Races in Skybax Canyon

Will and Cirrus lead the skybax races around ancient demisaurian monuments near Ebulon in Dinotopia's great desert.

The painting is 3 x 6 inches, oil on board, published in my illustrated adventure Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara (signed copies available in my online store).

Kentrosaurus Bakery

A Kentrosaurus assists the bagel seller, from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

Building Dinotopia in Lego

Seattle area builder Shawn Snyder recreated the saurian-themed architecture of Dinotopia in Lego bricks.



The gold trimmed details of the pediment use dinosaur-shaped motifs, and pterosaur finials hover over the towers.

The dinosaur firefighting rig was based on a page spread from Dinotopia: Journey To Chandara.

The firefighter has his tools mounted on the side of his Triceratops saddle, with the hose reel right behind him.

More Lego creations on the site Brothers Brick 

Thanks, Michael Lynch

Tips for Taping Off

When I do Dinotopia paintings on illustration board, I tape off the edge with blue low-tack painter's tape (from the hardware store). Then I cut a thin strip of white so-called "artist's tape" to put over that to preserve my perspective grid markings. Red marking is the eye level. I don't recommend using the white tape directly on the illustration board because the adhesion is too strong and it rips the board—and it's non-archival, as is almost all tape, really.

I seal the whole surface, including the edge where the tape meets the drawing, with clear acrylic matte medium so that the oil paint doesn't seep under the tape. 

When the painting is finished, I remove the tape. The image can be flapped with polyethylene coated paper while in production, and it has a safety margin of white board around the image. When it comes to framing it can either be cut down to the edge of the painting and framed without glass or matted and framed. 

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Previously on GJ:
Perspective Grid
Technique Notes

Want more insights? Pick up a signed copy of the new expanded edition of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara at my website or on Amazon or Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist.

New expanded edition of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara

Dover Publications has just released a new expanded edition of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara in their premier Calla line of illustrated books. (Link to book trailer video on YouTube)

This beautiful hardcover edition includes an exclusive peek behind the scenes, with 30 pages of sketches, storyboards, maquettes, photos of models, character designs, and models posing.

If you live in the USA (or can provide a domestic US shipping address), you can order a signed copy from my website store and it's also available from Amazon

Dinotopia painting, step-by-step

Here's a quick video that shows the painting sequence for an illustration in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. In the scene, Arthur Denison meets a retired musical conductor, surrounded by dinosaurs and musical instruments.

Old Conductor, 13 x 14 inches, from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara

The drawing is pencil on heavyweight illustration board, sealed with matte fluid medium. Over the drawing, I start by lightly washing transparent oil paint, and then paint area by area, making sure I get the major faces and the statement of light the way I want them early on.

If you're getting this blog post as an email, you may need to follow this link to see the video on Facebook.
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The painting is from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara (signed from my web store) or from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara from Amazon
More about the steps in a picture like this in my book Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist (James Gurney Art)

Tonal Study in Pencil

It doesn't take very long to do a preliminary tonal study, but the time spent pays big dividends. Here's a small pencil sketch that I did in preparation for a painting in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. 

For example, the tonal study helped me plan the dark area behind the light feathered dinosaur in the lower right, and it helped me work out the chiaroscuro of the bearded farmer.

Once I get into the details of the painting, I'm making decisions at a more micro level. Without that tonal study, it's hard to see the big picture. 

The original pencil tonal study appears in The Art of James Gurney exhibit at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia through November 16.

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More about various kinds of preliminary drawings in my book Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist

Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara on Amazon

U.S. customers can get signed copies of both books from my website store.

Strategies for Evoking Moonlight

"Khasra by Moonlight" is one of the original paintings in the exhibition "The Art of James Gurney"  in Philadelphia. 

Khasra by Moonlight by James Gurney, 12 x 18 inches, oil on board

To evoke the feeling of moonlight, I used the following six strategies, which I based on my own personal memories of observing moonlight, and my study of other artists whose nocturnes I really admire (especially Frederic Remington, Atkinson Grimshaw, John Stobart, and Frank Tenney Johnson):

1. Set up an overall temperature contrast between the orange torchlight and the cool blue-green moonlight.

2. Keep the chroma in the moonlight low--not too intense of a blue-green. Hint of blue in far distance.

3. Put a slight warm halo around the moon and edge-light the adjacent clouds.

4. Keep the key of the painting relatively high.

5. Suppress all detail in the shadows and put some texture and variety in the lights.

6. Introduce a gradual stepping back of value, lightening as it goes back to the far minaret.

Here's the quick (45 minute) maquette that I built for lighting reference. It didn't need to be beautiful at all, just any old blobs of modeling clay were all I needed.



I quickly discovered that I had to move the actual lighting position quite far to the left, much farther to the left than the position of the moon in the painting.

After taking a digital photo of the maquette, in Photoshop I shifted the key toward blue-green, and I desaturated it slightly. The photo shows a lot of reflected light in the shadows, which I largely ignored. I would have played up that reflected light had I wanted to evoke daylight effects, where I might want to amplify the relatively weak reflected light.

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Resources

"The Art of James Gurney" at the Richard Hess Museum at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia will be on view through November 16, and I will do a public presentation on October 29.

"Khasra by Moonlight" was first published in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara

There's a discussion of architectural maquettes in my print book Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist and an exploration of moonlight in Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter

GurneyJourney YouTube channel
My Public Facebook page
GurneyJourney on Pinterest
JamesGurney Art on Instagram
@GurneyJourney on Twitter

Eye tracking the stairway illusion

When I painted this Dinotopia image I wanted to do my own spin on the famous "infinite stairway" optical illusion invented by Lionel Penrose and M.C. Escher.

If you walk around the stairs clockwise, you proceed infinitely downstairs, and if you walk counterclockwise, you go upstairs forever without gaining in altitude.

"Scholar's Stairway," Oil on board, 12 x18 inches.

The way I painted it, the illusion is fairly subtle, and I wondered if other people even noticed the illusion, and if so, whether their eyes moved systematically around the stairs.

To find out, I asked vision scientist Greg Edwards, president of Eyetools, Inc., to run some eye tracking tests using this image as the subject.

Dr. Edwards had fifteen subjects look at my pictures on a computer screen for fifteen seconds each while a sensor tracked their eye movements in real time. Below is the eye track of one subject's experience. The colored line shows the pathway of the eyes, beginning randomly at the green circle. The numbers in the black squares show where they eye traveled at each second of the fifteen second session. 

One can’t know for sure without a follow-up interview, but evidently this particular observer didn’t notice the optical illusion.

The second image shows the "heatmap," which aggregates data from all fifteen observers. The red and orange blobs are the areas of the image received nearly 100% of people's attention. The rider on the brachiosaur took attention away from the central illusion. The dark blue and black areas received almost no attention. 

What can we conclude from the heatmap image? Viewers definitely looked at the figures, wherever I placed them. Beyond that, we can't say much because we didn't design a very thorough experiment. I would love to work with a larger sample size and to gather followup interview data, and ideally collect simultaneous fMRI data set to see if we could correlate cognitive behavior with eye movement. That way we could understand better what happens when people "get" the illusion. If there's any vision scientist who has the equipment and wants to try an experiment like this, please contact me.

This original painting is in the "Art of James Gurney" exhibition at UARTS museum in Philadelphia through November 16.
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Previous posts about my stairway painting:
Credit to Mr. Penrose
Using a Perspective Grid

Market Square and Maquette

"Market Square" and the archway maquette I built for lighting reference are both now on view at "The Art of James Gurney" exhibit at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia through November 16.
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My Public Facebook page
GurneyJourney on Pinterest
JamesGurney Art on Instagram
@GurneyJourney on Twitter
More on maquettes in my book Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist

Gurney Museum Exhibition in Philadelphia

A new exhibition of my original art has just opened at the museum of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. The Art of James Gurney includes more than 25 oil paintings from the Dinotopia books, as well as natural science illustrations, preliminary sketches, and maquettes. 

One of the featured images is "Waterfall City: Afternoon Light" from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara. This is the only image that overlaps from the Delaware Art Museum exhibition a few years ago; the rest are all different.

The Art of James Gurney will be on view at the The Richard C. von Hess Gallery of Illustration at 333 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA through November 16.

In connection with the exhibition, I'll be doing a public presentation on Thursday, October 29 at 1:00 pm at Levitt Auditorium, with a reception following.

Skybax Car

I've always had a fondness for exuberantly painted cars. Here's one in Ohio that features Will Denison from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara painted on the hood.


In case you couldn't make it out, here's the painting it's based on.

I love the wiggly yellow line against the blue and black stripes and the gradation from red to orange. Nice job!

Thanks, Azonthus.
Previously: Fan Fun, Waterfall City mosaic, and Dinotopia in Lego

Dinotopia at the Children's House

Dr. Jo Ann Leggett, director of the Children’s House preschool of Victoria, Texas recently completed a Dinotopia-themed project for the school’s summer program, and she sent some photos to share.


Dr. Jo says: "Children delighted in all the books," and they learned about geography from the Dinotopia map.


They tried "plank walking," a Dinotopia game that I introduced in "Journey to Chandara."

To succeed at plank walking, everyone has to pull the ropes and lift their feet together as a team.


"Dinotopia is our 'most-looked-forward-to' unit at the school. Thank you for your inspiration," says Dr. Jo.

Thank YOU, Dr. Jo! If you're a teacher of any age group and would like to spotlight Dinotopia at your school, please write me a letter. I’ll be happy to send you a list of suggested games, projects, and activities, and I'll include a signed card to help you get the ball rolling.

Previously:
Dinosaurs Invade Millburn High School
Science, Art, and Fantasy (Elementary School)

Dinotopia at the Grant Elementary School

St. Albans School in Washington, DC

Horses, Dinosaurs, and Turnip Carts

The draft horses at the farm have their full winter coats, and I'm hoping Lenny will be hitching them up soon to pull the sleigh. 

Watching the draft horses working in harness always impresses me.  The horses have to respond to so many voice commands. Each horse has to recognize whether Lenny is talking to both of them, or just one of them. And they have to know the commands for forward, back, stop, right, left, and step sideways right and step sideways left. 

The experience of seeing how a driver communicates with draft horses inspired me when I painted this image of a Triceratops pulling a turnip cart. You'll note that there are no reins; the driver (and Bix) are using voice signals entirely to communicate with the Triceratops. The painting originally appeared in Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara and later in Imaginative Realism. 

You can own this original painting. It is currently available for sale at the Daniel Maghen Gallery in Paris.

Previous posts on GurneyJourney:
Spokewheeling (compositional principle using this painting)
Ground Driving (me walking behind two of the Belgians)

Thanks, Damian

Chandaran Scientific Instruments

Part of the fun of fantasy worldbuilding is dreaming up plausible artifacts. 

In Dinotopia's eastern capital of Chandara, the imperial academy includes an assortment of scientific instruments, which Arthur Denison records in detail in his journal.

An orrery, which models the movement of the earth and moon around the sun. The base is a turtle, inspired by the World Turtle mytheme.

an astrolabe, which measures star positions to aid in navigation;  

a cylindrical music player like the Edison phonograph with an ammonite horn...

and a clockwork world map which demonstrates the movement of floating continents. 

Here's what Denison's journal looks like, where these drawings were recorded. This is built from cast latex, brass, and copper over a real antique book. I made it as a display prop for a Dinotopia art exhibition at the Smithsonian.

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Order a signed copy of Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara (2007)

or on Amazon: Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara