Back to the U.S.A. Border

A long line of cars led up to the border crossing as we returned from Canada. It seemed they were stopping and searching everyone.

Four guys in flak jackets searched a car in front of us, using mirrors on poles to look under the bumpers. They made the guy get out of the car, escorted him away, and then one of the officers drove off in his car.

I asked Doug for his passport. This time I wanted to make sure I presented the passports up front, rather than waiting for the officer to ask me for them.

I turned to Dennis. Last time the guard asked us four times if we had firearms, and when he asked Dennis directly, he just shook his head. This time he said he was going to speak up.

Tomorrow I'll tell you what happened.

Maintenance Man

The Giant of Nantes

Sketching the Mechanical Elephant

Here's a colored pencil sketch of the Sultan's Elephant, drawn a few days ago from observation in Nantes, France. (Click on the image for a big enlargement.)

I took a picture (left) after starting the sketch to show you one way to begin a small drawing like this (about 3x5 inches). The first step was to draw the basic outlines in graphite pencil.

Then I lightly rubbed the surface with a few browns and grays in water-soluble colored pencil. Since there was no delicate detail yet, I could smudge those colors around with a water brush, keeping the white highlights on the tusk and the forehead as untouched white paper.

After that dried, I went back to define the details with a black colored pencil. The whole sketch took about 45 minutes, and I had to finish because the thing started walking.

Drawn Together

"We are like children," said illustrator Aleksi Briclot (second from left). "Give us a pencil and some paper and we are happy and quiet." Center is J-S. Rossbach, Gilles Francescano and J-B. Monge.

Mr. Briclot and Jean-Sebastien Rossbach, who collaborated on the fully illustrated Merlin, were drawing sketches as a team, one of them beginning the sketch and the other finishing it.

It was a great honor to meet artists like Leo, J.B. Monge (above, with me on his shoulder holding his pencil), Erlé Ferronnière, Didier Graffet, Manchu, Enki Bilal, and many others.


I am touched also to meet students (such as Dmitri, above) and teachers from the art school Pivaut.


The people from the city of Nantes were very gracious and generous to Jeanette and me. Thank you to Marie Masson who arranged the festival, to Patrick Gyger who put together the the Dinotopia exhibition, to Mr. Paul Billaudeau and Mr. Jean-Marc Ayrault for helping welcome Utopiales to the Cité Internationale des Congrès of Nantes, and to Madame Agnès Marcetteau of the Musée Jules Verne.

Crossing the Atlantic

A ladybug shuttle took us to Terminal Z at JFK, where the Lepidopter was wreathed in steam and slowly test-flapping its golden wings.

But at the last minute Delta’s service rep barked out the announcement that there would be a service change. They switched to a Mayfly 4000. That meant an hour more standing around and sipping coffee, and it was a much more primitive ornithopter.

Liftoff was after sunset. We hit heavy turbulence, much to the displeasure of a school of guppy girls, who insisted on being dropped out the back so they could swim the rest of the way. The service carts kept banging my knees as I tried to sleep.

Sketchbook Shelf

A while ago someone asked about where all the sketchbooks end up, and here it is. It's nice to have one shelf in the house where you can park them all in order.

That's one of the reasons I don't use spiral-bound sketchbooks: you can't write on the spine. With book-type bindings, you can write on the date and even number them. As you can see, every decade or so I switch favorite types of books. Now I'm in an experimental phase.

I'm not as prolific or industrious as it may appear--sometimes months go by with hardly a doodle. But a sketch here and a sketch there, and after a few years it adds up.

Walkway over the Hudson

We took a walk on Tuesday on the newly opened Walkway over the Hudson. What used to be an imposing but forbidding obsolete railroad bridge has now become a kind of high-rise linear zócalo.

People of all ages and backgrounds promenade the 1.3 mile extent of concrete-surfaced walkway laid over the cantilevered iron structure or take the 3.6 mile loop across and back via Mid-Hudson Bridge. The views are mostly uninterrupted by high fences, allowing glorious views of Poughkeepsie, New York, hundreds of feet below in the full splendour of fall color.

Offical website with more information and pictures.
YouTube video about the history of the Walkway.

Thrush

A few days ago, a thrush struck the window. She lay on her side for fifteen minutes, and then brought herself to her feet.

Little by little she turned to face the evening light. After an hour and a half of quiet containment, she disappeared into the night.

Berry: Observation and Memory

Alaskan Field Sketches
William Berry (1926-1978) was an animal artist who did few finished paintings, but many masterful field sketches.For three summers, from 1954-1956, he worked in Camp Denali in Alaska, recording his observations of bear, lynx, moose, voles, and porcupines.

In the margins of his sketches, he noted whether the sketches were from observation on the spot, or from memory later when he returned to his cabin——or sometimes a combination of both.

I devoted a tremendous amount of time and energy to simply recording the facts of animal life—hundreds of hours and thousands of drawings in the zoo or in the forests, on mountains, in deserts, or plains. A caribou, for example, is never going to hold still for you, and a photograph of him, though useful for many reasons, is never going to show him doing exactly what you want him to be doing for a particular illustration. You have to learn the beast inside-out and upside-down, so that you can put him together on the page from scratch.

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His book of Alaskan Field Sketches
 is a treasure for anyone interested in animal drawing or animal behavior.

Thanks, Carl R. and thanks to this site for the images.

Garden Goblins

A fun challenge for creature designers is to create a whole new being that is halfway between a human and something else. Mythology is full of composite creatures such as centaurs and minotaurs that combine parts of humans and animals. You can also infuse trees, vegetables, or manufactured objects with human traits.

Here are some designs for garden goblins. These started with a grocery bag full of sweet corn and ornamental gourds from a farm market.

The corn husks seemed like a logical material for their homemade costumes. I wanted them to look impish, so I also looked at photos of chimpanzees.

Harvard Wind

Sometimes I like to exaggerate a little when I'm out sketching to poke some fun at my fellow man (and at myself in the process).

Yesterday at the County Fair

Stoddartsville Sketch

We're staying for a couple of days in Stoddartsville, Pennsylvania. Our little cabin is right next to the Lehigh River, where we've been painting and rafting every day. Yesterday we met 91-year-old John Butler, who presides over a whole settlement of historic buildings.


On his front porch during a summer shower he told of his 25 years in the Navy and his hunting adventures in Alaska.

One of his fondest memories was driving a dogsled down the frozen Matanuska river by the light of the moon.

Skimmer Chassis

Yesterday Eric Colquhoun of Toronto asked to see the sketch I was doing in the previous post.

I should explain that I’m writing and illustrating an article on concept art for Imagine FX magazine, and I thought I'd give you a sneak peak. You'll definitely want to pick up a copy when it comes out in a few months. I’ll be sharing 25 tips showing how to design a “lived-in” future—a science fiction universe with a believable past.


One of the tips deals with vehicle design. We’ve all seen plenty of renderings of sleek, new vehicles, such as this ground effect skimmer. But how often do you see the rusty hulk of a futuristic vehicle?

I thought it would be a cool exercise to take this skimmer about forty years forward in time and rip off the outer body, leaving only the chassis and the fore and aft stabilizers.

As I sat on the sidewalk sipping my BJ Joe, I stared at the real Blazer chassis and imagined discovering this hulk in the desert, with the antigravity generator still working. Even though it’s rusted out and dented and stripped down, it’s still hovering a foot or so off the ground.

Jeanette didn’t want to draw an old chassis, so she used the 90 degree rule and faced across the street. She drew the scene in ballpoint and watercolor, incorporating a construction worker that she had drawn earlier in the day.
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Thanks to Kevin, the mechanic at Bob's Automotive for your helpful advice on chassis design, and thanks,Eric!

Self-Similarity in Fractals

Fractals is a branch of mathematics that artists intuitively grasp because it appeals strongly to the pattern recognition part of the right brain. One of the principles of fractals is the concept of self-similarity. Many forms in nature repeat a certain structure or geometry at various levels of scale.

For example, this ginger root has bulbous branches that leave the main stem, and they tend to do the same thing as the branches get smaller, until the pattern degenerates at the smallest scale.

Romanesco broccoli demonstrates the principle of self-similarity even better. Each spiraling cone is composed of smaller spiraling cones. (Click to enlarge).

In many ferns, the shape of the leaflet resembles the frond. Since this comes down to math, computers can easily invent self-similarity, and this component has given realism to CGI renderings of rocks, plants, clouds, and water, where the phenomenon appears everywhere. Check out the digital fern below, which "grows" as you scroll down.


Fractal fern, link.
Wikipedia on fractals, link.
Fern glossary and more photos at: link.

My Mac Lazarus

A few years ago my G3 Macintosh computer decided to crash. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to start up. I lugged it into the car and brought it to Jerry, a computer repair man.

"Lazarus and I are going to have a little chat," Jerry said. He took the covers off everything and hooked up a tangle of wires.

"Will it ever work again,?" I asked nervously. "Hummmm, oh yeah," Jerry said.

I thought of all the letters I had written and all the photos I had taken. Down the drain. Stupidly, I hadn't backed up in a long time. Jerry mumbled a few incantations and fell into a deep reverie.

Then for the next two hours, as he contemplated the carcass of Lazarus, I did what I always do when I'm deathly anxious: I sketched.

Eventually my computer came back from the grave. It made some nice noises and some lights came on. Narrow escape this time, I told myself.

Portraits at the Fair

In-Flight Portrait

During the long flight from London to Cleveland yesterday, I drew a pencil portrait of a gentleman across the aisle.

He wasn’t aware I was sketching him. I observed him with occasional and sidelong glances. I didn’t want him to be self-conscious because his face would change. When I was finished, I showed it to him and he signed it. I did most of the sketch in HB and 4B graphite pencils, with the aid of a stomp and a kneaded eraser. (Click on the image below for a big enlargement)


My drawing shows him tapping the video screen to select a movie. He watched a film about young love. As I was drawing, I was thinking about identity and aging.

In the foundation of our hearts, none of us sees ourselves as old. Mentally we are all teenagers—teenagers who happen to be trapped in increasingly unreliable bodies.
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This picture appears in my book: Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter

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.