Art book or text book? And a note on styles.

In writing and illustrating my book, A State of Change: Forgotten Landscapes of California (Heyday: 2010), I had originally intended it to be more of an art book, filled with pages of large oil paintings and field sketches. Something for the coffee table I had hoped. After four years of editing, the book turned out to be more text and somewhat less artwork, but Heyday did a wonderful job of creating a manageable, readable work from my unwieldy manuscript. Still a good art book, I thought.

A lot of artwork was left on the cutting room floor, however, and I am going to use it for my upcoming book on Oil Painting Landscapes and Nature. Here are a sampling of illustrations I had completed years ago as Chapter title pages for A State of Change. I am re-purposing them now as new Chapter titles for my current manuscript. As an aside, I have been accused of having too many artistic "styles." But I enjoy exploring different media, materials, and stylistic expressions. Why should an artist be restricted?

Here are samples of Chapter title illustrations, influenced by my admiration for Arts and Crafts styles (all colored pencil and ink on paper).





And I recently found a few new reviews of my book, from 2016 on Good Reads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9897882-state-of-change-a?from_search=true

Comments

  1. essay bestAugust 7, 2017 at 3:38 AM

    I'm very much impressed with the arts and crafts work you have shared. And great to see you are offering classes too. That's really great, Keep it up

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paleoart

Image
Paleoart is a fascinating field, one of my favorites, where imagination is used in heavy doses along with scientific accuracy to try to reconstruct scenes of past life and landscapes. I enjoy the challenge of researching the fossil record, paleontological studies, and comparing them to living ecosystems and wildlife in order to bring ancient scenes to life, whether a century in the past or a hundred million years ago. I painted this mural in oil on canvas years ago for Badlands National Park, working with park staff who provided me with detailed material to work from. It was a fun project. I favor working in oil paint to achieve a glow and luster of color that is still hard to match in digital media, such as Photoshop-created art. My background as a Paleontology Major at the University of California, Berkeley, helped inform how I researched the project, and my graduate work in scientific illustration at the University of California at Santa Cruz gave me many methods to choose fro
Read more

Explosion of Interest in Block Diagrams

Image
Pen and ink, colored pencil on paper. I have not posted here in a while, because I am trying to crowdsource funds to write new books and publish them through Patreon.com lately. But when I posted this geology-hydrology block diagram on my Twitter page , it went viral.  That surprised me, as this was an old-fashioned, hand-drawn illustration. But it raised some interesting questions about the loss of traditional artistic techniques, and methods of presenting scientific information. Perhaps computer-driven digital graphics still lack something (unless you have a gigantic budget to hire Hollywood film-quality graphic designers).  I whipped this block diagram illustration out easily in a day. I started with a rough pencil sketch, using the principles of perspective.  Then I traced over the pencil lines with pen and ink. Lastly, I colored in the diagram with colored pencils. On paper. Seems primitive nowadays. But the response from social media has been tremendous, and many
Read more

San Francisco Before the City

Image
500 years ago: imagine standing on Nob Hill in present San Francisco looking eastward towards the East Bay, Mt Diablo barely visible in the distance. The middle ground Bay shore to the right is the site of downtown SF, since filled in with landfill. Market Street with tall skyscrapers would fill the view today. Treasure Island lies in the middle distance, and Oakland and Berkeley are in the background shore. Sand hills, coastal prairie with diverse bunchgrasses, California buttercups ( Ranunculus californicus ), California sagebrush ( Artemisia californica ), lilac bushes ( Ceanothus thyrsiflorus ), and a shed tule elk antler are visible in this early scene of San Francisco past.  San Francisco View From Nob Hill, 500 Years Ago. Oil on panel, 11 x 21.5 inches, 2003. Private collection. I painted the bay waters with a glaze of verdigris in Copaiba balsam to make a translucent glassy effect that differs from the opaque greens of the grassy hills and flats. The glaze was placed ove
Read more