Bewick’s Tailpieces

One of Newcastle's best known artists is Thomas Bewick (1793-1828). He was a wood engraver and an early pioneer and innovator of book illustration.

One of Bewick's specialties was the tailpiece, a small spot illustration filling the empty space at the end of a chapter. The Laing Museum has an exhibit of these works, which they call "tale-pieces" because many of them tell a witty story or teach a moral lesson.

This one, which is reality only about two inches across, shows an old woman chasing geese. This kind of ornamental design frequently was surrounded by leaves and foliage. For that reason they came to be known as a vignettes, from the French word "vigne" meaning "vine."
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The Laing Museum exhibit will be shown through 18 October 2009.

Wikipedia on Thomas Bewick.

Scale Tip

Here’s a tip for making something look gigantic: exaggerate the contrast between large, soft forms and tiny, sharp details.

For example, in this pencil sketch of a B777-200 yesterday, I peppered the big sausage shape of the fuselage with lots of tiny accents, all the way down to the rivets around the cockpit windows. (Click to enlarge.)

For a drawing like this, you’re not necessarily aiming for an obsessive level of finish. Instead you’re emphasizing extreme contrasts of scale and ignoring the middle-size shapes, such as the service vehicles.

I used a cardboard stomp to soften the big shadow shapes on the ground and on the underside of the aircraft. And I kept the HB pencil honed to a needle-sharp point.

It looks like I'm sketching Jeanette's portrait here, but actually I'm looking past her out the window.
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Photo by Little Nandi.com. Travel note: We're in Newcastle, U.K. now, a lovely city of honey-colored Victorian buildings left over from its industrial heyday. The architecture should make good watercolor sketching on Friday if the weather permits. Friday night the city transforms with its legendary "stag and hen" revelry.

Utopiales Poster, Part 7: The Painting

During the last week, I've been posting a blow-by-blow account of the progress on a single painting, the poster for the Utopiales Festival, which will take place later this year in Nantes, France.


Here's a video showing how the painting developed from the line drawing to the final image. I put the last strokes on the painting today.



The painting took twelve days in all: two days for thumbnails, two days for the maquette, two more days for the line drawing, and six days for the final oil painting. In cast you missed the previous stages of the artwork, check out the earlier posts in the series, listed in the blogroll at left.

Here's the full composition, called Décollage nocturne (Nighttime Liftoff) showing the Lepidopter taking off during moonlight from the Place Royale.

On the cockpit of the Lepidopter, I added the coat of arms of the city of Nantes. The passenger cabin says "Nantes - Dinotopia Express."

Was there a transport between Nantes and Dinotopia? Did Jules Verne have something to do with this? Was he more than just a witness to the liftoff of the Lepidopter? The gentlemen behind him are interviewing a farmer about strange sightings of giant reptiles on a farm in Clisson. Perhaps one day the mystery will be solved....
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More information about the Utopiales International Festival of Science Fiction on its official website.

More about the music of the Hay Brigade and Dan Gurney's current travel adventures in France.

Tomorrow Jeanette and I head for Newcastle for the Dinotopia exhibit there.

Comics in the Classroom

For any teacher considering using comics in the classroom, Teaching Degree.org has assembled a huge number of helpful resources, including benefits, resources, reading lists, lesson plans, manga & anime, and where to get free stuff.

(Above, Andy Wales of Lynch-Bustin Elementary School in Athens, PA, a pioneer promoter of comics to schoolkids). His blog is "Panel Discussion".

100 tips and tools for comics in the classroom, link.

Utopiales Poster, Part 6: Washin

This is Part 6 in the ongoing progress report on the Utopiales poster. The first steps of an oil painting are really important, because they set up opportunities for later stages of the rendering.

When I paint an imaginary scene in oil, I usually try for three strategies in the first statement:
1.Establish the overall color temperature for each region of the picture.
2. Suggest the large tonal statement of light and dark.
3. Keep everything a little lighter than the final rendering will be.

Following strategy #3 leaves you the option to achieve your final color rendering either transparently or opaquely. If you go too dark too soon, you can only correct it with opaques. Comparing the first step with the final below of Old Conductor from Journey to Chandara, the washin should look like the intended finish with a piece of tracing paper laid over it.

The reason for #2 is that every judgment needs to be seen in context. If you paint each area starting from white, like paint-by-numbers, it’s harder to make accurate choices. It can be done, but to me it makes more sense for observational work.

The first strategy could be called a color imprimatura. A moonlight scene might be washed all over with a light blue-green. If the scene has different colored lights, each light region should be bathed in the color of each source. If there are multi-colored light sources, a white object will take on the relative color of each source.
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Thanks to Online University Reviews for naming Gurney Journey one of the "100 Best Scholarly Art Blogs" (#65, right next to my buddy Tony DiTerlizzi.) Kudos to my assistant professor, my budgie!
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Earlier post on "Area-by-Area" painting, link.

Line Drawing

We’re continuing a daily progress report on the poster for the Utopiales Festival in Nantes, France.

During the preliminary drawing stage, the studio fills with clutter.
Near the maquette of the flying machine are model horses, photos of Nantes, books about insects, coffee cups, and audio cassettes with recordings I’ve made of steam engines and street noises.

I love this photo of the square called Place Royale in Nantes. This is the period I’m trying to evoke. My dream is that a little over a hundred years ago, Nantes had strange visitors who arrived and departed by moonlight in this incredible flying machine. It flew very gently and majestically like a sailing ship, creaking and hissing steam.

Here’s the line drawing. This jpeg is a pretty large file, so if you click on it, you can see most of the details. Even though it’s just a line drawing, I’m thinking ahead to tone and color, which is coming up next.

Here’s a 40-second video showing a little about perspective and how to seal the drawing before painting.
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More about the Utopiales Festival
Previous posts on Perspective Grid, Sealing the Surface

Utopiales Poster, Part 3: Lighting

One of the benefits of maquettes is that you can experiment with lighting ideas that would otherwise be hard to invent.

Here are four lighting ideas. The last one is shot outdoors in overcast light with an incandescent light filling the shadows. The other three are shot indoors with two lights of contrasting color temperature.

Number two uses a technique called light painting, where I handheld a small LED light wrapped in an amber gel, sweeping it across a small area during a four second time exposure.

In night scenes, localized lighting that falls off rapidly away from the source can be an effective way to suggest scale.

All of these are shot with a self-timered Canon Digital Rebel single lens reflex camera on a tripod. The pole in the middle is supporting a Mole-Richardson Tweenie II Solarspot (about three feet above the top of the photo), which is washing the back wall with orange light.

Now I’m ready to move ahead with the line drawing.

Utopiales Poster, Part 3: Maquette

When it comes to building a maquette, there’s always a little voice inside me that says, “You can skip this step. You’ve got a good enough idea where you’re going. You can pull it off.”

Sometimes I struggle to overcome that voice, especially with a pressing deadline. But I once I start sculpting, I always have fun, and later I’m always glad I did it. In the end it saves time and yields better results.

For this “Lepidopter” maquette (thanks for the name, Sean and Moai!) I had to decide between glue gun-and-cardboard or sculpted polymer clay. The former would have given it a more flat geometric look, but I wanted to get that organic insect look.

Here’s the armature, twisted together out of thin aluminum wire. It doesn’t look like anything yet, but actually all the lengths are carefully measured against the elevation drawing I showed you at the end of yesterday’s post.


Those four loops will hold the wings and allow them to be poseable. I start blobbing on regular white Sculpey until I bulk out the body.

As I get to the outer layer and the thin parts, like the tail and the legs, I switch to Effect Fimo. When this special kind of polymer clay cures, it become slightly translucent and flexible, about as flexible as a fingernail. That way a delicate part won’t break if you drop the thing (which I do often).

The window details are built up with little slivers of Fimo, using a toothpick and an Xacto knife as sculpting tools. The maquette is only detailed on the side I’ll see; the far side is not finished at all. I cured the fuselage in the oven before painting and assembling the wings.

Then I drew the wings on tracing paper and made two sets Xerox copies, forward and reversed, on card stock. I used a waxer on both sides and laminated the layers together so that the veining pattern lined up. With the intermediate layer of beeswax between the card stock sandwich, the wing will hold any airfoil camber.

Then I epoxied the wings onto the wing struts and painted the fuselage with craft acrylics—the cheap liquid kind you get at the big box craft stores. I actually like the opacity and flow of this stuff more than artist acrylics.

Here it is. The wings look too much like an actual butterfly right now, but I’ll change them a little to look like they were fabricated by the same mind that built the rest of the aircraft.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about lighting and photographing the maquette.