Phillip Straub is a concept artist and illustrator who works primarily digitally. His style ranges from dark and moody sci-fi game concept art to candy-colored children’s illustration.

Wally Torta’s Journal is a wonderful sketchblog that ranges from simple and direct observations from everyday life to flights of fantasy to meeting doodles to cartoons and drawings in a style influenced by B. Kliban (one of my absolute favorite cartoonists). Most often, though, he seems to simply draw what’s in front of him. Worth checking back often.

Jenn Manley Lee’s subtle, adult, character-driven science fiction web comic. It’s well written, well drawn and rendered in emotionally effective color palettes. The story deals with adult themes and is not for children. It’s also not for those who have a childish expectation of what science fiction (and science fiction comics) are about.

Bill Mather does paintings and portraits of women in a variety of media. He also does landscapes in acrylic and oil. The site in includes a number of nice sketches, as well as pieces from figure drawing classes.

What I enjoy most, though, are his direct and lively portrait drawings.

Derek Thompson is a comics artist, storyboard artist and concept artist. Most of all though, he draws monsters. Big, little, scary, silly, weird and wild monsters. He even has a Monster of the Day feature and a Monster Vault.

The site also features a gallery of his professional work and a Sketchbook that happens to include some nice travel sketches.

Julian Beever is probably the best known practitioner of “Pavement Art”, highly rendered drawings on city sidewalks. Some of them are portraits or reproductions of old masters, but the most interesting are anamorphic distortions that, when viewed from a certain angle, give a striking illusion of 3 dimensionality. The technique is reminiscent of the old master trick of creating apparently distorted paintings that only assume proper appearance when viewed in the curved surface of a reflective vase or bowl.

Lots of good-sized reproductions of Superman, Batman and Jack B. Quick art by this superb comics draughtsman. Click into Original Art for Sale to see some full pages of his inks over others’ pencils.

William Whitaker ia s contemporary American realist who paints mostly portraits and full length figures of women in a refined painterly technique. The paintings are sometimes accompanied by nice detail images. The galleries are somewhat awkwardly arranged but it’s worth clicking around. The Retrospective Galleries are kind of tucked away and they contain 50 works.

The site features several step-by-step painting demos as well as some notes on technique.

My father was a WWII veteran and when I was growing up there was always a copy of Up Front on the bookshelf. Bill Mauldin’s terrific cartoons about “Willie n’ Joe” tell about life in wartime from a footsoldier’s point of view. They weren’t pro-war or anti-war, they were just about life as it was for the soldiers on the front line. Many of them are just as relevant today as they were 60 years ago.

These selections are from an archive presented by Stars and Stripes, the long-running newspaper for military personnel in which they first appeared. There is also an article in the S&S about a current reservist named Chris Grant who is in some ways following in Mauldin’s footsteps.

Addendum: The curator from the 45th Infantry Division Museum in Oklahoma City writes to say that the museum has a collection of more than 200 of Mauldin’s original cartoons, many of them from his peak period of 1944-45. The museum’s site has visitor information here. For more detail, see the Comments for this post.

Speaking of War of the Worlds (this time referring to the recent movie), James Clyne was a concept artist for that film and many others, including Galaxy Quest, Minority Report, and Tron 2.0.

His gallery includes his concept paintings for many of the films, arranged by film title.