Light Spill

I had the morning free yesterday in Allentown, Pennsylvania so I set up my chair in an alley called West Silk Street and did this little gouache sketch.

I was interested in an effect that I've been calling "light spill." I've noticed this effect in old photographs or in pictures taken with a camera that has a dirty lens.

When an extremely bright field of light is surrounded by very dark forms, the light spills over into them. Even though those forms appear very dark near the sky, I tried not to paint them that way. The color of the light spill is the same as the color of the source of light, so a blue sky will spill blue light and a warm building will spill warm light.

I took some photos while I was doing the sketch. In these two details from the same high-key exposure, you can see the effect of light spill on smaller forms interpenetrating the bright areas. Note how the wires and the streetlight in the top detail are blue where they intersect the sky. The wires turn orange where they intersect in front of the warmly lit rooftops.

Photography has a disadvantage over painting in such super-high-contrast situations, because to really see the light-spill effect in the dark areas, you have to burn out the exposure in the light areas, which appear white in the photos above. 

But in the painting (detail above), I could hold some chroma in both the sky and the building. Gouache is a really nice medium for such experiments.
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Materials: Moleskine watercolor notebook, Winsor & Newton gouache, Caran D'Ache Supracolor pencils
Color and Light book
Related previous posts:
Color Corona

Artist Automaton

(Video Link) Here's a hand-cranked artist automaton.
Thanks, Michael Stancato

Lepidopter in Second Life

A Second Life user named Bunnys Fride visiting the Jules Verne Museum in Nantes, France saw my painting of the "lepidopter" flying machine and asked if he could create it for Second Life. It's now available for free from the marketplace there.

(Video Link) Natascha made this video of the contraption in action.  

Thanks, Bunnys Fride.

Lepidopter, free from the Second Life Marketplace

Previously on GurneyJourney:

Painting the Lepidopter

Unveiling at the Jules Verne Museum

Mammatus Clouds

Before the big thunderstorm arrived last Tuesday night, I sat outside and sketched some strange cloud formations.

They're called mammatus clouds, named so because their pendulous forms resemble an animal's udder or a woman's breasts. They are found at the base of anvil clouds, the giant cumulonimbus clouds that generate extreme thunderstorms.

As I made this quick notation with my water brushes, the wind whipped the treetops. The clouds swirled and turned green. Big raindrops started falling around me. I folded up my sketch gear and retreated indoors. Hail pounded the deck outside. Lightning flashed, then thunder. Suddenly the electric power died and stayed out for several hours.

I finished the sketch by the light of a kerosene lantern.

Mammatus clouds on Wikipedia

Iceberg flipping over

An iceberg gets top-heavy and gracefully turns over. The berg calved from Argentina's Uppsala glacier.
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via Best of YouTube

The Stroop Effect

What is the color of each words below? Say the name of each color aloud as you look at each word:

Green  Red  Blue  Purple  Blue  Purple

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Now do the same thing for the words below. Don't read the words. Just say the name of the color of type used for each word.


Blue  Purple  Red  Green  Purple  Green

For most people, the second task is more difficult. It takes longer to name the colors when the word doesn't match the color, and mistakes happen more often.

This experiment was first conducted by John Ridley Stroop in 1935, and has been used to understand how different pathways of information can interfere with each other in the brain. 

One explanation for why we have such a hard time sorting out the conflicting information is that it takes us longer to identify the color names than it does to read the words, so the brain has to go back and reconfigure each guess.

-----Wikipedia on the Stroop Effect 

"Art of the Fantastic" opens tomorrow

The museum exhibition "At the Edge: Art of the Fantastic" opens tomorrow at the Allentown Art Museum in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

The paintings and sculpture encompass the worlds of mythology, fairy tales, dreams, monsters, fantasy, science fiction, adventure, surrealism, and the bizarre. Right: "Beauty and the Beast" by Thomas Blackshear

Organized by Patrick and Jeannie Wilshire, founders of IlluxCon, the show includes about 160 works of from 145 artists, roughly 45 of them predating 1940. It's unlikely that a larger or more comprehensive museum show of this kind will ever be assembled in our lifetimes.


There will be a preview party Saturday evening (public invited, tickets still available), and the museum opens for free on Sunday. I have two Dinotopia paintings in the show (visible on end wall), and I'll be attending both days. The show will be on view through September 9.

At the Edge: Art of the Fantastic
Muddy Colors Post with more information