Over the years, great illustrators have created and shaped the popular vision of Santa Claus. Clockwise from top, left:

Thomas Nast, who gave Santa Claus a form almost like the modern idea in the mid-1800′s, with his clay pipe and arm full of toys (including a sword). You can see some of his visions of Santa here.

J. C. Leyendecker, who really created the modern vision of Santa [correction, see addendum below], and painted a number of memorable Saturday Evening Post covers featuring the jolly elf over the years. You can find them in the SEP cover archive.

Norman Rockwell, along with Leyendecker, provided numerous SEP covers with images of Santa, often with clever takes on the vision of his traditional role. The SEP cover archive has a section devoted to Rockwell Christmas covers.

Haddon Sundblom was an American illustrator who became noted for his yearly portrayals of Santa Claus for the Coca-Cola company. There is a section on the Coca-Cola site, and an album of Sundblom Santas here.

Addendum: I stand corrected. Stephen Worth of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive was kind enough to share with us illustrations from 1906 St. Nicholas Illustrated Magazine that show that illustrator Reginald Birch was in fact the one to flesh out Nast’s Civil War St. Nicholas concept into the the red-suited version we know today, prior to Leyendecker.

The Archive has posted a number of wonderful Birch illustrations from St. Nicholas Illustrated Magazine.

(Any fans of classic illustration and animation who are not familiar with ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive should click over there immediately and prepare to be amazed and delighted.)

In another clear example of how much more respected comics and cartoons are in Europe and Japan than they are here in the U.S., the Centre Pompidou (George Pompidou Center for Contemporary Art) in Paris has mounted a major retrospective of the comics work of Hergé, the creator of Tintin.

Tintin, whose stories to my mind are one of the first examples of long-form comics (i.e. “graphic novels”), is a character much beloved in France and his native Belgium, and highly respected elsewhere. The exhibit at the Pompidou is in celebration of the fact that Hergé (Georges Remi) would have celebrated his 100th birthday in 2007. It also marks the Centre Pompidou’s own 30th anniversary.

There have been flickerings of recognition of comics as a major art form in America, the Whitney, MOMA and other museums have had sporadic exhibits (see my post on the Masters of American Comics exhibit currently in New York), but we still have a lot to get over in a country that continues to regard cartoons, and particularly comics, as juvenile and unworthy of serious attention. Part of the problem, of course, is that Americans associate comics with super-heroes, and aren’t often exposed to the undercurrent of broader subject matter that is flourishing in independent comics and in pockets on the web, and has always existed in Europe and Japan.

In Europe, where currency was for years imprinted with the faces of artists, writers and other cultural icons rather than politicians, art is viewed a bit differently and comics have a natural place in the mix and represent a wide range of style and subject matter.

The Centre Pompidou has draped an enormous banner with the image of the checked moon rocket from Tintin in Space on the front of the building, hinting at the extent of the exhibit inside. Laurent Le Bon, organizer of the exhibit said “It was important for the Centre to show the work of Herge next to that of Matisse or Picasso, important that the museum show Herge as another artist…”.

The exhibit displays over 300 original drawing and plates from Hergé’s career, which spanned much of the 20th Century. He created 24 Tintin albums, including one left unfinished on his death in 1983.

For those fortunate enough to be in Paris, the exhibit runs until February 19, 2007. For the rest of us, see if you can find some Tintin albums in your local bookstore or library. For more on Hergé see my previous post from last July.

I wrote about Ilene Meyer’s beautiful Surrealist inspired paintings back in September.

Since then a new book has been released, written by D. Michael Tomkins and illustrated with her nature themed fantastic art paintings. The book is called The World Below and is a children’s story about survival and change in an ancient civilization that has parallels in modern environmental issues.

There is a site devoted to the book, but for some reason that eludes me, the site doesn’t take very good advantage of the book’s strongest selling point, and fails to feature Meyer’s beautiful illustrations as prominently as I would have expected. There is a sample chapter, a video interview with the author, a foreword by novelist Clive Cussler and a few small reproductions of Meyer’s images, but that appears to be it.

If you look harder, though, you’ll see a small row of text links below the main interface. There, amid links for Return Policy and Shipping Methods, is an easy to miss link for “Wallpaper“.

Here you’ll find a little treasure trove of Meyer’s illustrations at a higher resolution than you’ll find on her own site or elsewhere on the web. Until you can pick up one of her books (the other is a collection of her work), this is your best option to get a feeling for the appeal of her highly detailed and freshly imaginative paintings.

The other news is that Ilene Meyer is having her first gallery showing in the U.S. in ten years, at the Arts Partnership Gallery in Tucson, AZ. (Apparently there is no web address, the gallery is at 125 S. Arizona Ave., Tucson, AZ, 520-624-9977.) The show runs from January 12 to February 10, 2007.

I was one of those lucky kids who didn’t “outgrow” my fondness for dinosaurs, or drawing them, as I grew older. They are amazing animals in many ways, and their variation in size, wildly bizarre appearance and astonishingly exaggerated forms make them as much of a delight to draw now as they did when I was 10.

The Gnomon Workshop, a video-based offshoot of the Gnomon School of Visual Effects in Hollywood, is now offering an instruction al DVD called Drawing Dinosaurs: Anatomy and Sketching with David Krentz.

Krentz was the lead character designer on Disney’s Dinosaur, a disappointing movie with great character design and effects. (My understanding is that the original plan was to do it wordlessly, like an updated version of the terrific dinosaur sequence in Fantasia, which would have worked great, but Eisner insisted that the dinosaurs talk and have cutsie mammal companions).

Krentz is also a founding member of Ninth Ray Studios, a concept and production art group that includes Iain McCaig, Ryan Church and other major concept artists. In addition to his work on Dinosaur, Krentz has worked on titles like Fantasia 2000, Treasure Planet, Spider-Man 2, The Ant Bully, John Carter of Mars and Eragon.

Krentz is also a dinosaur sculptor, and has a site devoted to his small scale sculptures, of which he sells limited edition castings. His main web site has galleries of his concept art and illustrations for movies and games, as well as examples of his story boards from Dinosaur and John Carter of Mars. There is also a nice gallery of six images on the Gnomon Workshop page for the DVD, in addition to the stills from the video.

It’s interesting to note that his credits include story boards and animatics for Eragon, the new movie that prominently features dragons. Our long history of a fascination with dragons in various cultures just shows that if dinosaurs didn’t exist, we’d have to invent them.

Link via PALEOBLOG

At a time when his fellow Hudson River painters were searching for the most wild, untamed and and dramatic landscape subjects they could find (or sometimes combine and invent, in the case of Frederic Church), George Inness chose to paint settled and cultivated lands, the farms and fields in which both God and man had made their mark.

Inness started his career painting in a style in keeping with the other Hudson River School artists, but his trips to Europe exposed him to the artists of the Barbizon School of France, which changed his palette and approach. Inness eventually eclipsed the Hudson River School painters and was regarded as the finest American landscape artist.

In his later career, he was exposed to an influence of another kind that also changed his painting dramatically. He became enthralled with the theological philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist, philosopher and Christian mystic who believed (among other things) in a direct relationship between the natural and spiritual worlds. Inness took Swedenborg’s model of “as above, so below” to heart as a belief that the divine could be revealed by contemplation of the natural world, and attempted to convey that divine essence in his paintings.

His later work is loose, fresh, painterly and shares characteristics with the Barbizon School, some of the Symbolist painters, and even the Impressionists, but is uniquely his own. Although he disliked Impressionism, Inness shared some of their immediacy, attention to nature, qualities of paint handling and enthusiasm for working en plein air, although Inness finished his works in the studio.

The paintings from his later career diverge from realism and have a poetic quality that is hard to describe. Inness searched for the emotion in the scene before him and tried to represent that, more than the mere reconstruction of the scene’s superficial appearance. There is often a feeling in Inness paintings of something impending, waiting to be revealed, as in the image above, Early Autumn, Montclair, which I’ve had the pleasure of “growing up with”, seeing it often over the years at the Delaware Art Museum.

George Inness’ landscapes are not so much pictures to be looked at as invitations to look deeper, or what Inness called “the visible upon the invisible”.

OK, everybody knows Archie, right? That wonderful comics character with round bulges on top of his head to suggest large curls of bright orange teenage hair, eyes drawn with simple arcs and dots, a mere suggestion of a nose, and those bizarre checks on his head, as if he’s been sleeping on a waffle iron? Archie! Sure! “America’s typical teenager”!

And those girls! Betty and Veronica! Wasp-waisted, large breasted icons of corn-fed all-American teenage girls, somehow simultaneously suggestive and innocent, that share that same dot-and-arc eye shape, even less of a nose, sometimes just a tiny ellipse, and those wonderful lines across the bridge of the nose that make no actual sense in terms of form, but somehow do a delightful job of suggesting the tops of rosy young cheeks… Archie pursued Veronica and Betty pursued Archie, and except in the wonderful Mad parody by Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman, Archie never noticed that if you switched their hair styles, they look exactly the same! How could anybody not love these characters?

Well, evidently Archie and his “Pals n’ Gals” aren’t getting enough love here in the 21st Century. After more than 60 years of existence as metaphorical and literal icons, the Archie characters are about to be made over in what Archie Comics calls a new “dynamic art” style in an attempt to bring them, kicking and screaming, into the the modern world. (Sigh.)

There has been an attempt to modernize one of their second string characters, Sabrina, with a manga-style makeover by Tania del Rio, but this remake, the initial debut of which will be in the Betty and Veronica Double Digest #151 (image above, right) to be released in May of 2007, is taking their main characters and rendering them in a more realistic, mainstream comics style, drawn by Steven Butler.

Butler is a comics veteran who first came to light as the artist of First Comic’s The Badger, went on to work for Marvel comics titles like Silver Sable and Web of Spider Man and has been doing Archie Comics’ Sonic the Hedgehog titie.

OK, I can understand their thinking. These characters were created in the 40′s by Bob Montana, drawn in a wonderful heavy-outline cartoon style (image above, left), and later redefined in a finer lined but still cartoon like style in the late 1950′s by Dan DeCarlo, and have been going pretty much unchanged since. How can they be relevant in this day of hyper-kinetic video games, Saturday morning anime, Glitz-O-Rama Barbie and Pokemon-infested toy store aisles?

They’ve tried “modernizing” the characters at times by writing in topical subjects, but the look of the characters, that can’t-miss-it, unmistakable Archie style, was consistent, and wisely so.

I’m sure the new versions will have a certain appeal, Butler does nice work on the page of pencils I’ve seen, and I wish the company well in their endeavor to attract more readers, but I think they’re missing the point. The Archie characters are the style, the style is the characters!

Scott McCloud has pointed out in his treatises on the nature of comics, that the more iconographic a character is, the easier it is to project more of ourselves into it, without being put off by some detail that “isn’t us” because it’s too specific. The very cartoonyness of the style is the major part of its appeal.

Archie comics, though they say “teen” all over them, aren’t for teens, they’re for pre-teens who desperately want to grow up a bit and move into that stage of life that seems so much more glamorous than being “not quite a teen”. The cartoon style makes that ability to project your imagination into that other phase of “who you want to be” so much easier. Plus, it’s that defining look that makes the Archie comics, well… Archie Comics.

Newsarama link via Metafilter, via Waxy, via Kempa.com.

Addendum: According to continuing coverage over at Drawn!, Archie Comics is responding to a distinctly negative reaction to their plans to make over the characters, emphasizing that the remake in only being tried out in one title at the moment and the other titles will continue in the “classic” Archie style while reactions (and sales) are monitored. The post on Drawn! also provides links to coverage on Wired’s blogs.

Sergi Aparin is a contemporary Russian painter currently living and working in Belgrade.

Unlike many of the newer artists who are often classed as “Pop Surrealism”, Aparin is working firmly in the vein of the classic Surrealist artists like Dali and Magritte. In particular his work shows the influence of the Spanish Surrealist, but not just in the expected ways. Many artists who have been influenced by Dali have tried to capture his startling ability to rearrange reality, but Aparin goes beyond that to a deep appreciation of Dali’s mastery of old master painting techniques, particularly those of Velazquez.

Aparin shows the influence of the hyper-real landscapes and hallucinogenic skies of Dali’s later work. There are also nods to Magritte, Ernst and the other major Surrealists painters, but the ultimate synthesis is Aparin’s own.

His themes often involve villages that are ships (or ships that are villages), objects that emerge from or are displayed on stone, repeated forms that suggest connection between very different objects (pomegranates and planets, insects and aircraft, dirigibles and fish), images of clocks and particularly clockwork mechanisms and pastoral lakes and streams with other worldly shores, all brought into sharp focus by an intense magic realist painting style.

One of the interesting things about Aparin’s images is that they often include observers, images of people in the foreground of the painting with their back to you, who are evidently looking at the same scene as you are. Some of these are possibly representations of the artist himself, others are children (some of which may again represent the artist at a young age), others are obviously not the artist but may have meaning beyond the obvious.

His images seem laced with dream-like phantasms, arcane symbols and psychological inferences, which put them in the tradition of true Surrealism.

Alina Chau works as a 3D character animator, storyboard artist and concept artist. She also teaches CG animation classes at a university. When she’s not doing that she’s… drawing.

Her blog, Ice Cream Monster Toon Cafe, seldom features her professional work but is, instead, focused on the drawings and designs she does for the joy of it. These are often ink and watercolor sketches of everyday scenes around her adopted home of Los Angeles and travel sketches, as well as the results of her frequent participation in the Illustration Friday exercises.

You will also find life drawings, sketches for personal projects, cartoon drawings, and fanciful doodles of all kinds. The pieces I like best, though, are her quick, breezy sketches from life, whether from her immediate everyday surroundings or from her travels.

She has just released a book of her travel sketches, Alina’s Travel Journal, that collects her sketches of places like Las Vegas, Disney World Florida, the Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree State Park, San Francisco and San Diego, as well as scenes closer to home in Los Angeles.

I don’t think there is a specific “preview” of the book except in the form of the existing blog posts among her other designs and images.

Some of her designs show the influence of Chinese ink painting, and you can sometimes see the character of her concept design work, but her sketches from life are mostly straightforward, a quick ink line and watercolor capture of her immediate impressions of a scene. Her ink lines are accented, more than filled, with bright splashes of watercolor. Her colors are applied in a loose manner that suggests a quick impression rather than rendering, giving them a feeling of immediacy and informality.