Irish Signs

Most shop fronts in Ireland still have hand-painted signs.

John Herrick’s sign shop in Galway is down an alley next door to an instrument maker. Like most sign painters, he is also an artist and he offers art lessons.

Ma Murphy’s pub in Bantry shows the architectural setting—a fairly typical Irish facade, framed with pilasters, scroll corbels, and a dentillated cornice.

Curving baselines, shadow lettering, and Nouveau flourishes give distinctive touches set this sign apart from cheap computer-generated plastic signs.

The illusion of dimensional lettering on a flat surface is often created with five premixed tones: light side, shadow side, dark accent, highlight, and cast shadow. Such work takes specialized brushes and brush skills, and it’s a dying art in many other countries.
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Previously: Hand-Painted Signs (mostly North African).
There are several Flickr groups devoted to this subject:
“Hand-Painted Signs of the World.”
“Folk Typography”
“Signpaintr,” dedicated to the lost art of hand-lettering
“Hand-Painted Signs of Cambodia.”

Scart Road

Yesterday we set up our folding stools at the top of Scart Road looking down into Bantry, Ireland. Occasional sprinkles of rain and gusts of wind gave us some trouble: At one point the wind knocked over my water cup and dumped three ounces of water all over the half-finished watercolor.

The thing I found the most challenging was the perspective drawing. Here’s the scene as it looked to the camera. I knew all those buildings have different vanishing points from each other. And the road has its own set of vanishing points below eye level. And I expected I would be tricked by those building fronts, which were extremely foreshortened.

But even knowing all that, I still had to erase and redraw the pencil drawing three times until I was convinced I had it right.

Here’s how the line drawing looked after about three hours of measuring, erasing, and redrawing. I used a regular #2 pencil and I didn’t use straightedges. I tried to pin down some measurements using the central pole as a fixed unit of length.

Just to remind myself how much I need to improve, here’s the line drawing superimposed over the photo, after the fact. I made the yellow building on the right too big, and misplaced the windows and doors on the gray building on the far left. What would have cured a lot of these errors would be to measure across the scene, holding up a level pencil in front of me to judge relative heights—and I’ll do that next time.

Here’s the final painting, after two sittings on location, and about five hours work. I did make a few conscious changes, such as eliminating the wires, and raising the value of the illuminated roof on the red building in the middle distance.

And I regrettably left out of the drawing the wonderful people of Bantry, who passed by with a friendly hello while we were working—especially Brendy, who lives in the house at the far left.

“I like to say hi to me neighbors,” he said to us. “Me neighbors is mankind of every description.”

Roadside Flowers

May I ask the Group Mind: Can you help me identify these common roadside wildflowers from County Cork, Ireland?

Megalithic Vista

In the southwest corner of Ireland, long rocky peninsulas reach like bony fingers into the Atlantic. Prehistoric people raised Megalithic tombs and stone circles in the rocky foothills.

The standing stone of Leitrim Beg perches atop a hill overlooking Bantry Bay. Yesterday, Jeanette and I scrambled over a stile and waded through holly, heather, and gorse until we found the monument. We set up our tripod stools and pulled out the watercolor gear.


The Slieve Miskish Mountains brooded with their heads in the clouds. Alternating patches of sun and shadow swept across the small farms, each of which was ringed with trees and hedgerows.

Godson’s Folly

Chapel Street leads up to the hilly neighborhoods above Bantry in County Cork. The road is hemmed in by 12-foot walls of rock, topped with ivy.

The road was created by a fellow named Godson, who wanted to provide a convenient route for customers to get to his hotel in the town below.

At great expense, Mr. Godson hired a team to dig with hand tools through the solid rock. The expense proved too great for Godson, who went bankrupt. Ever since, Chapel Street has been known as “Godson’s Folly.”

Visual Perception in IFX

The new issue of ImagineFX magazine (issue 60) has a special article that I wrote for artists on the subject of visual perception. It previews material adapted from my upcoming book, Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter (November, Andrews McMeel).

The article includes both cutting-edge science and practical applications:
•Why moonlight looks blue.
•Our brains automatic “white balance” setting, and how to overcome it.
•How to use colour afterimages to make your paintings better.
•How colours are tied to emotions.
•Using eyetracking data to help you design better compositions.

ImagineFX is the premier magazine for the field of science fiction and fantasy art. It usually contains a DVD with additional images and videos.

ImagineFX website
"Color and Light" book on Amazon

Galway’s Back Streets

Galway is a sketcher’s paradise, and it gets even more interesting when you stray a few blocks away from the central tourist track.

At the corner of Eyre and Woodquay, the shops don’t cater as much to the visiting trade, and appearances aren’t kept up too carefully.

In places like this, the city displays the history of human ingenuity, as its exterior skin is retrofitted for new ways of living. You can trace how the old houses adjusted from coal to electricity, and how they strapped plumbing pipes on the outside.

The utility poles are made not from wood but from steel pipes of graduated thickness. They support automobile traffic signs, electric lights, Internet and television cables, and security cameras.

One lady, perhaps expecting a more postcard view, stopped and said, “It’s a lovely drawing, but I wouldn't think of making a picture of it.”

But for the next couple hours, three or four guys saw my wife and me painting, looked at the view, decided it was “artistic,” and took out their cameras to snap a photo.

Irish Sketching Expedition

We began a watercolor sketching expedition yesterday in Galway city, Ireland yesterday where our son Dan has been living for the last year.


Dan has a regular session gig at the Tig Cóilí pub on Mainguard Street in Galway. Yesterday he played a few tunes with the great bodhrán player Johnny Ringo McDonagh, fiddler Mick Conneelly and 18-year-old all-Ireland fiddler Dylan Foley.

De Dannan co-founder Dolores Keane sat by Dan’s side and thrilled us all with her rendition of “Galway Bay,” with Dan accompanying on his Paolo Soprani accordion.



They all headed off for more gigs, so we walked through the mist to see the old boats resting on the mossy rocks of the harbor at low tide. Black crows and white swans convened around us, hungrily eyeing our McVitie's Digestives.

J. P. Wilson's Plein Air Oils

Michael Anderson of Yale's Peabody Museum is publishing a book online about the work of James Perry Wilson, who I believe to be one of the most resourceful landscape colorists of the 20th century.

Mr. Anderson writes:

"James Perry Wilson loved to paint. He loved to paint dioramas, architectural subjects, and more than anything else, he loved painting outdoors en plein air.

"In sharp contrast to his diorama painting or architectural work however, Wilson painted other works in a single day on transportable 8"X10" mahogany panels or 12"X16" canvasboards.

"These small works, done apparently for the sheer love and challenge of painting, reflect the same skill and intelligence seen in his diorama work with the addition of a working spontaneity. They guide us directly to the heart of James Perry Wilson and where his passion lay.

"There is a palpable quality of joy in Wilson’s paintings. He expresses his awe of nature through paint. This is a meticulously observed landscape that emanates his love of color in nature and his depiction of light and atmosphere."

For the full chapter, follow this link to JPW's Plein-Air Painting. I highly recommend this link, and be sure to scroll down a little past halfway to read JPW's notes on atmospheric colors. This is like a whole textbook on plein air practice by a painter who thought more probingly about light and color than almost anyone.
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Previous GJ posts about J.P. Wilson, Part 1 and Part 2

Elgood’s Secrets

George Elgood was one of the great Victorian watercolorists specializing in flower gardens.


His paintings show botanically accurate flowers in natural groupings, often with architectural or landscape elements. Flower gardens are a brain-busting challenge to paint in watercolor because you have to paint precisely around all the light shapes.

Let’s go back in a time machine 100 years to see how he does it.

Mr. Elgood draws the whole subject carefully in pencil, especially if there are architectural elements. But he prefers not to tie himself to a hard and fast outline, instead drawing as much with the brush as much as with the pencil.

According to A. L. Baldry, who watched him work, he often “lays the whole thing in at once, sometimes in colours which are not by any means those he sees in nature,” thinking ahead to the colors he wants to add later when finishing.

He then builds the rendering from a strong dark and light focus. He works fairly rapidly, often focusing on a group of flowers that is in peak bloom.

He then moves on to other groups on subsequent days of a multiple-day plein-air study. All of his works are done primarily on the spot, though he doesn’t copy what he sees, but rather uses nature as a reference for a composition that he assembles from the best elements.

He uses no opaque white and limited scratching out. His preference is for lifting lights out of wet washes and in general working simply and directly. He works on smooth, stretched Whatman paper with a relatively small palette of colors.
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A. L. Baldry “The Practice of Water-Colour Painting,” London, 1911

Sinnott Visit

I paid a visit to Joe Sinnott and his son Mark yesterday.


Joe told stories of living for a dollar a day in New York City when he was a student at the “School for Cartoonists and Illustrators” (later redubbed “School of Visual Arts”). Tarzan artist Burne Hogarth was one of his teachers. Later Joe inked most of Jack Kirby’s “Fantastic Four” for Marvel during the classic years.

I gave Joe a printed-out version of the recent blog post on restoring school funding, so he could read every one of the wonderful comments you all made. Joe hadn’t seen the post because he doesn’t do computers: “Wouldn’t know how to plug the thing in,” he said.

He still inks Spiderman Sunday comics at age 83, though he says you can’t get as good a sable brush these days. And he had to switch to a pen because they print the comics so small now.

Previous post on Joe in "Restoring Art Programs."
Joe Sinnott.com

How to Paint a Giant Snake

The new August/September issue of International Artist magazine has a feature that I wrote called “How to Paint a Giant Snake.”


It profiles the portrait of Titanoboa for the National Wildlife Federation’s Ranger Rick magazine. The article contains photos and studio tips that don’t appear in either this blog or my books.

But that’s just a starter. The magazine’s other features include:

--“A Day in the Life of an Artist” with Burton Silverman.
--Detailed report on the “The Art of the Portrait Conference 2010” by Matthew Innis (who has left some great comments on this blog).
--Portrait Society of America’s 12th Annual Award Winners.
--Harley Brown’s “Four Principles that Affected Rembrandt and Van Gogh”
…and much more!

More at International Artist's website
More about the Titanoboa painting, at Chronogram magazine's website
An online kid's feature on creating the Titanoboa art from Ranger Rick's website.

Ciseri’s Light Interactions

The religious painting “Ecce Homo” of Antonio Ciseri has a startling realism that comes in part from his sensitivity to light interactions.

Ciseri was born in Switzerland in 1821 and studied in at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence under Florence under Niccola Benvenuti.


Note the soft edges in the hand in shadow at (1). Crisp edges should be reserved for elements in full illumination. At (2), look at the warm reflected light on the arm of the figure in this grouping.

At (3), check out the contre-jour handling of Christ’s figure. The top and side planes of Christ’s figure are raised in value so that they almost blend with the sky—a device that James Bama used almost a century later on Bantam paperback covers.


Pilate’s draped figure is rendered with extreme attention to transmitted light through various layers of fabric. This might have been aided by photography (the painting is from 1880, when many artists were using photographs).

But I would bet he also did charcoal studies of the nude model first and that he also set up a draped lay figure in a doorway. I’ll talk about lay figures on a future post.
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Thanks, Keita!
Wikipedia on Antonio Ciseri
Ciseri on Art Renewal
Previous GJ Posts on transmitted light, contre-jour lighting, and reflected light (croquet balls).

Super-Slow Videos

Did you ever wonder what happens in slow motion when a martial arts expert whacks his hand against a stack of bricks? The fingers flex alarmingly.


The video also shows what happens when an egg drops onto a mousetrap, and many other examples of things being destroyed slowly.



What does lightning look like when it’s slowed way, way down? It turns out that there are discharges of many different frequencies. Multiple strikes travel over established channels.

Via Best of YouTube.

Chelsea’s Wedding

A lot of you noticed that my little town of Rhinebeck, New York was the host of Chelsea Clinton’s wedding on Saturday. For the last week it has been a carnival atmosphere here, with TV cameras, blocked roads, crazy protestors, police cars, and black-windowed SUVs.


Big white satellite trucks parked on all the side streets. The sidewalks were sectioned off for dozens of news teams from all over the world. Heavily-made up presenters talked breathlessly and interviewed residents and shopkeepers. People came from out of town and sat for hours in folding chairs hoping to see Oprah or Spielberg or Streisand or Barack (none of whom showed up, apparently).

Someone dressed their two dogs up as bride and groom. Another guy with a raccoon-head wore a sandwich board that read “CHELSEA, WILL YOU MARRY ME?”

I walked by a restaurant where Bill Clinton was having lunch. The road was blocked by police cars and a crowd had formed outside. Bill walked slowly through town saying hello to everyone. Someone came away with tears in her eyes. “He shook my hand,” she said.

The wedding came and went. My question: Was it really that newsworthy? To me it seems like the biggest non-story of the year. Chelsea has been out of the media spotlight for a long time. Neither she nor her husband is particularly distinguished from a media point of view, apart from being the daughter of American royalty. There was no scandal, no story, not even good video footage. The main story was the media itself.

Television raises its white sails, and it also creates its own wind. Media begets media, and a lot of important stories out there don’t get coverage.

Solving a Puzzle

The mailman delivered a little blue box wrapped in a ribbon.

We opened it and poured the contents on the table. It was a jigsaw puzzle, but there was no picture on the package. The pieces were crisply sawn out of cherry plywood.

They felt completely different from the usual cardboard puzzle pieces. They slid together with a satisfying snap. This was no ordinary jigsaw puzzle. It was a whole new tactile experience.

Some of the pieces were cut in silhouettes. There was a snake, a clown, a dollar sign, a dog, and a boy and a girl holding hands. Someone had carefully cut around the shape of a face.

Other pieces were designed to bamboozle the average puzzler, such as straight edges inside the puzzle, or irregular extensions that stuck out of the rectangular perimeter.

One piece was initialed with the name of the clever craftsperson who did the cutting.

The puzzle went together in 22 minutes, even without looking at the picture. HA, HA, HA….those devious puzzlemakers thought they could befuddle me. But no, you cannot fool the artist who painted the picture: It’s “The Uses of Soybeans.” I know every atom of that image.


We had such fun building the puzzle that we have decided to make it an annual tradition.

Stave puzzles is a new licensee for Dinotopia and my other artwork. They sent this puzzle as a gift to celebrate our new business venture. If you love puzzles, or if you want to experience puzzling on a whole new level, have a peek at their website.

They’ve got a nifty assortment of one-of-a-kind images by me, and they would be delighted to handcraft a brain-frazzling puzzle for you or for someone you would love to torment.
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Stave Puzzles.com introduces James Gurney (with a puzzle for a 20% discount ).
Stave’s JG assorted products

Donkey Portrait

Peanut the donkey posed for me last evening after her munch of hay and her roll in the dust.

But the other donkey, Jezebel, wanted some attention too. She walked over and rested her heavy head on top of my sketchbook, wanting to be scratched on the top of her neck.

“Hard Times” Exhibit

Note: Event tonight in New York City (see end of post)

“A portentous stillness hangs over America; the affluence that we thought
would last forever has been replaced with apprehension, angst and anxiety,” says Traci Fieldsted, curator of the exhibition.

Clockwise from upper left, "Artist's Mother," David Kassan, 30 x 20, oil on canvas; "Wall Poster, " Burton Silverman, 48 x 40, oil on canvas; "Homeless, " Max Ginsburg, oil on canvas, 25 x 40.

The show is called “Hard Times: An Artists’ View” (at the Salmagundi Club in New York through August 20). The subjects are homeless people, manual laborers, and street vendors.

Warren Chang’s “Fall Tilling” shows field workers toiling with hoes. A woman sits on the ground, while a man talks on his cellphone.

The fourteen artists in the group show include such veteran realists as Harvey Dinnerstein, Burton Silverman, and Max Ginsberg. According to a caption, they “weathered the drought imposed by the modern abstract art establishment.”

Max Ginsberg’s “Snapple” shows a hot dog stand with tattered umbrellas. The sign in the store behind says “CLOSING OUT INVENTORY: EVERYTHING MUST GO.”

The paintings steer clear of overt narrative, sentimental pity, or political diatribe. Unfortunately, some images look like professional models impersonating down-and-outers. And some rely a bit too heavily on photographs.

The most convincing is a street scene with African-American young people painted by Garin Baker. Mr. Baker knows the neighborhood well, because he has worked for years on the street, developed a mural program with underprivileged artists in Newburgh, NY.

Marvin Franklin (1952-2007) painted authoritative watercolors of subway riders. Franklin taught at the Art Students League, working night shifts as a track cleaner on the subway, where he was killed in a freak train accident.

The show presents a brave direction to young realist painters, something meaningful to express with their skills. It stand squarely in the nineteenth-century realist tradition of Bastien-Lepage, Kramskoi (above: "Portrait of a Peasant"), and Dagnan-Bouveret, as well as the better-known Courbet, Millet, and Van Gogh.

The images are disquieting, reminding us of the hardships faced by the bottom margin of our society. Art can make us look at things we’d normally look away from. Such subjects are not easy choices for a career-minded painter. They are often made at the expense of an automatic sale.

Tonight there will be a lecture and panel discussion at the Salmagundi Club, including Fred Ross, Vern G. Swanson, Peter Trippi, Harvey Dinnerstein, and Burton Silverman.

Panel Discussion at the Salmagundi Club in New York City TONIGHT at 7:00 p.m. with a reception following
Art Renewal Center Article about the Exhibit

Warren Chang's Website
Max Ginsberg's Website
Garin Baker, Carriage House Studios
Salmagundi Club is at 47 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10003
Hours: Monday - Friday 1:00 - 6:00 PM Weekends 1:00-5:00 PM

Restoring Art Programs

Comic art legend Joe Sinnott grew up in Saugerties, New York. At age 83, he still lives there and he still works for Marvel.

When the Saugerties school board decided to cancel the art program, he wrote a letter describing how he owes his career to the encouragement of art teachers.

“I know that today it’s much harder to get into art schools and colleges, and that it is a necessity to have high school art credits to apply to these schools. The creativity starts in the early years, and I have lectured for the children at Riccardi, Cahill, Grant D. Morse and Saugerties High School to enthusiastic students. …Art is not just a fun subject. It is a career choice for many. Without it, many talents will be wasted.”

Joe Sinnott’s entire letter.
Report on hopes to restore the art program at the Sauguerties School District
Image from Wizard's Keep, which has more art and a bio of Joe Sinnott.

Slit Pupils and Intorsion/Extorsion

Yesterday's post about slit pupils and rotating eyeballs generated a lot of fascinating comments and links.



I spent the day yesterday beside a lily pond doing watercolor portraits of green frogs, who obliged me by posing very still——until a bug came along. Their attacks were lightning fast and very athletic. Speaking of slit pupils, frogs have them too!

In case you missed them, here are some of the links relating to these subjects:

Function of slit pupils. (Thanks, Kat!)

Rotation of eyeball in humans (intorsion and extorsion) (Thanks, Nick!)

Fun facts about gecko eyes and Wiki diagram of eye muscles. (Thanks, Don!)
Yesterday's post about goat eyeballs (with comments afterward).

Rotating Eyeballs

Goats, like most hoofed mammals, have horizontal pupils. The purpose of those elongated pupils is to allow them to scan the horizon for possible predators.


When a goat’s head tilts up (to look around) and down (to munch on grass), an amazing thing happens. The eyeballs actually rotate clockwise or counterclockwise within the eye socket. This keeps the pupils oriented to the horizontal.

That seems impossible to believe. Eyeballs might be able to scan from side to side, or swivel up and down, but how could they actually rotate clockwise or counterclockwise?

To test out this theory, I took photos of Lucky the goat’s head in two different positions, down and up. I then tilted one of the photos so that the slope of his forehead (marked by arrows) was constant. The photos prove that the pupils actually swivel about 25 degrees within the head.

Draw-Through

Here’s the preliminary line drawing for a Dinotopia painting called “Flight Past the Falls.” I did it on a separate piece of paper, photocopied it, and transferred it to the canvas with an Artograph projector.

The rider on the pterosaur was drawn on a separate layer of paper and moved around until I got the position I wanted.

What I want you to notice is the “draw through,” which means the lines carried across to invisible parts of the form. For example:
1. Circular curve of the bottom half of the globe.
2. Chest of pterosaur hidden by wing.
3. Eye level or horizon hidden behind falls.
4. Curvature of Moorish arch hidden by the flanking buttresses.

Note also the centerline markings on the globe, and the winged sculpture. Also note the perspective grid on the side of the drawing.

Draw-through helps you keep track of what the form is doing when it slips behind something else. If you work out the draw-through on a separate piece of paper from the finished work you don’t have to worry about erasing the lines or covering them up.

You can apply the draw-through principle to figure drawing or any drawing, especially in the early stages. It will make your final drawing or painting more solid and convincing. When an architect draws a building elevation, she knows where the windows and doors are located on the back side of the building.
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Earlier GJ post about the skybax model and the finished image.

Tool People Report

Here at last are some images from the “Tool People” workshop I conducted at the Delaware Art Museum a little while ago.

This four-hour creature design class had a sold-out attendance that included people of high school age and older. Each person brought a tool from the workshop or kitchen and an action figure or a doll (One high school art teacher brought a whole backpack full of GI Joes to loan out).

The students set up around the long tables and started by accurately sketching the objects they were going to morph.

Then they came up with character concepts such as the “Scissors Bunny” and the “Lemon Squeezer Guy.” People experimented with bending, squashing, and stretching rigid forms to make them come to life. Some developed backstories and “frontstories” for their characters, and some even started generating a series of graphic novel panels right on the spot.

In high spirits we posed outside the museum for our class photo. Thanks to everyone who attended! It was great fun to meet you and work with you.
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Delaware Art Museum

Rackham on Photo Illustration

Even as far back as a century ago, magazines were beginning to use photographs to illustrate stories and poems. Arthur Rackham, sensitive to the threat that the art of photography posed to him as an illustrator, challenged the practice:

“Now your work, all your work, should be regarded as a work of imagination, as art. You are not copying-clerks or phonographers or recording angels. Yet there is some tendency now to illustrate even poetic works and fiction by photographs. Surely to place before your readers…the actuality you had before you when writing, is ruthlessly to rub off all the bloom of imagination, of temperament, of personal view, of atmosphere, which are your chief, your only, great claim to consideration.”

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from James Hamilton's biography of Arthur Rackham

Nephroid Caustics

Oh, I forgot to mention…there’s another kind of caustic reflection that’s as near to you as your coffee mug: a nephroid caustic. That’s the name for the little shape that forms when sunlight slants into an empty cup or bowl.

These mathematical figures are called “nephroid curves” because they sometimes have a kidney-like shape, and they’re called “caustics” because they’re focused rays, so they could potentially burn something (but dang, the won’t keep my coffee hot).

Note that in the photo there’s also a caustic halo bouncing off the outside of the mug, too. Any time you’ve got glass or metal objects in direct sunlight, there will be lots of caustic effects all over the place.

The giveaway that it’s a caustic effect (as opposed to plain old reflected light or highlights) is that the light is focused into a definite shape with a bright line or edge around it.

And now you have a topic that you can try out at the coffee machine to find out who are your kindred visual geeks.
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Previously on GurneyJourney: Caustics, Caustic Reflections
Wikipedia on optical caustic effects and nephroid geometry.
CG Caustic rendering tutorial

Caustic Reflections

In a previous post we looked at the fun trick of optics is called caustics, where undulating waves act like lenses to cause a network of dancing lines on the sea floor. That’s called a caustic projection.

The same kind of thing happens when light bounces up from the water surface. It’s called a caustic reflection. It’s a common sight on the sides of docked sailboats or on the undersides of bridges in Venice.

In this case the caustic lines are fairly parallel to each other because the waves are, too. The light is hitting the water at a low angle (allowing a greater amount of light to be reflected upward), and the caustic reflections spread out and go a little out focus on the near side of the bridge.

A caustic pattern appears on the inside surface of the vaulted arch in this painting from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

This figure shows how the two kinds of caustics work. The waves act like curving mirrors and lenses at the same time.
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Photo by imappi2 on Flickr
Previously on GJ: Caustic Projections

The Cal Arts Story

The CalArts Story from Christine Ziemba (CalArts) on Vimeo.

The cultural life of Los Angeles seemed like such a glorious dream when Disney produced this video promoting the planned Hollywood campus for the CalArts art school. The voice is Sebastian Cabot, aka "Bagheera" in Jungle Book.
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Previously on GJ: A visit to CalArts Animation.