Ordinarily, concept art for film is created as a means of visualizing scenes before they are staged and filmed; giving directors, designers and production companies a guide as they develop the components necessary to actually bring the scene to to the screen.

However, according to Borys Kit of The Hollywood Reporter, this is a case of specialized concept art being utilized at a much earlier stage — to sell the film idea to the studio.

Producer Lionel Wigram had the idea for the action hero take on the Sherlock Holmes tradition, but felt that a written story treatment wasn’t sufficient to get the idea across to the studio executives.

He contacted Gregory Noveck at DC Comics and asked for a recommendation for an artist who could help him convey the idea visually. Noveck suggested John Watkiss, an artist with experience in both comics and movie concept art (see my previous post on John Watkiss).

Working together they created a comic book like pamphlet with illustrations that got across a visual and dramatic punch that sold the movie to the studio. (The comic-like format led to rumors for a while that a Watkiss-illustrated Sherlock Holmes graphic novel was in the offing, but unfortunately that was not the case.)

Watkiss used dramatically staged ink and tone drawings, heavy with chiaroscuro, to convey both the mood and action intended in the production.

The drawings themselves are an unusual style for concept art, but work beautifully for the purpose (and would have made for a terrific graphic story).

Many of the original illustrations are currently on display, and for sale, at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, CA, in an exhibit called The Art of the Motion Picture: “Sherlock Holmes” by Jon Watkiss, that runs until January 18 2010.

If you haven’t seen the movie, you might consider some of the images plot spoilers.

[Via io9]

For the third year The New Yorker is holding a Eustace Tilley contest, in which participants are encouraged to submit their own (usually modernized) interpretation of the top-hatted and monocled character who has become the magazine’s iconic symbol.

The original Eustace Tilley (above, top left) was drawn by Rea Irvin, then art director, for the cover of the magazine’s first issue in 1925.

Since then, the character has been reinterpreted by numerous artists on New Yorker covers, and now by many others in the course of the contests.

There’s no particular prize other than being selected by the New Yorker’s art editor, François Mouly, for a sildeshow on the magazine’s site. The point, of course, is the fun and challenge of doing your version (a bit like a high-profile version of Illustration Friday).

I’ve entered again this year (image above, bottom right, larger version here; some of you may recognize it as a repurposed version of my last-minute submission from last year, with a uniform change – grin).

You have to sign up to enter, and then you can upload as many entries as you like. You can find links the rules, signup page and information about the contest, as well as galleries of current and past entries, on the contest’s main page.

Deadline is 11:59 PM January 18, 2010. Results will be announced February 8, 2010.

This beautiful drawing in pen and brown ink, wash and brown, black and white chalks, Adoration of the Shepherds, by François Boucher, is currently on display at the Morgan Library and Museum in new York.

It is part of an exhibit called Rococo and Revolution: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings, that runs until January 3, 2010.

There is a selection of drawings from the show highlighted on the Morgan’s web site, which are linked to zoomable versions. Though I’m not always a fan of the constraints of zooming images, they still offer the ability to see details normally not available in smaller images on the web. This is also something that is rarely applied to drawings.

Zooming in on this drawing we can see Boucher’s fluid Rembrandt-like pen lines. Look at the way he has used the reddish brown tones and judicious applications of white chalk to give the scene a luminous quality more often seen in paintings than drawings.

I love the wonderfully economic notation of the animals and the wooden structures, bales and baskets at the lower right portion of the drawing.

The image above (large version here) is one of illustrator Haddon Sundblom’s wonderful paintings of Santa Claus pausing to refresh himself with sponsor Coca-Cola’s sugary carbonated beverage.

The now famous paintings were part of an illustrated campaign that ran from 1931 to 1964. Though Coca-Cola’s claims for Sundblom’s role in the creation of the modern version of Santa Claus are overstated, as I point out in my previous post on Haddon Sundblom, that does nothing to diminish the wonderful painterly quality of his interpretations of the old boy.

The company has a page devoted to the Coca-Cola Santas, and there are more resources and links in my previous post, as well as an earlier post on Illustrators’ Visions of Santa Claus.

Adebanji Alade was born in Nigeria, and trained at Yaba College of Technology (a renowned art college in Nigeria). He extended his studies at Heatherly’s School of Fine Art in Chelsea in the UK. He currently lives in the UK and works from a studio in Chelsea.

I first encountered Alade’s work through his blog, which he has subtitled: “My art, my passion for sketching”, and passion for art is something that he demonstrates in abundance.

His web site has galleries of his work in several categories, portraits, drawings, illustrations, landscapes, religious themes and African influenced work. It is on his blog, however, that I find the best showcase of the two aspects of his work I find most interesting, his landscapes, particularly cityscapes, and his “Tube” sketches.

Alade fills sketchbooks with drawings of fellow passengers on London’s public transportation; page after page of direct observation and impromptu portraiture, fascinating faces and glimpses into other lives, shared momentarily in the process of getting somewhere.

He sometimes takes his Tube sketches and develops them into paintings. He has a secondary blog, subtitled “The people I sketch everyday” in which he chronicles this process. There is also a gallery on his web site devoted to the sketches.

Alade works in a variety of media, oil, acrylic, watercolor, graphite, carbon pencil and pen and ink. For his landscapes, he works from sketches and photographs in the studio as well as being a dedicated plein air painter. Both his studio work and location painting evidence the same dedication to direct observation displayed in his Tube sketches.

He often posts preliminary sketches and the paintings developed from them on his blog, and occasionally posts photos of himself painting on location. I always find it interesting to see photographs of the location for a painting, as well as the artist’s setup, not only for the arrangement of easel, palette and painting tools, but for the sense of scale and feeling for the environment in which the artist was working.

In addition to his web site and blogs, there is a brief video of Alade at work and being interviewed on the Winsor & Newton site.

Since I wrote about illustrator Larry Roibal last year, he has been continuing his wonderful practice of daily sketches of prominent figures.

Roibal draws his newsmakers on newsprint, literally. It’s common for artists to draw on “newsprint”, meaning the cheap pulp paper, similar to that on which newspapers are printed, that is used for quick sketches and throw-away drawings, but Roibal’s “newsprint” drawings take on a whole new meaning.

He sketches his portraits of politicians, world leaders, entertainers, sports figures and other newsworthy individuals directly on sections of newspaper articles about them.

Roibal’s ballpoint pen drawings are defined enough to give a sharp likeness of the individual, but open enough to let the newsprint come through.

Roibal has just assembled a remarkable collage of his drawings from the past year. My excerpt above is just a tiny fraction of the whole. You can also see a tabloid size excerpt here.

Of course, for the larger and more detailed drawings, take a meander back through his blog posts over the course of a fascinating year of news and personalities.

Impressionism – Painting Light is the title of an exhibition at The Albertina in Vienna, Austria, on view through 14 February, 2010.

The exhibit draws from the collections of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and Foundation in Cologne, as well as the Albertina and the Batliner Collection, with additions from private collections and other museums.

Those of us not in the neighborhood can enjoy the Albertina’s online tour of some Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works that are rarely seen outside of the region.

The exhibition includes work by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters like Monet, Cezanne, degas, Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Morisot, Seurat, Renoir, Caillebotte and Sisley, as well as less well known painters like Albert Besnard, Maximilien Luce and Maxime Maufra.

(Images above: Gustav Caillebotte, Maxime Maufra, Alfred Sisley)

[Via Art Knowledge News]

Originally form Chicago, NYC based illustrator and gallery artist Chris Buzelli cites painting alongside his grandfather in his TV repair shop as a child as a major influence on his choice of career.

Buzelli studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, and his illustrations have appeared in publications like Time, Rolling Stone, Playboy and The New York Times.

His confidently rendered illustrations juxtapose disparate elements in logic-teasing arrangements. Forms, objects and expected contexts are stretched and re-imagined, the unexpected becomes the norm.

Often his images deal with wonderfully grotesque animals and other elements of the natural world, though they appear to be illustrating concepts related to modern industrialized life.

Buzelli’s web site has a gallery of his work (note that there are 4 pages of thumbnails, accessed by a small row of dots about the thumbnail area). There is also a Shop, in which both prints and original art are available.

The images on his site are unfortunately a bit small. You will find some larger images on the Tor.com site, and accompanying an interview with the artist on LCS and another on Woosta. There is also an interview with Buzellii on the Communication Arts site.

Buzelli has a blog on Drawger.

After spending much of her career in the animation industry, working for companies like Walt Disney Feature Animation and Hanna Barbara, Allison Proulx turned her attention to gallery painting.

She studied at Rhode Island School of Design and Art Center College of Design and worked briefly as a freelance illustrator before entering the animation field.

Her web site featured galleries of work from both sides of her career, including figurative work.

Her simply and clearly stated landscapes come from direct observation, and are a marked contrast to the stylized animation background art that is also featured on her site.

I always find it fascinating when an artist does both real and fanciful landscapes, as the comparison speaks volumes about the intent and techniques employed in the creation of each.

This post finds me simultaneously elated and frustrated.

I’m elated because, like many other fans of William Stout’s paleontological illustrations, I’ve been waiting several decades for a suitable follow-up to his terrific 1981 book The Dinosaurs. (There was an expanded update, The New Dinosaurs in 2000, that was welcome, but not the same as a new book.)

A beautiful book of Stout’s Prehistoric Life Murals for the San Diego Museum of Natural History was released last year; but as much as I enjoyed that book, it still wasn’t the follow up to The New Dinosaurs, that I and many others have been hoping for.

The reason for that is that the murals, as striking as they are, are direct paintings, but the illustrations for The New Dinosaurs were in a style that is unusual for paleo art, but at which Stout particularly excels.

Most dinosaur art is either fully painted, or monochromatic pen and ink (there are exceptions, of course, like Douglas Henderson’s wonderful charcoal drawings); but the majority of Stout’s images for The New Dinosaurs were pen and ink with watercolor. This approach has all of the visual charm of Stout’s refined pen and ink work, combined with a beautiful application of color.

Pen and ink with watercolor is an approach that I enjoy in general, but particularly in the case of Stout’s application of it to images of dinosaurs, in which the textures of the animals and their environments are ideal subjects for the style.

(I like this approach so much that I used it, or a digital variation of it, for my own dinosaur illustrations for my dinosaur themed iPhone app; but I’m nowhere near Stout’s degree of mastery.)

The good news is that Flesk Publications, a small publisher that specializes in superbly produced books on art, illustration and comics (and which printed the aforementioned book of Stout’s paleo murals) has released not one but two absolutely beautiful new books of William Stout dinosaur art, Dinosaur Discoveries and New Dinosaur Discoveries A-Z.

The first is the true long-awaited successor to The New Dinosaurs, surpassing it in many ways. Beautifully produced in the tradition Flesk has established, Stout’s prehistoric pen and ink and watercolor marvels just jump off the page. It showcases 61 new dinosaurs that have been discovered in the last 20 years.

The hardback is a limited edition of 500 copies, numbered and signed by the artist with a bound-in plate not published in the subsequent paperback edition.

The second book is a smaller edition in which some of the material from the larger volume has been elegantly arranged into an A-Z children’s dinosaur book. While it shares content with the larger volume, Stout fans will want both, as they present the material differently enough to not seem redundant (plus they’re just so wonderfully designed and printed).

You can read publisher John Fleskes’ account of The Process behind the New Stout Books on his blog.

Though Amazon lists the books as not yet released, all three (New Dinosaur Discoveries A-Z and the hardbound and softbound editions of Dinosaur Discoveries) are available now from the Flesk Publications web site, as well as William Stout’s site.

OK, so why the part about being frustrated when Dinosaur Discoveries is, indeed, the Stout paleo art book I’ve been waiting for all these years?

Well, my frustration centers on my limited ability to point you to images from the books. Neither Flesk or Stout have seen fit to show a gallery of work from the books on the web, though there are a few scattered images you can look at.

I know that both artists and publishers have concerns about images (particularly terrific dinosaur images) being “borrowed” and spread around the web; but if you want to sell these books, you should let people know how great they look (with some detail images, come on)!

Anyway, below is what I can find on the Flesk site; but the best, and largest, images I can point you to (short of the books themselves, of course) are to be found in a download the Flesk Catalog from the right hand column of the Flesk site’s home page (from which I extracted the detail image above, bottom).

In the meanwhile, I’m happily camping out in the comfy chair with a cup of tea and my copy of Dinosaur Discoveries.