Speed Blur

Here’s a painting of Will Denison that appears near the beginning of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. It follows a finicky establishing shot of Waterfall City. The idea was to grab the reader with fast movement.


Maybe you’re like me, and you love to stop-frame DVDs during fast action sequences (drives some people crazy). I got this idea by frame-grabbing during scenes where the camera is tracking a fast-flying object through tight spaces. The whole background blurs radially from the vanishing point along the path of movement. The blur gets more extreme toward the edges of the picture. Forms closest to the “camera” blur the most. Only the edges perpendicular to the movement get the blur treatment; the ones running along the path of action stay sharp.

Yeah, I know there are Photoshop and 3D programs that can create this effect, but I wanted to do it the “inconvenient” way with good old oil paint. I laid in the whole scene wet-into-wet, and swooshed the edges with a white nylon blender.