If you, like many people, envision the process of 3-D CGI (Computer Graphics Imaging) as arranging a few wireframe shapes and pressing the “render” button, you may as well say painting is as easy as taking a brush and slapping some color on a canvas.

The same skills of composition, proportion, perspective, color and, yes, drawing, are as important in the creation of a successful CGI image as they are in traditional painting. Yes, it’s possible for an amateur to make an image in a 3-D application without knowing those things, and the results are similar to someone trying to paint without them. I’ve seen enough poorly done amateur CGI, and have worked in 3-D applications myself just enough to have some idea of how important those skills are to a good CGI image.

Raphaël Lacoste is a French matte painter and concept artist now living in Canada. He is also an award-winning art director for high-end games in the Prince of Persia series. He uses a combination of 3-D CGI and 2-D digital painting in Photoshop to create beautifully atmospheric images that are at times evocative of classical and 19th century paintings.

The image above, Path to the Gothic Choir (large version here), is the subject of a feature article on the CGSociety site that goes into some detail about the process of creating this kind of image, including preliminary sketches, initial renderings, details and an image of a painting by 19th Century German romantic painter Caspar David Fredrich called Cloister Graveyard in the Snow, that was the inspiration for Lacoste’s image.

Lacoste’s own site has a nice selection of his moody and atmospheric matte paintings and concept art, including a wonderful evocation of Arnold Böcklin’s The Isle of the Dead. (See my previous post on Arnold Böcklin.)

There is also a gallery of his work on the CGSociety’s site.

I first wrote about illustrator Tim Jessell and his “realistic with a twist” style in this post back in October of 2005.

Since then, his site has been completely redone and the Portfolio section expanded with larger versions of his editorial and advertising illustrations for the likes of Time Magazine, American Airlines, Nike, Polaroid and Apple Computer.

Jessell also illustrates children’s books, including the Secrets Of Droon series by Tony Abbott, Superhero Christmas, a children’s book written by Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee, and Amorak, written and illustrated by Jessell (details here).

His style is at once varied and consistent, changing with his subject but retaining a foundation in realistic painting and solid draftsmanship. Browsing his portfolio, you can find a straightforward portrait next to a fearsome dragon in from the Droon series next to lighthearted children’s fantasy.

His new galleries also feature a display gimmick that I’m a sucker for, showing a “reflection” of each image as if the painting was sitting on a dark reflective floor. The effect is repeated on the gallery thumbnail page and I’ve chosen to use a section of that here, rather than try to choose a “representative” image among his broad variety of subjects.

When I write these posts, I take the approach of describing artists from one tradition or genre to readers who are coming to lines and colors with an interest in a different area, in the hope that I can introduce you to something that you might not have encountered otherwise.

Even so, I usually try to avoid images that those familiar with the artist would consider a cliché because they are that artist’s “hit single”, and find treasures that are less frequently seen.

Some images, however, are simply too strong to resist.

Katsushika Hokusai’s In the Hollow of a Wave off the Coast at Kanagwa (from a series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji), commonly known in the West as “The Wave”, is one of the most recognizable images in all of art. It is certainly the most widely recognized image of Japanese art in the Western hemisphere, and many think of it as the archetypical example of a Japanese print.

Ironically, Hokusai is possibly the first Japanese printmaker to introduce elements of Western art into Japanese printmaking, incorporating Western-style perspective, shading and lighting effects learned from smuggled European prints at a time when contact with Western culture was still forbidden.

So the Western artists, notably French Impressionists like Monet, Degas and Toulouse-lautrec, and American artists like Whistler, were entranced and influenced by the Japanese prints of Hokusai, the first Japanese artist to become popular in the West, who in turn had absorbed influences of European printmakers like Rembrandt and van Ruisdale.

Hokusai represents a nexus between the art traditions of East and West, whose development until that time may as well have happened on separate planets. Hokusai had a tremendous impact on the course of Western art and is, in fact, more highly regarded in the West than in Japan. He was uncharacteristic among Japanese artists in other ways. He was a rebel, a restless individualist, changing homes, and names, frequently throughout his career. Katsushika Hokusai is not his actual name, simply the one most recognized. One of his later works was signed “The Art-Crazy Old man”.

In the Hollow of a Wave is such a remarkable image that it has become an icon, like the Mona Lisa or Van Gogh’s self portraits, at once familiar and still unknown. Often incorrectly thought to represent a tsunami, it is actually a scene of fishermen encountering one of the dangers of their profession, large offshore waves called okinami.

A wave yes, but more than that, Hokusai’s wave is alive, it’s foamy crest breaking into grasping fingers, its troughs and crests swelling and falling as if the sea was breathing, and the sea spray flying like clouds of fireflies.

The image is even more remarkable for its composition. Hokusai was a master of “negative space”, the areas of an image where the objects are not. This was a characteristic that particularly enthralled the impressionists.

The sky is the negative space here, and it is a remarkable echo of the shape of the wave, as you can see if you look at the image upside-down (left) and look at the shape of the sky as a wave.

Beyond that, many have pointed out that the two waves together, the one that is “there” and the one that is “not there” form a pattern uncannily like a Taijitu, or “Yin Yang symbol“, the ancient Chinese icon representing the balance and blending of the duality of light/dark, positive/negative and masculine/feminine believed to form the foundation of existence.

Whether this is intentional on Hokusai’s part is unknown, but his powerful compositions, delicate colors and beautifully finessed lines can captivate today as easily as they did before the turn of the last century.

I was disappointed to learn that I missed an exhibit of Hokusai’s work at the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian, itself a remarkable nexus of art from East and West, that ended in May,

I’ll list some online resources below, and there are several excellent books available, including Hokusai by Gian Carlo Calza and Hokusai: One Hundred Views of Mt. Fuji, edited by Henry D. Smith.

I’ll leave you with Hokusai’s wonderful quote about his development as an artist throughout his life:

“From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. but all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with.

At seventy five I’ll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before.” — Hokusai

German artist Käthe Kollwitz began her career as a painter until, inspired by the prints of Max Klinger, she began creating etchings, lithographs and woodcuts, eventually abandoning painting for graphics.

Kollwitz was also a sculptor and her drawings and graphics have a distinctly sculptural quality, as if rough-hewn from wood or stone.

Her subjects were “rough” as well, often drawn from the poor and downtrodden in Berlin, who her husband attended as a doctor. She remained committed to pacifist and socialist ideals throughout her career. Much of her early work in particular was shaped by the death of one of her sons in the First World War.

She was the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Art, a post from which she was ejected by the Nazi Party, who also forbade her to exhibit; although they used some of her work for propaganda and included her in their derisive exhibition of “Degenerate Art”.

Through it all, she continued to create, and her work, even when portraying grief and tragedy, resonates with an uncanny strength.

There is an exhibit of her prints, posters and drawings at the CSU Art Museum in Long Beach, California from June 23 to August 5, 2006. Unfortunately there isn’t an online gallery accompanying the exhibit listing.

There is a Käthe Kollwitz museum in Berlin that has a gallery of her work.

The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco has over 60 images of her work in their online image base, including the image above (detail here).

Link via Art Knowledge News.

Ten years ago, the landscape of comics on the web was a vast empty plain dotted with a few (very few) examples of what we now call webcomics. One of them was my own online comic, Argon Zark!, which was the first long-form comic created specifically for distribution on the web (started in June of 1995).

It was preceded by short form and single strips that had moved from print to the web, most notably Where the Buffalo Roam by Hans Bjordahl, which had been distributed over the internet via Usenet newsgroups even before the first graphical web browsers came into use, and Dr. Fun, a single panel cartoon that had began running in September of 1993.

Soon after the first Zark page went up, newspaper cartoonist Bill Holbrook brought Kevin and Kell to the web. Other online comics started to dot the landscape and the nascent world of webcomics started to look like a small colony. In June of 1996, Peter Zale began the strip that would become Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet, the first webcomic that would move in the other direction, (eventually making the transition from webcomic to sydicated newspaper comic in 2000).

The tiny colony was fast becoming a thriving town. Major landmarks like Sluggy Freelance and User Friendly appeared, Scott McCloud began his “infinite canvas” online comics experiments, Penny Arcade and Keenspace erected their skyscrapers an the town grew into a city. By the turn of the century, the advance of webcomics began to snowball. Even the sleepy self-satisfied print comics companies were trying to figure out how to use this phenomenon to sell more of their usual wares.

It’s hard to estimate how many webcomics there are today, or even how many of them are added daily (yes, daily), but where once an empty plain stood is now a webcomics megalopolis, stretching as far as the eye can see in all directions.

The history of webcomics is a lot more complex an detailed than I can possibly indicate here, which is why it’s so cool that webcomics author and commentator T Campbell has done the painstaking research and organization to put together A History of Webcomics, which has just been released from Antarctic Press.

There isn’t a lot of direct promotinoal material available on the book. You can read an discussion board interview with T Campbell on the Comicon boards.

(There is also a good set of articles on The Webcomics Examiner, on The Artistic History of Webcomics, in which Campbell was also involved and Argon Zark! is also prominently mentioned.)

Campbell has traced the history of webcomics in considerable detail in this volume, and included a number of illustrations of key points and players in the field.

The book includes several illustrations of mine: two Argon Zark! pages, a drawing of my characters and a chapter heading (image at left, top) that I did specifically for the book, in which my characters Argon, Zeta and Cybert peer out of a Netscape 1 browser window (Netscape had just come out when I started Argon Zark!), and point at characters from Hans Bjordahl’s Where the Buffalo Roam (incorporating Hans’ own drawings), ensconced in windows of the first and second generation of Mosaic, the first widely used graphical browser on the web.

This has never been a personal sketch blog, and perhaps it’s a little self indulgent to feature a book that my work figures prominently in, but it happens to be quite a good book, and I’m allowed to be self indulgent today, it’s my birthday!

Mike Luckovich doesn’t pull his punches.

Luckovich has been the editorial cartoonist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for 18 years. Sometimes his cartoons earn him vitriol and threatening letters and sometimes they earn him editorial acclaim. They often bring him both simultaneously.

When he goes after a public figure he considers foolish, irresponsible or even reprehensible, he shoots with a fully loaded pen. For example, he portrays Ann Coulter, (who recently accused widows of the World Trade Center disaster, who had pushed for the formation of the 9-11 Commision and come out in support of Democratic candidates, of “enjoying their husbands’ deaths”, in an attempt by Coulter to stir up controversy and increase sales of her new book), as drooling, acid-blooded alien (image at left, top, his blog entry here).

One of the cartoons that simultaneously earned him threats and accolades (and probably had an influence on his receipt of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning) was a remarkably unique piece of editorial image creation. He sat down at a larger than normal sheet of board and hand-lettered the 2000 names of the soldiers who had been killed in Iraq at that point in time, arranging them in the form of the word “Why?” (image at left, middle and detail, bottom – click on image here for large version). Love it or hate it, you have to admit it makes a powerful statement.

Luckovich’s drawing style doesn’t pull any punches either, His loose, unrestrained linework and frenetic hatching look as if his drawings were created at a furious pace, his pen too charged with emotion to make more careful lines. I have no idea how carefully he actually draws, it’s just that his finished drawings have the look to me of frantic activity driven by some unspeakable urgency.

Luckovich won the Pulitzer prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1995, and was awarded it again this year. He was also awarded the Reuben this year, the National Cartoonist Society’s award for cartoonist of the year. (You can find a fascinating history of the Ruben winners from 1946 to 2003, with bios and artwork, on the NCS site.)

His official site at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a selection of his previous cartoons, but it’s not that easy to browse, and the gallery of available reprints is crippled with watermarking (see my rant about watermarking in yesterday’s post), so you may want to just do a Google image search. There is a good gallery of his cartoons on the Pulitzer Prize site.

There are collections of his cartoons, LOTSA LUCKOVICH and Four More Wars!. The former is out of print, but copies may still be available if his acid-tinged cartoons haven’t eaten through the paper.

I heard an interview with Luckovich on the radio and he actually sounded soft-spoken and deliberate, but his cartoons come at you like buckshot at a quail hunt.

It’s difficult to separate the work of fantasy and science fiction artist Tim Hildebrandt from that of his brother Greg. For the greater part of their careers they have collaborated on most of their work.

Word has gone around the web that Tim Hildebrandt died Sunday (June 11) at the age of 67 of complications from diabetes.

The Brothers Hildebrandt, as they are often referred to, have done book, magazine, game, card and calendar illustrations that are some of the most widely known in the fantasy art field. Before Peter Jackson’s movies cemented the “look” of the world and characters of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, many would say that the Hildebrandts had created the definitive visual interpretation with their calendar illustrations in the 1970′s. They also created widely distributed illustrations for collectable cards of Star Wars themes and Marvel Comics superheroes.

Their work together was often brash, bold, in-your-face and exaggeratedly colorful. They would frequently employ the technique of juxtaposing brilliant complementary colors on the same face or figure in areas of backlighting or secondary highlights to increase the visual drama and “push” the color. (Complementary colors, such as blue and orange, are actually the inverse of one another. If you stare at a patch of light blue for 30 seconds and close your eyes or look at a white sheet, you will see orange. Many artists and illustrators know that this process is constantly occurring when you perceive colors, and the placement of a color next to its compliment will exaggerate the intensity of both colors. This is the basis of much “op art” and is particularly common in fantasy and science fiction art and comic books.)

The two brothers did go their separate ways at times. Of the two I think that Tim was perhaps more inclined to subtlety. He did a lot of science fiction illustration in which the color range was a bit more muted and atmospheric. Both brothers have been prolific and there is a good deal of their work available in books, calendars and posters.

The official Brothers Hildebrandt site has some good images. Unfortunately, a large number of them are defaced by the overzealous application of watermarking. (When will people realize that they can’t “protect” an image by limiting its size or watermarking it on the web? If the image is in print, anyone with a scanner can produce a higher-resolution version than anything you’re likely to post on the web.)

If you find the watermarking as frustrating as I do, you may want to simply do a Google image search to turn up images like the one above (larger version here), but if you’re looking for printed versions, make sure they’re the approved versions from which profit is actually going to the artists or their families.

Sometimes there is a fine line, if you’ll excuse the expression, between drawing and painting.

Illustrator Joe Ciardiello manages to walk on both sides of that line at will by developing his color work out of his black and white drawing style.

His black and white drawings have a wonderfully loose and lively line quality, often mixing lightly suggested figures with more fully rendered detail in the areas of focus, usually the faces, in his drawings of well known individuals. Those drawings, themselves, straddle the line between caricatures and portraits, employing varying degrees of exaggeration.

Most interesting is the way he will render portions of a drawing in color. With deft applications of watercolor, at times sketchy and at other times as rendered as a painting, he will bring even more intense focus to the face of an individual or accent other elements in the drawing.

Ciardiello seems to choose a different point in each drawing for the balance between color and black and white elements. The result is a terrific mix that can have the rendered subtlety of a painting and the charming immediacy of a drawing in a single image.

Ciardiello has a new website (designed by Jack Harris, himself a talented illustrator) that makes an effective showcase for his work. There are sections for Illustration and more casual Drawings from sketchbooks, including travel sketches from Venice that I particularly enjoy.

The highlight, though, is the section on images of Musicians, an area in which Ciardiello excels. He is a musician himself, he plays drums with several groups including an all-illustrator band, the Half-Tones, and his images of greats from jazz, blues and rock reflect the touch of someone intimately familiar with these players and their music.

Ciardiello has worked for major publications like The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Jazziz, The New Yorker and others. His drawings cover a wide range of subjects from politics to sports to literature, but it is his portraits/caricatures of musicians that are most widely recognized, and they are emphasized in the prints available in the For Sale section of the site.

As you look through his work you’ll be delighted with the playfulness and visual fun of Ciardiello’s unique mixture of lines and colors.