Art Out Loud

If you would like to watch five artists on a high wire act, come to New York City a week from tomorrow.

At the Society of Illustrators, five of us will demonstrate our painting methods in an informal setting, where people can come up and watch or ask questions.

I'll be joining four of my admired friends and colleagues: Sam Weber, Charles Vess, Donato Giancola, Greg Manchess (painting above).

Just for fun I'm going to try something a little different. Walt Reed and his son Roger, authors of The Illustrator in America and owners of Illustration House gallery, have agreed to be my models for a series of two quick portrait studies in oil. I'm not only excited to have the opportunity to paint them, but also to chat with them about the history of illustration.

Also, you can peruse the first advance copy of Imaginative Realism, which just arrived from the printer, as well as copies of Dinotopia for sale.

As Irene Gallo has mentioned on her blog post about the event, "Space is very limited and tickets are cheap. Buy tickets in advance, all previous Art Out Louds have sold out." UPDATE: I'm very sorry, but I just found out that the event has just sold out. You were right, Irene!

When: Saturday, September 12, 2009 1-5pm at
Where: Society of Illustrators on 128 East 63rd Street.
Cost: $10 students, $20 members, $25 non-members. Refreshments included.
RSVP: kevin@societyillustrators.org 212 838 2560

The Eye: Simplicity and Softness

The nice thing about working very quickly is that it forces you to make decisions favoring big truths. I painted this portrait during a 20 minute sketch group session.

Because I was moving fast, I didn’t have time to see too much detail in the eye and the eyebrow. Simplicity and softness is the secret to eyes anyway even if you have a lot of time to work on them.

There's a a tiny bit of finger-blending at the outside corner of the eye and just below the lower lid. I don't like to put my fingers into the paint, but in a quick-painting session, I don't always have time to reach for the right brush.

The eyebrow is modeled in just two planes. It all looks fairly “strokey” close up, but when you back up from the 9x12 inch painting, the detail appears to be all there.

Rocks and Shallows

Oil study on location, 9 x 12 inches on oil-primed masonite panel.

Previous GJ post: Color in Mountain Streams

Lehigh River Video

Here's a short video showing steps in a plein air oil study two days ago.

The early stages show the subject drawn with a brush, large tones scrubbed in, and the details of foam saved for last.


The oil painting is 9 x 12 inches, and took about six hours.


Here's a shot of the final painting.

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.


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

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

Too-Smooth Tones

When he translated his reference photo into a painting, Andrew Loomis softened the edges and subordinated the unimportant small forms. For example, he simplified the details under the model’s left hand, and eliminated the delicate tracery in the lower half of the dress.

To idealize the figure, he made the head of the model slightly smaller in the painting than it appeared in the reference.

He was also conscious of breaking up the flat tones of the photo.

“One of the main things that identify a photo as a photo,” he wrote in his classic book Creative Illustration, “is the ultra-smoothness of the tones.”

Where the photo presented monotonous values, such as in the pillows behind the model’s shoulders, he activated the surface with painterly variations.

“Note the accents placed here and here of dark against light, to add punch,” Loomis says. “The lights have been forced somewhat to obtain extra brilliancy. The background has been lightened in spots to avoid the monotony of tone in the photo.”
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From Creative Illustration (1947)

Puttin’ on Daubs

One day Edgar Payne was painting outdoors, far from any sign of habitation. He was surprised to find a man behind him, watching.

Then the man said, “ Why that’s nuthin but puttin’ on daubs!”

A little later the man shook his head and said, “But you sure gotta know where to put them daubs!” and walked away.
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Recollection by Evelyn Payne Hatcher in an addendum to Composition of Outdoor Painting by Edgar A. Payne.

Plane Heads

Here’s another painting exercise that I learned from Paul Souza, who taught the “scumbling the lights” method on a previous post.

As you look at a real posed model, try to analyze the head in terms of simple planes.

State the lines bounding the planes in pencil on chipboard. Seal the board as before, and apply the white oil paint with a bristle brush in varying degrees of thickness until you get the relative tone just right. Leave the shadows untouched by the paint.

I recommend that you use this plane breakdown as a guide. Both the forehead and the upper lip are divided into three planes. The chin and the nose each end in a flat shape.

The same analysis, in varying proportions and angles, can describe very different face types. If you try this plane analysis, and it just doesn’t fit the face, try an alternate breakdown, but keep it simple.

It should look like a puppet being carved from wood, as was stated in the Carolus-Duran post recently.

Seeing forms in simple terms helps you to draw or paint them better. As you proceed with a real portrait, you can subdivide the planes and blend their edges. If you establish a portrait in these terms at the beginning, you’re much more likely to get a three-dimensional appearance and a good likeness.

Premixing Color

Recently blog reader S. J. asked me whether I premix colors on the palette or just mix each color from scratch from the component pigments.

It’s a good question, and I don’t recall any of my teachers ever talking about it.

The answer is that in the studio I usually do premix colors. It saves paint and it saves time. If you don't premix you waste effort with the mechanics of color mixing and you use up a lot of palette area. Mixing with the brush alone often leads to skimpy mixtures. There’s also the tendency to end up with habitual mixtures—reaching for the same colors over and over again.

Early in my career I was influenced by the teaching of Art Student's League instructor Frank Reilly (known mainly now from the excellent instructional works of his students and grandstudents).

Mr. Reilly had his students mix several strings of colors from light to dark tones. He used a 10-step value or tone sequence of each principal hue, along with a corresponding scale of grays. But I think ten value steps is more steps than you really need. Mixing four or five steps gives you plenty of control for intermediate values.

If you’re curious about that color wheel at the top of the palette and how those colors were chosen, I’ve done a lot of blog posts about my color wheel masking system. If you click on the “color” button at the left of the blogroll, you can read those back posts.

In a future post I’ll show how I use premixed color for plein air painting.

Carolus Duran’s Method

Carolus-Duran was the teacher of John Singer Sargent, whose technical approach to painting generated considerable interest on a recent post.


Sargent’s portrait of his teacher (above) is in the collection the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. The paintings below are by Carolus-Duran

Here’s a firsthand account of what was taught in Carolus-Duran’s atelier:

“The model was posed on Monday, always in full light, without shadow effect, and against a strongly-coloured backround, which we had to imitate exactly in its relations to the figure. The figure was drawn in in charcoal, then we were allowed to take a sable and strengthen the outline with some dark colour mixed with turpentine, but not to make any preparation, nor put in conventional dark brown shadows.

The palette was set as follows: Black, verte emeraude, raw umber, cobalt, laque ordinaire, brun rouge or light red, yellow ochre, and white (the colors being placed on the palette in this order from left to right).

We were supposed to mix to or three gradations of yellow ochre with white, two of light red with white, two of cobalt with white, and also of black and raw umber to facilitate the choice of tones.

We were not allowed any small brushes, at any rate not for a long time—many months or years.

On Tuesday Duran came to criticize and correct the drawing, or the laying in of painting if it was sufficiently advanced. We blocked in the curtain first, and then put in the figure or face in big touches like a coarse wooden head hewn with a hatchet; in fact, in a big mosaic, not bothering to soften things down, but to get the right amount of light and the proper colour, attending first to the highest light.

The hair was not smoothed into the flesh at first, but just pasted on in the right tone like a coarse wig; then other touches were placed on the junctions of the big mosaic touches, to model them and make the flesh more supple.

Of course these touches were a gradation between the touches they modelled. All was solid, and there were no gradations by brushing the stuff off the lights gently into the darks or vice versa, because Duran wished us to actually make and match each bit of the tone of the surface. He came again on Friday to criticise and on that day we finished off.”

Carolus-Duran’s teaching was considered progressive among academic instructors because of its painterly, direct handling and its emphasis on form and color rather than line. He was an ardent admirer of Velazquez and a friend of Manet.

The essence of Carolus-Duran's method, according to one of his students, is to “seek first of all for absolute truth of tone and colour, and getting this truth in the simplest and most obvious way.”
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Sources: John Collier, A Manual of Oil Painting, London 1891, 5th Edition, page 57-59.
Barbara Weinberg: The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth Century American Painters and Their French Teachers. New York, 1991.
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More on Carolus-Duran at Art Renewal Center, link.
Lines and Colors on Carolus-Duran, link.
A Manual of Oil Painting by John Collier on Google Books, link.
Ciudad de la Pintura, link.

Scumbling the Lights

Here’s a painting exercise that really works well with people who are using oils for the first time.

1. Starting with gray-brown chipboard, do a careful pencil drawing of the model about 22 inches high. The model should be lit with a single clear light source.

2. Seal the drawing with shellac. The shellac should be brushed on and squeegeed off with a piece of cardboard.

3. Squeeze some titanium white oil paint onto some blotter paper, or other absorbent paper to remove excess oil.

4. Using a bristle brush, scumble the white paint only in the areas of the form that are touched by light. Make the paint thin for the darker halftones and thicker and whiter for the highlights.

5. Leave the shadows untouched with paint. The result should be a photographic look, with an attention to variations in the light.

This exercise was taught at Art Center College of Design by the instructor Paul Souza. Mr. Souza studied with Millard Sheets and Frederick Taubes and died in 2007 at age 89.

Fa Presto

In Italian, "fa presto" literally means "make quickly." It became a painting term when the father of Luca Giordano (1634-1705) urged his son to speed up his studies.

The term became a nickname for Giordano, and more broadly, a byword among baroque painters like Tintoretto (self portrait, below) who were seeking a more spontaneous handling.



In a fa presto technique, the composition is established quickly over an earth-toned ground with no preliminary drawing. The paint is laid on thinly in the darker areas and broadly and generously in the lights.

Sargent’s Painting Notes

1. Painting is an interpretation of tone. Colour drawn with a brush.

2. Keep the planes free and simple, drawing a full brush down the whole contour of a cheek.

3. Always paint one thing into another and not side by side until they touch.

4. The thicker your paint—the more your color flows.

5. Simplify, omit all but the most essential elements—values, especially the values. You must clarify the values.

6. The secret of painting is in the half tone of each plane, in economizing the accents and in the handling of the lights.

7. You begin with the middle tones and work up from it . . . so that you deal last with your lightest lights and darkest darks, you avoid false accents.

8. Paint in all the half tones and the generalized passages quite thick.

9. It is impossible for a painter to try to repaint a head where the understructure was wrong.

PALETTE: Silver White, Naples Yellow, Yellow Ochre, Ochre dew (English Red), Red Ochre, Vermillion, Ivory or Coal Black, and Prussian Blue.

These notes, attributed to American painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), are courtesy George Pratt. Mr. Pratt is a painting instructor at Ringling College of Art and Design. He told me he found these nuggests in the library when he was a student at Pratt Institute. Thanks, George!

These notes are just the tip of the iceberg. Two of Sargent’s students, Miss Heyneman and Mr. Henry Haley, also recorded extensive first hand observations of Sargent’s painting methods. If you’re interested in this kind of material, let me know, and I’d be happy to share it with you on future posts.

Synthetic Flats

Synthetic-filament brushes come in a variety of shapes: flats, filberts, and rounds. Flats are especially useful for painting architecture and machines because they can lay down rectangular shapes easily. You can also turn them sideways to paint a fine line.


Here I'm using a Winsor and Newton Series 995 Golden Taklon ½ inch flat to establish the dark shape of a crypt door.

The finished watercolor painting shows the chunky half-inch stroke module in the stonework and the big shadows. I also used a #4 sable round travel brush for some of the fine line work.

You can use ¼ inch nylon flats with oil or acrylic. For opaque media they come with longer handles. They’re inexpensive, but they don’t last long. Eventually lose their chisel-sharp edge.

The BLAST Rule

When it comes to painting procedure, it’s healthy to be suspicious of rules and recipes. Isn’t painting supposed to be a wild dance in the wilderness?


But allow me to suggest five general pointers that lead to happier results in just about any kind of painting. If you like them you can print them out and stick them near your easel.

1. Use the biggest brush possible for a given passage.
2. Paint large shapes first, followed by small shapes.
3. Save your tonal and chromatic accents until the last.
4. Try to soften any edge that doesn’t need to be sharp.
5. Take time to get the center of interest right.

Or, the briefer version: (B.L.A.S.T.)
Big brushes.
Large to small.
Accents last.
Soften edges.
Take your time.

James Perry Wilson’s Dioramas, Part 2

In the midst of World Wart II, a young soldier wrote a series of letters to James Perry Wilson, painter of the illusionistic diorama backdrops for the American Museum of Natural History in New York (see yesterday's post). Mr. Wilson replied with valuable insights about his approach to color and atmosphere:

“It is one of the fundamental principles of aerial perspective that the dark tones of a landscape are the first ones affected by the interposed veil of atmosphere.

“A green tree in the foreground, for instance, will appear dark green in the shadows; but you don’t have to get very far away from it before that green disappears entirely, especially if you are looking toward the sun. In the middle distance the shadow areas in the foliage will take on a violet tone, while the sunlit parts are only a little cooler green than they are close up.

“At a distance of several miles this violet will become more and more blue. By this time air will have begun to affect the sunlit parts also, and the green will begin to disappear. A forest-covered mountain fifteen or twenty miles away, in clear air, will probably appear of a violet hue; but if it is fifty or sixty miles, it will be a clear pale blue.

“Another thing to remember is the effect of air on values. Here again it is the darkest tones that are affected first. The deep shadows and the halftones melt together, while the detail is still distinct in the highlights. As the distance increases, both dark and light objects approach the sky in value; but the light objects will hold out the longest.



Objects lighter than the sky grow darker as they recede, instead of lighter, and they grow warmer instead of cooler. You can observe this on a clear day when there are cumulus clouds in the sky. As the clouds recede they become yellowish, and those away off in the distance will be pinkish. (Note: the above image is the painted background from a Peabody Museum diorama.)

“The reason for this diverse behavior of light and dark objects is to be found in the fact that the air absorbs and scatters light of the shorter wavelengths toward the blue and violet end of the spectrum, while transmitting the reds and yellows whose wavelength is longer. Toward sunset, when the slanting rays of sunlight have to traverse a thicker layer of air, still longer wavelengths are filtered out and the sun appears red.


“Do you remember the band of pinkish light across the top of the mountain in the Jaguar group? What happens here is that all the blues are filtered out high up in the sky, and by the time the sunlight reaches the lower air and falls in front of the mountain, it is decidedly reddish. So you are looking at the mountain through a reddish veil instead of a bluish one.

“The most important thing to remember in painting a sunset effect is to keep all your tones harmonious and consistent. And if you have bright clouds, yellow or rose-colored in the blue sky, don’t paint your sky too blue. Keep the blue very quiet. That way your clouds will appear much more brilliant and luminous.”

Color Palettes
According to his assistant, Ruth Morrill, Wilson used the following nine colors, along with Permalba white.

Ultramarine blue
Cobalt blue
Windsor blue
Cadmium yellow pale
Cadmium yellow deep
Yellow Ochre
Indian red
Cadmium scarlet
Alizarin crimson

“He could make anything he wanted from those colors,” Ruth Morrill said. He did not use black and only rarely used browns. He regularly premixed graduated tints of each of the primaries on his palette before commencing to paint.



According to one of Wilson’s letters, the entire distance of the Connecticut shoreline diorama (above) was painted with ultramarine, light red and yellow ochre. “It is astonishing what variety you can get with these three,” he wrote, “especially since both the red and the yellow are rather subdued colors. I recommend your experimenting to see what you can do with just these three. They are bound to impart a mellow quality to the greens, which is a good thing.”
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More information
As blog reader Armand Cabrera pointed out, there’s a good article on JPW in American Art Review, December 2000. There’s another detailed article in the Peabody Museum publication Curator, October 2000. Both articles are written by Michael Anderson, who has compiled 20 years of research about Wilson. I am grateful to him and Ruth Morrill for sharing their unpublished interview material.

Jaguar image courtesy Supreme Fiction, which has an interview with Stephen Quinn about the art of the diorama, link.

Art and Influence

A bountiful new art blog called "Art and Influence," has just burst upon the scene. The blog is the work of Virginia plein-air painter Armand Cabrera and Diane Burket.

In less than a month since its inception, they have hit the ground running with dozens of posts on Armand's traditional painting instruction, mainly in oil landscapes. There is also a rich collection of biographical spotlights from art history, focusing on realist/impressionist painters of the 19th and 20th centuries, complete with quotes and bibliographies.

Many of these posts were adapted from material Armand and Diane created for the website Outdoor Painting.
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Art and Influence blog, link.
Armand Cabrera website, link.
Outdoor Painting website, link.
GJ post about painting with Armand earlier this year, link.

Square Brushes

Painters of the Newlyn School, a group of 19th century plein-air painters in southwestern England, were known for their “consistent squareness of touch.”

“A Street in Brittany” by Stanhope Forbes shows the characteristic look achieved by brushes that we would call brights or flats. Forbes once wrote home to his mother asking her to bring a “flat sable brush” when she came to visit.

Sir George Clausen (1852-1944) was also known for his square brush technique, which the British critics identified with French juste-milieu painters like Bastien-Lepage, with whom some of the Newlyn artists studied.

The purpose of the method was not just to get that chunky feeling, but to blur outlines and capture an atmospheric envelope. The critic Garstin wrote: “We seek to represent not only the man but, as it were, his very atmosphere, and not only his surroundings, but his surroundings under certain specific conditions.”

Other artists indentified with a square touch are Arthur Streeton, Frank Brangwyn, and Dean Cornwell.
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Reference for quotes: Artists of the Newlyn School, 1880-1900, by Caroline Fox, 1979, link.
Images from FreeParking's Flickr stream, link.

Mass Drawing

Many art students find the transition from drawing to painting a bit daunting, because there are so many variables to contend with.

One of the best painting teachers was Harold Speed (1872-1957). A sample of work is shown above. His books on both drawing and painting are among the finest sources of classic art instruction. Speed uses the term “mass drawing” to distinguish it from “outline drawing.”

Mass drawing in monochrome oil paint is one of the transitional steps from drawing to painting. The purpose of mass drawing is to bring students “from simple outlines to approach the full realization of form in all the complexity of light and shade.”

In this demonstration, Speed follows four logical steps:

Step 1. The blocking in of various areas in charcoal.
Step 2. Middletone block-in with lights painted into it
Step 3. Shadows added with dark paint.
Step 4. Refinement and completion.

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The Practice and Science of Drawing (still in print), link.
The Science and Practice of Oil Painting, link.
Selection of Speed's Portraits in the National Gallery, link. (thanks, Art4Marc)