The 9/11 Report: a Graphic Adaptation is an an attempt to adapt the 568 page 9/11 Commission Report into graphic story (i.e. comics) format.

The project is being published as webcomic by Slate, the long running online magazine. The graphic adaptation is written by Sid Jacobson and illustrated by Ernie Colón, both of whom have a long history in the comic book field.

The story is divided into chapters, the first thirty page chapter is devoted to the dramatic events of the day itself and the second chapter begins to go into some of the backstory, including the rise of Bin-laden and al-Qaeda. It looks like there will be about 13 chapters in all, so there is quite a bit of backstory and probably more detail on the events of the day to come.

It’s an ambitious undertaking, but Jacobson and Colón seem up to the challenge. Colón’s art is clear, unfussy, straightforward and built on solid draftsmanship, which seems essential to conveying this kind of information-dense account.

Colón’s drawings are also lively enough to keep your attention, and Jacobson knows how to break the story and backstory down into smaller coherent sub-stories, which also seems important in dealing with what could otherwise be a dry mountain of information overload.

The full graphic story project is available as a hardback print edition: The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation.

We have a chance here to see a broadly circulated example of the medium of comics conveying complex information in a way that is unique to the nature of graphic stories.

Comics are the only visual storytelling medium in which readers move at their own pace, hopefully making it easier for all of us to digest what actually happened on that fateful morning.

Eyvind Earle was an illustrator, author, animation art director and background artist. He did backgrounds for a number of Disney’s notable short films in the ’50’s and was the background artist and art director for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty feature length animation. He also worked on Lady and the Tramp and Paul Bunyan.

His illustrations appeared in Time, The New York Times, The New York Sun and The Los Angeles Times, among others. His designs have also been the center of successful lines of greeting cards.

He focused in his later career on images for gallery display and is represented by Gallery 21 in Carmel California. In the gallery’s site you’ll find Earle’s limited edition edition serigraphs (screen printing, often anachronistically called “silkscreen”).

His landscapes are very stylized and yet highly evocative of time, season and atmosphere. He uses color combinations that in lesser hands might dissolve into treacle (read: Thomas Kinkade), but in service of his swirling oriental art and 1960’s animation inspired compositions work remarkably well.

There is an article on the Cartoon Modern blog with some images of his Disney production work.

There are a couple of beautiful, but unfortunately expensive, volumes of his work: The Complete Graphics of Eyvind Earle and Selected Poems and Writings 1940-1990 and The Complete Graphics of Eyvind Earle and Selected Poems, Drawings and Writings by Eyvind Earle 1991-2000.

Earle is also featured in the short Disney documentary “4 Artists Paint 1 Tree” which is included on the special edition DVD release of Sleeping Beauty.

Thanks to Cully Long for the suggestion and information.

Koren Shadmi’s site includes illustration, drawings, comics (in PDF format) and prints, but very little in the way of biographical or background information.

Shadmi has a blog called PAPERfeast, which includes work and sketches, but is sometimes more of a personal journal style blog than one devoted to displaying work.

Without more time to read through her blog, I haven’t been able to establish much about her work or background. Much of her illustration is in the style of ink drawings filled with color, in the tradition of comic book drawing, some is more directly painted. The drawings section also has a varied approach, from painted sketches to cross-hatched colored pencil.

The blog includes sketches and several examples of images in both preliminary and finished stages.

Link via Designers who blog.

It’s hard to get to the National Portrait Gallery.

Not because it’s remote, at least for those of us on the east coast of the US. Like most of the museums associated with the Smithsonian, the National Portrait Gallery is conveniently located in central Washington, D.C. (a few blocks north of the Mall at Eighth & F Streets).

It’s difficult to get to the NPG because it’s too conveniently located in the midst of Washington’s cornucopia of stupendous galleries and museums.

The National Gallery of Art alone is enough to dazzle you for days on end with it’s fantastic collection. Add in the Hirshorn Museum of modern and contemporary art and the Freer and Sackler Galleries with their stunning collections of American, Near Eastern and Far Eastern art, and you have an art overload that can keep the art lobe of your brain stupefied for weeks. (Add in the other fantastic museums on and around the mall and you have what should be thought of as the nation’s cultural Disneyland.)

So the National Portrait Gallery often gets overlooked, partly from being lost in the cultural overload and partly because it conjures up images of dark canvasses of presidents and Secretaries of the Interior in stiff poses, with dour expressions on their civil servant faces, leaning on wooden desks in gloomy paneled rooms.

While the aforementioned dark portraits are there, so are dazzling contemporary portraits and changing exhibits, and the museum is augmented by its presence in the same building with the American Art Museum.

Now is a great time to discover these museums because they’re back, bigger and better than ever, after being closed for a six-year renovation of the Patent Office Building, which houses both museums. The galleries’ collections are on display in a vastly improved and expanded display space collectively called the Renyolds Center.

Even though the building renovations are complete, the web site is still not filled out in many places, but you can explore a few exhibits, like the Portrait Competition below and some special features like an interactive feature on Gilbert Stewart’s famous full-length portrait of the US of A’s dear old dad, the real George W (image above, top left).

One of the 14 exhibitions with which the museum reopened on July 1 of this year is the winners of the Outwin Soochever 2006 Portrait Competition, which runs until February 19 of 2007 (image above, clockwise from Gilbert Stewart’s portrait of GW at top left: Kris Kuksi, James Seward, Sarah Sohn, Will Wilson, Chris Campbell, Armando Dominguez and Laura Karetzky).

Here’s a webcomic to get “cool” with in the hot days of August.

So there’s this band, see, except that it’s just two people, but they get a new drummer, except that he’s really a secret agent looking for a cover, and they have these adventures, except that they’re more like pastiches of 60’s modern pop culture and design, and.. well, it goes on from there.

Wrap it all up in thick-outline drawings and graphic color, season liberally with dry humor, cultural references, parodies of travel ads and 60’s comic books, shake well, and and you have Acid Keg, a funny and visually entertaining webcomic by Steve Hogan.

Hogan draws from 60’s pop culture both for his story references and for the bright graphic look of the strip. He draws his characters in a broad outline style that has echoes of Archie comics, 40’s illustrators and 60’s poster and album cover art.

The first story is a bit darker, the second gets brighter an diverges from the plot more often with excursions into parodies and send-ups of various aspects of pop phenomena. He likes to play with stylized backgrounds and page layouts that are a big part of the visual appeal of the strip.

Some Acid Keg pages are reprinted in Webcomics, a book by Steven Withrow and John Barber that also features my own webcomic.

Hogan also has a site devoted to his illustration work (some material NSFW).

No, it’s not kids sitting around chewing bubble gum and saying “I’ll trade you two Holbeins for a Rembrandt.” (Although I love that idea.)

Artist Trading Cards are small, usually original, works of art by contemporary artists (or non-artists) that meet certain criteria and are swapped between artists and collectors.

The original concept came from Swiss artist M. Vänçi Stirnemann who conceived of the idea in 1996 and launched a project in 1997 with a show of 1200 cards he created.

The idea blossomed and grew and there are now hundreds of participants around the world. Many get together at artist trading card meetups to talk and trade cards.

Several art galleries offer ATC events. There is a brief description of the basics of the cards and the activity surrounding them on the New Gallery site and the Alternator Gallery site as well as this artist’s site, and a more extensive one on the ATCards.com site.

Also a number of individual artists and collectives (and here) post images of cards, both their own and others they have traded for.

The general rules for Artist Trading Cards (ATC) are:

The card must be the size of a standard trading card: 2 ½ x 3 ½ inches (64 x 89 millimeters).

A card can be ether an original work or a very small edition.

The back of the card should have a signature, the date and the number (if the card is part of an edition) and ideally an address for the benefit of contacting the artist for additional trading.

Techniques and materials can be almost anything: paintings, drawings, collages, photographs, rubberstamp works, mixed media, found images, assemblages, beadwork, woven, string, doctored existing trading cards, etc. The only real rule here is that the card should fit into the standard plastic album sleeves for trading cards, which leaves out anything too dramatically thick or three-dimensional.

The cards are not to be sold, only traded or given away. (This is a noble attempt to keep the practice non-commercial, but as with comic book artist convention sketches, that trust is sometimes betrayed; artist trading cards can be found on eBay.)

The cards should ideally be original, but reproductions or “editions” are permissible. There is some controversy about this, mostly centering around the failure of someone to be up front about the nature of the work when swapping.

There is also controversy about suspending judgment when swapping to avoid assigning value to the cards (the “quality” and amount of effort put into the cards varies wildly). Stirnemann himself has struggled with the issues of copies vs. originals and the suspension of critical judgment.

Look through the links on Stirnemann’s site and do a Google search for “Artist Trading Cards”. There are numerous forums and community sites devoted to the subject. There is a large Flickr group devoted to the subject with over 400 members and more than 2,000 images.

Community, and sharing art with others, seems to play a large part in the appeal of the practice. At the very least, it’s a fascinating concept.

Link via Metafilter.

John Gurche is a paleontological artist known for the near-photographic realism and compositional drama in his scientific reconstructions of prehistoric life.

Gurche was a consultant on Jurassic Park and provided paintings for the 1989 dinosaur stamps for the U.S. Postal Service. His illustrations have been in numerous books and have been featured in magazines like National Geographic and Natural History Magazine. His work is in the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian and the Field Museum, which houses the mural version of the t-rex image above, showing an interpretation of the famous t-rex find named “Sue” which is mounted at the Field.

His dinosaur images in particular showcase his ability to add realism to scenes of prehistoric life with his superb control of atmospheric effects and aerial perspective. He also has a knack for finding unusual positions and angles of view for his images.

Although his work covers many aspects of prehistoric life, his is most widely recognized by the general public for his dinosaur art, and is probably best known in the scientific community for his reconstructions of early humans and pre-human species.

He is currently involved in an 10 year ongoing project called “Lost Anatomies” for which he is illustrating many of the anatomical changes that have occurred to the human form over the course of our evolutionary history.

Olga Antonenko & Arseny Gutov are Russian concept artists, matte painters and illustrators who work in a variety of traditional and digital media. On their shared gallery site, CGpolis, you’ll find drawings, engravings, paintings, pastel, digital painting and 3-D CGI rendering and compositing.

The GCpolis site is somewhat enigmatic and mentions neither artist by name, so it’s a little difficult to sort out who did what. I think the majority of the 3-D CGI, some of the digital painting and most of the compositing is Gutov. He seems to specialize in that end of things although he does do nice digital painting as seen in this portrait of his sister, painted in Corel Painter, and this digital portrait painting tutorial on the CG Society site.

I get the impression that much of the traditional media work in the artworks section of the CGpolis site is Antonenko’s.

The concept art in the cartoons section (I’m guessing Antonenko, but I don’t know) is a grab bag of iridescent candy color that somehow works wonderfully well. Like the concept art it uses really fun contrasts of brilliant color and tone to create moods. I would love to know more about what these projects are.

There is, unfortunately, no information on technique on the CGpolis site and no background on the two artists or their clients. The concept section lists work from nurium games (image above – Antonenko’s?) and Sibilant Interactive.

Their is a brief interview with Gutov on 3DExcellence.com and a slightly longer interview with both artists on 3DValley.com.

invisibleman is a collaborative art blog where you’ll find a variety of art: drawings, paintings, sketches, cartoons, graphic design, illustrations and photographs, in a variety of media: pen, pencil, oil, watercolor, acrylic, print and digital, on a variety of surfaces: Moleskine pages, paper, canvas, posters, billboards, guitars and who knows what else, by a group of artists (image above, top row): Paul Antonson, James Antonson, Kurt Dietrich, (bottom row) Barbara Zuckerman, Kerry O’Neill and Jon Keegan.

There are links on the left to their individual sites in addition to the archives of their work on the invisibleman blog.

Note the wonderfully subtle Flash animation at the top of the page.

Along with Gustav Caillebotte Alfred Sisley is one of my two favorite “ignored” Impressionists.

Sisley is usually lost in the glare surrounding Monet, the “star” of Impressionism, particularly since Sisley’s work at its most “Impressionistic” resembles a slightly anemic version of Monet’s prismatic marvels.

Often referred to as “the English Impressionist” Sisley was actually born in Paris of English parents. He became friends with Monet, Renoir and Bazille as a student in the atelier of Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre. With them, Sisley was one of the founding members of the Impressionist movement and is sometimes referred to as a “typical” impressionist.

This attitude, along with a lack of substantial biographical information and the overwhelming presence of Monet and other Impressionist painters with more distinctive styles, has long pushed Sisley into the background.

What I find most appealing about Sisley, however, can be found in his paintings that live somewhere on the realist side of full-blown Impressionist technique, painted honestly and directly with more of an eye to the color and light of the scene than to the abstract notions of purity of color and optical mixing of hues. The result is a fresh, painterly approach in which the feeling of light and color are more important than technique.

His palette is also likely to be more subdued than Monet at his most explosive, preferring a more naturalistic harmony of color. Although very influenced by his Impressionist compatriots, Sisley considered himself a student of Corot and also showed the influence of Courbet and even Constable.

He was fascintated with the effects of light and shadow and the process of capturing them by plein air painting. Sisley, even more than the other Impressionists, was a painter of water. His canvasses were often divided into horizontal bands of sky, land and water, as in the examples above.

I have occasionally seen his work referred to as “cold” or “reserved” but I’ve never felt that. I’ve always thought of his paintings of the French countryside and, in particular, the River Seine, the Thames in London and other streams, as quiet and contemplative, without the splashy drama of Monet or Renoir.

Compared to the more prominent Impressionists, there are few books available on Sisley, representative of the general tendency to ignore him on the way to cashing in on the most popular names. This catalog from a 1992 retrospective is out of print, but nice if you can find a copy. Richard Shone’s scholarly study, Sisley, is probably the most widely available book, and has nice reproductions as well. If you’re lucky, you might find Janice Anderson’s little hardback Life and Works of Sisley on a chain store discount shelf for $3.

The good news is that seeing a real Sisley in person is relatively easy. His paintings can be found in collections and Museums throughout the US and Europe. There is a listing to start with on the Artcyclopedia site. I’m delighted to say there are at least 6 here in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (although only 2 or 3 are likely to be on display at any one time).

The tendency to ignore Sisley when thinking of Impressionist painting is sad, particularly as a parallel to the difficulties he faced later in his life and career. To me he is a hidden gem, a treasure waiting to be discovered and enjoyed.

Spend some quiet time with Sisley’s subtle masterpieces and you may agree.