Vanderbilt Vista

Monday was a perfect day for painting along the Hudson River.

As an added pleasure, we were joined by two artists I greatly admire: Erik Tiemens (on bench to the left), one of the main conceptual designers for Lucasfilm, and Bill Mather, concept artist, matte painter, and author of Drawn to Beauty.

The park ranger of the Vanderbilt Estate appeared from nowhere and started telling us about the place.

He told us that the view we were painting was immortalized by Currier and Ives (above) and “painted by a lot of amateurs, like yourselves,” he said, gazing at my painting. He kindly overlooked the fact that Trusty Rusty spent three hours in the 15 minute parking lot.

After we finished, it was fun to see how all four of us brought out different aspects of the scene.

Jeanette did the small watercolor in the Moleskine book at lower left. Erik did a vertical composition in gouache, after sketching a couple of exploratory thumbnails. Bill worked patiently in pencil to describe the foliage textures. “I’m approaching it as if it was an etching,” he said.

Mine is the one in oil, 8x16 inches. The air was so misty that you could barely see the Catskill Mountain range, just a faint hint behind the white dots of the convent on the far shore.
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Erik has a blog called Virtual Gouache Land, and a website, Water Sketch.
Bill has a blog and a web gallery.
The great art blog Lines and Colors has covered Erik, link, and Bill, link,
We were painting at the Vanderbilt Mansion site, link.
Currier and Ives image courtesy The Old Print Shop, link.

Music While Painting

I’m curious what you like to listen to when you’re painting and drawing. Is there a certain kind of music that gets you into the zone? Can your left brain listen to books-on-tape while your right brain is doing art? Are there times you just prefer silence?

In the column at left is a blog-reader poll. I invite you to vote for the kinds of music that you listen to the most when you’re working.

In the comments, please recommend your favorite links for free podcasts, or share some funny stories about people listening to music in studios or sketch groups. I’m curious to know how music or talk radio interacts with your visual tasks. Do different parts of your creative process (preliminary sketching, blocking in, or finished painting) seem to call out for different kinds of music?

E.H. Shepard’s Academic Studies

(Note to parents: there’s some minor artistic nudity on this post).

Last weekend some artist friends came by the studio: Barry Klugerman (left), an artist, collector, and connoisseur of illustrated books; fellow illustrator Mark Elliott; and muralist, portrait painter, and illustrator Mike Wimmer (far right). Mike was stopping by on his way home to Oklahoma after attending the Hartford Art School Illustration MFA Program.



Barry brought up his collection of academic figure drawings by Ernest H. Shepard. Better known for his Winnie the Pooh illustrations, Shepard won a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools in 1897, where he received rigorous academic training. At age 18, he was the youngest student there, but he was already good at drawing. Both his parents were artists, and they were close friends with the artists Frank Dicksee and Edwin Abbey.

These drawings were done in 11 sessions, 2 hours each (with breaks) in the figure class under proctors like George Clausen and John Singer Sargent. Once the pose was set by the visiting teacher, the students were not allowed to make suggestions, and they were absolutely forbidden to speak to the model. Male and female students worked and lived separately.

Nevertheless Shepard met the woman who was to be his first wife at art school. Her name was Florence Eleanor Chaplin, three years his senior, but at least his equal at drawing (her drawing above). Like many gifted female artists, she sacrificed her career for her responsibilities in a Victorian marriage.

Shepard soon was illustrating for the magazine Punch. According to biographer Rawle Knox, “knowing that he was a draughtsman rather than a colorist, he tried to get a footing as an illustrator and black and white artist.” The apparent ease and simplicity of Shepard’s Pooh illustrations belie the long hours of careful observation from his early training.

All images are copyright their respective owners.
Information from The Work of E H Shepard, by Rawle Knox, available at Amazon.

ABC: University

On Wednesdays we share in a group sketch game called "Art By Committee." I give you an excerpt from an actual science fiction manuscript and you come up with a picture to illustrate it.

I always try to stump you with a tough one. This one was, "It seemed as if the whole damned planet was a university." As always, you rose to the occasion with some creative solutions.

Michael Geissler
Chris Oakey

Andy Wales Tony Upton
Antonio Araujo

Art Keegan

…and the one from the original sketchbook, a group effort of artist friends at a coffee shop.

Here’s next week’s quote: “His left eye was swollen shut.”Please scale your JPG to around 700 pixels across and compress it as much as possible. Title it with your name, send it to: jgurneyart(at)yahoo.com, subject line ABC, and let me know your blog or website if you want me to link (even if you gave it to me before). Please have your entries in by next Tuesday at 10:00 AM Eastern Time USA.

Walking Vehicles, part 2.

This four-legged walking vehicle or “strutter” was a main character in Dinotopia: The World Beneath. It's based on the design of a ceratopsian, with the passenger seat built into the pelvis area, and the driver's seat between the scapulas. This is how it appeared after the head/windshield was bitten off by a T.rex.

I built the original reference maquette (below) by “kitbashing,” or combining parts from about four different Japanese robot plastic model kits and filling in extra shapes with two-part sculptor’s putty. The reference maquette was just a start in conceptualizing the design, but it gave me a lot of information, especially for unusual angles.

You can often find unbuilt plastic models at yard sales, and they make good raw material for kitbashing. The front section of the vehicle above was originally the torso of a humanoid Japanese robot.

Denison’s strutter was one of the toy prototypes made by the concept development team at Hasbro based on the illustrations in The World Beneath. This model shows the full strutter, complete with its head, and the windshield built into the frill. The prototype can walk...sort of—you can see the linkage bars behind the front legs—though the challenge with a real toy is to make it strong enough to be manhandled by toddlers.

Model builder Glenn Ludgate of Australia has built several scratch-built one-of-a-kind Dinotopia vehicles as hobby projects. Here's one of Arthur Denison's strutter in progress.
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More about the Hasbro Dinotopia prototypes, link.

Walking Vehicles, Part 1

Vehicles that move across the ground usually have either wheels, tracks, or legs. A walking vehicle has the advantage on uneven terrain. You can base a design concept on many living analogs, for nature has no use for the wheel.

Above is a scratch-built arthropod-based vehicle from Dinotopia: The World Beneath. The small maquette helped to visualize it in three dimensions and from various angles. The design is based on an extinct shrimplike invertebrate.

In the story, the vehicle, or “strutter” as it is called in Dinotopia, gets out of control and fights another strutter, while Arthur Denison and his friends watch in horror.

One reason wheels never arose in nature is the difficulty of designing a circulatory system that could work across a turning axle. Birds, humans, and a few mammals use two legs, but four, six or more legs are more common. Below is a full-size working model of a Japanese armored tech.



Engineers who design the drive mechanisms for walking vehicles usually have to solve three problems: how to translate the energy of the motor to the back and forth movement of the leg, how to achieve balance, and how to steer and change direction.

Tomorrow: part two, including Arthur Denison's strutter.
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Addendum: Blog reader Scibotic has suggested these awesome YouTube videos. Thanks, Ben:

Mondo Spider, homemade walking vehicle with driver: link
Walking Sculptures, passive wind-powered beach walker with many legs: link
Big Dog, a four-legged autonomous vehicle that recovers balance on ice and uneven terrain: link

Bleaching and Glare

When sunlight is extremely bright, the eye is dazzled for a moment. It takes a few seconds for the pupils to constrict. The cones are overwhelmed. Color response drops off in the brightly lit areas, and the shadows appear higher in chroma. This is the reverse of the normal rule of “color obtains in the light.”

Before Impressionism there was a movement called “The Glare Aesthetic” where artists used this bleaching phenomenon to convey bright light.
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GJ post: "Color Obtains in the Light," link.
Top painting is by William Paxton (1869-1941) called the Chinese Parasol (1908), link.
Bottom painting by William Picknell (1853-1897), Road to Concarneau, link.
Chapter on the glare aesthetic in American Impressionism by William Gerdts, link.