I have long been fascinated by pen and ink drawing, and its mirror world cousin, scratchboard.

Both are demanding mediums, but scratchboard is additionally difficult in that the unfamiliarity of working by subtraction rather than addition takes some practice, as well a mental shift (in common with some printmaking techniques); but the rewards are a kind of textural quality and visual appeal unlike any other medium.

There are some excellent contemporary scratchboard artists carrying forward the tradition; perhaps the best known and most accomplished of which is Canadian illustrator Mark Summers.

Summers combines superb draftsmanship, a talent for whimsey and humorous exaggeration and a knack for likenesses, both contemporary and historic, with a flair that have made his unique illustrations in demand and a common sight for readers of Time, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Book Review and numerous other publications and a range of book publishers an corporate clients.

He has received awards form the Society of Illustrators and been featured in juried shows, collections and publications like Step by Step Graphics, Communication Arts, Print and Applied Arts.

If you are a book lover, you may in remember his wonderful series of literary portraits that were prominent in Barnes and Noble bookstores a few years ago (I particularly loved his portrayals of Edgar Allan Poe).

Summers was born in Ontario and studied a the Ontario College of Art. He was introduced to scratchboard by Duncan Macpherson, an editorial cartoonist who drew for the Montreal Standard and the Toronto Star.

Summers doesn’t have a dedicated website, but since I last wrote about him in 2007, a new resource for viewing his art has become available. In addition to the portfolio on the site of his artist’s representative, Richard Solomon, and his portfolio on The iSpot, he now has a presence on the relatively new Behance Network.

In the latter you will find a section of delightfully Wicked Portraits, with Summers’ portrayals of notorious heavies from history, such as Edward VII (image above, top), in the company of such cheery chums as Torquemada, Rasputin, Genghis Kahn and Atilla the Hun.

In these and many of his recent illustrations, he enlivens his scratchboard drawings with tones of watercolor and sometimes oil glazes. There is a step through and description of his working process on the Richard Solomon site, and the same process is also shown a little larger at the bottom of this page on the Behance site. In addition, Summers has left a few replies to comments on my earlier post about his work with answers to questions about his technique.

Summers’ illustrations are featured in a new book, Vanity Fair’s Presidential Profiles: Defining Portraits, Deeds, and Misdeeds of 43 Notable Americans–And What Each One Really Thought About His Predecessor.

Kenn Backhaus is a contemporary realist painter who is a Signature Member of Oil Painters of America and past president of Plein Air Painters of America.

Backhaus was one of the painters featured in the 2007 PBS series Plein Air, Painting the American Landscape, and is instrumental in the independently produced series Passport and Palette, which was recently running on the Create TV cable network.

The latter is one of the better instructional painting shows I’ve seen, and I found the episodes with Backhaus to be the most instructive.

Backhaus was born in Wisconsin and attended the Layton School of Art in Milwaukee. He pursued a successful career as an illustrator and designer, earning recognition from the Society of Illustrators in New York as well as national and local awards; but after ten years or so his passion for plein air painting took over and became his primary focus.

He paints with the crisp immediacy often associated with the best plein air painters, using textural brushstrokes and the artful simplification of forms to their essentials to capture fleeting light in the field.

Unlike a number of contemporary plein air painters who feel the need to emulate Impressionist colors, Backhaus exercises restraint in his color palette, refusing to overstate colors simply for effect. Instead he searches out the real light and color of the scene before him, finding compositional drama in value contrasts and richness of color in the carefully noted relationships of adjacent colors.

There is a gallery of work on his website (note at the top a link to a second page). Unfortunately, the images are on the small side. Somewhat larger images can be found on the websites of galleries where his work is represented (listed below).

In addition to pursuing his painting, Backhaus devotes time to a number of workshops and seminars throughout the year. You can see his current schedule here. The next workshop is a 5 day outdoor and studio class at the Hudson River Valley Art Workshops in Greenville, NY from September 26 to October 2, 2010.

He is also leading the Passport and Palette travel workshop in the South of France from October 16-25, 2010. These painting trips will be filmed as part of upcoming Passport and Palette episodes.

Christopher Denise is a visual development artist who has worked with companies like Fox/Blue Sky Studios and Treanor Brothers Animation. He is also a children’s book illustrator whose clients include Candlewick Press, Penguin, Harcourt Brace McMillan and McGraw Hill.

His website portfolio includes sections for character design, props design, environments and more. The work on display here owes much to his children’s book illustration style, which has a classic fairy tale and animal character feel, with delicate linework, a subdued color palette and nice attention to texture.

He also maintains a blog in which he discusses ongoing projects both in visual development and book illustration. You will also find occasional posts about plein air painting and other topics.

Denise works in both traditional and digital media, though he doesn’t always indicate which pieces are created in a particular medium.

The books section of his website portfolio doesn’t include information about the books themselves, you can find links to many of them in the right hand column of his blog.

A “pencil test”, as I mentioned in my recent post about Pencil Test Depot, is a hand-drawn animation sequence (or entire cartoon) in pencil, prior to the steps to final inking and painting.

A rare Disney animated short that was never finished, a classic style 7 minute Mickey Mouse cartoon called Plight of the Bumble Bee, directed by Jack Kinney in 1951, has surfaced on YouTube., giving us a rare glimpse of the classic animation process.

In much the same way that hand drawn animation has a visual charm distinct from any kind of computer animation, the even more raw and immediate look of animated pencil drawings has a wonderful look all its own.

The cartoon has a full soundtrack, and can be enjoyed as a if it were a finished work, but with the x-ray view of penciled-in characters against more fully (and wonderfully) drawn backgrounds.

Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News has posted the cartoon to his site along with a plea to John Lassiter to consider applying the contemporary Disney (Pixar) studio crew to finishing the unfinished work, and distributing it as an opener for a new Disney theatrical release (which was the role of the original classic cartoons in the early to mid 20th Century).

Great Idea.

[Suggestion courtesy of Gregory Frost]

[Addendum 9/2/10: This has been removed from YouTube by the Disney Copyright Hawks, but as of this writing is still viewable on Ain't It Cool News.]

Since I wrote about Danish landscape painter Peder Mørk Mønstead (sometimes written as Peder Mørk Mønsted) two years ago, the wonderful World Wide Web has continued to do what it does best — grow at an astonishing rate, bringing with it the joy of even more resources on Mønstead’s work.

Notably, Hans Bacher has added a nice article on Mønstead, with lots of images, to his always terrific One1more2time3’s Weblog (see my post on One1more2time3’s Weblog), Art Renewal Center has added a number of higher resolution images to their set (look for the text links to “View High Res Image”), and All Paintings Art Portal has added an extensive section on Mønstead’s work (click “View Larger Image” text links).

I’ve listed some more new resources below, and added to them the listings from my previous post about Mønstead.

Active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Mønstead was one of those painters who applied an Impressionist influenced feeling for light, atmosphere and color to a foundation of the kind traditional academic draftsmanship that Monet and many of the other Impressionists rejected, with beautiful results.

Mønstead’s sometimes dark forest glades, intimate views of creeks, ponds and reflective pools were often as much about shadow as the Impressionist’s works were about light.

The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, sometimes shortened to Royal Society of Arts, or RSA, is a British institution founded in 1754 to “embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine art, improve our manufactures and extend our commerce”.

Among their many endeavors is a series of talks in which leading thinkers examine social challenges and seek to shed light on issues both contemporary and timeless.

Some of those talks have been incorporated into animated presentations, in which the speaker’s words are accompanied by time lapse animation of a cartoon illustrator drawing and writing a clever whiteboard presentation of the topic.

These are created by a studio called Cognitive Media, though I couldn’t find individual artist credits. The stop motion is occasionally accompanied by added animated elements, but the end result seems seamless and is often clever in the way already drawn elements are repurposed as the talk and animated presentation continue.

The result is a visually entertaining presentation that holds your interest and adds clarity to concepts that might otherwise be a bit off-putting an effective combination of words and pictures.

[Via BoingBoing]

James Christensen’s paintings range from straightforward portraits to fantasy tinged depictions of angels and Renaissance ladies to phantasmic tableaux of fantasy subjects that look as though the books in a children’s library had been run through a fan and reassembled by a cross-eyed surrealist.

Christensen seems to swim in a rich sea of influences, from medieval, Renaissance and baroque art to Golden Age illustrators like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Neilsen, John Bauer, and Gustaf Tenggren. You can even see suggestions of the obsessively detailed fairy paintings of Richard Dadd.

At his most expansive, Christensen’s wonderfully detailed and brightly garbed fantasy world denizens parade across lavishly textured landscapes, awash in saturated colors, sprinkled with luminescent details, carrying with them a trove of references to literature and folklore.

Christensen was born in California and studied at Brigham Young University and UCLA. His work has been featured in a number of publications and books, including Voyage of the Basset, A Shakespeare Sketchbook, Rhymes & Reasons, A Journey of the Imagination: The Art of James Christensen and James Christensen: The Greenwich Workshop’s New Century Artists Series.

I don’t know if the artist has an “official” site; jameschristensen.com is associated with the Jerry W. Horn Gallery, and offers original art as well as reproductions. Unfortunately the images are small and the site is poorly organized, but it shows a broad range of Christensen’s work and styles.

Larger images can be found at the Greenwich Workshop’s online gallery, B&R Gallery, Hidden Ridge Gallery and Swoyer’s Fine Art.

One of the best pages for a quick overview of his fantasy themed work is this unofficial page on 2photo.ru. I’ve listed other resources below.

[Via Monster Brains]

The Haggin Museum in Stockton, California has the largest collection of works by the great American illustrator J.C. Leyendecker held by any museum.

The collection had been on tour for some time and returned to the museum in May. Since then work has been completed on a newly remodeled gallery in which the collection will be on display until December 31, 2010 (just long enough for the next installment of my traditional Happy Leyendecker Baby New Year post).

Unfortunately, the museum has not matched the renovated gallery display with a much needed revision of their online image gallery, which still suffers from images with camera lens distortion and color aberration (I’ve straightened out a few of the above images with the Lens Correction filter in Photoshop).

The images are also frustratingly small, but you can get an idea of the breadth and depth of the collection, which contains some superb examples of Leyendecker’s work, as well as unique early pieces.

The museum’s website does include an article about the exhibit and a Leyendecker biography, which includes a history of the collection and of Earl Rowland, the museum’s former director who assembled the museum’s holdings of Leyerdecker and other noted illustrators.

As far as I know, there is not a printed catalog of the museum’s Leyendecker collection, but a new, long awaited book on Leyendecker was released in 2008, J.C. Leyendecker, by Laurence S. Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler.

J.C. Leyendecker, for those who are unfamiliar with his work, was one of the finest illustrators in the history of the art form. His relative obscurity continues to amaze me; he should at least share the spotlight usually focused on Norman Rockwell, if not eclipsing him to some degree.

For a quick selection of large images, see these two articles on Golden Age Comic Book Stories. For more on Leyendecker, including additional links to large images and other resources, see some of my previous posts listed below.

[Addendum: Since publication of this article, the Haggin Museum has updated their online gallery with some higher quality images of 8 of the works.]

As necessary is it is these days for artists to have a presence online, there are times when print is the medium of choice for showing one’s artwork, whether as a leave-behind for galleries, a sample book or portfolio for prospective clients or as a printed book for collectors.

I wrote back in 2008 about Blurb, and other modern print-on-demand services that allow you to create and print a professional looking 8x 10″ book, up to 40 pages, in quantities as few a one copy, for as little as $20; providing a terrific alternative to traditional means of printing portfolios or sample sheets for presentation to galleries, potential clients or buyers.

These are printed on Hewlett Packard’s Indigo digital press, in a process that produces results close to the more expensive process of offset lithography. The pages are bright and crisp with rich color, well suited to inexpensively reproduce color artwork and photography.

Blurb books are bound like a book and have a minimum of 20 pages; nice if you have a fair bit of work to present.

For a smaller body of work, an alternative resource is MagCloud, a service from HP that uses the Indigo press to produce short run on-demand magazines. This allows you to not only create a short run magazine on a schedule if you like, but also to create magazine-like printings that you can order yourself to use as handouts, or gallery leave-behinds, that can be as few as 4 or as many as 100 pages.

For magazines with more pages, they also offer a “perfect bound” option (a square binding as opposed to the fold and staple, or “saddle stitched” binding used in thinner magazines). These can be from 20 to 384 pages.

Unlike Blurb, which offers a free software application to allow amateurs to easily layout a book, you’re kind of on your own with MagCloud; but all you need is any software that will allow you to create and output a PDF file of the appropriate dimensions.

Like Blurb, MagCloud has a online store that allows you to offer your publication for sale if you want. They have a base price of 20 cents U.S. per page, and you mark up your publication to whatever price you want to set beyond that. The website has a feature that allows you to provide a multi-page online preview of the printed piece.

In theory, you could even publish comics, but the size is limited to 8 1/2 x 11″, not a standard comics format in the U.S. or Europe. I don’t know to what degree the service is available outside the U.S.

The New York Times has a photo/audio essay about a group Making a Magazine with MagCloud, and Read Write Web reports that MagCloud is rolling out a new feature that lets you create an iPad optimized version of your magazine.

A friend of mine, photographer and 3D computer graphics animator Harry Saffren, has been publishing his series of photographs of food on plates (as sequential images of the progress of consuming a meal) as 16 page issues of Plate Magazine. I was impressed with the results. Though there is no “cover” of heavier stock on the shorter run magazines, the reproduction is very like a professional newsstand magazine, and the printing reproduced the the bright vibrant colors of his original photographs to a remarkable degree.

MagCloud has an introduction as well as a Help page to get you started.

(Images above, links are to MagCloud page for that publication: top 2: Harry Saffren’s Plate Magazine, Paintings of Lesley Deacon, The Artwork of Bonnie Gloris, Works, American Painter John Grazier, Concept Art by Josh Mongeau 2010, SLAM (Support Local Arts Magazine), Fire Mass, eatsleepdraw magazine, John Bell, Jr. Paintings & Prints)

I’ve written before about the beautiful etchings of James McNeill Whistler, whose work as an etcher is even less well known than his paintings.

On Beauty and the Everyday: The Prints of James McNeill Whistler is a new exhibition opening this Saturday, August 21, 2010, at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, which has one of the most extensive collections of Whistler’s graphic work in the U.S.

The collection, which you can preview here, contains examples of some of Whistler’s finest and best known etchings.

Unfortunately, both the exhibition page preview (link for “More Images” at bottom) and the above images of the collection (meant to facilitate ordering slide sets) are small.

Etchings by their nature are subtle, with delicate lines against toned papers. This is part of their unique visual charm, but it makes them difficult to do justice in reproduction. There are some larger images on the site of the Frick Collection in New York. You can find impressions of some of the same etchings in both collections.

Some of the best online reproductions I’ve found are on the University of Glasgow’s site for James Mcneill Whistler: The Etchings, A Catalog Raisonne. Unfortunately the Catalog Raisonne mentioned is a book project, and the online resources are from from complete, but what is there is large enough to appreciate some of the subtlety of Whistler’s touch. You have to drill down a bit. Go to “Exhibition”, scroll down, click on the thumbnail to access the detail page, then click again on the image for the large version.

Next best may be the online images from the Freer Sackler Online Collections.

You will sometimes find the same etching in different “states”, impressions pulled form the plate at various stages of the artist’s work on the image.

Whistler was inspired by the etchings of Rembrandt, likely the finest practitioner of the art in history, and to a great degree revitalized the art in his time and placed himself high in the canon of the world’s great etchers and lithographers.

The exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art continues to November 28, 2010.

For more information and links to resources, see my previous posts on James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Whistler’s Etchings. In the latter I give a brief overview of the process of creating an etching.

Etchings of James McNeill Whistler is wonderfully inexpensive Dover book.

I haven’t seen Etchings by Whistler: Sixty Photographs from Original Prints. It’s a facsimile of a book published in 1923 and I don’t know how well it’s fared in the reproduction.