrew Wyeth in Rockland through February 17, 2019.
Online article: Andrew Wyeth's Rockland: Boats, Planes, and Trains
Recommended books:
Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In
Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life
Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World, and the Olson House
Andrew Wyeth: A Spoken Self-Portrait

Can I Mix Different Brands of Gouache?

Rei asks:

Is it alright to mix gouache of different brands? I have some Winsor and Newton gouache in primary colors, but am interested in trying other brands because of the differences in ingredients, to see what best works for me. Would I be able to mix my white and black W and N gouache with other brands and have an okay turnout? I am not certain because of the ingredients, and would rather not buy paints if they will not mix well with the Winsor and Newton I already own.

Yes you can, Rei, absolutely! I always mix different brands of gouache.

Not only can you mix different brands of gouache, but you can also mix your gouache with watercolors. They're all water based, of course, and both the gouache and watercolors use the same binder, which is gum arabic.

I sometimes start a picture in transparent watercolor and bring in the opaque gouache gradually as I need it, to cover up mistakes, add accents, or flatten passages.

I have even combined transparent watercolor pigments with acrylic matte medium to create an impermeable glazing layer over a casein painting. But be careful of your brushes if you use any acrylic, casein, or cel vinyl in any mixture because those binders will wreck a brush if it dries with paint on it. As always, I'd recommend that you do experiments on test scraps and see what happens with different combinations.

As for which brands to mix with your primaries, I would recommend Holbein's gouache set, M. Graham's watercolor or gouache sets, or the gouache set by Daler Rowney. To read more about kinds of gouache, check my previous post: Gouache Ingredients from Manufacturers.
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PDF of Recommended Gouache Materials

Science Fiction Exhibit in Denmark Opens Today

"Ex Machina" film still ©2015 Universal

Opening today in Odense, Denmark: A major museum exhibition called "Into the Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction," with 6 major Dinotopia paintings. Through Feb. 17, 2019.

Curators say: "Science fiction is responsible for some of the world’s most iconic films, music, literature and art. In the wake of the Star Wars and Alien blockbusters, a constant stream of films, games and books continues to transport us to new planets and galaxies, and into the distant future. But how did the genre arise at the end of the 18th century? And why has it become so popular with people of all ages?"

"This exhibition is the ultimate genre-defining exploration of science fiction, delving into its storytelling beginnings to discover how visionary creators have captured imaginations around the world. Visitors will encounter rare pieces, such as vintage comics and advertisements promoting Soviet visions of space, alongside well-loved classics, including maquettes from Jurassic Park and the original Darth Vader and Stormtrooper helmets from Star Wars."

Into the Unknown: A Journey Through Science Fiction