Before I go too far, I’ll point out that although this is essentially an instructional book, it also works well simply as an art book; and fans of fantastic art in general, and Gurney’s work in particular, will quickly find it a “must-have”. (See my previous posts on James Gurney, also here and here. As a side note, Gurney is part of the Enchantment Artist’s Symposium and Exhibition at the University of Hartford’s Joseloff Gallery, 6 November 2009 to 17 January 2010.)

First, this book is unusual because of its topic. Most art instruction books concern themselves with drawing and painting aspects of the real world, and this is certainly the most fundamental and important factor in representational art. But for those in working in areas that demand the creation of images of things that do not exist, whether of real but extinct animals, scenes form the historic past or visionary imaginings of undiscovered worlds, the challenge is to take those fundamentals of drawing and painting from life and extend them into the realm of the imagined.

This is increasingly important for contemporary illustrators, movie and gaming concept artists, animators and comic book artists. Figures, faces, animals, creatures, scenes and entire worlds need to be conjured from the the artist’s imagination and made visually manifest.

Gurney tackles the skills needed in this kind of art head-on. He goes through an extensive array of topics, from generating ideas to initial sketches to models and maquettes, through materials, mediums, techniques, perspective, composition and finishing. In the process he covers elements like imagined architecture and landscapes, vehicles, dinosaurs, history painting, characters, creatures and aliens. The topics are arranged in short, but densely informative two-page topics and sub-topics, lavishly illustrated with Gurney’s own work and occasional nods to the masters.

Steeped in the traditions of classic representational art and the firm artistic foundations of 19th Century academic art in particular, Gurney starts from his interest in those traditions and opens with a brief look at the history and origins of imaginative art, with an acknowledgement of the value of studying the work of artists that have defined the field.

The topics are at once wide ranging and surprisingly consistent. I say that because of the other, perhaps most important, stand out characteristic of this book, its rather unique origin.

There are several approaches to the creation of art instruction books. We can eliminate those that are mediocre or downright terrible and concentrate only on books we would consider valuable.

Among these there are books that are proposed by editors in publishing houses, and fulfilled in a perfunctory, but capable manner by artists and writers chosen for the task. There are books that are proposed by the artists themselves in an effort to leverage their knowledge into financial stability beyond its application in their own work. There are books that are created from the artist’s inclination to take on the role of a teacher.

Rarest of all, there are art instruction books that are born out of the artist’s sheer enthusiasm for what they have learned and the desire to share it with any who are inclined to benefit from that knowledge. Imaginative Realism is one of those rare gems.

The contents of this book didn’t originate as a book project, but were gleaned from posts to Gurney’s superb blog, Gurney Journey, in which they have been offered up for free over the course of the last few years.

Over the extent of it’s run, Gurney’s blog has evolved from chronicling a book tour into a personal journey of artistic exploration and discovery; in the course of which Gurney has shared his insights into painting, composition, color, light and a variety of keen observations about the nature of creating art. As you can imagine, in the course of writing Lines and Colors I have occasion to visit hundreds and hundreds of artists’ web sites and blogs. Gurney Journey is one of the exceptional few that I return to on an almost daily basis.

The book started as an idea in a blog post, and further posts followed it’s creation and eventual publication. In this one, Gurney explains his intention in creating the book.

The resulting book is beautiful. It’s printed in a nicely oversize format on heavy stock, with printing values that make the hundreds of illustrations jump off the pages. The reproduction standards follow in the tradition of the superb reproductions and excellent printing evident in Gurney’s popular Dinotopia books (particularly the most recent one, Journey to Chandara), and his refined use of color is vibrantly present.

I also haven’t seen many art instruction books as information dense as this one. Not that the book feels visually cramped in any way, the book design is clear and elegant, but every one of its 200+ pages can be mined for nuggets of art technique gold. This is likely due to the origin of the book in blog posts collected over a long time, rather than a book project that had to be filled out from its inception. Instead of having to put together enough material to create a substantial book, Gurney probably had a job sifting through that wealth of material and deciding what to leave out.

Gurney even goes the extra mile and gives an insightful overview of art careers based on the techniques he outlines in the book, including paperback covers, film design, storyboards, concept art, video game design, toy design and even theme park design.

The one glaring omission is comics, perhaps because it’s an art form in which Gurney doesn’t personally work, and, though he pays plenty of attention to drawing, his emphasis is on painting. I do work in comics, however, so I’ll take in on myself to point out that virtually all of the concepts in the book can be applied to the creation of comics in addition to the other areas mentioned.

The last way in which Imaginative Realism is different from most other art instruction books is the feeling it carries of a start-to-finish labor of love; from its origin in the artist’s enthusiasm for the subject, to the fulfillment from a lifetime of experience, observation and work, to it’s refined finish, crafted like one of Gurney’s own paintings. It is instructive not only in how to draw and paint from the imagination, but in how to create an outstanding art instruction book.

In short, an absolute treat.

While you might expect a painting developed for an instructional DVD to be more quickly realized than Giancola’s highly finessed professional work, he turns in a work worthy of the 18 Chesley Awards he has garnered, showcasing his strengths not only as an imaginative science fiction artist, but as a strong figurative painter, steeped in the techniques of traditional oil painting.

The demonstration goes from initial sketches to reference photography through the step by step creation of the finished painting. The two disc DVD is $60 and runs 5 hours, but there is a 6 minute+ trailer on YouTube, that is instructive in it’s own right, in addition to giving a good taste of the quality of the DVD.

Giancola presents his thoughts with clarity, explaining his process in some detail, while the director alternates between time-lapse segments, in which some of the more extended periods of painting are condensed, and real-time segments in which the most salient parts of Giancola’s painting process are demonstrated.

Search engines, of course, come to mind. Those tireless workhorses of web direction (and misdirection) are always happy to give out their directions (and maybe a few ads) to help in your righteous quest, oh Grail Seeker.

But suppose you don’t have that magic word, the name of the painting or artist, What then?

Enter similarity based image search, the ability to search for other images based on the characteristics of a known image. There are several approaches to this, and several kinds of search engines to use.

In investigating them, I started out with an image that was common, but not too common, Titian’s portrait painting known as Man with a Blue Sleeve (The National Gallery, London, also called A Man with a Quilted Sleeve, which may or may not be a self-portrait, I think it is).

I got an interesting variety of results from several visual search engines with similarity based search features, though none of them returned the image I was hoping for (at least in the first round), Rembrandt’s similarly posed self-portrait (see my post on Web Gallery of Art).

The first kind of search engine can be particularly helpful in this kind of search, in that they allow you to actually upload an image you already have and search for similar images; completely image based, no search words necessary.

TinEye (images above, top) allows you to browse your desktop, upload an image, or enter the URL of an image file on the web, and search for similar images. It does a good job of finding other versions of the same image, which can be very helpful in identifying an image for which you don’t have a name or artist. It wasn’t that helpful for finding related images by the same or other artists, but you could start there and carry on with a more generalized search engine.

BYO Image Search Lab (above, 2nd down) from Idée Labs also lets you upload an image or enter a web URL, but the returns are quite different. I was actually very impressed with the engine’s returns of images with similar composition, color and value, and it returned fascinating images; but it was not particularly helpful in finding other images by Titian or similar images by other artists. It’s fun, though. Idée Labs also has searches based on a selection of colors, or combined tags.

The other engines require that you first find an image through traditional word-based search and then show you similar images to the ones found.

Incognia (above, third down) did a decent job of finding some other paintings by Titian, but was not extensive in its returns and doesn’t identify the source of the image on the thumbnail.

Pixolu (above, 4th down), which uses a Flash based interface, found a wider range of Titian images. It allows you to control the size of the thumbnail display, and drag multiple images to a sidebar and click “Refine” to focus your search. The thumbnails are not directly linked to their source, however. You have to click on them and then look to the right under the thumbnail size control, for the image URL.

Of course, the big boys want to play at this game too.

Venerable Google, which essentially owns web searching (something like 80-90% of all searches now) has a solid similar images labs feature (above, 5th down); probably the most useful and extensive of the lot (they’re #1 for a reason). Google found a range of Titian portraits, as well as similarly composed portraits by other old master artists, and displays the link to the original under the thumbnail. Subsequent pages of results started to stray more widely off topic, but retained a mix of relevant results for several pages. (Still didn’t turn up my Rembrandt, though. Perhaps that was too much to ask.)

Bing, Microsoft’s rebranded search engine, appears to have an automatic similar image feature. When searching for images, clicking on any one image brings up its source in a browser frame, and displays related images in another frame to the left. I don’t like the frame based interface, or the fact that it won’t let me Command-click (on the Mac) to open multiple images in additional browser tabs.

Bing did an OK job of finding some similar images (above, second from bottom); but as I scrolled down in the related images frame (above, bottom) some of the “similar images” just boggled my mind.

Correction: OK, I owe Microsoft an apology (sort of). Apparently the images to the left are not related by similarity, but are results from the original search term. It is evidently finding “Titan” in addition to “Titian”, thinking I’m too lame to have actually meant “Titian” (thanks for nothing, Clippy), which explains the colorful figure of the Boy Wonder and the football stuff. Still wonky, though; and now not related to the topic of this post. Sorry.

Addendum: I want to give you the benefit of one of the key things I’ve learned about searching in my 14 years on the web; and particularly over the last few years of researching topics for Lines and Colors: and that is that search engines are not where you begin and end your search.

Search engines are a great place to begin a search, particularly if you learn to use their more powerful advanced features, but search engines can only take you so far. Much of the web is the so called “deep web”, billions of pages beyond the reach of the major search engines because they are behind logins or database driven sites that don’t get indexed easily. (The last estimate I heard is that Google, by far the largest and most powerful of the major search engines, reaches less than 20% of the total pages on the web. Granted, most of this is corporate documentation, but it’s still a striking figure.)

Use search engines to start your search, but then focus in on the local search available within databased sites that may have the information (or image) that you’re seeking. For example, if go to the large online art sites like Art Renewal Center, Web Gallery of Art, CGFA, The Athenaeum, or Artcyclopedia and use their local search features, and you’ll often have greater access to their resources. The same applies to the online collection databases of museums.

Art Babble, the tagline for which is “Play Art Loud”, aggregates art related videos from a variety of sources, most notably museums like the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Arts & Design, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Norman Rockwell Museum, Rubin Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Van Gogh Museum, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; along with Public TV station KQED.

For the most part these seem to be high end, professionally made videos that delve into a variety of art subjects. I’ve only had chance to watch one full video so far, and perhaps I got lucky, but I found it fascinating, illuminating and nicely erudite without being stuffy or overly technical.

Research in progress: Van Gogh and contemporaries (images above), from the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, is a short in which a restorer from the museum examines a painting by Van Gogh and a painting by Monet side by side, utilizing a range of approaches, from naked eye to microscope to x-ray to ultraviolet, and explores similarities in their painting technique, the use of broken color and the choice to allow the ground to show through the brushstrokes to add to the color and texture of the painting.

if the other videos are of this quality, I’ll be looking for a lot of spare moments to return to the site.

You can view the list of videos by topic (”Channels”), by artist, by series or by the participating institution.

Since then, Clyne has extended his resume and added to his online project gallery with concept art for feature films like The Poseidon Adventure, X-Men 3: The Last Stand, Star Trek (image above, top, with detail, middle) and an underrated and undercirculated science fiction film called The Fountain (above, bottom).

Clyne’s atmospheric, detailed and and imaginative concept images start with traditional media, markers and pens, rendered on vellum, and then move into digital applications like Photoshop for final renderings as digital paintings.

There are 5 instructional DVD’s on the Gnomon Workshop in which Clyne details his techniques. As I also mentioned in a previous post, Clyne was an instructor for the Gnomon Workshop: Live! 2008 event. I think he is scheduled to be part of this year’s Gnomon Workshop Live!: 2009 event, which takes place in Hollywood on June 27 and 28, 2009, but I haven’t been able to confirm that yet.

The io9 site has recently featured some additional galleries of Clyne’s work, with his designs for Star Trek, and several more general articles, including a collection of his Sweeping Vistas .

Unlike Google and other traditional search engines, WolframAlpha doesn’t direct you to web pages on which you might find information on a subject, but instead attempts to provide the information directly in a condensed display. The intention is to provide the ability to ask a question and receive an immediate answer.

In its nascent form the engine is limited in scope and, unsurprisingly given the background of the developer, focused largely on mathematical, scientific and technical information.

However, I found the concept and its potential interesting, and immediately found at least two uses of possible interest to artists and art lovers.

One is the ability to type in the names of two or more artists, in the case above, top, I’ve entered Leonado da Vinci and Michelangelo, and immediately get a short comparison of information such as full name, place and date of birth, ect.; but most of relevance to those interested in art history, a comparison of the two artist’s lifetimes on the timeline of art history.

The other built-in feature I found is the ability to enter color names and get a return with color swatches, designation values in different color systems, and related or complimentary colors.

These features are obviously of limited use at the moment; but the possibilities are tantalizing, and I think this kind of “knowledge engine” will become a tremendous resource, across all fields of endeavor, in the near future.

In part, I suppose there is a thought that one might get usable ideas form the way others have arranged their work area; but mostly I think it’s just curiosity and the vaguely inspirational nature of being around or in artists’ working areas.

Even art school studio and work spaces, which always seem to have a “same as it ever was” feeling to them, can feel inspirational, just because of the associations they have for those of us who attended classes at one time or another.

Parka Blogs, who I profiled here, has a post about Creative Workspaces and Home Offices, with links to a number of individual workspace articles from blogs (including Man Arenas, who I profiled here); as well as links to collections of workspace and studio photos on Flicker.

Some of them are: The Creative Workspace Pool, The Workspaces – No Computers Pool, The Art Studio Pool, The artist STUDIOS Pool, The Professional Creatives at Home Pool, and even The Inspiration Boards Pool, devoted to those collage-like amalgams of inspirational and reference images most of us have accumulating push pins above our drawing tables and computers somewhere.

(Images at left: “sweet sweet life“, “lavadera“, “the arborgeist project“, “jacanegra“)

[Via Drawn!]

Most notable among them are things like health insurance, which can be a make it or break it factor in the ability of artists to support themselves.

There are other factors, like retirement savings and an unfairly high tax rate on self-employed people here in the U.S., based on various government excuses, the gist of which are that the government assumes that we’re cheating in some way.

All of these are factors that the Freelancers Union is intended to deal with. The Freelancers Union is an organization started by Sara Horowitz, a labor organizer and attorney from New York, whose family has been involved in unions and labor relations for a couple of generations.

Membership is free and open to all freelancers, consultants, independent contractors, temporary and part time workers and anyone who is self-employed.

The Freelancers Union offers access to group health, dental, term life and disability insurance, and in the state of new York is acting as it’s own insurance provider. There are also seminars, workshops, networking events and a member directory and gig listing, as well as offers of discounts with Staples, Zipcar and other companies.

I learned about the Freelancers Union from a story on the NewsHour on PBS.

I can’t speak about the organization from personal experience, at least not yet; but I intend to join, even if only to learn more.

The ability to take your own photos of artworks is wonderful for a number of reasons; not the least of which is that, if you work at it, you can take photographs with a small, inexpensive camera that show more detail, brush strokes and paint surface characteristics than the images in most art books and other reproductions.

It’s not that professional photographs taken under controlled conditions aren’t better, it’s just that they’re seldom made available at high enough resolution to show the detail. Occasionally an art book will show a few small detail crops, but even that is rare. In your own photographs you can zoom in at will, and take close-up crops the would never make it into an art book. You can also get photographs of wonderful but obscure works that rarely make it into reproduction.

It’s not easy, though. There are rules. Most museums that permit photography prohibit the use of flash or tripods. There is usually a policy statement about photography on the museum’s website in the section about visiting the museum or “museum policies”. (The National Gallery of Art in Washington actually allows flash photography, though they shouldn’t, and the Met permits tripods on certain days.)

Taking a well focused photograph of a painting in low light with a handheld camera can be a challenge, as my numerous blurry attempts attest, but you can do it with a little patience.

The good news is that it’s gotten easier in in the last couple of years, with new advances in camera technology, most importantly the new generation of cameras with Image Stabilization.

This is a group of technologies that reduce the blurring effect of camera shake by physically moving either the lens element or the image sensor in digital cameras to compensate for the movement of the camera body.

Be careful when shopping for this, however, there are a lot of spurious claims of “anti-shake” and “anti-blur” features that refer to simplistic mechanisms that simply use a high ISO (allowing more light to be read by the sensor in less time) that allows them to increase shutter speed; which in small consumer cameras can easily result in pictures that are so grainy and noisy as to be unusable. (This is a phony feature in much the same way that “digital zoom” is a phony feature, as it is essentially just a smaller crop of the original image with less resolution. “Optical zoom” is the real thing.)

Read reviews on camera enthusiast sites to ensure that the camera you’re choosing has actual mechanical image stabilization. The better manufacturers generally make it clear that they’re providing genuine image stabilization (though they often have different names for it).

Even though I already have a small camera I like very much, a Canon A-95, I recently bought a new camera just for the purpose of taking photos in art museums, both because I wanted image stabilization and because I wanted something a bit smaller and easier to carry around.

After diligently doing my homework (and if you’ve read my article on pochade boxes, for example, you know I can be a bit obsessive about researching what I buy), I decided on a Canon SD770IS Digital Elph (Amazon link, image at left).

In looking for camera that would be best for the purpose, and still relatively inexpensive, I considered several cameras, read numerous reviews and, after leaning toward the Sony Cybershot DSCW150 for awhile (their image stabilization tech is branded “Sony Super Steady Shot”), settled on the Canon.

Both have received excellent reviews and provide the image stabilization feature in a small package (about the size of a deck of playing cards) at a reasonable price. These size cameras are sometimes called “sub-compact” or “shirt pocket cameras”.

Prices on digital cameras are ephemeral, changing by the minute based on retailer, marketing whims, and apparently alignment of the moon and planets. I found good prices on Amazon for the particular camera I was buying, but that even varied within the same model. When I bought my SD770, the Silver version was $160 and the black trim model of the same camera was $190, and at the moment it’s reversed, go figure.

It’s worth looking around even within Amazon or other large suppliers for multiple listings of the same product to see if you can find a better price. The camera review sites often list suppliers and prices at the bottom of reviews, but be wary of some smaller suppliers, look for reviews of the retailer before buying somewhere you haven’t purchased before.

There are a number of other small image stabilized cameras from Nikon, Panasonic and others (who often have different names for the image stabilizing technology) that would also be excellent choices. I don’t mean to limit your choices or suggest I have a definitive answer, I’m just trying to provide the benefit of my experience.

So far I’ve been very pleased. The image stabilization feature allows me to get about 2 f stops of improvement in ability to shoot unblurred images in lower light conditions, the color balance and image sharpness are good and the camera is small enough to carry without being distracted by it when I’m not actively taking pictures. I also got a Canon case for the camera that slips on a belt and has a magnetically closed flap that provides much easier access than a zippered case.

Bear in mind, though, that image stabilization is not a magic cure for blurred shots, just an improvement, an edge. Also, you can certainly take photos in museums with cameras without that feature, as I’ve done many times, it just takes a bit more work.

In either case the old advice still holds, keep your elbows in, breathe out before shooting and, perhaps most importantly, take multiple shots. Get a large memory card for your digital camera so you’re not intimidated about using memory space, they’re inexpensive now, and take several shots of everything. That’s perhaps the single most useful rule I’ve learned about photography, and one of the best things about digital photos, you can just throw out the files you don’t want.

There is also neat trick for making you own $1 camera stabilizer (Metacafe video). You may get funny looks, or even objections, from museum guards, but it’s not a tripod.

When learning to take photographs in museums, I also tested my shooting methods by taking two shots of each painting, not just because taking multiple shots is always advisable, but to see the results at different ISO settings, usually 200 and 400.

The higher ISO permits a faster shutter speed, hence less chance of blurring, but as ISO levels increase, so does noise in the photographs, particularly in these small cameras with tiny CCD sensors. Most small cameras do OK at 400, and it significantly reduces blur, but the discerning eye can tell the difference. At ISO 800 or above, most small cameras start to produce an annoying level of noise in the shot (hence the uselessness of the ISO-based “anti-shake” features in cheaper cameras).

The image above, top is a photo I took with my new camera of a charming little Monet in the Philadelphia Museum of Art called Green Park, London, with a crop below at full resolution. My original 10 megapixel image was 3648 pixels by 2736 pixels. The crop here is at full size at 450 x 300. Here is the painting on the PMA’s web site. The listing has a zoomable feature that shows pretty good detail; but not as good as mine, even though the original professional photograph, taken under controlled conditions with tripod and lighting, was undoubtedly much better.

Also, when photographing paintings in museums, be aware that using the zoom produces more sensitivity to camera shake. I walk up to a painting to take close ups.

There is also a tendency to use a little bit of zoom to compensate for the fact that small cameras often show “barrel distortion” when used at close range without zoom (the tendency for the image to look as though it’s spread out across a somewhat curved surface, as in my image above, top), but there are ways to correct that digitally.

Recent versions of Photoshop, in particular, have a great filter for just that purpose called “Lens Correction”. I’ve used that, plus the free transform tool, to correct my rather haphazardly composed shot at top into a nicely square version (left, top). I’m assuming that there must be consumer level image editors with similar features.

There are also software remedies for reducing noise in images taken with higher ISO settings, like Neat Image, which is a free Photoshop plug-in for Mac and Windows, and offers a stand-alone version for Windows (also free). I haven’t tried it yet.

Another factor to consider when taking photographs of artworks is “white balance”, an adjustment in color sensitivity to compensate for the different spectrums of light produced by the sun and incandescent, florescent and halogen lamps. Most cameras have an auto white balance feature, but if your images come out looking too yellow or too blue, etc., you may want to look into setting it manually by taking a white card into the museum and shooting it in gallery lighting at different white balance settings, to see which makes it look most like pure white.

Here are a couple of articles that go into more detail, Museum Photography, from Digicam Help, and a Museum Photography article on Wikiversity.

If you have access to a major museum, it’s worth investigating their museum policies to see if photography is permitted. If you’re studying painting, in particular, close-ups of paintings by artists you admire can be an invaluable resource.

Unfortunately, the big disappointment is that many smaller, regional museums, like the Brandywine River Museum, The Michener Art Museum and the Montclair Museum, to name a few of my favorites, don’t permit photography of artworks at all. Some small to medium sized museums, like the Delaware Art Museum, have policy comparable to the larger museums. I don’t know exactly why there seems to be such a division in policies; perhaps small museums are more dependent on loaned works in their primary galleries.

I’ve long been an admirer of Rembrandt’s drawings, particularly those done in reed pen, bistre ink and wash. (Bistre ink is made by boiling wood soot, often taken from wood-buring chimneys, in water. It produces as yellow-brown, transparent ink that was not favored for writing, but is well suited to drawings with washes.)

In attempting to emulate Rembrandt’s sketching methods (and those of other master ink and wash draughtsmen), I’ve even made my own reed pens (moderately successfully) and bistre ink (unsuccessfully); but eventually settled on modern tools, a steel nibbed pen like a Hunt/Speedball 108 and washes of modern sepia-colored drawing inks, or other brown or red-brown inks (as opposed to real cuttlefish sepia, which can be problematic).

There are more interesting drawing inks appearing in recent years, like Walnut Ink and Noodler’s Drawing Inks, but I haven’t tried them yet.

So for a while I was carrying around a sketching kit of a sketchpad, pen holders and points, a bottle of ink, a bottle of wash, a watercolor brush, rinsing water and a wiping cloth. Perhaps comparable to what the old guys carried around, but more awkward than a modern portable pocket watercolor kit.

I wanted something I could stick in my pocket and have with me to sketch at a whim, without the mess and fuss, but I still wanted to sketch in brown line and wash.

After trying various tools, I settled on a couple of Sakura Pigma Micron markers with sepia colored (brown) ink in different sizes, usually 05 and 005, and a Tombow Dual Brush-Pen, “Tan”, #942 (many of the other colors in these markers are too dark to be used for washes).

The Pigma Microns are water-fast once dry, which is almost immediately. I can wash over them at will with the Tombow, which is light enough for relatively light washes, and can be built up a bit with repeated passages. The Pigma Microns can also be used over the wash which results in an interesting bit of bleed and rough line.

The result is a reasonable approximation of ink and wash, as in my drawing below (larger version here), and makes for a simple, easy to carry, no-mess sketch kit that lets me draw in ink and “wash” wherever I go (though the Tombow Brush-Pen is a bit big to casually carry in a pocket).

(BTW, I know I’ve got a lot of nerve posting one of my own drawings with a Rembrandt, but I’ve learned over time how horribly counter-productive it is to be intimidated by others’ work; so I refuse to be intimidated even by the great masters. Inspired, yes, intimidated, no.)

For a nice off-white suface, on which the brown ink lines and washes look great, I use Strathmore Series #400 sketchpads. They have a nice paper with a slight tooth that takes light washes well, and are slim enough at 24 sheets to slip into a pocket or case easily. (I also use Moleskine Cahier softbound sketchbooks, which are even thinner, about the size and appearance of a U.S. passport.)

While I’m at it, I’ll recommend a good book on pen and ink drawing: Rendering in Pen and Ink by Arthur L. Guptill and Susan E. Meyer, and a nice inexpensive book on Rembrandt’s drawings in color (which really makes a difference) is Rembrandt Drawings: 116 Masterpieces in Original Color from Dover Books.

You can also look for Rembrandt drawings in color on the terrific web site Rembrandt van Rijn: Life and Work (see my post on author Jonathan Janson, the Rembrandt site, and the related site, Essential Vermeer).

Here is a larger version of the Rembrandt drawing at the top of the article, and another Rembrandt ink and wash drawing that I just love.

There are other variations on portable ink and wash drawing, of course; a nice fountain pen with waterproof ink and a Niji Waterbrush, in which you could carry your own mixture of wash, would be more flexible, but a bit more trouble.

I’ve been happy though, with the portability and flexibility of my “Pocket Rembrandt”, and the wonderful character halfway between drawing and painting produced when rendering with washes. If you haven’t tried it, pick up a “Pocket Rembrandt” kit and head for the marshes.