For those in south Florida, I'll be giving a digital slide presentation at 3:00 p.m. today at the Norton Museum of Art, followed by a booksigning. Hope to see you there. Bring the kids and bring your books to be signed. The signing is at 4:00 (there will be books and a poster available there, too).
Here's the new Estonian edition of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.
As I painted the fallen stone face on the right side of the picture, I was thinking of Percy B. Shelley’s 1818 sonnet “Ozymandias,” which describes a traveler’s encounter with a colossal ancient statue in the desert: “Near them, on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies.”
The inscription on the stone at the lower left echoes Shelley’s theme of the mute arrogance of a vanished civilization. The phrase says “EVERLASTING DOMINION” in Dinotopian footprint alphabet, ancient Greek, and Aramaic (written with Hebrew letters).
A city slicker buys a bull calf from some country bumpkins, wishing to save the poor animal from becoming veal. He ties the lead rope to his waist against the urgings of the farm kids.
The calf drags the humane man through fences and fields, until the man cuts the creature loose and sells him cheap to be made into meat. 
Finally Lenny told me the secret: you push down on his hind end, while pulling forward on the lead rope. “I’ll make a farmer of you yet,” Lenny said as we headed down the dirt road.
The calf and his mother will be on the farm all summer. I’ll keep you posted about future animal stories.
“Dinotopia: The Fantastical Art of James Gurney” contains over 50 original oil paintings, along with preliminary sketches, plein air studies, scale maquettes, and dinosaur fossils. This will be the first venue to show the sculpt of the Protoceratops Bix made by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
There will be a whole family day celebration on Sunday June 6 from 1:00 to 5:00 with live animals and activities. And there will be events going on all around town during the whole summer. The exhibition will be up through September 5. Call 561. 832.5196 for more information.
At the Andrews McMeel Publishing booth I signed posters for Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter (224 pages, Fall 2010).
It was a risk for me, too, but I was rescued by you, my audience. In the last six months since the release of Imaginative Realism, it has reached the #1 position on Amazon.com in the categories of both art instruction and painting, and I was surprised to learn that it is already in its third printing. 
So I am very appreciative to of each of you readers of the book and the blog for helping support my work in the rough waters of this economy.“This is the book I wish I had in art school”
—Dylan Cole, Concept Art Director, Avatar
“This is the text book that we’ve been searching for but until now, never existed.”
—Mark Tocchet, Chair, Illustration, University of the Arts, Philadelphia
“There has been a profound lack of a clear and comprehensive volume on color and light for the representational painter until now. James Gurney’s outstanding new book gives traditional and digital artists the means to give accurate and compelling expression to their subject matter.”
—Nathan Fowkes, concept artist for DreamWorks and teacher at the L.A. Academy of Figurative Art
“James Gurney’s new book, Color and Light, cleverly bridges the gap between artistic observation and scientific explanation. Not only does he eloquently describe all the effects of color and light an artist might encounter, but he thrills us with his striking paintings in the process.”
—Armand Cabrera, Artist
"The world we all see is a light painting. Gurney gives you the tools you need to understand and paint the light you see."
Tobey Sanford, Photographer and Author of Capturing Light
“James Gurney’s book Color and Light is a rich compendium of practical information vital to any artist concerned with depicting visual reality. With a fresh intelligence, Gurney moves from foundation principles for creating form and premixing a palette, to advanced concepts of color gamut mapping. He gives us a new look at the traditional color wheel, and essential advice for the plein-air painter. I enthusiastically recommend this book to my students.”
—Ed Ahlstrom, Professor of Painting,
Montgomery College
It’s not a light arrangement that you see too often, but it has its purpose, especially in film and comics. Because it places equal importance on the light side and the shadow side, it can convey the sense that the subject is a doppelganger, a person whose soul is a battleground of equal and opposing forces.
One thing you get with split lighting is reflected light bouncing back into the nasolabial furrow (the smile crease). This bounced light is very warm because it comes off the nose, so the N.L. furrow will likely be the warmest skin tone in the face.
Above: a photo from the BEA in 2007. I'll resume the posts on portrait lighting on Friday.
We hardly recognize family, friends, and celebrities when we see them with the light shining upward on their features.
The portrait of the character Lee Crabb from Dinotopia, below, shows him at a dramatic moment when he wants to take control of a powerful glowing sunstone. The ruby-colored light from the sunstone gives him a threatening, power-mad look. The underlighting is combined with a strong, cool edge light from the right.
Contre-jour lighting is the opposite: The head is seen against a field of light, which spills over the edges of the form.
Here are some charcoal studies using frontal lighting that I did as reference for a portrait of a spaceman on a paperback book cover (below, left). 
I used contre jour lighting for the Asteroid Miner painting, right, which I did as a portfolio sample. I later sold the rights for a paperback cover, but the black type behind him sort of killed the effect. 
As a result, the subject’s emotion is masked. The effect can be threatening, mysterious, or inscrutable. Above: N.C. Wyeth, from Kidnapped.
You probably wouldn’t want to use this lighting arrangement for portraits, but it can yield powerful effects for a dramatic entrance of a dangerous character, or for conveying a feeling of cool detachment. Above: Dean Cornwell.
The lighted triangle now appears on the cheek closest to the viewer. Short lighting emphasizes the cheek contour, and it can help make a face look thinner. 
When short lighting is arranged so that the nose shadow merges with the shaded side of the face, many photographers call it “Rembrandt lighting.” Here’s Rembrandt’s “Lady with an Ostrich Fan,” a classic example.
The forehead and cheekbone planes on the illuminated side are turned with color temperature, rather than with value. The blue color of those planes that angle back suggests the effects of light from a blue sky beyond, even though we can’t see any background in this vignette.
The dramatic broad lighting brings out character in this mountain man from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. The shadows help to define the wrinkles in the brow, and the low sun increases the squint.
In this portrait by Rembrandt, the main light casts a shadow onto the man’s left cheek, leaving a lighted triangle on the shaded side. 
Above: William Trost Richards, “The Storm” (click to enlarge).
To make the foam appear to ride on the surface of the water, it should be painted last, while the underwater foam should be painted first. Above: A detail of an oceanscape by Montague Dawson (1895-1973). Full image at Animation Treasures
The topic is “Flagging the Head,” a compositional strategy introduced on this blog and in Imaginative Realism. 
Note to commencement speakers: There are a few lines you might want to delete from your speeches. They’re nice sentiments, but we’ve heard them too many times already.
“The arrangement of these colors on Norman’s palette may vary somewhat, but the accompanying sketch shows a typical disposition. The colors in capital letters are those most frequently used.
“The palette consists of a heavy adjustable drawing table (the metal stand type) on top of which is a large piece of white glass known as “milk glass.” Such a stand permits the raising or lowering of the palette to the desired height. It can be used horizontally or tipped to any degree. Norman has equipped his stand with a box designed to accommodate tubes of color.
“He keeps red at the left, yellows next, then white, and at the right his blues, greens, black, and miscellaneous colors. An attached shelf behind this box accommodates his brushes.”
Here’s the loose lay-in demonstrated on a 9x12 inch plein-air study, shown with the finish on the right half and the first statement on the left.
With other pictures, however, it's a different story. In this painting from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, I did a careful pencil drawings directly on the final surface, and I sometimes work out the drawing on a separate piece of paper. 
Sargent, the maestro of alla prima, sometimes did very careful pencil drawings before he tried to tackle some of his Venetian studies of architecture. Richard Ormond’s new book on his Venetian work includes a reproduction of a line drawing that he did to work out the perspective of the church of Santa Maria della Salute.
They would include Howard Pyle, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and John William Waterhouse (above). 
Yesterday we had the chance to visit N.C. Wyeth's studio. He built his home and studio in Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania using the proceeds from the success of his illustrations for Treasure Island, which was published in 1911. 
This historic photo shows the studio in Wyeth's time. It was kept intact fortunately, so all the props, costumes, and references are still there. 
This drawing by a teenage Andrew Wyeth shows N.C. at work, with the light conditioned by drapes dangled from the window.