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Today the Oshkosh Public Museum opened its exhibition of 49 original paintings from Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

Here’s the sign outside museum. There were also buses with Dinotopia banners, local school events, a signing at the Apple Blossom Bookstore, and reading lists at the library, thanks to the tireless organizing efforts of the museum’s assistant director Mike Breza and members of the community here in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Performers from the Cirque du Soleil were present in costumes that matched the “Liners” illustration from the Dinotopia book. Here they are posing next to the original painting “Spotters and Liners.”

The stiltwalkers made an impressive sight as they walked nimbly up and down the grand staircase, while jugglers managed up to five pins in the lobby.

Thanks to everyone at the museum and to all of you who came to say hello and have your books signed. I’m especially grateful for those of you who drove from far away to attend the opening.

A weird thing happened at 6:32 p.m. at the rest stop on the north side of I-90 near Angola, New York. We were stopped to look at a map and we heard someone doing something at the back of the car. We saw a guy with a long brown coat jog off past the dog walk area into the forest.

We checked and nothing seemed to be taken from the back of Trusty Rusty, but there was a little note on top of the load. It was kind of creepy—some crackpot stalker apparently trying to take credit for Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara.

I guess you can expect anything on Halloween, but how would this guy, whoever he is, know where we were at that moment?

Contre-jour lighting is a type of backlighting where you place the subject right in front of a bright, sunny sky. In French the phrase literally means “against the day,” a poetic way to express this mysterious and powerful effect.

The term is still in common use among photographers. But cameras can’t deliver this effect as powerfully as painters can, because cameras are unable to respond to a wide enough range of intensities, and the silhouettes tend to go to black.

Artists of the 19th Century did wonders with contre jour. You’ll find it with Royal Academicians like Atkinson Grimshaw (upper left), Barbizon painters like Constant Troyon (the other images here), and American landscapists like Frederick Church.


Troyon’s student Leon Belly used this effect to capture a feeling of dazzling, intoxicating illumination in several of his Orientalist paintings, like this one of water buffalo in a desert oasis. I learned about contre-jour lighting from art historian Kristian Davies, who discusses it in his brilliant book The Orientalists (Laynfaroh, 2005).


When a form is placed contre-jour, it goes into silhouette. The colors weaken. Shadows stretch forward. Details disappear as the glare of the light spills over the edges of the form. The sun itself often shines from inside the frame of the picture, making the viewer’s eyes squint involuntarily.


I’ve been fascinated by the idea of contre-jour since starting work on Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, and it crops up in quite a few of the paintings in the new book, like the one above, where Arthur and Bix are approaching the Imperial Palace.

Today I visit Rhode Island School of Design. Stay tuned in a couple of days for the report.

On the Journey to Chandara Road Tour, I’ve been spotlighting some of the bookstores that Jeanette and I have visited along the way. But I don’t want to overlook the mail order companies, who work quietly in the background and bring their own artistry to bookselling.

Bud Plant Comic Art in Grass Valley, California is the premier catalog retailer for fantasy and illustrated books. They have a staff of people that really know and love comics and visually told stories. They wanted to do something special for the new Dinotopia, so they asked me to design a custom bookplate to match the endpaper design.

The endpaper art (above) shows multi-lobed ginkgo, horsetail ferns, mayflies and other things from the fossil record.

I drew up the bookplate in pen and ink, trying to stay in the spirit of book design a hundred years ago, and showing maple seeds, which also turn up in fossils.

John Reed at Bud Plant took the drawing and had it printed (above) on a 1918 letterpress. The printers cast the image into a metal die and inked each impression by hand. Here’s a shot of the press being inked on the Dinotopia job.

And here’s the stage called “rolling.”


Thank goodness there are still people in the world who know how to run these glorious old letterpresses. I love the smell of the ink. It makes me want to put on green eyeshades and suspenders.

Letterpress printing is an art form that is almost lost, like harnessing an eight-horse team, or making a mechanical wristwatch. Check out the fascinating video about the art of letterpress printing, where the narrator muses about the potential disappearance of such skill and knowledge.

It’s a funny thing about schedules. When you’ve got all the time in the world, ideas often don’t flow as well as when you’re on a tight deadline.

At least it’s that way for me. Doing the art for the new Dinotopia book meant generating 150 paintings in about a four year period. Four years sounds like a lot of time, but as the crunch got closer, I had to produce each painting in less than a week, start to finish.

This schedule helped keep me on track. I tallied the finished pages in the margins, with the goal of six to eight pages a month. I completed the artwork out of sequence, following the plan of the storyboard and outline.

I had to completely lose myself in the project. Let the roof leak! Chuck the ‘Do List.’ Never mind Christmas! Chain your ankle to the easel and start another audio book! Somehow this regimen put me into the same kind of creative tunnel that monks, prisoners, and students often describe with a grim fondness. The painting studio became a kind of sideways elevator taking me completely into another world.

But now I’m back in this world. For the moment I’m wrung dry. And now I've got to do something about that leaky roof.

Here are some snapshots from the Journey to Chandara Road Tour.

We stopped at Yeehaw Junction on the long drive across in Florida to scrape all the dead bugs off the windshield.


Getting fueled up with bagels, coffee, and wireless at Einstein Bagels.


I did a taping of "Weekends with Marcia." The two cardinal rules of TV appearances are: always bring a copy of your own book to wave in front of the camera, and always wear a jacket and tie. Oops, I forgot both rules.


At the Vero Beach Book Center, I did some dinosaur drawings for the kids from St. Edwards School.

The kids from the Willow School had good interview questions written out in cursive in their notebooks. "Do you ever get frustrated in your work?" "How did you come up with the idea for your pictures?"


And I was caught again scribbling on the wall with markers, a hobby of mine.

P.S. Thanks for the mention on Moleskinerie, a fun blog if you're curious what other people do with those nifty little sketchbooks.

Inspiration strikes in the most unlikely places.

As I was working on the new book, Dinotopia: Journey to Chandara, I was trying to come up with a street grid—a city plan—for the city of Chandara. But I had wasted a whole afternoon making tentative scribbles like this one.

I had studied maps of some of the greatest cities, like Paris and Amsterdam, and there was some elusive quality of design to each one that appealed to me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

That evening, Jeanette and I went out for Chinese food. As we waited for the Moo Goo Gai Pan, the door of the Jade Palace Restaurant caught my eye.

I was intrigued by the pattern of cracking paint. The big diagonal cracks reminded me of avenues, and the smaller cracks looked like a maze of hidden alleyways, or "snickleways" as they call them in York, England.

I was down on my hands and knees staring closer and closer at the door. People walking by thought I had completely lost my mind.

Every city, in its old medieval section, has a pattern of streets that includes broad, straight avenues and little winding side streets. There is some deep law of nature at play in the cracking paint that also governs the layout of cities. I would like to live in such a city.

This was the breakthrough! The design of Chandara fell right into place. I went home and drew the map.


My fortune cookie said some trite nonsense, like “You will meet an interesting friend.” But what it should have said was “Stay open to possibilities.”