A Traveler's Sketchbook

I have been an avid sketchbook artist for many years. I always have one with me.  My car has one also.  And, yes I do draw on napkins at restaurants sometimes.  When I first started drawing before toilet training I would have used a sketchbook them but, alas, my parents didn't get me one.  I'm not really sure if they are visual image repositories or just annotated journals.  I can't conceive of an artist or the hands of the curious being without one.

Over the years I have developed some preferences in sketchbooks.  I prefer a small book  (14 x 21.6 cm)
with paper as heavy as I can find.  I prefer 90lb paper.  Because if you want to add color with watercolor the heavier paper will wrinkle less. For drawing, I prefer a black ballpoint, something like you would find on the nightstand at Motel 6.  I have used pencil, but it smears unless you carry a travel size aerosol of hairspray or fixative to fix the drawing.  I usually lost the hairspray.  In the back of my sketchbooks a paste an envelope of a size that will fit.  This is great place to keep ticket stubs, tokens business cards or maybe a few pesos. I use my books daily whether traveling or not. I develop painting ideas, make notes for videos,  copy song lyrics and  add about anything else that will fit.

Here are some examples:

On these pages I've worked out a color scheme for a painting on the upper left while below it I have done a storyboard for a video presentation.




The right side has value sketches and designs to be included in the video.

On the left page recounts an interesting event.  We were in a restaurant in Newcastle, England, where the service was extremely slow.  We entertained ourselves by writing limericks on post-its and sticking them on the page. 
On the right is a small drawing from Scotland with watercolor wash. (I usually do the washes in a hotel room in the evening rather that on site.)





Above on the left is a watercolor sketch for a larger painting.  I like to work out the a lot of the detail in the smaller scale.  In the book on the right  are rubbings of foreign coins.  I normally don't carry a pencil, but my wife loaned me an eyebrow pencil which worked quite well.   You will note on the top of the next page over the miscellaneous drawings is the layout of a hotel room.  Yes, I draw floor plans and maps as well. One of the books has a  extensive collections of drawings of the ruins of a 18th century South Carolina mill and the probably machinery for its operation.

Not shown are rubbings of plants, stickers, labels from beer bottles, collages, stampings, and other stuff.  (One of my books has a passport stamp in it.) Did mention "doodles"? The books are not just for drawings.

My sketchbooks are quite autobiographical.  They will tell you where I was and usually what I was thinking at a perticular point in time. if you don't have a sketchbook, get one!  If you have one, ise it!  You'll be glad you did.

James Gurney, the dinosaurs are coming!

On Sunday we were due our monthly Barnes and Noble fix. I have a prescribed route I take in the store. First, what's new in the cheap stuff in the lobby, then past the books in the main aisle. If it is the usual browsing mission then to the art books and finally to the magazine stand to peruse the newest periodicals. After scavenging knowledge on subjects from cinema  to Google hacks, I'm picking up a few and heading to the coffee shop where the odor of Starbucks blends with that of printers ink for that most intoxicating of aromas. With my decaf mocha I'll enjoy my latest  issue of my favorite publication with my mate. And there are always new discoveries. Enter James Gurney.

Gurney is most well known for his Dinotopia books which are illustrated stories from an imaginative land inhabited by dinosaurs and people. His work from concept to execution is fantastic. The style is like that of the twentieth century illustrators, Howard Pyle, N. C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell. But I like to find out more about these people who introduce us to the fantastic. Where do they come from? What is their training? What inspires them?

from Fire and Ice

James Gurney was born in 1958 and grew up in Palo Alto, California. His father was a mechanical engineer and he was the youngest of five children. Much like me he liked to tinker and build things as a boy. He studied archaeology at the University of California, Berkeley, but received a BA in Anthropology in 1979. He then studied illustration at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California for a couple of semesters. After a cross-country trip, he and Thomas Kinkade (aka, The Painter of Light) coauthored The Artist’s Guide to Sketching in 1982. Gurney and Kinkade also worked as painters of background scenes for the animated film Fire and Ice, co-produced by Ralph Bakshi and Frank Frazetta. Frezetta was a well know painter of fantasy magazine covers. Gurney produced many magazine covers for the science fiction and fantasy publications. National Geographic Magazine was a client, and he produced a series of illustrations of dinosaurs for U.S. postage stamps. In 1992 he published Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time which became a best seller. Later he produced sequels to the book. His paintings have the quality of the classical illustrators with unerring accuracy to detail as seen in the video below. Notice that his medium is oil usually applied in transparent layers. The anatomical accuracy of the animals and the technical accuracies of mechanical objects is unbelievable. Although, I'm not quite sure how you would ascertain the accuracy of mythical beasts and fictional mechanical objects. He currently lives in Rhinebeck, New York, and continues to produce great art along with books on art instruction as well and maintains two websites and a blog.

Additional information:

• http://www.jamesgurney.com/
• Dinotopia
• Gurney Journey blog

Tinkerer's Delight

I am a confessed tinkerer.  I think it's genetic. My brain as a child was warped by reading those books about famous inventors and scientists. I believed that I could build anything.  I did have may famous follies.  Most notable was a rocket. In the 1950's space travel was depicted in Life Magazine as rocket and satellite whizzing through the universe.  Why should I not build my own model rocket from scratch.  I had built model planes and cars.  My first plane was a Piper Cub, built it before I could read, just followed the step-by-step pictures.  When I was about  and my interest in rockets peaked I would build a gunpowder powered rocket.   Around the house I found everything I needed: gunpowder from Dad's shotgun shells, an empty toilet paper tube for the body of the rocket, and a nosecone I whittled from the wood of a packing crate.  After assembly, needed a way to ignite the powder remotely.  I didn't want to use a traditional fuse. (That would put me too close to the rocket.  I scrounged a bit of with from a discarded hot plate and wrapped between two nails and inserted it into the tail of the rocket.  I had an old piece of two-conductor wire with a plug on it and attached one wire to each nail.  Time for the countdown.  3-2-1-(plug it in)-Blast-off!

Smoke and fire were forthcoming, but it did not move.

My family was upset about the loss of electricity.  I was severely admonished for another one of my "scientific" projects.

I can't help but wonder what I could have done with the shop below.

Fairey Tale Redux

I like the movie, Hanna.  It's the story of a genetically altered teenage girl, Saoirse Ronan, trained by her father, Eric Bana, to be a fighting machine. An innocent sought to be destroyed by the resident evil, Cate Blanchette. It has nuances of fantasy with the chill  of a good thriller and a story line that is vaguely familiar. I particularly like the visual effects of the film. It appeared to be shot in the post apocalypic light of the future. The action scenes, and there are many, are well done but not quite overdone and the CGI work blends effortlessly. But the fight scenes, as in most current films, seem to be video game recreations. One note on lack of detail: The warm breath of the dying caribou in the opening scene does not fog the cold northern  air. All actors offer good performances, but I feel that Blanchette underplayed her role a bit. The bloody tooth brushing scene is a plus. The film exhibits good direction by Joe Wright, the London trained director, known for his direction of Atonement. 



It's a good thriller and I would watch it again.

Linx:

• Roger Ebert's Review
• Director
• Rotten Tomatoes

Travel Bits

As you know from previous posts, we love to travel. We prefer journeys of  roughly three weeks in duration and we don't like organized tours although sometimes that is the only way to see what we wish in the allotted amount of time.  We prefer to experience the maximum at the minimum of financial expenditure. Another preference is to take the Robert Frost road which is to say the road less traveled. One way is which we plan and execute is with our travel folder and a good guidebook.

The travel folder is a simple manila folder with the spring clips to hold the pages in.  On the left side is our itinerary in chronological order. It contains in a table  from left to right:

• Date and  day of journey (i. e. Day 25)  and location of that day
• what we wish to see that day
• the nights lodging ( inn, B & B,etc.)
• Daily mileage (we prefer to drive)
• Total mileage

As a sheet is completed it is moved to the back.

On the right side of the folder is the documentation to support what is on the left side.  Here would be car rental agreements, lodging confirmations, and/or maps from Google or Yahoo maps. (Navigation is crucial when driving in a foreign country, particularly one with a different language. In our case the non-driver reads directions to the driver.) These pages are moved to the back also as they are used.  There is also an additional manila envelope attached to the inside of the right side which keeps small  items such as tickets or brochures where needed.

This folder has the culmination of about nine months of planning. The bulk of the reservations are made on line as well as the details of attractions to see. Details of attractions are very important when visiting popular sites.  In France there are days when there is no admission charge to national attractions.  That is when crowds are at their greatest. To be confronted with the least crowd we try to visit in early morning or late afternoon and pay admission.  Also be aware that some attractions close during lunch.  We missed the Toulouse-Lautrec Museum in Albi, France, because we were there during lunchtime.  Lunchtime was two hours long!

Get a good guidebook.  We prefer Rick Steves'.  We have long been fans of his travel shows on PBS and have used his books and travel products successfully.  But we investigate other books as well.  Lonely Planet and Frommers' have good books too.

Planning pays off when you're traveling and a travel folder is a big part of planning.

Sources:

Travel stuff

Travel books