Enrico Casarosa is a storyboard artist for Pixar. He is also a character designer and comics artist. You can browse through his portfolio which includes sketches, character designs, backgrounds, storyboards, figure drawing and comics. He has a webcomic called Haiku 5-7-5.

At one point, after a “pubcrawl” with some friends, he got a notion put together his sketching stuff and devote a day to a “SketchCrawl”, spending the day wandering around San Francisco sketching until he ran out of day. (Here’s his description of coming up with the idea.) The results of his day of sketching are posted here.

He liked the experience so much he repeated it and collected the drawings as a book. He then expanded the idea to organized “Worldwide SketchCrawls”, inviting other artists to join in on a particular day and “sketch till you crawl”. He created a site devoted to the SketchCrawls that features bulletin boards for discussing the events and planning new ones. What a great idea.

Enrico also has a new blog, often devoted to the SketchCrawls.

Michel Gagne has been a concept artist for films like “The Iron Giant” and the “Star Wars: Clone Wars” animated series. He has also illustrated children’s books, written and drawn comics, done artwork in various mediums including sculpture, designed toys and created animated shorts in Flash. Best of all, though, he draws wonderfully twisted creatures.

The site has a large gallery selection (even if the images themselves are somewhat small) that gives a good cross-section of his work. Click through the rest of the site, there’s lots of stuff that’s not immediately available in the main navigation.

For example, there is a full (if small) reproduction of Inner Sanctum, his beautiful 17 page story for the Flight 2 anthology.

Flesk is a small publishing house that has issued wonderful collections of work from two of the best pen and ink illustrators in history: Joseph Clement Coll and Franklin Booth. Both are extraordinary in their own way.

The site contains small galleries of both artists’ work. The work is reproduced at a smaller size than you might like, but consider it a taste. If you like pen and ink drawing but are not familiar with these two artists, you owe it to yourself to check them out.

Flesk is also publishing collections from contemporary comics artists Mark Schultz and Steve Rude.

Check both the Galleries and the Publications sections for reproductions of the art.

OK. I’ll say right off that I love travel sketches. These are some nice ones, along with more finished paintings, created by a young artist from California as he made his way across Europe in a VW camper. Includes a journal of his travels, photos and some studio work.

Kazu Kibuishi’s charming, wistful, and deceptively simple series of single page web comics. A boy an his (talking) dog drift through various settings, real or imagined, while musing on a variety of thoughts. Sort of Calvin and Hobbes meet Little Nemo, with emphasis on the latter. The strips are beautifully drawn and colored. Read one of the recent ones to see how beautiful they are, then scroll to the bottom and read them all from the earliest. When you’re done and dying for more, explore the rest of the Bolt City site.

There is also a copper strip on the preview for Flight Comics.

Ryan Church is a Senior Art Director at ILM and was a Concept Design Supervisor for Star Wars Episode 2 and Episode 3. There are lots of eye-candy concept pieces for those movies on the site. As good as his professional concept art is (and it is very good indeed), many of my favorites here are from his “Personal” gallery. For those into digital painting, check out the FAQ, in which he describes many of his digital tools and even offers some of his Painter brushes for download.

This is The New Yorker’s online presence for their enormous repository of cartoons. You can search by topic or by cartoonist and browse online through hundreds of cartoons. Yes, the site is very commercial and exists mainly to hawk their multiple lines of prints, t-shirts, et al, but the cartoons are there, large enough to read, whenever you need a little sophisticated absurdity.

If that isn’t enough, there are the occasionally wonderful New Yorker covers, viewable slightly larger than the cartoons. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any sign of the often great little spot illustrations that have brightened the magazine’s pages over the years. Some of the original art is for sale, although they don’t quote prices on the site.

Of course, if you’re really into New Yorker cartoons, you have the book.

I decided my first post for this weblog would be ARC.

This site is just amazing. The heart of it is an enormous virtual museum of realist and representational art filled with high-resolution images of thousands of paintings (as well as some drawings).

Browse through the Museum (online galleries), which you can sort by artist’s name, nationality or dates. The vast array of monitor-filling high-res images are sometimes accompanied by super-high-res versions that let you see details you can’t see in most book or poster reproductions.

The site is somewhat clouded by its emphasis on art politics and its “Philosophy”, basically a constant rail against modernism that takes on an air of importance and exclusionary doctrine that starts to sound like… well, like the arrogant, exclusionary art-establishment modernists themselves. ARC champions 19th century academic art, once the art establishment, now out of favor, against the current modernists, once out of favor, now the art establishment. (Sigh.) Same as it ever was.

Anyway, don’t let that (or their incessant, inexplicable attempts to elevate William Bouguereau to demi-god status) get in the way of the art. The art is spectacular. The art is amazing. Any minor gripes I might have fall by the wayside in light of what they’ve accomplished. ARC is a mind-opening, eye-dazzling online collection.

The site also includes a gallery of selected modern realists, a listing of ateliers (studios and schools) of modern realists, and many other resources for anyone interested in representational art.

Warning – be prepared to spend hours feeding your eyeballs once you start.