Stuart Immonen is a Canadian comics artist and cover illustrator with a crisp, confident style. His drawings can have a loose, stylized and modern feel, but are always based on an underpinning of solid draftsmanship.

Immonen has done work for mainstream comics companies like Marvel, DC, Dark Horse, Image Comics and the French publisher Les Humanoides Associés. Most of his work in recent years has been for Marvel, where he has worked on high-profile titles like The Hulk, Ultimate Fantastic Four and Ultimate X-Men.

I particularly enjoyed his run on the Ultimate X-Men last year, an 11-issue arc (#54-65) inked by Wade Von Grawbadger and colored by Justin Ponsor.

For those not familiar with the process, mainstream American comics are usually created by an artistic team, the art being broken down into pencil art, final ink drawings and then color, usually applied digitally. This allows for the creation of 22 page continuing stories on a monthly basis. (Personally, I think the old practice of crediting the color artist on a level with the letterer rather than equal to the inker is way out of date. Ponsor’s nice work on this series is a case in point.)

Immonen started in comics by self-publishing a series called Playground. He moved from there to small companies and then the major publishers. In addition to his mainstream comic work, he still produces his own work in the form of webcomics. He has two titles, Never as Bad as You Think and Misery Loves running on the subscription based Webcomics Nation comics portal.

In addition to Immonen’s own site, which is somewhat disappointing in the limited amount and scope of the artwork in the galleries, I’ll suggest the unofficial galleries on Comic Art Community, as well as some interviews from Top Two Three Films (re: their Adventures into Digital Comics film), Sequential Tart, and Newsarama, in which he discusses his 50 Reasons to Stop Sketching at Conventions, a painfully humorous insight into what comic artists sometimes put up with at comic conventions.

With the Mona Lisa as a starting point, Joan C. Gratz took paintings by 35 artists, rendered her versions of them in colored clay, animated parts of them and morphed them into one another in a fun, short (7 minute) animation set to music and sound effects called Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase.

Aside from Da Vinci’s enigmatic portrait, the majority of the works are from the 20th Century. Particularly fascinating are the sequences where she morphs a face or figure from one painting into a face or figure form another. It’s nicely done and fun just to try to identify as many of the artists and paintings as you can.

(Although Duchamp is in evidence in the image of his mustache and goatee’d postcard version of the Mona Lisa, seen here morphing into Magritte’s The False Mirror, I didn’t see the titular Nude Descending a Staircase.)

Gratz works in a fascinating animation technique (which I believe she pioneered) called “clay painting” in which colored clay is used as if it were paint. The advantage is that the clay can be repositioned and re-blended in a way the permits the creation of stop-motion animation, similar in principle to the the 3-D stop motion process used in popular films like Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, Nick Park’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and an entire school of Eastern European animation called Puppetfilm.

Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase won the 1002 Academy Award for Best Animated Film. Gratz also applies her clay painting animation technique to commercial work and you may have seen her spots for Coke, Wishbone and Microsoft. If not, they are beautifully done and well worth checking out.

Gratz is also the author of a new book of yoga humor (yes, yoga humor) called Downward Facing Frog (Amazon link, more details on her site).

Link via Nita Leland’s Exploring Color and Creativity. Leland’s own new book The New Creative Artist is also available from Amazon.

Imaginary landscape has long had a place in art, from the idealized classical landscapes of the Renaissance and Baroque eras to the imaginary worlds and alternate histories of modern fantasy and science fiction art.

Yves Tanguy painted landscapes from the world of impossible dreams.

Tanguy had no format artistic training. After leaving military service in 1922, he began sketching cafe scenes in his native Paris. He came across the work of Giorgio de Chirico, a painter who was also an inspiration for the Surrealists, and was so affected by it that he decided to dedicate himself to painting.

He encountered the Surrealists themselves not long after and became an official member of the group. (Surrealism wasn’t just a style, it was a movement, a “revolution”, led by poet Andre Breton.) His painting style matured rapidly and in a few years he was exhibiting with artists like Jean Arp, Joan Miro, Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso.

Tanguy’s hauntingly strange images depict landscapes (for lack of a better definition) populated with unreal objects, but painted with a realism that makes them tangbile. Like Max Ernst, Tanguy is often missed in the attention paid to the more recognizable stars of Surrealism like Dali and Magritte. Also like Ernst, he is one of my favorites, and I find his paintings have a fascinating ability to pull you in and immerse you in that state where the rational and irrational meet and mix.

His work was inspirational to the other Surrealists as well as subsequent painters, modern illustrators like Robert Powers (see my post from yesterday) and even your humble writer. (I did my little nod to Tanguy in this early page from my webcomic back in the mid-90’s.)

In some ways Tanguy was the purest of the Surrealist painters, adhering more consistently to the ideals of unconscious imagery as extolled in the Surrealist manifestos and periodicals (to which he contributed). Tanguy married painter Kay Sage and moved to the U.S. in 1940, eventually becoming a citizen.

Unfortunately, the best book I know of about Tanguy, Yves Tanguy and Surrealism is out of print and a bit expensive if you can find used copies.

I became a fan of of science fiction artist Richard Powers without knowing it.

As a teenager I read a lot of science fiction and much of it was in the form of inexpensive paperbacks from the 60’s that I would come across in used book stores.

While there were a number of cover artists for these books that I enjoyed, there seemed to be two major styles. One was the straightforward style that involved a more or less realistic depiction of spaceships, robots, alien landscapes (that usually looked like the rocky parts of the American West for some reason) and adventurers in spacesuits. Some cool and fun stuff, but pretty much what you would expect for an art style that evolved out of the wonderfully lurid pulp covers of the 40’s and 50’s.

The other style was… something else.

In the midst of the more prosaic cover art, there was a variety of truly weird and bizarre images that looked like the paintings themselves had come from another world (or another dimension or the mind of an incomprehensibly alien creature from beyond the reaches of known space). It was the kind of imagery that prompted a reaction of “Wow! I don’t know what that is, but it is unbelievably cool!”

There was a fair bit of variety within this second style, just as in the first, and even though it often appeared on the covers of books from certain publishers (Ballentine and Ace), I assumed it was the work of several artists who were just out on the fringe of the science fiction cover art, or else were all actually sending in the work from beyond the moons of Jupiter. I didn’t realize at the time that they were pretty much all the work of one artist.

Richard Powers started with a more conventional science-fiction style, painting the usual spaceships, aliens and women in other-worldly distress, but like someone whose mind has been invaded by the tendrils of an alien intelligence, his work started to get stranger and stranger, eventually dropping almost all pretense at representing normal science fiction subjects and evolving into a style somewhere between non-representational and the realistic depiction of unrecognizably strange objects.

Powers was, in fact, under the influence of bizarre alien intellects - he had discovered Surrealism. His work shows the wonderfully strange impact of the dream and subconscious inspired work of Surrealist painters like Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Joan Miro and, in particular, Yves Tanguy.

Unfortunately, I can’t point you to a grand repository of Powers art on the web, so I’ll have to give you scattered links to some modest galleries, bios and articles.

There is a collection of his work, The Art of Richard Powers by Jane Frank (from Paper Tiger, with an intro by Vincent Di Fate) that is out of print, but available from used book sources or through Amazon.

Thanks to Jack Harris for links and info.

Addendum: The Art of Richard Powers, a beautiful and insightful book written by Jane Frank and published by Paper Tiger is available dierctly from her WoW-Art.com site. Frank also has Richard Powers original art for sale thorugh the site! (Search by Artist on in the laft hand column.)

When I profiled Chris Turnham and his fresh, lively illustrations and concept art back in January, he immediately wrote me and suggested I check out his friend and fellow illustrator Kevin Dart.

I immediately checked out Dart’s snappy, wonderfully styled and colored illustrations, was immediately impressed and just as immediately got distracted and neglected to follow through with a post. I’ll correct that today. (Hey, it only took me 6 months.)

Kein Dart’s site is arranged as a blog with links at the top to a Gallery, About page and some Extras, including some photo journals, a tutorial and two slideshow style animations of his drawing process.

The Gallery contains real book covers as well as some made-for-fun book covers and movie posters in which Dart indulges in his obvious affection for 60’s modern style movie posters and paperback covers. There are also some sketches and a short CGI animation called Gertie Gutless.

Dart’s jauntily stylized characters and abstracted backgrounds are a nice counterpart to Turnham’s stylish renderings.

Turnham and Dart have a created a collaborative site to sell prints of their work called Fleet Street Scandal that has galleries from both artists.

Seung Ho Henrik Holmberg is a concept artist who has worked for gaming and entertainment companies like The moving Picture Company, PDI/DreamWorks, Industrial Light and Magic, Chimney Pot and Streamline Studios.

Many concept artists will put a bio on their site the makes it sound like they simply fell out of bed and into a plush job working for glamorous film studios, glossing over any difficulties reality may have placed in their way (and who knows, maybe some of them had an easy time of it).

Holmberg (who signs his work “Seung Ho” - the wonderfully unusual name comes from the fact he was born in Korea and adopted by a Swedish family at 13 months) is remarkably candid in his bio about the fact that his career path was not easy, and as such should be inspirational to others who feel they are struggling inordinately.

Seung Ho draws concept sketches in marker, ink and paint and often goes to color in Photoshop. He has a facile command of both digital and traditional media and uses both with a sense of what is appropriate to the illustration task at hand. His site features a variety of concept art, matte painting, and CG painting as well as sketches and studies.

As much as I enjoy his professional work (love the concept designs for that wonderful dinosaur and caveman FedEx SuperBowl ad), some of my favorites are the “speed sketches” (image above, top) and digitally painted studies of ordinary rooms and objects.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post about the challenges and rewards of taking on the practice of doing “a painting a day”, the hardest thing about doing one small painting every day and then posting it to a blog is, of course, making the time.

All of us are pulled in various directions and maintaining a schedule that allows that kind of dedication is no small thing. The commitment, however, is part of the reward. Like exercising physical muscles, exercising our self-discipline gives us more control and, ironically, more freedom. There also seems to be no surer cure for “painters’ block” and the hesitiation that sometimes comes from confronting a blank canvas.

I’ll follow up on this topic in the coming weeks and look at some artists who are trying to pursue this course in smaller doses, perhaps reaping fewer benefits, but still adopting a regimen that requires dedication and commitment to a schedule. Some are doing paintings on a less frequent schedule, some are committing themselves to daily drawings or sketchbook entries, and sometimes a mix of the two.

Today, here are four more of the intrepid painters who have gone the “full monty” and embarked on the course of doing a painting a day.

Justin Clayton is a painter from California who studied at the California Art Institute and the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Arts. He started his Daily Paintings website (not arranged as a blog) on January 1st of this year. He paints in oil on masonite panels of 5×5 or 5×7 inches. His site includes a time-lapse video of the process of creating one of his small paintings (requires Quicktime 7, which you should have anyway if you like high-quality web video).

New Mexico painter John Conkey has created a fascinating variation on the painting a day process. His painting blog, Themeworks, is a journal of daily paintings that are based on 12 monthly themes, chosen on the first day of each month. His stated goal is to pursue this for one year. Conkey’s primary website emphasizes landscapes and portraits and he differs from most of the other artists working in the painting a day framework by showing a much wider variety of subject, from plein air landscapes, birds, butterflies and other wildlife as well as small household objects, and is one of the few to include small portraits.

New Zealand artist Paul Hutchinson has been pursuing his Postcard form Puniho painting a day project for several months. Initially his paintings were only offered for sale to other New Zealand residents through a local online auction site, however he has started to offer the ability for people from other countries to buy them directly through the site. His work often exhibits distinctive brushstroke textures that form an integral part of the overall composition. Hutchinson’s main website has galleries of self-portraits, nudes, landscapes, hands, still life, portraits and works in pastel and encaustic wax as well as silkscreen prints.

Sarah Wimperis has worked as a muralist, set designer and teacher. She has also done illustrations for publishers like Collins, Penguin, Random House and MacMillan. She has a main website Sarah Wimperis Illustration, personal blog Muddy Red Shoes and painting a day blog called The Red Shoes. In the latter, she posts her small daily paintings that are often of the countryside, farms and villages of her adopted home of Brittany, France. Unlike most of the other painting a day painters, Wimperis paints in watercolor rather than oil. Also unusual is the scale of some of her paintings. Many are the more or less characteristic size of 6×4″ (15×10.5cm) or so, but some are 3×2″ (7.5×6cm) or smaller. The very small ones are sometimes painted on ivorine, a synthetic material made to replace ivory, which was a traditional surface for the painting of miniatures. The Image shown here is 3×2 1/2″ (7.5c6.5cm) on ivorine. Her clear, fresh watercolor technique features nice contrast of dark to light and strong use of textures created from paint strokes.

Our story thus far: in October of last year I wrote a post about Duane Keiser, a painter and teacher from Virginia who, in December of the year before (2004), had committed himself to the excellent but demanding practice of doing one small painting a day.

Most of his daily paintings were about 5×7″, or the size of a common postcard, so he called them “postcard paintings”, posted them on a blog he called A Painting a Day, and began to offer them for sale over the web, and then through eBay.

Originally his postcard paintings sold for $100, which is still the minimum bid for them on eBay, but now they sell quickly and usually for many times that. All of this is in addition to Keiser’s regular gallery painting as featured on his main web site.

He continued the practice for two years, painting small household and studio objects and using a old cigar box as an easel. At the two year mark, Keiser “slowed down” a little to allow more time for larger projects, but he has continued the process with amazing consistency, still often using the cigar box easel that is the subject of one of his recent paintings.

In the meantime, other artists began to follow suit, taking on the practice of one small painting a day, an excellent discipline for any artist. I posted about 5 of them in a Painting a Day Blogs post back in April. (I’ll call that “Round 2″).

Most of the artists taking on the painting a day practice and posting them on a blog, usually with some comments abut their creation, were also offering them for sale directly to potential buyers through eBay. The daily painting routine has the potential to contrubute to an artist’s financial well-being as well as encouraging artistic growth and establishing strong working habits.

Since then, a number of readers have written to let me know about other artists that are pursuing the painting a day regimen and I’ve finally assembled and organized a post about some of them. I’ll feature three today (”Round 3″) and four more tomorrow (”Round 4″). This is not a comprehensive list, and I’ll continue to watch the phenomenon as it develops.

Louis Boileau was a commercial illustrator and layout artist for 30 years. Through all that time all he really wanted to do was be a painter and that is now what he’s doing. His main web site is Still Lifes Plus on which he has galleries of landscapes portraits and a bit of commercial style work, but the highlight, not surprisingly, is the still life paintings. Many of them are from his painting a day blog Little Paintings from Orangeville which he has been pursuing for about four months. I can’t speak to the reality of this from the artist’s point of view, but I personally feel that his recent small works show a level of accomplishment noticeably above his previous work. They are rich, colorful, and wonderfully painterly, with no-nonsense brushstrokes that help define the forms as well as carry the paint. His objects are also starting to display a refined use of local, atmospheric and reflected color.

Darren Maurer is an artist from Sioux City, Iowa whose A Painting A Day: Miniature Masterpieces site and painting project has been going since March. Originally his goal was to simply try it for a month. After succeeding at that, he decided to take a break and then push on, a month at a time, as he reported on this post, which marked the completion of the first month. Maurer’s main site is Darren Maurer Fine Arts which has galleries of his full size work as well as a bio of the artist.

Connecticuit artist Jan Blenclowe started a Painting a Day Project that “blossomed” into a Flower a Day Project (no longer a blog, now an online gallery) taking advantage of her focus on plein air painting and her own bountiful garden. In addition to those sites, Blenclowe seems to have quite a garden of web sites, including her main website, a Squidoo Lens, her Pen, Pencil and Paper sketching blog and her main blog, Art & Life, on which she posts both her small daily paintings and larger works.

French illustrator Edmund Dulac began his career in the first decade of the 20th Century, just as the new technology of color separation was making the economical printing of color book plates possible.

Dulac moved to London because of the publishing opportunities and was soon working as an illustrator in the new genre of illustrated gift books, in which color plates, printed on special coated paper that accommodated the new printing process, were “tipped in”, or placed between pages rather than being bound into the spine.

His style shows some obvious influence of Arthur Rackham, an influence that eventually traveled both ways, and I think he and Rackham were probably influenced by Swedish Illustrator John Bauer.

However the influences travelled, the result was that Rackham and Dulac became the dominant figures in this new area and developed wonderful illustration styles that still enchant readers today.

Unlike Rackham, who was making a transition from the old color process , in which a black ink line was needed to “hold” the color and hide the effects of misregistration of the color plates, Dulac started with the new, more accurate process which allowed him to work without the ink lines, which he did for many of his early works, working largely in watercolor and gouache. He eventually came to use outlines more as a nod to the expectations of the market than a technical limitation.

Dulac did memorable illustrations for classics like The Arabian Nights, The Rubiat of Omar Kayyam, and fairy tales like The Sleeping Beauty, The Snow Queen, Cinderella,, Little Mermaid, and Bluebeard. He also illustrated an edition of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and The Bells and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe.

There are some books available including Dulac’s Fairy Tale Illustrations in Full Color, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the very inexpensive Dover postcard book, Dulac’s Illustrations for Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales: 24 Cards. Also look for A Treasury of the Great Children’s Book Illustrators by Susan E. Meyer, a treasure trove of great illustration from the “Golden Age” including Dulac, Walter Crane, John Tenniel, Arthur Rackham, Kay Nielsen, Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth, among others.

Dulac’s charming, beautifully drawn and wonderfully colored images are what fairy tale illustration is all about.

Jack Ziegler is, of course, quite mad.

Some may say it’s toaster mania, some may suggest worst case wonkiness, but I know, because I have a treasured copy of the long out-of print classic cartoon collection of the same name, that it’s Hamburger Madness!

Jack Ziegler has been drawing cartoons for The New Yorker, and other publications since slightly after the invention of movable type. Do a search on the Cartoon Bank archive of New Yorker cartoons and you come up with over 900 Ziegler cartoons!

His deliriously loopy cartoons careen back and forth from Kliban-like lunacy to Steinberg style thought provoking drawings to traditional New Yorker style boardroom cartoons - with a twist. The twist is the point, of course, some of his “gags” bend logic in a way that would have made Ernst or Duchamp sit up and take notice.

Ziegler’s drawing is exactly what a cartoon drawing should be, hilarious in its own right, dead on with facial expressions and body language, always clear and sharp and delivers the gag like an exploding California roll in an uptown sushi bar.

Even though his classic collections like Hamburger Madness, Worst Case Scenario and Marital Blitz, and his one children’s book, Mr Knocky, are out of print, you may still be able to find used copies.

His newest collection, You Had Me at Bow Wow: A Book of Dog Cartoons by New Yorker Cartoonist Jack Ziegler has not yet been released but there are other Ziegler collections that are in print: How’s the Squid?: A Book of Food Cartoons, The Essential Jack Ziegler (The Essential Cartoonists Library) (edited by Lee Lorenz), and Olive or Twist?: A Book of Drinking Cartoons.