Bloomsbury Auction

On Wednesday, December 9, Bloomsbury Auction house will have a sale called "Capture the Imagination: Original Illustration and Fine Illustrated Books."

There will be one Dinotopia item in the sale, a rare first edition/first printing with an even more rare title page:


Bloomsbury "Capture the Imagination" Auction Catalog, Lot 279, p. 116.
Website Bloomsbury Auctions.com

Enchantment Symposium Tomorrow

Tomorrow the Joseloff Gallery of the University of Hartford in Connecticut will open the exhibition "Enchantment Then and Now: Drawing Connections."

The exhibition includes Briton Riviere (above), J.L. Gerome, William Bouguereau, Howard Pyle, NC Wyeth, Graydon Parrish, Walton Ford, and a selection of other contemporary painters whose work addresses the theme of enchantment, narrative, and romanticism.


Above: Howard Pyle, "Why Seek Ye the Living in the Place of the Dead?," 1905.

There will also be a panel discussion tomorrow, Friday, Nov. 6th, 1:30-3:00 p.m moderated by former Dahesh Museum director and current editor of Fine Art Connoisseur Peter Trippi. The panel includes Alison Moritsugu, Graydon Parrish, Patricia Watwood, the Director of the Dahesh Museum of Art, David Farmer, and me. The opening reception will be Friday from 5-7.
-------
Review of the exhibtion in the Hartford Courant.

Preview all the art in the exhibition at the Joseloff Gallery's Flickr Page.
Information about the symposium and the opening reception on Friday.

Storybox

Don't think outside the box. Think INSIDE the box.

----------
This spoof of movie trailers brings Video Week to a close. I hope you enjoyed these little commercials. Tomorrow we return to regular programming.

Caption Contest Finalists

It was very hard to narrow down all the great captions you provided for this Dinotopia Deleted Scene Caption Contest. Instead of three finalists, I have kept six, all of whom will receive an Imaginative Realism poster.

1. Kid: Dag! What's in this stuff?!! Look what it did to my Corgi...

2. Just a little farther and I'll be one step closer to having those dino-feet for the back of my chair too!

3. If this painting wasn’t so bad, maybe this food would taste better!?

4. "Timmy! No! That's how you lost your left hand the last time!"

5. Gee Johnny. If one cake turned you into a dinosaur, maybe another will turn you back.

6. Dinosaur: Why can’t I have a knife and fork?

Boy: The iron age hasn’t arrived yet!

----
Note: The poll is now closed, and #4 is the winner.
-------
Daroo, Mark, GooGoo, Ted, Advantageous, and David: please email me your mailing address so that I can send you the poster, and, depending on who wins, the extra grand prize poster.

Caption Contest

This drawing from 1989 is an early experimental (and failed) attempt to work out the technique for Dinotopia.

But it needs a humorous caption. So I'm inviting you to contribute one in the comments below. Either the dinosaur or the kid could be talking.

The deadline is tomorrow, Thursday at 9:00 p.m., Eastern time. I'll pick three finalists, each of whom will receive as a gift a signed, two-sided poster for Imaginative Realism (the book itself will be published in early October).

On Friday you'll be able to vote on your favorite of the three caption finalists. The grand prize winner will receive an additional Dinotopia poster and a hand-drawn remarque.

Insect Vehicles, Part 1

A few weeks ago, we took a brief look at a vehicle based on a butterfly design (link), but I thought it would be fun to explore the topic of flying insect-based vehicles a little more.

Throughout the history of transportation design, engineers have looked to nature for design analogs: fish for ships, tortoises for armored vehicles, and birds for aircraft. From the time of Leonardo da Vinci onward, many of the concepts for ornithopters were based on birds. Today many of the new semi-autonomous spy drones come from the study of insects.

The dragonfly is an ancient natural design, and it’s a powerful and agile flier. The two sets of wings beat out of phase with each other, making for a smooth ride. Each wingbeat is controlled by a separate nerve impulse, unlike flies and bees, whose wingbeats depend on a pulsating vibration of the upper plates of the thorax.

Recent high speed photography has revealed the secret of how insects fly. They take advantage of minature vortexes in the air to get extra lift—you can feel this effect by moving your hands in “wingbeats” underwater. But in an air medium, insect designs only work at a small scale, for the physics changes as you scale everything up.

This ornithopter maquette is from Dinotopia: The World Beneath. It’s based on the extinct dragonfly Meganeura, with some steampunk elements. I built the maquette with a pine fuselage and cardboard wings, which were mounted over armature wire, much like I did with the Utopiales Lepidopter, so that I could pose them at any angle.
------
Photo by Robert Seber: link. (Canon 30D, 300mm IS ISO 1600, 1/1600, f/8)
Building the Utopiales maquette, link.

Waterfall City Gliders

One of the first paintings that led to Dinotopia was Waterfall City which I painted in 1988. At the time I hadn't thought of dinosaurs or pterosaurs yet. When I imagined how people should cross the gorge to the city, I imagined them flying hang gliders. These sketches show how the designs for those gliders evolved.

Cronkite in Dinotopia

The legendary newsman Walter Cronkite (November 4, 1916 – July 17, 2009) attended the release party of Dinotopia in 2002. He is seen here holding the animatronic hatchling "26."

Thanks, Stefan.

Centre for Life

We had a memorable visit to the Centre for Life in Newcastle, UK, where the “Return to Dinotopia” exhibition will be held through this summer.

This superb hands-on science discovery museum has an upstairs room where over 50 Dinotopia paintings are on display, along with a large format digital slide show taking viewers behind the scenes into the making of Dinotopia. I gave three slide presentations to a variety of groups in the egg-shaped auditorium.

One of the highlights was meeting a longtime Dinotopia Message Board administrator Nathalie, who came all the way from Holland.

Another highlight was listening to Noel Jackson, one of the directors of the science center, as he performed a piece that he composed called “Dancing with Dinosaurs.” Behind him on his right was the painting of the dinosaur playing a concertina in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

Behind the scenes in the museum, I had a chance to hold a giant African land snail and a Madagascar hissing cockroach (above) in my hand. These are both surprisingly good creatures for interacting with the public, the museum's educators told me. They don't run around or bite or get stressed out too much from being handled. And young children, if they haven't been taught to fear them, kind of fall in love with snails and cockroaches.

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....
------
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.


Part 1: Initial Sketches
Part 2: Researching Insect Flight
Part 3: Maquette

Part 4: Lighting

Part 5: Pencil Drawing

Part 6: Washin

Part 7: The Painting

Costumes, Part 2

Continuing yesterday's costume tips:


7. You can improvise a lot of costume details with samples of fabric combined with old clothes from your closet. It doesn’t matter if the color matches or if it looks good enough to go on stage. You’re just looking for information about folds and drapery.

8. If you can’t fine the right costume, don’t worry! Remnants of leather, satin, brocade, or velvet from a fabric store can provide you with helpful information about the behavior of the fabric. Steel bowls from the kitchen can give ideas for how armor would look.

9. For simple togas and capes, you can drape and pin fabric samples over your artist mannikin or dressmaker’s dummy. For the fabric to scale down to a miniature size, it should be a very light weight. Cellophane scales down really well over a miniature figure, and can be spray painted to give it opacity (Thanks, Graydon).

10. Don’t be shy to ask for help. If you know someone who is clever with a sewing machine and can think laterally, they might be able to help you improvise a few basic things.

11. Once you get your model (or yourself) in costume, you can take reference photos in a variety of poses. If it’s an easy pose to hold, you can work directly from the model. That's how I did the painting of Oriana above, which appears in Dinotopia: The World Beneath. I put pieces of tape on the floor to mark where the model's feet should return between breaks. The whole session only took about an hour and a half, which saved time over shooting reference or doing drawn studies.

12. If you attend a sketch group, ask if your fellow artists might enjoy sketching from a costumed model. If so, everyone can pitch in a costume or two, or the models may come with something. You can usually pay the model to stay after the sketch session to work with you for reference.

Costumes, Part 1

An artist like Edwin Austin Abbey (below: "Who is Sylvia") was legendary among his peers for lavishing a fortune on the right costume for reference. (More Abbey samples here)

Good costumes can be expensive to buy or rent. And they can be difficult to make. But having a real costume makes a huge difference in your finished work. You can tell right away if an artist just made up a costume or went to the trouble to get a real one.

Abbey’s illustrations commanded princely sums a hundred years ago. What are we mortals to do nowadays on a shoestring budget? Today and tomorrow I'll offer 12 tips to save you money, time, and trouble.



1. You can find costumes at thrift stores or junk shops. Almost every garage sale has a Halloween costume or an unusual hat that you may want to use later.

2. Many smaller communites have a local theater company with costume collections. They are sometimes willing to loan their costumes to illustrators.

3. Renaissance festivals have vendors with an assortment of hats, cloaks, corsets, gowns, breeches, and doublets. Example: Moresca Clothing and Costume. That’s where the blue and red jacket came from, and I’ve used it in many Dinotopia pictures.

4. People who work in living history museums wear very authentic costumes. I've found they're glad to model for a sketchbook study. They may also be willing to pose for photo reference, but be sure to get their written permission first. Examples: Plimouth Plantation, Old Sturbridge Village, Colonial Williamsburg.

5. Big cities like New York, London, or Los Angeles have rental agencies serving theatrical or movie productions. Sometimes they will sell off their older, worn-out costumes. That’s where the doublet with the slashed sleeves above came from. Examples: Palace Costumes, Adele's Costumes.

6. Large museums, like the Metropolitan Museum or the Victoria and Albert in London have costume collections which can usually be sketched or photographed. Examples: Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Tomorrow: Six more costume tips.

Spiderwick Meets Dinotopia

Tony Diterlizzi asked a bunch of his art friends to do drawings set in the Spiderwick cosmos. The drawings will appear in the back of an upcoming omnibus edition of Spiderwick stories.

I drew Hogsqueal riding Bix.


Here’s a movie of the work in progress, drawn with a Niji water brush filled with Higgins Eternal ink.


I gave the original to Tony and he reciprocated with this nifty drawing of Will Denison meeting a befeathered Bix. I love it!

Read how he developed his drawing on his blog, link.

Backyard Posing Party

Creating Dinotopia paintings has often led to strange parties in my backyard.

In the spring of 1991, I invited a whole bunch of friends to pose for a painting of a dinosaur Olympic event called Ring Riders. The painting appeared in Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time,

Each kid chose which hat or headdress they wanted to wear. I played both actor and director while my wife Jeanette worked the camera.

One mom made a bunch of pastries and handed them out. I used that moment in the final painting.

Using chairs and cushions and cardboard rings as props, the kids took their positions, imagining they were riding on the backs of the dinosaurs. It helped when it I acted it out first, hamming it up a little to try to get them to loosen up.


A group with mismatched costumes and with varying levels of enthusiasm acted out the part of the crowd watching the sporting event. I’m sure they could sympathize with modern actors who have to emote in front of a greenscreen.

This form of group acting works especially well with young people. Chance moments and improvisations can take your conception to another level.
------
Related post on using photo reference, link.
Thanks, Nancy, Jake, Aliza, Judy, James, Mike, Joey, Morgan, Justin, Franklin, Jeanette, and everyone else who took part!

The Real Lee Crabb

The guy who modeled for Lee Crabb, the sneaky malcontent in Dinotopia, is an old friend named David Starrett. He is pretty craggy, but he’s a lot more handsome than the character I turned him into. He is the son of the famous western character actor Charles Starrett.

Dave Starrett has taught art for many years at various art schools in Los Angeles. Jeanette and I knew him mainly as a sketching and an art museum buddy.

He would pick us up in his old VW camper van, which he called the Foxmobile. We’d go over to the Huntington Library to look at paintings. He pulled all these mirrors and flashlights and viewscopes out of his pocket until the guards put us on a close watch.

While standing in front of a painting, he would make up stories about the artist: “Gainsborough lost an arm in a sword fight and had to switch to painting with his other arm…Renoir did this entire painting while standing in six inches of coconut milk in a bathtub.” Museum goers would tag along to hear the juicy tidbits.

That was before the days of those gawdawful preprogrammed audio guides, which turn museum-goers into mindless zombies.

Then we’d go out painting in the gardens out back. Sometimes a flock of foreign tourists would come by and ask him, “Are you an artist?”

“No, I’m a plumber,” he’d snap back. “Just finished putting in a commode.”

Deleted Scene from Dinotopia

Once in a while a picture idea goes all the way from the storyboard to the finished illustration before you realize it’s a dud.

Here’s a deleted scene from Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time (1992). Norah, the matriarch of Treetown is supposed to be having a conversation with a dinosaur.

There are a lot of problems with this picture. Both Norah and the dinosaur are talking at the same time. They don’t seem to exist in the same light or space. You can tell that I was looking at a snapshot of a model (Betty Ballantine) for the person, and I let the photo snuff out my imagination.

I didn’t have a clear idea of two characters driven by a real, emotional situation. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say; I was just pushing paint around. When that happens, be merciless. Put the picture aside, or stick it on the Gallery Flambeau.

Dinotopia Exhibit in Newcastle

The exhibition "Return to Dinotopia" opened on April 4 at the Centre for Life in Newcastle (UK).

Patrick Gyger, director of Maison d'Ailleurs, supervised the installation. Here’s how the room looked before the exhibition was fully in place.

Jeanette and I are looking forward to visiting Newcastle-upon-Tyne this summer to see the museum and to visit some schools in the area.

The Dinotopia exhibition consists of about 50 original oil paintings from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara (2007). The show will continue for the whole summer, after which it will travel to Nantes in France for the Utopiales festival.

If there are any other museums in Europe that might be interested in hosting the “Return to Dinotopia” in 2010 and beyond, please contact Patrick Gyger, link.

Centre for Life Dinotopia page, link.

Mighty Andar

We're in Pittsburgh now on a rainy spring day. Here's a drawing done by Andrew Wales from the last post. His comic alter ego is "The Mighty Andar."

Drawing from Maquettes

Andy Wales, a frequent commentator on this blog and a contributor to Art By Committee, is also an elementary school art teacher at the Lynch Bustin Elementary School in Athens, Pennsylvania.

In anticipation of my visit next month, he has been using maquettes with his young art students so that they can make their fantasy drawings more realistic.

"We're not building our own models, but we are using dinosaur toys and action figures to imagine scenes. Above you see that Cyclops of the X-Men is taped to a dinosaur. We're working with the lights off, using only the lights that come in from the skylights. In my demonstration sketch, I'm showing the kids how to use charcoal, blending stump and erasers to create shadows and highlights on objects."

Andrew Wales’ blog Panel Discussion, link.
The Lynch Bustin Art Room, link.

Timberjack Walking Machine

When I designed the walking vehicles for the Dinotopia prequel universe in First Flight (1999), I scarcely could have imagined the actual machines that were already emerging from engineers’ drawing boards.


The PlusTech Oy company, a division of John Deere, unveiled a prototype for a walking timber harvester called the Timberjack. It may be a little slow, but it has adjustable ground clearance, automatic leveling, and the ability to walk sideways, never mind what it does to trees.
---------
Thanks, Art! Previous GJ Posts:
Walking Vehicles, part 1, link.
Walking Vehicles, part 2, link.
Sultan's Elephant, link.