I recently did an update on James Gurney, and I don’t normally do two posts about the same artist in such quick succession, but I finally had a chance to spend some time enjoying my new copy of his latest book, Journey to Chandara, and I was just knocked out.

Journey to Chandara (more detail here) is another in his series of Dinotopia books, fantasy adventure stories set in a “land apart from time”. All of these books, and particularly the new one, are the kind of books for which even that wonderful term “lavishly illustrated” is inadequate. To say these books are fantasy adventure stories is insufficient as well; they are excursions into the science, history and, in particular, art of previous centuries.

In a way somewhat more subtle than William Stout’s playful series of dinosaur images that make reference to various painters and Golden Age illustrators, Gurney likes to combine his fanciful images with his fascination for the styles and techniques of great artists, particularly those of the 19th Century, from Charles R. Knight to Daniel Ridgeway Knight.

In the new volume, this phenomenon is even more pronounced than before. This is a quest adventure to a distant part of Dinotopia. From Waterfall City, which is an idealized European city (think Rome + Venice + Mongo, which Lucas & Co. “borrowed” uncredited as the inspiration for Naboo in Star Wars Episode I), Gurney’s dinosaur and human characters “journey to the east” on their way to Chandara, the Dinotopian equivalent of China. On the way, they visit an ever widening variety of places with their attendant variety of landscapes.

In the process, we see Gurney observing, absorbing and playing with the techniques and subject matter of a host of great landscape painters (which I have to think is the real inspiration for the story). In particular he shows his affection for painters like Caspar David Frederich, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner (particularly his early work), and a number of the “Orientalist” painters (like Jean-Léon Gérôme), who took their own journeys of exploration.

Gurney also continues his obvious display of affection for 19th Century Academic painters, the Pre-Raphaelites, great illustrators like Maxfield Parrish and N.C. Wyeth, and even M.C. Escher.

Somehow, he manages to mix in his knowing winks and thank-yous to these artists with dazzling lighting and dramatic compositions that will enthrall modern adventure fans, as well as inventive designs for places, characters and props that would be the envy of many accomplished production designers and concept artists, and make it all feel like part of a whole. Remarkable.

There is another aspect to this book that makes it my favorite of his published works to date. The reproductions seem even better than in the previous volumes, even though they were excellent. You can see more of the artist’s brushstrokes and the surface quality of the paint. This may be due to the quality of the reproduction, or the way in which the works were photographed, or it may be that Gurney himself is getting more painterly and confident as he continues his restless exploration of the art of painting. I suspect it’s a combination of those factors. The paintings are in oil but Gurney occasionally achieves watercolor-like effects where the paint is thin enough to let the white of the support, and at times hints of the underlying drawing, come through.

Beyond the subtle details for art lovers, and the illustrated adventure itself, Gurney adds, as he often does, features like imaginative cut-aways of the interiors of structures and devices that appeal to the 12-year old inveterate Popular Science reader in many of us. This includes inventive conceits like the use of a brachiosaurus as a fire truck, with an escape ladder on the back of its neck.

The level of detail extends to invented alphabets based on dinosaur tracks and and a separate, beautifully done, National Geographic style Traveler’s Map of Dinotopia. The attention to detail in this volume rivals that of Chris Ware’s amazing book/artifacts.

Gurney also continues to mix real science and history in with his fantasy. He goes on to explore Escher-like surface tessellations (made, of course, of dinosaur tracks) and the presence of the Fibonacci series (the “golden section”) in the surface patterns of seeds and flowers. He shows real designs for astrolabes, demonstrates how an abacus functions; and illustrates, in a detailed, David McCauley-like cutaway, an explanation of how a windmill works.

Of course, on top of that we get image after image of Gurney’s beautiful renderings of dinosaurs; all manner of dinosaurs — large, small and in between. Again, he is including real science. In spite of the fanciful setting, Gurney strives to keep his renderings paleontologically accurate, and the book’s dust-jacket features, amid raves from Ray Harryhausen and Walt Reed, notices from renowned paleontologists like Michael Brett-Surman and Mark Norell. In some cases the relation of the dinosaur images to the story is subtle enough that that the fantasy element is subdued and the images just look like particularly beautiful straightforward paleo illustrations, making me hope that Gurney has plans for such a book up his sleeve.

All of this plus the way that Gurney has allowed us to look over his shoulder as he explores the work of great artists from the past, adds up to a package that is an absolute treat.

Gurney continues to cover his own journey, as he travels in support of the book, on his blog, Gurney Journey. The blog is increasingly fascinating and features posts on his process and technique for the book, on the practice of studying and borrowing from the masters, and the subject of painting in general (see his recent post on his favorite How-To books). It also features larger reproductions of some of the paintings than those on the Journey to Chandara section of the Dinotopia site, along with preliminary studies and sketches, and even some of Gurney’s recent landscape paintings.

Original paintings from Journey to Chandara and his other books are currently on display in exhibitions in Los Angeles and Oshkosh, Wisconsin. See my previous post and Gurney’s Dinotopia Exhibitions page for more links and details.

I received a note through James Gurney’s mailing list that his Dinotopia site has been completely redone and expanded with new content, largely in support of the newest book in his Dinotopia series, Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

In addition, Gurney has a new blog, Gurney Journey, in which he intends to chronicle the people and places he and his wife (who is also an artist) encounter as they travel on the book release tour.

As I mentioned in my previous post about Gurney, Dinotopia (images above, top and middle) is a series of illustrated fantasy stories, in which the illustration/text ratio is nicely weighted toward illustration. The stories are about a land where intelligent dinosaurs co-exist with people in a vaguely late 19th Century level culture; and in them Gurney mixes a fascination with dinosaurs with a passion for Victorian painting and 19th Century academic art (particularly Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema).

You can tell that Gurney keeps abreast of the latest paleontological discoveries, as his portrayal of various dinosaurs has changed to reflect scientific revisions over time, in spite of the overtly fantastic setting.

If your only exposure to the Dinotopia stories is by way of the cable TV mini-series, the books are much more engaging, largely because of Gurney’s wonderful illustrations; and the new book promises to be one of the most visually striking of the series. You can see some sample pages on the Dinotopia site and the publisher, Andrews and McMeel, also has a web space devoted to Journey to Chandra.

What isn’t made obvious on the Dinotopia site or the blog is that Gurney is also a landscape painter (image above, bottom), working in the area, and somewhat in the tradition, of the Hudson River School.

In looking at the rich, high-chroma palette in his landscape paintings, it’s easy to think that he has carried some of his illustration style into the landscape work, but I think the style flows more dramatically in the other direction, in that his landscape painting from life informs and enlivens the invented landscapes in his illustrations.

Addendum: Those in Los Angeles, CA and Oshkosh, WI will have the opportunity this fall to see Gurney’s work in person in the form of two exhibits: Dinotopia: The Fantastical Art of James Gurney is at the Los Angeles Public Library from Aug 4, 2007 – Jan 6, 2008, and Return to Dinotopia will be at the Oshkosh Public Museum, November 3, 2007 through January 27, 2008. For more details see the Dinotopia Exhibitions page on the Dinotopia site.

The “About Me” section of Dan McCarthy’s web site simply has three photos of him pulling screen prints, a photo of a dog (presumably his), and the unhelpful legend, “more soonish..”.

Not very informative, but the prints are pretty much the story. Though there are sections of posters, paintings and even T-shirts on the site, they all seem to carry the flavor of his prints.

The prints themselves are very graphic, beautifully designed and often carry themes of trees against the night sky and, a subject I’m always keen on, dinosaurs, particularly as portrayed in the form of their skeletal remains. The one above, for example, is a 4 color screen print on 100lb Stonehenge printmaking paper (a wonderfully textured paper that I like as a drawing paper for chalk and conté). Oddly, McCarthy doesn’t indicate the size of the edition on the pages that describe the individual prints, but some of them are listed a sold out, so I presume the runs are reasonable numbers (I don’t know the limits of current screen printing materials).

Check out this fascinating print (unfortunately sold out) that is essentially a short graphic story, the biography of a carbon atom.

His posters share some of the same themes, notably skeletal winter trees and skeletal paleo images. Even his paintings are very graphic and share the same thematic direction.

His drawings are a bit different, but I’m particularly fond of them. They remind me very much of drawings I used to make when I was younger, of telephone wires, poles and transformers. (I was just fascinated with the idea of lines drawn across the sky.) Mine were just sketches, though. McCarthy’s are more fully realized silhouette drawings, carefully composed and strongly designed.

McCarthy’s “news” page does seem to have a recent update, and lists newly added prints, so maybe the “more soonish..” promise will be realized with more images and a bit of background about this fascinating artist. Until then we’ll have to extrapolate, like paleontologists, from the bones we can find.

Link via Paleoblog and Drawn!

I was one of those lucky kids who didn’t “outgrow” my fondness for dinosaurs, or drawing them, as I grew older. They are amazing animals in many ways, and their variation in size, wildly bizarre appearance and astonishingly exaggerated forms make them as much of a delight to draw now as they did when I was 10.

The Gnomon Workshop, a video-based offshoot of the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood, is now offering an instruction al DVD called Drawing Dinosaurs: Anatomy and Sketching with David Krentz.

Krentz was the lead character designer on Disney’s Dinosaur, a disappointing movie with great character design and effects. (My understanding is that the original plan was to do it wordlessly, like an updated version of the terrific dinosaur sequence in Fantasia, which would have worked great, but Eisner insisted that the dinosaurs talk and have cutsie mammal companions).

Krentz is also a founding member of Ninth Ray Studios, a concept and production art group that includes Iain McCaig, Ryan Church and other major concept artists. In addition to his work on Dinosaur, Krentz has worked on titles like Fantasia 2000, Treasure Planet, Spider-Man 2, The Ant Bully, John Carter of Mars and Eragon.

Krentz is also a dinosaur sculptor, and has a site devoted to his small scale sculptures, of which he sells limited edition castings. His main web site has galleries of his concept art and illustrations for movies and games, as well as examples of his story boards from Dinosaur and John Carter of Mars. There is also a nice gallery of six images on the Gnomon Workshop page for the DVD, in addition to the stills from the video.

It’s interesting to note that his credits include story boards and animatics for Eragon, the new movie that prominently features dragons. Our long history of a fascination with dragons in various cultures just shows that if dinosaurs didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them.

Link via PALEOBLOG

For somebody who isn’t specifically a paleo artist, New Zealand artist Greg Broadmore paints very cool and realistic dinosaurs. He has apparently loved drawing dinos from an early age (as happens to many of us), and now gets to paint them in the service of movie concept art, specifically for the lavishly dinosaur-populated remake of King Kong from Peter Jackson.

Broadmore works as a concept artist for Jackson’s WETA Workshop and has also done concept design and illustration for The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the upcoming Halo and live action Evangelion films.

He works digitally in Photoshop and Painter, and his illustrations have a feeling of physical paint and a muscular approach to light and shade that gives his work an appealing immediacy and power.

Broadmore’s work is featured prominently in The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island, a book set up as a mock “natural history” of Kong’s Skull Island, beautifully illustrated by the WETA concept artists who worked on the film.

Broadmore also created a comic called Killer Robots Will Smash the World that is published in New Zealand and may bit hard to find here in the States (I’m looking).

Did I mention that he also paints great robots?

The links below are to his galleries on the WETA Workshop site, that showcase his concept art for the films, and a site called The Battery, a project he shares with fellow WETA artist Warren Mahy, which features some of his sketches and quick studies, as well as more finished personal work.

John Gurche is a paleontological artist known for the near-photographic realism and compositional drama in his scientific reconstructions of prehistoric life.

Gurche was a consultant on Jurassic Park and provided paintings for the 1989 dinosaur stamps for the U.S. Postal Service. His illustrations have been in numerous books and have been featured in magazines like National Geographic and Natural History Magazine. His work is in the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian and the Field Museum, which houses the mural version of the t-rex image above, showing an interpretation of the famous t-rex find named “Sue” which is mounted at the Field.

His dinosaur images in particular showcase his ability to add realism to scenes of prehistoric life with his superb control of atmospheric effects and aerial perspective. He also has a knack for finding unusual positions and angles of view for his images.

Although his work covers many aspects of prehistoric life, his is most widely recognized by the general public for his dinosaur art, and is probably best known in the scientific community for his reconstructions of early humans and pre-human species.

He is currently involved in an 10 year ongoing project called “Lost Anatomies” for which he is illustrating many of the anatomical changes that have occurred to the human form over the course of our evolutionary history.

Charles R. Knight was one of the most influential and well known paleontological artists in the history of the field, and was one of the pioneers of paleontological reconstruction art, creating images of extinct animals based on their fossil remains and a knowledge of modern animal anatomy.

He began his study of art at an early age, taking classes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in spite of the fact that he had been struck in the eye with a stone at the age of six and suffered from an astigmatism that together rendered him legally blind.

He was from a family that had a passion for the outdoors and soon carried his interest in drawing to the zoo, beginning a lifetime practice of drawing animals. He started his career as an professional artist working for a firm that decorated churches and gradually moved into illustration for magazines and children’s books.

His interest in animals led him to the American Museum of natural History, where his frequent visits were noticed by the museum’s scientists, one of whom, Dr. Jacob Wortman, asked him if he could draw a reconstruction of prehistoric mammal that resembled modern pigs.

Knight used his knowledge of modern animal musculature and surface anatomy to create a successful restoration that began his career as a paleontological reconstruction artist.

Working at a time when most fossils at the AMNH were kept in drawers and there were no dinosaur skeletons in the kind of dramatic display that we now expect of natural history museums, Knight worked with Henry Farifield Osborn and William Matthew to create displays of the animals in lifelike mountings.

The scientific accuracy of his reconstructions was up-to-date with scientific findings at the time, but the past changes quickly. Paleontology has made dramatic advances in recent years and Knight’s images of tyrannosaurs and triceratops with their tails dragging on the ground and apatosaurs (at the time called brontosaurs) wading in water to support their bulk are inaccurate in light of modern knowledge.

The power of his artwork remains, however, and Knight’s drawings, watercolors, oil paintings and large scale murals are still considered classics in the field and are still influential on subsequent generations of paleo artists. Knight absorbed influences from the art world around him, including the brilliant colors of Impressionism and the elegant compositions of Japanese art and brought a feeling of light, texture and life to his work that set high standards for everyone who was to follow.

There is an excellent website devoted to Knight, maintained by his granddaughter Rhoda Knight Kalt that includes a detailed bio, gallery and Knight related news. The American Museum of Natural History has an excellent online gallery of Knight’s work, even if the images are small.

Knight was featured as a character in the IMAX film T-rex: Back to the Cretaceous, and the historical graphic novel Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards (more info here).

A previously unreleased autobiography, Charles R. Knight: Autobiography of an Artist (more info here), has been published, put together by an interesting team, including a forward by Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen, an introduction by William Stout and illustrations by Mark Schultz (see my previous posts on William Stout and Mark Schultz). Stout, who is himself a dinosaur artist of note, has published three volumes of Charles R. Knight Sketchbooks (toward the bottom of that page).

In addition to his ground breaking and influential work as a paleo artist, Knight also continued to pursue his interest in painting modern animals, particularly tigers and other big cats. In fact, Knight may have thought of himself as simply a nature artist, portraying animals and plants, both contemporary and extinct, with equal aplomb.

Michael Skrepnick gets to draw and paint fantastic animals that are as wild and bizarre as anything done by any fantasy or science fiction artist, except that the animals he portrays are real, or at least based on the best information we have about real animals that once walked the Earth.

Paleo artists like Skrepnick work with paleontologists to create images of animals long extinct by extrapolating their appearance from the fossil record and from a knowledge of modern animals that share physiological characteristics with the extinct ones. In the case of dinosaurs, this means birds and members of the crocodile family.

Good paleo artists and paleontologists are painstaking in their efforts to recreate these animals faithfully. The fossils give good information about skeletal structure, from which things like muscle mass, size and weight of an animal can be deduced. There is also some information about skin textures. (For color, however, fossils don’t give a clue.) The closer we get to the reality of what dinosaurs actually looked like, the more one thing becomes clear: these were some weird puppies.

Working in graphite or pen and ink for monochromatic works and in acrylic for paintings, Skrepnick portrays prehistoric animals with a clear, sharp and detailed style that reinforces their connection with the real world and recognizable environments and makes their strangeness even more palpable. His dinosaurs are bathed in sunlight, strongly modeled and connected to the ground and the world around them.

His images have appeared in many museums and scientific institutions and in books from a variety of publishers.

There are two galleries in the site, but the images are frustratingly small – not large enough to get a real feeling for the quality and drama of Skrepnick’s work. Try looking for some of the books he has illustrated.

Some titles are: Great Dinosaur Expeditions and Discoveries: Adventures With the Fossil Hunters (Dinosaur Library) (Thom Holmes, Laurie Holmes), Armored, Plated, and Bone-Headed Dinosaurs: The Ankylosaurs, Stegosaurs, and Pachycephalosaurs (The Dinosaur Library) (Thom Holmes, Laurie Holmes), Triceratops: Mighty Three-Horned Dinosaur (I Like Dinosaurs!) (Enslow Publishers), Sinosauropteryx-Mysterious Feathered Dinosaur (I Like Dinosaurs!) (Michael William Skrepnick), and Mesozoic Vertebrate Life: (Indiana University Press), for which the image of Monolophosaurus jiangi, shown here, is the cover.

I first encountered Bill Stout’s work in underground comix. He then cropped up on the covers of Firesign Theatre albums and in the pages of magazines devoted to automotive humor from Peterson Publishing (a publishing niche which also featured work from Gilbert Shelton and Alex Toth). By the time I found his remarkable book of dinosaur art, The Dinosaurs, I was a solid Stout fan, and the book was a big influence on me when I started doing my series of dinosaur cartoons for Asimov’s.

Stout worked with Russ Manning on the Tarzan daily newspaper strips and worked with Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder on Playboy’s Little Annie Fanny. In addition to comics, album cover art and dinosaur art, Stout has done fantasy art, trading cards, movie poster art, and film design. The one common thread is that his work always stands out.

His admiration for the classic pen and ink illustrators like Joseph Clement Coll, paleo art greats like Charles R. Knight and classic comics artists like Wally Wood, Will Elder and Al Williamson serves him well. Stout has a wonderful ability to put down just the right amount of hatching, just the right spotted blacks and just the right amount of detail to make his drawings hit my visual pleasure button square on. Unfortunately there aren’t many examples of his black and white work on his site, but you can see some of it on the covers of his published Convention Sketches.

Stout’s beautiful book of dinosaur art has been reissued as The New Dinosaurs. Also in print is Abu and the 7 Marvels, illustrated by Stout and authored by Richard Matheson. There is an interview with Matheson and Stout on SciFi.com.

Delightfully, you can also get many of Stout’s convention sketchbooks as well as sketchbooks on other themes, reprints of classic stout comics, other books, trading cards and all manner of other Stout stuff directly from his site. Stout sometimes offers his original art for sale directly on the site or through eBay. He also keeps a journal on the site.

The images on his site are a bit small to get a real feeling for the quality of his work. There is an unofficial Stout gallery here with some larger images, and there are some interviews with him on the Comics Journal site.

Olduvai George is a blog title and online identity for natural history illustrator Carl Buell. (The name is a play on Olduvai Gorge, a large ravine in Tanzania where some of the earliest human remains have been found.)

Buell has a passionate fascination with animals, living and extinct, although his work has him most often illustrating animals that lived in the last 65 million years (after the disappearance of the dinosaurs). His robust, colorful illustration style uses texture and color relationships to give the animals a real sense of physical presence.

He works in both traditional media and digital painting, working primarily in Photoshop for the latter. You’ll also find work in acrylic posted on the site (image above). Here is his step-by-step walk through of his digital illustration of a mammoth, and a more abbreviated look at the drawings for a color image of a bird.

The links that say “Click here for a larger, more detailed image” link to Buell’s Photostream on Flickr. While it’s nice to be able to leaf through the images that way, and I think there are a few on Flickr not on the blog, the images are disappointingly not much (or any) bigger then the images on the blog. They’re good sized on the blog postings, I would just enjoy seeing more of the details because the images seem rich in detail and texture.

There are both color and black and white illustrations posted on the site. Some of the black and white ones are preparatory drawings for color pieces, some are finished (and nicely rendered) black and white illustrations.

Check out this wonderful black and white landscape, inspired in part by Ansel Adams’ photographic techniques.

Link via John Nack on Adobe and Drawn!.