No, I do not have permission to reproduce this image. But it's for an art class.
This is a color-corrected scan of a painting by James Gurney, from his book Dinotopia: The World Beneath. It is unfortunately cropped to about half its original area, missing a lot of nice colors actually, with the sunset and the reflection of light off the waterfall and the metal globe. The full painting is really a lot nicer and more balanced, both color-wise and compositionally.
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I've always liked James Gurney's Dinotopia, but it wasn't until this year that I really started appreciating its world and art.
For a little over a year now, I've been spending time on the website deviantART and learning about all sorts of styles of art, but especially of digital speedpainting. Probably my favorite artist who works in that style is artbytheo. I love the sketchy, flowing, layered, translucent, wet look of his paintings, as well as the expressive and tantalizing glimpses they provide of strange, intriguing worlds.
James Gurney is the only traditional painter listed among artbytheo's favorite artists - the rest are known primarily for their digital work. Gurney's influence is noticeable in artbytheo's paintings, both in specific pieces and elements that resemble illustrations from Dinotopia, and in general a similar creativity in creating vividly compelling worlds.
So after getting this basic familiarity with painting through deviantART, I went back to my old Dinotopia books in January and was struck with how amazingly awesome these books actually are. How awesome? Almost as good as corn chips. That's how awesome Dinotopia is.
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I find that I have a weakness for glowy, shiny, and wet things in paintings, and The World Beneath certainly delivers the goods in that respect (though I find that the traditional paintings do not do as well in capturing the smooth wetness that digital techniques excel at). While the original Dinotopia is undeniably great, The World Beneath has introduced the use of light as a significant element in its illustrations. While the first book took a more diagram-like approach to its paintings, with a uniform light source and not much variation in light and dark, its sequel could almost be viewed as a comprehensive study of lighting effects in painting. The World Beneath opens with an early morning panorama in Waterfall City, complete with shadows, reflections, and an appropriate capturing of the crisp, golden, horizontal light of a sunrise. The following illustrations continue that attention to light, and later in the book introduce such things as glowing lights and light filtered through glass, crystal, and even underwater. The book ends at sunset with the picture you see so cruelly cropped above.
In this painting, I particularly like how the densely high-contrast foreground is balanced out by the three milder parts unfortunately cropped out of the image I have posted. At the far right is the broad top of a waterfall, lit purple as through sub-surface scattering by the nearly horizontal light. Then towards the corner is the dully reflective globe of the museum, containing a microcosm of the entire picture that serves to let the viewer pause and reflect on the painting as a whole. At the top of the metal sphere is the blue of the sky and mountains, while below is the purple of the buildings and the falls. In a band around the middle is yellow, reflecting both the setting sun and the glow of village lights. This globe points to the light yellow and pink of the sky above the city, which I consider to be the third element relieving the cramped closeness of the building in front. It turns the painting from a warm nighttime scene to something much more vast and significant.
Really what these things do is bring the prescence of a larger world and higher power and greater context to what would otherwise be a very internally-focused, solely human place.
All the lights you see in the cropped image above are artificial, human lights. But the waterfall, the globe, and the glowing clouds all owe their brightness to the sun, thus opening up the space of the picture not only by their relative sparseness but also through more subtle means of directing the viewer's attention through relationships of light. The yellow sky glowing above the faintly purple mountains says, in effect, "You humans may light up your purple buildings with glowy yellow lights, and it looks nice, but remember where you are, and what came first, and that this world is a lot bigger than your little city." It makes the scene refreshingly expansive and stimulates the viewer to imagine what is beyond the scene immediately before them. I like that sort of thing.
Alex Cho Snyder
p.s.
james
gurney
has
a
blog
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Oh, and here is a study I did of the full painting. I learned at least two things while working on this: one, that I need a lot more practice to be any good at painting, and two, that getting colors right is really hard - a lot harder than it looks. It might be easier to work with color when you are just going from your imagination, but trying to get your painting to match an existing color scheme is not easy. It is simply another skill to learn, I suppose.
Cower in fear at my weak painting skills! Or more likely, at the inappropriate hugeness of the image file.