For Will, Dinotopia becomes a path to manhood, as he begins a tame relationship with a dinosaur rancher’s daughter, the red-headed Sylvia. For explorer Denison, travelling around Dinotopia with trusty dinosaur sidekick Bix becomes a series of adventures encountering bizarre people and creatures, while becoming fascinated with unique flora and fauna. Even more mysterious, everyone on this dinosaur-inhabited island appears to have arrived by shipwreck with no apparent way to leave. The two are shipwrecked off the schooner Venturer and land somewhere uncharted. Gurney has written three sequels which center around nineteenth century biologist Arthur Denison and his adolescent son Will. The packed audiences eagerly caught the posing models on their iPads while Gurney professed to get as much as much down on his sketch pads using plain observation.ĭinotopia is celebrating twenty years in print. During PSA’s art weekend, this king of dinosaurs stole around ballrooms unobtrusively drawing visiting artists who demonstrated how to render a figure in paint. Gurney was the key speaker at PSA’s gala and enthralled even those, like my husband Dave, who only uses a paintbrush for touch-ups to the exterior of our house. I don’t think I could even write my grocery list on a Gurney sketch pad, but then I haven’t been endorsed by Dream Works Animation or Johns Hopkins School of Medicine or the Denver Museum of Natural History, either. I can’t imagine a sketchbook being smaller than a legal pad or my paint tubes and brushes being carried in anything less than a Home Depot rolling tool box. OK, I’m a slob when it comes to packing paint and brushes for going on-location. A sketch of Gurney sketching at the Portrait Society of America gathering. Gurney gets his to-go supplies into a hiker’s fanny-pack. On location you might need several water brushes loaded with different hues-very convenient and I plan to try some. Apparently, you load the water brush’s hollow handle with liquid watercolor and away you go.
So I Googled art stores to research this seemingly handy tool. He draws with HB and 4B pencils, and preloads water brushes, which I’d never heard of. Gurney has a keen sense of his surroundings which he records with the simplest ingredients: pencils and watercolors, a fountain pen and markers, all rendered in the tiniest sketchbook. Gurney showed his to-go-kit, minimal art supplies he takes on the road, to an audience of painters ranging from beginners to the highly skilled. At PSA’s conference, I chose a Gurney break-out session and began to learn how approachable he was. As a parent, I was familiar with his book Dinotopia but had never looked beyond the bedtime story scenario. The Portrait Society of America (April 2013) held its annual conference in Atlanta and featured illustrator James Gurney.
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