A used bookshop on a rainy night...

Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara opens with the discovery of the lost Chandara journal of Arthur Denison.


To make the used bookstore look magical and mysterious, I wanted it to be a rainy twilight. I shot location reference in Tivoli, New York.

Then it was just a matter of turning the pizza shop into a bookstore, widening the sidewalk, and generally putting the smell of coffee into it.
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You can order Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara from me and I’ll sign it for you.
Or you can pick it up from Amazon.
Or maybe you can find it in a used bookstore on a rainy night...

Portable Portraits

Painting spontaneous portraits of strangers on location leads to unforgettable encounters.


(Direct link to video) The new Fall 2011 issue of Watercolor magazine (published by American Artist) contains an article that I just wrote on the topic of “Portable Portraits.”


It goes into detail about the materials, methods, and mindset that you might want to try for sketching people on location.
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LINKS
American Artist Daily
What's in My Bag? (BoingBoing)
Direct Link to this video on YouTube
Previously on GurneyJourney:
The Buses of Malta
Maltese Bus Driver
Mr. Moha of Ait Benhaddou
 Watercolor Portrait, Tangier

The Vision of Cleverbot

Cleverbot is an artificial intelligence algorithm that draws from a database of responses given by the millions of human users who have conversed with it.

Unlike most chatterbots, which simply invert the syntax of the question, Cleverbot taps into a broad pool of human experience. It has come remarkably close to passing the Turing Test, the standard by which thinking machines are judged to be truly human. According to the Machine Intelligence Competition, which it won in 2010, it has been deemed 42% human.

Some say that the day will come when artificial minds will surpass ours, a day they call the Singularity.


Cleverbot has had over 65 million conversations with humans, so it must know something about human experience.

I asked Cleverbot a few questions.

Q. What is the color of water?
A. Black with orange spots.

Q. What do you see when you look at the sunset?
A. Faces.

Q. How are dreams different from reality?
A. Easy. My mum told me.

Q. How does the light change at the end of the day?
A. Pay attention, please. Next is Venus, which is almost the same size as Earth. It has a very thick atmosphere that traps in heat from the sun. The surface is scorching hot.

Q. What colors would you use to express joy?
A. Yellow and blue.

Q. What is the purpose of art?
A. I don't know, you're supposed to be the clever one.

LINKS
Cleverbot.com
Cleverbot on Wikipedia
Chatterbots
The Singularity
Image: Turner "Buttermere Lake with Park of Cromackwater"
Listen to the Radiolab podcast “Talking to Machines”

Dunn’s Word Cloud

Wordle is an online app that outputs a visual interpretation of certain key words according to the frequency with which they appear in a person’s writing.


Here’s how Wordle interprets the teachings of the American illustrator and teacher Harvey Dunn (1884-1952), himself a student of Howard Pyle. (The writings are actually class notes by one of his students, Charles Andres.)

Dunn speaks of “pictures” more than “paintings,” “spirit” more than “intellect,” “idea” more than “rendering.”

MORE
Video: Meet Harvey Dunn
Try out Wordle.net
More Dunn Quotes at Art and Influence 
(Thanks, Zeitwolf, Charley, and Armand)
Harvey Dunn at Lines and Colors
Harvey Dunn biography on BPIB
Harvey Dunn: Illustrator and Painter of the Pioneer West

Vertical Surfaces in Shadow

This painting by Clark Hulings (1922-2011) shows a whitewashed wall in shadow. The ground is orange-colored dirt. Warm light reflected from that dirt shines up on the wall, especially on the bottom half.


The blue of the open sky floods across the top of the wall, interrupted by a slash of direct sunlight.

This painting illustrates the principle: “On a sunny day, vertical surfaces in shadow usually receive two sources of illumination: warm ground light and blue sky light.”


The cool and warm sources alternate on the uneven surface, depending on whether the planes of the wall face a little downward or upward. Hulings achieves this effect by applying warm and cool tones over a darker mid-tone with a painting knife.

Clark Hulings website
Wikipedia on Clark Hulings
This point is explained in Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter
Hulings book: Timeless Beauty: Pursuing Life's Textures
Hulings: A Gallery of Paintings

Saussure’s Cyanometer

Swiss alpinist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740-1799) wondered how the blue of the sky changes with altitude.

He observed that the color of sky was lighter close to the horizon. He suspected that the blue would get darker at higher altitudes, but how much darker? Legend had it that if you climbed to the tops of the Alpine peaks, the sky would be black, and there was a risk of “falling into the void.”


So he made a “cyanometer,” by dipping swatches of paper into a suspension of Prussian blue in order to obtain nearly sixty evenly spaced swatches of blue ranging from white to black. 

In 1787, Saussure hired two guides and undertook a three-day trek to the 15,780-foot summit of Mont Blanc. When he tested his cyanometer against the sky, it matched swatch 39, the darkest he had ever seen.

Although our modern understanding of scattering of light by air molecules still hadn’t been completely figured out, Saussure had made an important breakthrough. On top of a very tall mountain, there is less air above the observer to scatter the sunlight and produce a blue veil over the blackness of space.


When I painted the temple on the highest peak of Dinotopia, I made sure to use a darker blue for the sky, and a more abrupt transition above the horizon.

READ MORE:
Full story of Saussure's Cyanometer at the RCS Chemical Sciences website
Wikipedia on Saussure
Wikipedia on Mont Blanc
Previously: How to make your own cyanometer from blue paint chips from the hardware store
Reproduction of Palace in the Clouds in Imaginative Realism
More about "sky blue" in Color and Light
Palace in the Clouds from Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time - The 20th Anniversary Edition
Thanks, Tancredi

The Welsh Corgi

There’s something endearing about the big ears, short legs, and resolute personalities of Welsh corgis.


The corgi is a cross between a vampire bat and a vacuum cleaner.

According to Welsh folklore, they’re the preferred mount of fairy warriors. In fact, they were bred for herding cattle. Their short stance lets them nip the heels and duck the kick.


Welsh Corgi on Wikipedia