In 1977, I was approached by actress Carol Lynley’s former boyfriend, John Broderick, about creating presentation art to help sell a “gore-type sword and sorcery movie”. What John actually said over the phone was “Gor-type sword and sorcery movie”, referring to John Norman’s Gor series.

1st Gor Book - Cover by Boris

The Gor books were S & M sword and sorcery novels. I had read one or two of the Gor books, so I would have known what John was referring to if I hadn’t had that homonym confusion.

At the time I was a big sword and sorcery fan (I’m referring to the books; that film genre had yet to be invented). I was well read in that genre, being especially enthusiastic about Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories (I eventually worked as a key designer on both Conan movies and the related Red Sonja film as well).

John and I got together, he liked my picture ideas, character ideas and my thoughts about the movie, so much so that he proposed I write the screenplay. I had never written a screenplay, so to be sure it was roughly the right length, I initially based it upon the bones of Akira Kurosawa’s film Yojimbo. Once I had what I felt was the proper structure and length, I went back and changed each and every story element that reminded me of Yojimbo. By the time I figured out that John had meant “Gor” (not “gore”), John was very happy with my story and we were on our way.

Each time I presented what I thought was a finished screenplay, John and I would meet in L. A.’s Farmer’s Market, a regular filmmaker and screenwriter hangout at the time (it might still be). John combed through each version and requested dozens and dozens of major changes, necessitating a full rewrite each time. The rewrites were painful. With each one (and there were at least eight) I felt as if I was psychologically flaying my own flesh from my body.

During this time period John and I became pretty good friends. One day he told me he was going to introduce me to “an old time producer”. He drove me over to a small nearby office where I met Harry Rybnick, whose company Jewell Enterprises, Inc. was responsible for buying the rights for and adapting the first Godzilla film for American audiences.

John and I fought over the film’s most original elements. He HATED my idea that the fat king had an implied sexual relationship with his beloved pet creature.

It turned out that John was crazy about Yojimbo (it was John who introduced me to the film; for that, I’ll be eternally grateful) and caught whiffs of its structure in my story. He tried to get me to change the script so that it closely mirrored the great Kurosawa film. I refused his demand to plagiarize the Japanese master’s work.

Once John had approved my screenplay, I began creating the presentation art to sell the project. I painted several pictures depicting key scenes in the film, plus a faux movie poster of our project, which was now entitled Kain of Dark Planet.

During my writing period on the movie John and I discussed casting. John pushed for his good friend Gary Lockwood (or “Foxy Loxy”, as John called him) to have the lead role (Gary and I met years later on the sci-fi convention trail and have since spent many hours together swapping filmmaking stories).

Gary Lockwood

My first choice was David Carradine. I liked David’s look and presence on the screen, plus he was a damn good actor. Ironically, I have never watched a single episode of his TV show Kung Fu, in which he played a character coincidentally named Caine (more serendipitous homonym mischief).

John took my script and paintings and pitched the film to Roger Corman at New World. John was peeved that Roger did what Roger usually did: he proudly presented John Broderick to his New World staff as this “incredible new talent” who was going make “great movies for us here at New World”. John told me, “I was annoyed. I had heard that Corman speech many times before. He treated me like I was some new kid to The Biz.”

John told me he had passed on Roger’s offer and was going to try to sell it elsewhere.

Time passed, and I forgot about Kain of Dark Planet as other work demanded my attention. I was in the heyday of my movie poster period. I ended up working on over 120 movie advertising campaigns, three of which were movie posters for Roger Corman (Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Up From the Depths and The Lady in Red).

I became friends with New World’s advertising art director. Chatting on the phone one day I asked what was new over in Roger Corman Land.

“Roger is producing a film in Argentina called Kain of Dark Planet”.

“Wha––?! Have you got a copy of the screenplay there?”

“Yeah. I’ve got it right here.”

“What does the title page say?”

“Kain of Dark Planet. Story and Screenplay by John Broderick.”

“And…?”

“No ‘and’ — just ‘Story and Screenplay by John Broderick. He’s the director. Roger just shot a film down in Argentina. Rather than let the sets go to waste, Roger told John to go down there and shoot Kain of Dark Planet re-using Roger’s old sets. Roger gave him a budget of $80,000.”

I immediately called my attorney, Henry Holmes. Henry got on the phone with Roger. Roger, of course, knew nothing of John’s subterfuge.

I got a panicked call from Argentina. It was John. He was very, very upset. In fact, he sounded pretty fried.

“What in the heck are you doing? What’s going on?!!”

“What am I doing? You stole my screenplay!”

“We wrote it together!”

“I wrote; you critiqued. But I shared the credit with you in gratitude for what I learned from you. And then you sold it — but not before you took my name off of it.”

Then John told me a whopper to justify his actions I’ll never forget.

“It’s easier to sell a screenplay if there’s only one name on it.”

Roger Corman, honorable man that he is, promptly paid me for my script — out of John’s directing fee, of course.

I was supposed to get a solo “Story and Screenplay by” credit but when the movie eventually came out John and I ended up with a shared story/screenplay credit, plus an “Original Art by William Stout” credit for my pre-production presentation art.

I saw the film at one of my favorite grindhouses: the World Theater. “Three films for 99¢” in a theater that smelled like the inside of an old shoe. The World’s ushers wore concealed, fully loaded shoulder pistols under their coats.

The film rolled. I was shocked. John Broderick had changed all of the dialogue I had sweated over — and the plot as well. My film was now a direct rip-off of Yojimbo. I was horrified that my name would be associated with such unabashed plagiarism.

I was pleased, though, that David Carradine, my first choice for the lead, was cast as Kain. Years later I shared a limo ride with David. He told me tales of the making of the movie. Shortly after arriving in Argentina, he saw John cave in to a demand very early during the production.

“John, I just saw you make your first compromise — and we haven’t even begun shooting yet. If you’re beginning to sell out your vision this early in the game, how many more compromises are you going to make? What kind of film do you think you’ll end up with if you keep doing that?”

David said John took his advice and became much firmer as a director.

The movie also included sword expert and actor Anthony De Longis with whom I worked with later on Masters of the Universe (he played a character I designed named Blade; he also trained the film’s other actors in their sword work).

Before its release, Roger Corman had changed the title of the movie from Kain of Dark Planet to The Warrior and the Sorceress. I was mystified by the change.

“But Roger — there’s no sorceress in the movie!”

“That’s okay, Bill. The object of the title of a film is to get butts into seats. Once they’ve paid their money and their butts are in those seats, it doesn’t matter if the film’s got a sorceress or not. Plus, that title means we can put a scantily clad sorceress on the movie’s poster.”

And that’s the tale of my introduction to the business of making movies.

This is the third quarter of the modern animal mural with the animals (but not the background and foreground settings) pretty much fully rendered.

I painted the bobcat‘s body twice. The first time I painted the critter, everything looked in proportion. But after better familiarizing myself with bobcat proportions, I realized that the body was too small for the head. Bobcats have very small heads in proportion to the bodies when compared to most other cats. It was pretty simple to bulk him up some more when the rendering was still fairly rough.

The interesting challenge in painting both the bobcat and the tortoise was in keeping their values dark in comparison to the other critters too emphasize the bobcat and tortoise as being in the deep foreground (this visually explains their larger size relative to the other animals), especially because in the reference I shot the animals are both well lit.

I love painting birds, especially big raptors. Depicted here are a turkey vulture and a red-tailed hawk. They are both pretty finished, but I know I’ll be losing some of their hard edges once I finish the sky. Losing the edges will make them more a part of the painting, instead of them looking like they had been cut out and pasted onto the mural.

This shows the animals in the fourth quarter of the painting. Again, the landscape still needs to be finished.

This golden eagle and merlin have what will be a blooming agave between them. Both birds were not on my original list from the zoo. I felt they should be included because both birds exist today in the San Diego region as well as being found in the Pleistocene fossil record.

I also sneaked in this burrowing owl (I realize that every animal depicted in the modern mural has to also occur in the Pleistocene mural — and in roughly the same spot, which makes for some interesting compositional planning).

I had an experience with the coyote opposite to that of the bobcat. Once I had finished the coyote (working from shots I had taken of a coyote who had wandered onto my front lawn one afternoon) I realized I had painted its head too small, so I reworked it.

I also added a badger emerging from its burrow, but there wasn’t sufficient sun to shoot this addition by the time I had finished it.

Here’s how the whole modern mural looks now (minus the badger; remember, if you double click on the images they should present themselves in a larger format):

The obvious next step is to finish the foreground plants (which will take more research) and the general landscape and sky (not so much research). Hopefully, that will all go more quickly than the animals.

Next: Landscape and Plants

Wow! I didn’t expect my new 2012 Zombies calendar to sell out so fast, but it did! I see copies selling for over forty bucks on Amazon and Ebay now.

I hope you got yours when I had them; I’m all out now. Thanks to everyone who purchased them from me. I wish I had about a hundred more!

No zombie calendar next year; the calendar company decided against a 2013 edition, despite the impassioned arguments there by my pal Arnie Fenner. Too bad, as I was looking forward to some more zombie art mischief…

I decided I really needed to repaint the roadrunner. It was too darn big.

Here, I took a thick brush and quickly roughed out the shape of the bird in its proper scale. After I was satisfied it was the correct size in relation to the other creatures in the mural I knocked in the detail:

I’ll worry about the background later.

I had spent about three or four hours beautifully detailing the stag mule deer when I realized that it was out of proportion as well. It was too small relative to the size of the other critters.

The mistake I made was this: in my eagerness to complete the buck, I jumped to my small brush too soon, before I had carefully checked its roughed-in proportions.

Taking a fairly big brush [Note to self (and other artists): When painting, always use a brush about twice the size you think you'll need. Always work macro to micro] I blocked in the mule deer family, this time making sure all their sizes were correct.

Then, I detailed them:

To be truthful, the first animal I painted in this section of the mural was the California condor.

Note that I changed both the value and the color of the condor’s outspread wings from tip to tip. The wing farthest from the viewer has a blue haze over it, implying that this bird is so damn big that you can see atmospheric haze between you and the farther wing. The change in value emphasizes that as well.

The gray fox was next. I like doing these murals in a painterly style. I haven’t yet figured out how to make peppery coats like that of the fox ring true in a painterly fashion ––– but I’m working on it. I probably need to look at more of my late friend Bob Kuhn‘s paintings.

I really like painting scrub jays, as they are a frequent visitor to my porch while I am painting. They are highly intelligent, curious birds.

A member of the crow family, I once taught one I named “Scrubby” to perch on my arm and take peanuts from my fingers. It only took me a few hours to train him to perform that trick. The problem was, from that point on he wouldn’t leave me alone. He’d pester me and pester me (shrieking and jabbering at me like…well, like a jaybird) until I produced a peanut for him. I learned my lesson that day to leave wild things wild. He still visits me when he’s the neighborhood. Scrubby likes to perch atop my easel, offering unasked for criticism of me and whatever painting I’m working on.

Here’s the second section of the mural with its animals all painted (except for the tarantula):

It’s coming along a little faster now. I’ve got most of the bobcat completed now, too, but it was too dark to shoot by the time I felt done with him. We’ll see if I still think and feel (always remember to both think and feel when you’re painting) he’s finished in the morning.

Next: The Animals in Section Three of the Modern Mural

I have been remiss in blogging as of late. I’ve got my reasons…

I spent last Thursday through Monday in Albuquerque as the Guest of Honor at the Albuquerque Comic Con. It was a great show, very well organized. I met fans from all over the state (and adjacent states as well). Their attendance was up over 40% from last year, so you know these guys are doing something right.

I was delighted to be able to spend time with my old pals Phillip Anderson (a former comic shop and bookshop owner, Phillip now owns a Lubbock, Texas winery. He has been commissioning his favorite comic artists to do his labels!), Randy Pence (a pastor/paleontologist who just named a newly discovered prehistoric shark after me — how cool is that?!) and Patricia Rogers (one of the key BuboniCon folks and a real gem of a woman with an endlessly fascinating mind. Her hubby is no slouch, either!).

On Saturday I gave a very well attended talk with a lot of stories about the adventures I’ve experienced and the films I’ve made. I had a terrific time.

Not So Terrific Department:
My wife, Kent, was recently diagnosed with kidney cancer. Her particular cancer gave her a one-in-three chance she wouldn’t make it through the next five years.

Fortunately, however, she became aware of her cancer very early —- two years earlier than she would have known normally. Finding a cancer in its earliest stages really works in your favor.

She had her surgery yesterday. I spent most of the day at the hospital, bringing her there at about 5:30 AM. The surgery took about 4.5 hours. She had the best urological surgeon in southern California (which is saying a lot).

Her surgery went incredibly well. She was lucky in that the tumor was on the outside of her kidney. That made snipping it off a relatively easy procedure (as opposed to if it had been buried inside her kidney). The margins were clear (meaning that the cancer had not yet spread to the rest of her kidney). She was able to retain 95 % of her kidney. The operation was so smooth and efficient that there was never a point where blood had to be cut off to her kidney. There was very little blood loss. She won’t need chemotherapy, either.

Whew! It’s always something…

I still have managed to find time for my murals, though. I’ll try to put up another mural post tomorrow so that you can see the progress I have made. I’ll tell you in advance that I ultimately felt the roadrunner was slightly too big, so I ended up repainting the entire critter.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Poe!

The detailing begins. I’m focusing on the animals first, as they are the most important elements to my San Diego Zoo client.

I began with the black bear. The umber underpainting really helps to warm up my rendering as it peeks through my cool color scheme of the bear here and there. It looks much harsher here than in the original, as the camera always seems to see and emphasize things that the human eye doesn’t. I’ll have to compensate for that with my final rendering of this animal, as the final display of my murals will be extremely detailed digital representations of them printed full size on a huge tile.

This rendering of the black bear is near completion; I don’t want it to get too tight; I want the execution of the animals to be consistent with my painterly handling of the landscape.

The jackrabbit sort of flew out of my brush with very little effort on my part (that’s not always so, believe me). Working wet-on-wet I got some very nice painterly passages happening here. There won’t be too much final tweaking necessary on this guy.

A roadrunner confronts a southern pacific rattlesnake. I’m kind of carving the animal forms out of paint. At this point I’ll make raw corrections to what is around them (ground, grass, etc.) without concern for the crudeness that surrounds each animal rendering. I can fix that later when I turn my focus to the different elements of the landscape. Right now my main concern is getting the animals — and their shapes — just right and in proportion.

Thinking about proportion brings up the fact that the roadrunner seems a little large in relation to the other animals. This afternoon I’m going to carve him down a little bit to solve that problem. Hopefully, it won’t require an entire repainting of the bird. If I have to, though, I’ll do it.

The rattlesnake was fun; I just happen to love painting snakes. I’ve owned many, so I am intimate with their anatomy. They are not tubes, as many artists have portrayed them. Everything hangs from their spine and their bellies are a bit flattened.

The trick in painting the roadrunner (and the hawks, as you’ll see) is in figuring out how to not lose the bird’s form with all of those complex plumage markings. The key is too simplify where possible and to use the markings to describe their forms.

Here is the cougar (or puma or mountain lion). I wrestled with this one for a while. I was having proportion problems, mostly. Cougar proportions (and colors), like humans, vary from one animal to another. My goal is to distill the essence of cougar, and paint a beautiful, definitive vision of this animal. As I’m painting, I am constantly checking: Are the neck and tail too short? Should I lengthen the body? If I do that, how will it affect its proportions in relation to the bear; i.e., will it then make the cougar too large relative to the bear? Are the eyes too high in the head (originally they were indeed too high, then too low. I think now, as Goldilocks would say, they are just right, although I think that head still needs a little work; some softening, perhaps)?

Unlike the bear, which was very cool in color and needing some warmth, the cougar as painted in my first pass of rendering was too warm. It needed some cool grays to take the bite out of the overall warmth — and, in my mind, to make it look more like a cougar.

I was also having problems with the cougar disappearing into the background. I fixed that by changing the values of what was behind the cougar. Some parts required darkening; others, lightening.

I took those rough brown blobs of my lay-in and turned them into three different species of hawks. There are a lot of delicate patterns in some hawks — like the ones portrayed here. The trap to watch out for would be rendering them too much and not leaving any soft edges. Without soft edges, the hawks won’t be a part of the picture. They’ll look like they’ve been stuck on to the canvas like paper stickers. So, I look for ways to realistically blur some of the edges of these birds with the sky.

Note that the sky (like the ground in the other animal renderings) is not finished at this point. I’ll get around to that later.

Upon finishing my first pass at rendering the animals in this quarter of the mural, I began to suggest some of the distant landscape.

At this point, I could either finish this quarter of the painting or continue down the mural and render the other animals. I think I’m going to do the latter because I fear that rendering each quarter’s landscape separate from each other might lead to some inconsistency in the painting. Better to paint each mountain range all at once, I think.

Last night I did a lot more research on the animals for both murals. I discovered several more creatures that I could include in both murals. Should I surprise the zoo and add all these extra animals? That is typically my tendency — to give my clients 120% or more of what they are expecting. I think it’s one of the reasons I’m successful.

We shall see if time allows for these unscripted additions.

Next: Rendering the Animals in Section Two

Here’s the lay-in of local color for the mural depicting the contemporary wildlife of San Diego. Like the prehistoric color lay-in, this one is pretty rough. I’m obviously not going for detail here. At this step I am out to establish the color scheme and tweak the design a little bit. Like the other painting, I’m working full size now: 3 ft. by 8 ft.

Here’s a detail of the left hand side:

The black bear and the jackrabbit and its tableau appear darker in the original painting.

Again, I have tried to evenly distribute the color to move the viewers’ eyes around the painting.

I can already see that I am going to have to lighten those last two sets of mountain ranges to give the viewer an even greater sense of distance.

Note that I have already varied the color temperature across the wings of the condor to give it more size and scale, as if the wingspan is so large that we can see an atmospheric difference between the closer and farther wings.

With the exception of the bobcat, tortoise, coyote and hawks, this last section of the painting will basically be a California Impressionist landscape by the time I’m done with it. Again, I can see those distant mountains need to recede more.

Here’s a slightly larger detail so you can see just how darn crude this thing is at this point:

I love painting landscapes. The landscape part of these murals just might be the most fun elements for me to paint.

My wife thinks the bobcat appears too big. She might be right (she usually is). If the dark value alone doesn’t convey how close the bobcat is to the viewer (its closeness is why it’s larger in size in relation to the other animals), I’ll reduce the bobcat in size a bit before I begin detailing it. It’s always easier to change an element in its raw, crude form. I don’t end up wasting a lot of time painting detail that I’d ultimately have to paint all over again once the scale has been changed.

Next: The Detailing Begins

Sean Bonniwell, the prime force behind the proto-punk rock group The Music Machine has died of lung cancer at age 71.

The Music Machine had one national hit (written by Bonniwell), the blistering pop fuzz guitar classic, “Talk Talk”. They also had two regional hits here in Los Angeles, two Bonniwell-penned classics of tough, jaw-dropping power pop: “Double Yellow Line” and “The Eagle Never Hunts the Fly”.

My band saw The Music Machine at the Thousand Oaks Recreational Center in 1966. We thought they were the ultimate in cool. They didn’t wear suits but they did sport matching clothes. The incredibly tight, solidly professional group was all in black; black boots, black leather pants, black long-sleeved turtleneck shirts, black sunglasses — and (remember, this was pre-Michael Jackson) each band member wore one black glove. Now, how cool was that?!

The Music Machine’s first LP was Turn On The Music Machine. It consisted of pop covers (Neil Diamond‘s “Cherry Cherry”, The Beatles’ “Taxman”, Ma Rainey/The Animals’ “CC Rider”, ? and the Mysterians’ “96 Tears” and the first pre-Jimi Hendrix “slow version” recording known to me of The Leaves’ “Hey Joe”) as well as brilliant Bonniwell-penned originals. Sean’s songs were heightened by his dangerous, sexually potent vocals. This was no kid singing here — this was an angry, frustrated and highly sensual man.

After their first LP Sean fired everyone in the band (WHAT TH—?!!! His talented bass player, Keith Olsen, became an enormously successful record producer, responsible for Rick Springfield‘s #1 “Jessie’s Girl”. Olsen co-produced Fleetwood Mac‘s monster LP  Fleetwood Mac and produced albums by musicians as diverse as Whitesnake, The Scorpions, The Grateful Dead, Emerson Lake & Palmer, REO Speedwagon, Carlos Santana, Joe Walsh, Sammy Hagar, The Babys, Ozzy Osbourne and Mexican superstar Emmanuel).

The second LP was credited to The Bonniwell Music Machine. Bonniwell wrote all of the songs this time around — no covers. Sean then recorded a solo LP, T. S. Bonniwell, that completely confused his fans, as it had none of the hard rock elements of The Music Machine. The solo effort was a strictly light, mellow, folksy affair with vocals veering more toward Frank Sinatra than early Kinks Ray Davies or Them period Van Morrison.

After that, Sean Bonniwell faded from the music scene. I met Sean during the acting phase of his career. He had just appeared as a bad guy henchman in the feature film The Swamp Thing.

We were introduced to each other at a Rhino Records party (Rhino had just issued an LP of some classic and rare recordings by The Music Machine). After being introduced I was very eager to discuss The Music Machine with Sean, as my own garage bands had covered several of their songs.

Bonniwell did not want in any way to discuss his old music except to proclaim that he was a genius and his music was brilliant for its time and era — nothing more need be said except that he firmly disassociated himself from his own musical legacy.

I soon found out why.

He considered his “Talk Talk” era music somewhat impure and Satanic. His sole conversational focus immediately became a concerted effort to convince me to become a Born Again Christian, as he himself had become. I find few topics duller and more annoying (proselytizing of any religion; I was once trapped as a teen at a Mormon youth event), so I found a way to deftly yet promptly end our talk and meander over to another part of the Rhino party. My friend (and Rhino co-founder) Harold Bronson gave me a sly smile. That rascal knew what was going to transpire as soon as he had introduced me to Sean.

Regardless of Sean’s annoying proselytizing, the music he made under The Music Machine banner was (and is) amazing. Here are some CDs well worth tracking down (especially the first two):

The Music Machine – The Ultimate Turn On (Big Beat Records CDWIK2 271) This 2 CD set includes both the stereo and mono versions of the first Music Machine LP plus an entire disc of previously unissued recordings.

Bonniwell Music Machine – Beyond the Garage (Sundazed SC 11030) This CD contains the entire Bonniwell Music Machine LP plus loads of bonus tracks from the period.

Bonniwell Music Machine – Ignition (Sundazed SC 11038) 19 tracks that are (for the most part) previously unissued.

This part is fun. I love the physicality of it. Because of the size of the painting and its lack of detail, I stand the entire time I’m painting at this stage. Despite my eating Christmas cookies, I lost four pounds during this part of the mural process.

Using my little scale color studies as a guide, I start laying in the local color of the picture. “Local color” is the average color of an object. I am obviously not going for detail here; I am just trying to establish the color scheme of each mural on top of its value (dark and light system) painting.

This part of the process is not as mechanical or as non-thinking as it may appear. As I paint, I look for opportunities to distribute the colors I use throughout the painting. For example, if I use a bit of intense reddish pink in one part of the painting (like on the flamingo), I don’t want that to be the only spot of that color in the entire work. It would call attention to itself and keep the viewer from looking elsewhere. So, I look to distribute that color, even if only in small amounts, throughout the rest of the painting. Those spots of that color then become a way to guide the viewer’s eyes over the rest of the painting.

Here are some details so you can see just how loosely this is painted.

Like I said: pretty rough. It is not my goal yet to render here. I am just laying down my color scheme.

Here’s the middle section:

The pose of the sabertooth on the right had been bothering me (it seemed clunky and unnatural), so I changed it. While I paint I am constantly looking for ways to improve the picture. I try to find ways to make it read more clearly, I get rid of any tangents I run across, I take bits of color that are still on my brush from painting one side and add them to the other side — I do lots of these little things that have nothing to do with detail but nevertheless add to the quality of the picture.

Note the shift in temperature in both the pond water and the sky (especially in the full mural shot). Doing this creates a greater sense of scale and gives the sky a more natural dome-like presence. If I had painted the sky (or the pond) the same color from left to right and top to bottom, the sky and pond would both appear flat and lifeless and, almost as importantly, the large animals would appear to be much smaller.

Why does this work? Changing the temperature or value of a sky over the length of a canvas gives the viewer’s eyes a sense of traveling — a feeling of scale and distance. Painting them with just one flat color would indicate to our eyes that we haven’t traveled much in distance — if at all.

You can see the temperature change in the sky even in this last third of the painting, as it goes from a cool lavender on the left to a warm blue on the right. The pond color goes from a warm lavender to a cool blue.

Here’s part of that same section, slightly larger, so that you can see more “detail”:

The color has been laid in; the fun part is over. Now comes the work (although, in truth, I enjoy rendering, too). The next step with this picture is to begin rendering each and every element in the picture.

When I work like this I an reminded of one of the oft repeated bits of advice from my best art teacher, Harold Kramer. Hal was the head of the illustration department at the Chouinard Art Institute (CalArts). After graduating, I studied privately with Hal for over twenty years.

Hal would often repeat this simple (yet profound) phrase: “Draw, paint; draw, paint.”

Here’s, in essence, what that means: Hal would tell us to always work with a brush that was twice the size of the one we thought we needed. He wanted us to always see the “big picture”, to have a broad overview of our painting. He didn’t want us to get caught up in the details too soon in the painting of our pictures. He insisted we use a big, fat brush to lay in our paintings. Once the basic design was established, then we could use a slightly smaller brush to tighten things up a bit. At that stage, we’d have our picture’s color and design well established. Hal knew that no amount of detail can save a bad design.

OK; that’s the “paint” part. At this stage the painting needs some drawing. With a smaller brush we would put our drawing skills to work, correcting and fine tuning proportions that needed it, perhaps adding color sparks here and there to enliven the color scheme and basically adding elements of drawing that the painting needs.

After drawing for awhile, I usually sense when it’s time to stop — typically, it’s at the point when your painting has now ended up with too much drawing. So, back to “paint”. Using a larger brush, some of the unnecessary drawing details are painted out, as are many of the hard edges. As my friend and painter Dan Goozee says, “Shapes. Values. Edges.” If there is something wrong with your picture, it is almost always one of those three elements. You want to choose your hard edges very carefully, as that is one of the places the viewer’s eyes go first (typically, the very first place a viewer’s eyes go to is where your darkest dark meets your lightest light).

So, “Draw, paint; draw, paint”, back and forth until the drawing and the painting in your picture have equal strength.

Next: The Color Lay-in of the Modern Scene

Maybe it’s the completist collector in me, but after accidentally running across the very first preliminary pencil drawing (more of a rough, really) of the San Diego Zoo Pleistocene mural, I thought I should include it (even at this late date) in my series of blogs on the process of creating the zoo murals.

So here it is.

I think I was inspired by one of Zdenek Burian‘s iconic paintings of prehistoric elephants with similar tusk symmetry. The symmetrical form of the head and tusks are what gives the mammoth its iconic, almost religious presence. I’ve broken up the symmetry, however, with the mammoth’s body and its placement within the design.

I like this design, but the unfinished quality of the rest of the picture makes me think that I probably came up with the more dynamic pose (from my earliest postings) shortly thereafter and jettisoned this pose in favor of the more dramatic stance.

OK; that’s Old News. Here’s New News, continuing our murals saga.

I did something a little different here.

In the past, I’ve used three ways to enlarge my studies to their full size. The first was taking a slide of the study, projecting it on to the canvas as dusk was beginning (as you can’t see the projection in daylight), then very quickly (because it rapidly gets too dark to paint at that time of day) “drawing” (with my paint brush) the outlines of all the creatures. That’s how I enlarged my Houston Museum of Natural Science murals. Crude, but it worked.

For the San Diego Natural History Museum murals the amazing Enrique Vidal (or his talented partner Johnny Thongnoi) at ThemeScape Art Studios took digital snapshots of my quarter scale paintings and printed them out. Then, he placed a sheet of acetate over the print-out and traced all of the animals’ shapes with a Sharpie. Once finished, Enrique used an overhead projector to project his line drawing on to the full size canvas. Using oil paint and a brush, Enrique traced the line drawings on to the canvas.

The other method is squaring up. I draw a graph paper-like grid over my scale picture. Then I proportionally make the same-but-larger grid on my full size canvas. After that, I fill in each square on the full size canvas with its own individual part of the drawing.

I don’t like this method. It’s dull, mechanical and, hence, tedious and it doesn’t allow for “happy accidents”. I like art to be fun and for it to have a magical sense of discovery.

If you look at this picture carefully (a double-click should enlarge it), you’ll see that I ended up doing a variation of the squaring up method. Using lines of yellow ochre paint, I divided each 3′ x 8′ canvas into four 3′ x 2′ sections.

Trying to re-draw the entire design on to a full size canvas would have been difficult and intimidating. I know I would have made a lot of proportional mistakes that would have turned into a nightmare of correcting and re-correcting.

But I paint 3′ x 2′ canvases all the time. It’s no big deal. So, I just looked at each 36″ x 24″ section as its own “little” painting. I printed out each of the four sections of each mural from the digital snapshots you saw in earlier posts. Using those print-outs as a guide to each section, I did a quick lay-in of each section in dark brown paint with only rough fidelity to the original design. If I saw some way to improve the design, I did. If it didn’t work out, I went back to the original.

I did the same thing with the modern San Diego mural:

OK. So, now my basic designs have been transferred. It’s time to add my basic light values to each picture.

I told you it would get more interesting! It’s starting to look like a painting, isn’t it?

Again, using my print-outs of my little scale color pictures as a guide, I roughly knocked in my lighter values. I didn’t use titanium white (too harsh). Instead, I opted for the mellower unbleached titanium, a kind of ivory cream color.

When I didn’t want the full-on “white” that you can see in the pond water and sky, I scumbled or dry-brushed some not-so-intense, slightly darker light areas on to the canvas.

I did the same for the modern mural:

Since I’m not yet working in color here, these sepia lay-ins give me a pretty darn good idea of how my value (dark and light) systems are working. If they’re not, it’s pretty easy to correct them at this stage. Once again, let me remind you artists out there: if your value system is working (and your shapes and edges as well), your picture will work regardless of what colors you use.

The next step is establishing local color on the full size canvases (in artistic terms, “local color” is the average color of an object).

If these paintings were fantasy paintings that didn’t require any research, I could now finish each mural in about eight days (it usually takes me three days, start-to-finish, to paint a 3′ x 2′ canvas. After I’ve done the value lay-in it takes me about two days to finish the painting in color. I’m talking long days, by the way). Obviously, that’s not going to happen with these two babies. We’ll see just how long this all will take.

Next: Local Color