Paint Here

For Garden of Hope (Oil, 24x36”) I didn’t just dive into a blank canvas and hope for the best.

So far in this series on the making of Dinotopia art, we've focused on various strategies, including: location sketches, preliminary sketches, maquettes, and models posing.

In our series of behind-the-scenes of Dinotopia, I’d like to show you the steps that led to the painting “Ring Riders.”

Dinotopia's origins go all the way back to a 150 mile voyage I took with my dad on the Missouri River from Fort Benton to Fort Peck Reservoir in Montana, following the route of Lewis and Clark.

I thought you might be interested in seeing some key Dinotopia images and what went into making them.

Yes, I have a press pass.

When it comes to collecting art and building a museum, George Lucas operates with the same principles that helped him create Star Wars.

When I painted The Excursion, I had to decide what was in light and what was in shadow, and then commit to that decision.

Sometimes I set up an overall movement of color from one family to another.

Here’s what I’ve got in my belt pouch: Sketchbook Pentalic Aqua Journal.

Song in the Garden, from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, 2007.

A wild gorilla sits down to a meal of water plants, and starts humming.

–––– 'Jimothy' is a wild raccoon with a congenital short spine syndrome.

Lighting designers and photographers are aware of how hard or soft the light is.

If you needed to animate your logo for a video, the standby method was to spend lots of money on high-tech digital motion graphics that will look fake and dated in five years.

When I was starting out as a freelance illustrator, I did a few cover designs for Activision and Atari.

What are the main psychological obstacles to being productive and happy as an artist?

Show-card writing, which I introduced a couple days ago, was done mainly with the pen and brush.

If you were to walk into any store, pharmacy, or theater lobby 100 years ago, you would be see handmade advertising signs everywhere.

I was researching what my parents were doing in the 1960s, and I ran across a scientific paper with my dad’s name on it.

I’m not so much thinking of the flag as a symbol, but more as just a collection of shapes: thirteen stripes alternating red and white, the whole thing suspended by the upper left-hand corner with folds radiating from the top corner.

In the winter of 1879, a 23-year-old John Singer Sargent stood in the Prado, copying Las Meninas (below).

Plein-air study painted in oil on the north rim of the Grand Canyon, looking west.

Even though we've seen some mind-boggling examples of hand skills last week and the week before.

Here’s a step-by-step drawing sequence by an academically trained Chinese artist.