Dead Tech: Esterbrook Inkwell

Dip pens aren't dead tech. Lots of people, including me, use them all the time. That's how I did all the lettering in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.


But the Esterbrook 407 Dip-Less inkwell is an endangered species. It came singly or configured in pairs. The black bakelite Art Deco base holds the inverted glass well, which is sealed with a rubber stopper. It was intended to be used with an Esterbrook Dip-less pen, which held more ink than a simple dip pen shown above.

It was made to feed ink to a constant level and to reduce the risk of spillage. You'd find it chained to a desk in the lobby of a bank, hotel, or post office, where a steady supply of ink had to be made available to the public.

Previous dead tech: Zipatone, Waxer.

Eye Tracking and Composition, Part 3

(Note: This is the third and final part of a series of posts adapted from Imaginative Realism, Andrews McMeel, October, 2009). Please follow these links to the earlier posts, Part 1 and Part 2.)

By adding together the eye movement data from a group of test subjects, we can learn where most people look in a given picture.

To create the image below, the eye-tracking technology recorded the scanpath data of sixteen different subjects and compiled the information into composite images, called heatmaps. The red and orange colors show where 80-100% of the subjects halted their gaze. The bluer or darker areas show where hardly anyone looked.

Here’s the heatmap for the painting Marketplace of Ideas, which we discussed in the last two posts.

It turns out that there was very little interest in either of the main vertical columns. Instead, the red splotches reveal a concentration of interest in the figures. There were secondary interest areas in the far buildings and the sign in the upper right.

The interest in people, especially faces, appears to reflect a hardwired instinct to understand our fellow humans.

In the heatmap for Chasing Shadows, which shows a group of children running along a beach with a Brachiosaurus, there’s a strong focal point around the dinosaur's front feet and the nearby running children.

There are secondary points of interest at the dinosaur’s head and the leading child. Note how the action of the walking pose was read without directly looking at the rear leg.

Other spots of interest congregate around the dinosaur’s tail, the base and the top of the tree, and the vanishing point along the beach.

Hardly anyone looked directly at the sky, the upper palm fronds, or the middle section of the palm trunk. But these areas were presumably perceived in the halo of peripheral vision around the center point of vision.

Have a look at this painting, and be aware of where your eyes travel.


The heatmap for the painting Camouflage (click to enlarge) shows that everyone noticed the dinosaur’s face. They also spotted the hidden man and the small pink dinosaur.

According to statistical data connected to timing, these three faces drew almost everyone’s attention within the first five seconds. The dinosaur's face was statistically the first thing most people looked at, followed quickly by the hiding man. Below is one subject's scanpath, with the black numbers counting off seconds.

I was surprised that the two patches of lichen on the tree above the man scored near 100% attention. Evidently viewers noticed these strange shapes in their peripheral vision and checked them to make sure they weren’t important, or somehow a threat to the man. From a narrative standpoint, I suppose they were a bit of a red herring, distracting with no payoff.

The sunken log and the detailed patch of leaves in the lower left drew 60% of the viewers, perhaps because those were likely places for other dangers to hide.

Just because an element has sharp detail or strong tonal contrasts, it doesn’t necessarily attract the eye. The dark branches behind the dinosaur’s head drew almost no attention because they fit into the natural schema of a forest scene. Apparently the viewers developed a search strategy based on the threatening situation of a hungry dinosaur looking for a bite to eat.

PRELIMINARY CONCLUSIONS
These experiments force us to question a few of our cherished notions about composition and picture-gazing.

1. The eye does not flow in smooth curves or circles, nor does it follow contours. It leaps from one point of interest to another. Curving lines or other devices may be "felt" in some way peripherally, but the eye doesn't move along them.

2. Placing an element on a golden section grid line doesn’t automatically attract attention. If an attention-getting element such as a face is placed in the scene, it will gather attention wherever you place it.

3. Two people don’t scan the same picture along the same route. But they do behave according to an overall strategy that alternates between establishing context and studying detail.

4. The viewer is not a passive player continuously controlled by a composition. Each person confronts an image actively, driven by a combination of conscious and unconscious impulses, which are influenced, but not determined, by the design of the picture.

5. The unconscious impulses seem to include the establishment of hierarchies of interest based on normal expectations or schema of a scene. For example, highly contrasting patterns of foliage or branches will not directly draw the gaze unless they are perceived as anomalous in the peripheral vision.

5. As pictorial designers we shouldn’t think in abstract terms alone. Abstract design elements do play a role in influencing where viewers look in a picture, but in pictures that include people or animals or a suggestion of a story, the human and narrative elements are what direct our exploration of a picture.

As Dr. Edwards succinctly puts it, “abstract design gets trumped by human stories.” The job of the artist, then, in composing pictures about people is to use abstract tools to reinforce the viewer’s natural desire to seek out a face and a story.

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Related posts on GurneyJourney:
Eyetracking and Composition, part 1
Eyetracking and Composition, part 2
Eyetracking and Composition part 3
Introduction to eyetracking, link.
How perception of faces is coded differently, link.

All the paintings are from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

Many thanks to the team at Eyetools, Inc. for their assistance.

Eye Tracking and Composition, Part 2

Below is a scanpath image of the artwork that we saw in yesterday’s post. The chart represents the behavior of an individual who, with no prompting, looked at the artwork for a sixteen second period on a computer screen.

The computer recorded a series of circles, indicating where the eye paused momentarily, connected by a thin blue line.

The scanpath reveals that the eye darts unpredictably in straight jagged leaps known as saccades. Saccades occur between three and five times per second, alternating with brief periods of rest called fixations.

The white glow around each circle represents the subject’s peripheral vision. (The heavier blue shows a running average of the center of attention and the orange line is an attempt by the computer to detect reading behavior. Those lines are not important for the study of artwork.)

The numbered black boxes are time markers, indicating the position of the eye at each passing second. The session begins at the green dot and ends at the red dot, the last point of rest before the image disappeared. By following the blue line second by second, you can precisely reconstruct the viewer’s experience.

The test subject’s eye enters the composition at the top center and zigzags down to the figures at left center. This happens within the first second. In the next three seconds it swoops to the right, leaps upward to glance at the upper right corner, and then moves across the center of the picture in large strokes, pausing briefly to look at the near and far buildings.

For the remaining ten seconds the subject’s gaze slides back and forth in smaller saccades, examining the people in the scene.

According to Greg Edwards, President and CEO of Eyetools, “During the first 3 1/2 seconds, this particular person was getting the lay of the land. How long people take to get this initial overview will depend on each picture. They’re trying to understand the basic structure or the context of the picture.”

After that, they usually settle into finer eye movements. “If they make a big movement,” he said, “they’re typically searching for context. If they make a smaller movement, they’re looking for detail.”

The second person’s scanpath (above) both resembles and differs from the first one. The eye also makes large orienting moves initially, taking in the far vista and the full array of people below. But this scanpath shifts between large and small movements throughout the session and spends more of the time looking at the distant vista and the surrounding architecture.


It might be hard to make out these diagrams in small Web illustrations. For the sake of clarity, this video roughly reconstructs the sequence of saccades over the same approximate overall duration——though it doesn’t accurately represent the relative duration of each fixation.

Tomorrow we’ll see what we can learn from crunching together data from a lot of different observers, and I'll suggest some preliminary conclusions.
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Thanks, Greg! Link to Greg Edwards's Eyetools blog. and Eyetools website.

Related posts on GurneyJourney:
Eyetracking and Composition, part 1
Eyetracking and Composition, part 2
Eyetracking and Composition part 3
Introduction to eyetracking, link.
How perception of faces is coded differently, link.

Illo 2

Dan Zimmer is best known for the beautifully produced ILLUSTRATION magazine, which is about the history of American Illustration. He also publishes ILLO, a book-length spotlight on the contemporary illustration scene.



He has just released ILLO 2, which features interviews with Michael Cho, Nancy Stahl, and Zina Saunders. Somehow I got lucky and they included me, too.

It’s hard to convey how extensive the coverage is on each person without actually seeing the whole issue, so here's every page. Go to a newsstand and pick one up so that Mr. Zimmer can keep making future issues. There are a lot of other deserving illustrators that he still needs to cover.

ILLO main website, link.
Purchase ILLO 2 or subscribe directly from Dan Zimmer, 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.

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

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.

Review of Un Voyage a Chandara

Dinotopia: l'ile aux dinosaures
A quoi ressemble Ie parfait recit imaginaire? A Dinotopia. Imaginez une ile aux paysages epoustouflants ou humains et dinosaures vivent en harmonie, une ville d'architecture classique construite a flanc de falaise, bordee de cascadesgeantes qu'enjambent des ponts sculptes. Sous un vol de pterosaures, des enfants partent a I'ecole dans un bus Apatosaurus et croisent un Brachiosaurus pompier… Ala maniere d'un Francois Place qui revisitait Ie recit d'exploration avec ses Derniers Giants, James Gurney embarque Ie lecteur encore plus loin dans Ie fantastique. Sous forme de camet de voyage, ses deux heros, Arthur Denison et son fils Will, content leur expedition a Chandara, un ancien empire interdit. Ils y rencontrent des merveilles de la civilisation dinotopienne mais aussi des Tyrannosaures qui ont envahi les basses terres ... Suivez l'etrange caravane, composee de porteurs de blasons et de triceratops. Partez pour un voyage au bout de l'utopie. II etait temps que I'on redecouvre en France cette serie fantastique traduite en dix-huit langues et creee il y a une dizaine d'annees par cet ancien illustrateur du National Geographic. Gurney propose mieux qu'une cartographie de I'imaginaire. Un monde qui fera rever bien des generations. NathalieRiche (Lire)
**Dinotopia. Un voyage a Chandara par James Gurney, traduit de I'americain par Juliette Saumande, 160 p., Fleurus

Giant Pterosaur Behavior

New theories have emerged about the behavior of giant pterosaurs.

A team of researchers at Johns Hopkins has concluded that most pterosaurs probably didn’t take off by running on their back legs and flapping, the way birds do. They used all four appendages pushing off the ground to propel them into flight. Link for the Science Daily story.

Scientists at the University of Sheffield have argued that large pterosaurs probably didn’t feed while skimming their bill along the surface of the water. Link.


And finally, a group of scientists at the University of Portsmouth have concluded that large pterosaurs related to the Quetzalcoatlus probably spent a lot of time walking around as “specialized terrestrial stalkers” and may not have spent much of their time flying. Link.

Images are from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, link.
Thanks, Steve B!

Guess the Foreign Editions

Here are five new foreign editions of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. Can you guess which languages they're translated into?

The first person to guess correctly will receive a free bookplate and a signed dinosaur sketch by James Gurney. One guess per person, please. Employees of Dinotopia publishers not eligible.
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ADDENDUM. The answers are: 1. Romanian, 2. French, 3. Bulgarian, 4. Czech, and 5. Hungarian.

Thanks everyone. Vertumno was the winner. As I understand it, Bulgarian and Russian share the Cyrillic alphabet, so a lot of people, including Ruuhkis made a completely reasonable guess right away. Erin McGuire was right, but just a little late.

The publisher of the Romanian, Bulgarian, Czech, and Hungarian editions is Eastone Books, and the publisher of the French edition is Editions Fleurus.

Atmospheric Study

When you're planning a fantasy landscape painting, it often helps to do a quick atmospheric study. Here's one I did for the painting Waterfall City: Afternoon Light, from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

If you make a 3-D schematic maquette, you can do the study while looking at the model. This study uses white and black charcoal on brown Kraft paper. The goal is to study the chiaroscuro: and to consider which things are light on dark and which things are dark on light.

An atmospheric study also gives you the chance to think about the mist and atmosphere. In a scene like this, not everything should be crisply lit. Some areas should be in shadow, and others half hidden behind veils of atmosphere.

ASFA Awards

The Association of Science Fiction and Fantasy Artists (ASFA) recently announced their 2007 awards, based on the vote of working artist members. Donato Giancola was the big winner, with five awards, including best hardback and paperback cover. Michael Kaluta won in the Artistic Achievement category, and Irene Gallo was chosen as the best Art Director (see her art/illustration blog here).

If you will pardon me for tooting my own horn, Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara was chosen in the Best Interior Illustration category. I am very grateful to the members of ASFA for their vote of support.

If you're still looking for that last special holiday gift for that artistic someone, you can get Gurney-signed copies of the Chandara book or the Chesley Award Retrospective from the Dinotopia Store. If you send in your check today (USA only) you should get the book in plenty of time for Christmas. End pitch.

Storyboard

This little storyboard sketch from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara is one of many that didn’t make the cut, mainly because the idea evolved from this point. At this point I thought of having a Therizinosaurus ridden by a Chandaran border guard. As I thought about the character, I thought it would be far more interesting to have a more sympathetic character connected with the dinosaur, and the idea for the retired conductor Cornelius Mazurka developed.

Postcards from Paris

Dinotopia: Un Voyage a Chandara, published by Editions Fleurus, was spotlighted by Jean-Philippe Lefèvre for the program called "Un Monde de Bulles," on the Public Senat channel. The makeup lady had to do a lot of work to cut down on the glare from my head.

The program was about fully illustrated fantasy stories in the context of "bande dessinees," the uniquely French version of comics, usually presented in oversize, full-color books. They're a huge market here, and hard to find in America. The program will air in November or December.

The program is hosted inside the magnificent Senate building, next to the Luxembourg gardens. Imagine an American national TV program on comics originating from inside the U.S. Capitol! Afterward Mr. Lefèvre toured us through the Senate chambers, including the inner sanctum where laws are made, surrounded by ornate sculpture and decoration.

We visited the purveyor of comics and fantasy art Galerie Daniel Maghen with our friend Olivier Souille, who works there. Olivier and his brother Laurent are also the authors of the recently published L' Univers of Dragons.

Two more average tourists on the Ponte des Arts.

We met Marc Bourgne creator and illustrator of Frank Lincoln, Voyageur, and Barbe Rouge.

I had fun at a booksigning at the science fiction specialty bookshop Labyrinthes in Rambouillet, outside of Paris. I also signed at the FNAC Les Halles. The French edition will be officially available on 10 October.