Colored Light and Depth

An interesting way to add a sense of depth to a scene is to bathe different regions of the scene in different colors of light. This cave scene from Dinotopia: The World Beneath is lit in the foreground by a reddish light, and in the background by a complementary-colored greenish light.

Midway

Jim did this large pencil sketch while sitting amid the jangle of the midway at the local county fair. The carnival barkers were curious and came by to check out what he was doing. He was surprised how many of them were artists and poets and musicians.

Jim watercolors a landscape in Malta

Jim has sent a very short video of a watercolor townscape-in-progress. He reports that he and Alan Foster took wonderfully colorful 1950s-era Maltese buses all over the island. It looks like good weather for plein air watercolor painting, too.

John William Godward

“John William Godward (9 August 1861 – 13 December 1922) was an English painter from the end of the Pre-Raphaelite / Neo-Classicist era. He was a protégé of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema but his style of painting fell out of favour with the arrival of painters like Picasso. He committed suicide at the age of 61 and is said to have written in his suicide note that "the world was not big enough" for him and a Picasso. His already estranged family, who had disapproved of him becoming an artist, were ashamed of his suicide and burned his papers. No photographs of Godward are known to survive.” —Wikipedia.
Thanks, Jason

Shapewelding Sketching

Here’s a handy way to practice shapewelding, the linking of light-to-light shapes and dark-to-dark shapes. Next time you’re at a classical concert or a penguin convention, where everything is either black or white, bring a Marvy brush pen (or equivalent) and a sketchbook. Lightly sketch in the shapes, and then draw in the blacks as one big shape. Try to avoid drawing lines around the white shapes; just let them blend into the white of the paper. If you need to define a white shape, like the white jacket at lower right, use a black shape behind it.

Initial Caps

Here are a couple of the initial capital letters that I (Jim) designed for The Hand of Dinotopia by Alan Dean Foster, with whom I’m currently traveling in North Africa. Initial caps are an old fashioned device in book design. I used them to open up chapters with little pictures.

Fields from Mill Road

This oak tree stands in the middle of a field near Rhinebeck in the heart of the Hudson Valley. The painting is 14x18 inches, painted in oil on location. If you’re interested in acquiring an original oil by me, you might be interested to know that this work has just now being offered by the Windham Fine Arts gallery in the Catskills of New York State. For more information, please contact Victoria or Marie at 518.734.6850
http://www.windhamfinearts.com/