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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Mount Princeton

Admin October 22, 2013 0

Mount Princeton is one of the "Fourteeners," one of the highest peaks of the Rocky Mountains. I painted it from across the valley, with Buena Vista far below.

I'm proud of my son Frank for climbing all the way to the 14,197' summit. Even in the valley below at 8,000 feet, I'm breathless after a flight of stairs.

Mount Princeton by James Gurney, watercolor and gouache, 5x8 inches, October 2013

I feel that mountain painting requires a different mindset from other subjects. For one thing, I believe it's essential to draw all the forms as accurately as possible, as if I'm on a 19th century survey expedition, and lives depend on my getting the forms right.

To get a feeling of scale, I tried to set up an extreme contrast between large and small touches. A barn in the valley is the size of a pinhead in the painting.

Detail of Mount Princeton, about 1 inch wide. White accents in gouache over watercolor.

Gouache and watercolor lend themselves to this kind of subject, because they allow for extremely small accents, contrasted with larger softly modeled forms. One of the keys to achieving a sense of scale and atmosphere in mountain painting is to keep all the values of the distant space fairly high key.

The way I was set up, with the sunlight streaming directly onto the painting, I had to watch out that I didn't distort the values, because the direct sunlight makes all the painted passages appear lighter and more colorful than they would look in indoor light.

Street scene in Salida, Colorado

Paint Technique

Admin October 21, 2013 0

Here's a painting I did yesterday on a street corner in Salida, Colorado. You can see the giant "S" on Salida's spiral mountain, just behind the Palace Hotel sign.

Palace Hotel, Salida, Colorado. Casein, 5x8 inches, by James Gurney

I used casein paint, with the limited palette of cobalt blue, golden ochre, Venetian red, burnt umber and white.

Here's a detail of the shopfronts and awnings. This represents about one square inch of the original painting. By the time I got to this stage, I was using smaller brushes, mostly flats. With casein, you can build detail by overlapping light over dark and dark over light.

Here's an early stage, about 10 minutes into the 1 hour painting.

Although there's quite a bit of finicky detail work in the final painting, the beginning stages are really loose, painted with a big brush, a luxury you can afford yourself with opaque painting. But under that loose, transparent lay-in is a carefully measured "pencil map" of the big shapes.

Additional tip: Whenever you mix a color, think in terms of classifying the colors in the scene. For example, you might think "white in shadow," "bricks in light," or "aspen foliage in light," etc. Once you have that color on your brush for the one thing you wanted to paint, look for other places in the scene that have similar conditions, and repeat that color in those places.

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Note: Tonight at midnight is the deadline for the "Plein Air Persistence" video contest. I'll try to have all the entrants up and ready for voting by the end of the 24th or 25th.

Icelandic Sheep in Casein

Paint Technique

Admin September 30, 2013 0

Last week we helped with the sheep shearing duties at Dancing Lamb Farm.

In between cleaning the fleeces, I paused to do a casein sketch of one of the sheep who was dozing in the clover.

I took a few closeups of the painting to address some of the questions that came up during last night's web show. One person asked whether you can draw with colored pencils on the surface of dry paint.

Usually casein dries with a surface that doesn't take the colored pencil quite as well as watercolor or gouache does. Sometimes the pencil just skids over the surface. But this time it worked, and I used the black colored pencil to quickly note some detail in the horn, cheek, and eye. I was also able to use the fountain pen over the thin paint, as you can see from the image at the top of the post.

Note the thin, semi-transparent layers of blue, yellow, and green applied with a half inch flat brush in the upper left.

There were a couple of other questions last night about impastos and painting light accents. I set up the whole painting for these last light strokes.

I'm working here in a watercolor sketchbook with about 200 gram paper. Because the paper is quite flexible, heavy impastos in casein could crack off because thick passages are rather brittle, more like chalk than plastic. My impastos here are fairly low, still within the safe range for a watercolor paper support.

If you like to go really crazy with impastos, you should work on a panel, or pre-texture the impastos with acrylic modeling paste, which has more emulsion strength and flexibility than casein.

The handling of the paint here is very reminiscent of oil. It flows off the brush like oil, but it dries in minutes instead of hours. For the oil painter like me looking for a water-based sketching medium that travels well, this fits the bill pretty well.

Scroll down a couple of posts for links on where to get any of these supplies.

Menzel's underdrawings

Perspective

Admin September 20, 2013 0

Unfinished paintings reveal insights about an artist's working methods.

This unfinished painting of the inside of a church by Adolph Menzel shows the scaffolding of perspective lines that he laid down before covering them area by area in oil.

Note the careful spacing of the steps and tiles, and the diagonally sloping centerline from the floor through the feet of the priest, to a point on the eye level. I believe this line helped him establish the correct relative heights of the figures.

One art historian wondered why Menzel painted that blank-looking face staring out at us. I believe that's just a stand-in figure placed there for measurement to set the heights of the other figures. That figure would not have appeared in the final work.

Such careful preliminary underdrawing would be necessary for an accurate study like this one, too. In fact, you can see some more uncovered preliminary lines in the lion in the lower right.

Edit: Blog reader Ken did this diagram to explain. Thanks, Ken!

Release of "How I Paint Dinosaurs"

Video

Admin August 20, 2013 0

Today I'm proud to announce the release of my first art instruction video. Here's a trailer to tell you about it. (Direct link to YouTube trailer)

How This Video Came to Be

Over the last few years, three different art video companies have asked to film my working methods, but I turned them all down because I wanted to learn how to do it myself. That way, I felt I could deliver a better result to you.

That's why it took a while to produce this and bring it to market. I had to learn a lot first. I wanted to shoot detailed video coverage of the entire process, not just one or two days of it, and I knew that an outside team couldn't do that if they just dropped into the studio for a short period of time.

What's in the Video

The video follows the making of these two paintings from start to finish over a two month period from assignment to delivery. It covers the research, thumbnails, maquettes, line drawing, color planning, priming, and the final oil painting.

I know not everyone is into dinosaurs, but if you paint any kind of imaginative realism, I think you'll find the method helpful. I have more videos in the pipeline about plein-air painting in watercolor and casein, which I'll tell you more about later.

"How I Paint Dinosaurs" runs about 53 minutes, short enough to watch multiple times, but long enough to cover everything. I tried to apply everything I learned from your 81 comments to my post asking you what you like (and don't like) in an art video.

Reviews

“Any artist who has been treated to James Gurney’s previous books will be delighted with his newest offering, How I Paint Dinosaurs, an over-the-shoulder look at how this remarkable dinosaur artist achieves not only realism but a true sense of drama in portraying these animals for National Geographic Magazine and others. Gurney not only knows dinosaurs but is a master painter of light and shadow, and he shares his techniques in an easily understandable and informal way. I learned much from watching this.”
---Mark Hallett, paleoartist

“What do Leonardo Da Vinci, Charles R. Knight, and Jim Gurney have in common? True art, texture, and no photo manipulation software. Who needs a time machine to see life in the Mesozoic? Just let Jim paint it for you. Here is how True Magic is done. Now it is your turn to learn to make magic.”
—Michael K. Brett-Surman, PhD., co-editor of The Complete Dinosaur (Life of the Past)

How to Order

The DVD is currently available at Kunaki.com, where you can order directly and have it shipped to you. (International customers, please remember, it's region-encoded NTSC for U.S.A and Canada.)

You can also preorder the DVD from Amazon.com. I just set up the page there, and they'll have copies soon.

At Gumroad where you can download a video file right now. (Edit: I would like to sincerely thank all of you who have added a little extra to your Gumroad payment. I really appreciate it!)

Paypal customers can also get the digital download at Sellfy (link to product description page) by clicking on this button: buy

Quang Ho Portrait Demo

Portraits

Admin April 29, 2013 0

On the last day of the Portrait Society’s annual convention, Vietnamese-born, Colorado-based Quang Ho treated an audience of over 500 attendees to a dazzling two-hour head study.

(Photo by Susan Voss)
I sat off to the side with my sketchbook on my knee. I wanted to capture Quang Ho’s confident stance and the big curve of his new palette. “I bought it because it looks so cool, really,” he said.

While he painted, he discussed everything from color to cosmology, interspersing profound musings with self-effacing jokes.

Quang Ho’s primary concern was to create interesting abstractions within the context of realism: “I’m not painting a person,” he said. “I’m painting the visual context, the setting in a given light. I’m reading the story of what the light is doing to the form.”

(Photo of Thursday's Face-Off painting)
He regarded the light mass of the picture as a single organism, with its own life and personality. The same is true with the dark mass or shadow. “[The art of] painting is how those two organisms come together,” he said. In any given painting, either the light or the shadow should dominate, but they should not be equal.

His first strokes were a wild but accurate frenzy of brushwork. The model’s pose and attitude emerged from a tangle of apparent randomness. He alternately advanced toward—and backed away from—the painting, repeatedly relating the part to the whole. “Painting goes at different speeds, like driving,” he said. If you only go fast all the time, you’ll get in a train wreck."

(A sample from his website)

During the breaks he showed a gallery of images on the screen, starting with a microscopic array of diatoms and sand grains, followed by sweeping vistas of the solar system and distant galaxies.

(Above: Detail of "Mizuna.")

He then zoomed into details of his own paintings, which he calls “internal structures.” As with self-similarity in fractals, he was conscious of creating interesting abstract compositions at both the micro and the macro scale. He made an effort to infuse even the negative areas of the pictures with painterly interest.

(Quang Ho, "Mizuna," 12x12 inches, from which the previous detail was extracted.)

In color mixing, he spoke most often about value. “If you’re not sure of the color, think only of the value,” he said. “Value is what is important. You can give me motor oil and I can paint with it.”
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Many thanks to Mr. Edward Jonas for inviting me to be a part of the convention, and to all the attendees for your kind words and welcome.

(Above: James Gurney and Quang Ho. Photo by Sivananda Nyayapathi)
Read more:
Quang Ho's website

Quang Ho’s interesting life story
Portrait Society of America

Source of sand grain photo, galaxy,

Marc Dallesio's one-minute videos

Paint Technique

Admin April 19, 2013 0

Florence-based American artist Marc Dalessio has produced a series of short videos, each one making a single point about academic methods for painting the landscape and the figure.

(Direct link to video) This one shows how to use the the sight-size method for landscape.

(Video link) A pocket mirror helps check the accuracy of a portrait. You can hold it both horizontally and vertically to help spot errors in the drawing.

Some of Marc's other one minute videos:
Using a cuttlebone for to prepare the surface of a painting
Scraping down between painting sessions
Sealing gessoed panels
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Marc Dalessio's blog
Marc's website
Lines and Colors profile
Thanks, Thomas Kitts

Plein Air Gouache in Monterey

Watercolor Painting

Admin April 17, 2013 0

Gouache—or opaque watercolor—is a wonderful sketching medium because it's so portable, opaque, and fast drying. It's well suited to oil painters who want to travel super-light. I had a few tubes with me at the Plein Air convention in Monterey last Sunday.

Good thing, because I needed something opaque to cover a failed page in my watercolor sketchbook (better than cutting a page out).

For this painting, I set out to capture a lineup of painters in a warm color range, gradating both the background color and the silhouettes as you shift to the left. The morning sun edge-lit the artists and their easels, helping to separate them in some places, while they merged into the tone at the base.

(Direct link to Video)

You can watch the painting being made on this short video. Note the skateboard dolly shots by my son Frank and his buddy Justin Critelli, who operated the cameras while steering dangerously between tippy easels.
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Subscribe for free to the James Gurney YouTube Channel and see the videos before anyone else.

Materials: Designers' Gouache, Caran D'Ache watercolor pencils, Moleskine Watercolor Notebook, and various sizes of flat watercolor brushes.

Zhaoming Wu Demo

Paint Technique

Admin April 14, 2013 0

Chinese master Zhaoming Wu did a two-hour figure painting demo in oil yesterday at the Plein Air convention in Monterey, California. Here are a few notes:

"I start with three values. At the beginning I keep the treatment of shadows flat, with almost no form, but I keep lots of color. After working on the shadows I begin working on the light side."

"I start with a 2D approach, thinking first of shape, then of value, and then color. First comes 2D—shapes and angles; then 3D—form, volume, and structure."

"Once the shadow shapes are clear, I establish halftones and value ranges in the light side. There should be some temperature contrast from light to shadow. Normally I like natural studio north light, with warm shadows and cool light."

"I use thicker paint on the light side to give texture. Some touches of the brush are very delicate, and some are more scumbling. At the final stages, edge control is very important. There should be a lost and found quality to the edges in order to show atmosphere and depth."

Zhaoming Wu gave a lot of consideration to the transition areas between light and shadow. He brushed along, but also across, the forms, alternately softening and defining edges all the way from start to finish.

He stood evenly on both feet, holding the brush well back from the ferrule, and considering each stroke carefully, flicking the brush upward after each stroke was completed. The small accents of the dress and the hair came at the very last.

New book: Selected Oil Paintings by Wu Zhaoming: Oversea Chinese Oil Painters (Chinese Edition)
Zhaoming Wu website
Plein Air convention
YouTube video of Zhaoming Wu

Auster and Crump Demos

Paint Technique

Admin April 13, 2013 0

There are about 70 faculty artists here at the Plein Air convention, each giving lectures and demonstrations. Some of the demos are conducted indoors on a stage, with giant screens projecting the work as the artists describe their process.

Ken Auster set up a canvas the size of a picture window. To establish the placement of elements, he held up a small photo directly in front of the large canvas, charged forward, and placed the landmark points that he held in short term memory.

For the remainder of the hour and a half demo he used big brushes and paint squeezed from a caulking gun, to create the oil cityscape you see below.

He expressed the importance of leaving all but the focal point broadly stated. "The part of the visual field that you see in focus is equal to the size of your thumb held at arm's length," he said. He compared an overly finished painting to a play with too many lead actors in it.

New Zealand artist John Crump demonstrated a surf scene in oil. "I tend not to be a

high key painter. I tend to paint in grays." He used a light touch with his bristle brushes, often feathering the strokes to give softness and atmosphere.

Crump established the dark masses of rock as large shapes and then added the light planes over them toward the end of his hour and a half-long demo. What you see above is a work in progress, and he seemed keen on putting more time into it.

Edit: Here's the finish!

When do you paint highlights?

Watercolor Painting

Admin March 18, 2013 0

A couple of years ago I visited the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University as the guest of the illustration department. After giving a lecture, I did a portrait demo of painting professor Tom Barrett.

As you can see, there were at least three sources of light (two incandescent floods on stands and the window light, but the one next to the table predominated. The drawing is in water-soluble colored pencil and watercolor about 8 x 6 inches.

Once I had established the preliminary drawing, one of the earliest decisions was where to place the highlights, since I was using transparent watercolor only. So when I laid the first washes of skin tone across the face, I painted around the white spaces on the forehead, the tip and bridge of the nose, and the cheeks.

In watercolor, since highlights are the lightest values, they must be left as unpainted white paper. They can also be masked out from the start, or applied with gouache at the last. In oil paintings, highlights should generally be saved for the last.

There's a lot more on the subject of "highlights and specularity" in the six-page article that I wrote for the current issue of International Artist magazine, which should be on the newsstands now.

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Flickr stream with more photos of my visit to AIB
Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University
International Artist magazine, Issue 90
Photo above by Keith MacLelland

Media: watercolor pencils and water-soluble pastels. Water and ink applied with water brushes, one filled with water, and the other filled with fountain pen ink.

This subject is also covered in my book Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter (Amazon), also available signed from my website store.

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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Mount Princeton

Monday, October 21, 2013

Street scene in Salida, Colorado

Monday, September 30, 2013

Icelandic Sheep in Casein

Friday, September 20, 2013

Menzel's underdrawings

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Release of "How I Paint Dinosaurs"

Monday, April 29, 2013

Quang Ho Portrait Demo

Friday, April 19, 2013

Marc Dallesio's one-minute videos

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Plein Air Gouache in Monterey

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Zhaoming Wu Demo

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Auster and Crump Demos

Monday, March 18, 2013

When do you paint highlights?

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