French animator Arthur De Pins first gained notice with his animated short L’Eau de Rose (Bed of Roses, image above — bottom, left), for which he created the characters and animated them in Flash, with some additional compositing in After Effects.

Macromedia (Adobe) Flash, a computer animation application which was originally aimed at the creation of animated banner ads for the web, has been coming into its own as an animation tool for both television cartoons and animated shorts aimed at the animation circuit. The Kalamazoo Animation Festival International actually has a special category for Flash animation and awarded that category to L’Eau de Rose in 2005.

De Pins worked with producer Jeremy Rochigneux on Rose, and teamed up with him again for La Révolution des Crabes, which took home home top honors, and the prize money, from the 2005 session of Nextoons, The Nicktoons Film Festival.

In the meanwhile, De Pins has been creating animations for commercials in Europe and illustrations for European magazines like Max-Magazine and Wombat. His web site is in French, but non-French speakers can easily navigate through the galleries of illustrations (some NSFW) arrayed in the left column and the choices for animations on the right, including his first short, Geraldine.

At the top of this site you’ll find his bio, bulletin board, wallpapers and links.

De Pins illustration style has a strong graphic simplicity combined with a feeling of completed rendering that is achieved with artfully controlled areas of flat color. His celebrity portraits (image above, bottom, right) are particularly strong in this way, as are his panoramic illustrations for Max-Magazine (image above, top). His gallery for Max includes some comics that are done in a broad, cartoony style that is closer to his animation style.

His illustrations are wild, sexy, funny, unabashed, wonderfully drawn and beautifully colored.

Link via Cold Hard Flash (and here)

Note: The site linked here contains adult material that is not suitable for children and is NSFW.

Shawn Kenney is a Rhode Island based painter who has been warming up for his regular painting practice with small (4×6) daily paintings since the summer of 2006. Initially this was not inspired by the daily painting blogs that have become prevalent in the last year or so, and Kenny wasn’t blogging about the studies, just painting them for his own advancement as a painter (what a concept).

He eventually did bring his small paintings to the web with a painting blog, but with a twist. The subject matter of most of his small paintings is food, a common subject for small daily studies because of its familiarity, variety and the ease it provides in acquiring and arranging colorful and visually interesting objects.

In a seemingly unrelated series of events in a cooking class, involving meat trimming and a bit of first aid, Kenney met food writer and blogger Lydia Walshin. They became friends and Walshin saw some of Kenney’s small food paintings as a studio open house and asked if they were for sale.

Out of this came an idea in which Kenney asked Walshin to help him to donate a portion of the sale of his small food paintings to organizations involved in hunger relief, an area in which she was already active both personally and through the Ninecooks cooking group. With the additional involvement of Peg Meade, as business manager and “set designer” for Shawn’s daily food paintings, they launched the Will Paint for Food site which works, in conjunction with Kenney’s painting blog, to bring a portion of the proceeds from those paintings sold to organizations like Heifer International, the Rhode Island Community Food Bank and Share our Strength.

I wasn’t able to easily find out the percentage donated or the average price of the paintings in my initial perusal of the two blogs, but perhaps that will be addressed as they progress.

You can see a gallery of Kenney’s larger farm-themed paintings on his regular web site, along with a selection of drawings and some of the food paintings. Unfortunately they are reproduced quite small here. Fortunately the food paintings are shown larger, more or less life sized, on his blog.

He paints his larger works in oil but most of the small food studies are done in acrylic, in which he manages to keep an oil-like feeling of painterly brush strokes and surface texture. He seems to feel particularly challenged by reds, and takes on subjects like jars of sauce that let him work with those color schemes, still keeping to the original purpose of daily painting practice as a way to move forward as a painter.

Suggestion courtesy of Jeff Hayes

Ashley Cecil is a Kentucky based artist who mixes paintings of still life and landscape subjects with those of rallies, demonstrations, meetings and urban scenes as well as subjects encountered in trips to South America (image at left, bottom).

She posts work to her painting blog, which she calls The Painting Journalist, and donates a percentage of the sale to non-profit organizations, often with a thought to matching the theme of the painting with the mission of the non-profit.

She supports organizations like Habitat for Humanity, the Bowery Mission, Democracy Matters, Witness for Peace, and Kentucky Youth Advocates.

A watercolor of a neglected dog in an animal shelter (image at left, top), whose leg had to be amputated because of an injury, not only sent $10 of the painting’s $70 sale price to the shelter, the blog post resulted in the successful adoption of the dog. Cecil’s blog features a time-lapse movie of that painting in progress, as well as others.

Unfortunately the “About” link on the blog just returns you to the main page and the “Gallery” page is not that helpful either. There is, however, a page of “Paintings for Sale” and a Sold Paintings page that have more variety and list the non-profit and amount of donation which is assigned from each painting.

Illustrator Jeff Miracola has subtitled his web site “Here there be monsters!”, and his Paintings gallery is chock full of them — grinning, leering and gnashing their lovely monster teeth amid assorted bad guys and other nasties. Miracola has done a good bit for work with Wizards of the Coast for their collectable card game Magic: The Gathering, which is always a fertile ground for monsters.

Miracola has also done illustration and occasionally conceptual toy design for companies like Warner Brothers, Jamdat Mobile/Electronic Arts, Upper Deck, Hasbro, White Wolf and others. His work has been featured in a number of books and collections, including several of the Spectrum collections of contemporary fantastic art.

In addition to the Paintings gallery, his site has a gallery of his Sketches, but what I find particularly fascinating is his forays into Digital Art, in which he is playing with iconic, almost primitive, decoration, particularly when applied to faces, often seen in a symmetrical head-on view like a mask, combined with modern gradient rendering techniques.

There is also a gallery, with additional comments, on the CGSociety site. His work has also been featured in in ImagineFX Magazine and is included in the February 2007 issue of Advanced Photoshop Magazine.

I will persist in my assertion that the early masters of oil painting were the special effects wizards of their day, astonishing those who viewed their works with the rich colors, brilliant luminosity and uncanny level of detail made possible by the new medium.

Not that there aren’t wondrously beautiful works done in tempera (Botticelli leaps to mind), but oil painting was a different painting technology, and allowed effects that were previously impossible.

Antonello da Messina, (which simply means Antonello of Messina, the town in Sicily where he was born, his family name was Antonello di Giovanni d’Antonio), was painter of the Italian Renaissance who combined the fanatical detail of the Flemish masters of oil painting (see my post an Jan van Eyck) with the openness and simplicity of the Italian painters.

His paintings often exhibit a remarkable sense of space, whether in the open, spacious skies behind his many unique visions of the crucifixion, or in voluminous architectural spaces, as in the amazing St. Jerome in his Study (above), in which Antonello plays with our sense of space and pulls us into his invented world.

(View the image larger by clicking on the preview image on this page on the Web Gallery of Art, and then clicking on “100%” at the top of the viewer window, or view the same image here, from this post on the French blog, La Boîte à Images which prompted me to do this post. There is also a highly zoomable, but watermarked, image on the site of the National Gallery in London, where the painting resides.)

Antonello invites us to step through a trompe l’oiel doorway, its reality emphasized by the tactile details in the way he represents the texture of stone, and reinforced by the carefully rendered birds and brass bowl in the foreground.

Once inside, our eye can wander through the fascinatingly divided space, through passages of dark and light, over the minute details of the objects arrayed on the shelves and platform on which St. Jerome sits at his study. We can gaze at the underside of the dimly lit curves of stone arches, and let our eyes pass across the intricate patterns of the tiles floors, through arches, doorways and colonnade and finally out through windows at the far side of the building, to the broad sky and distant hills of the landscape beyond.

What a remarkable journey Antonello has taken us on in the space of an 18 x 14 inch (46 x 36 cm) wood panel.

As I said, a master of special effects.

Ito Shinsui was a Japanese printmaker who, like his contemporaries Hiroshi Yoshida and Kawase Hasui, was part of the Shin Hanga movement in the early 20th Century. (In writing these artist’s names, I’m using the Western convention of putting the given name first.)

Shin Hanga was essentially a revival of the art of Ukiyo-e woodblock prints from the previous century (see my post on Hokusai), often combined with influences from Western art. Interestingly, one of the major European influences on the Shin Hanga artists was that of the French Impressionists, who, in turn, had been dramatically influenced but the brilliant colors and subtle compositions of Ukiyo-e prints.

Unlike Yoshida and Hausi, who, in keeping with the majority of the Shin Hanga artists, concentrated on landscape and scenes of life in towns and cities, Shinsui focused on the depiction of people, in particular beautiful young women.

His elegant compositions, in which the negative space is as vital as the primary shapes, are often 3/4 length figures with minimal space around them in the the frame. His beautifully dressed subjects, their decorative robes flowing about them in graceful waves, are frequently engaged in the application of makeup or preparation for the bath, and are warm with an understated eroticism. His forms are delicately modeled, with fine lines delineating areas enlivened with rich but subtle color.

You can see some of the influence of European art in certain prints (in his later years, you can even see the influence of cubism), and the strong traditions of Ukiyo-e in others. Though his depictions of women are his most notable subjects, Shinsui also created beautiful, brilliantly colored landscapes, which are not to be missed. He was at one point awarded the status of “intangible living treasure” by the Japanese government.

Even within the illustration community, which is itself often dissed by the fine arts world, medical illustration, like botanical illustration and architectural rendering, just doesn’t get the respect it deserves.

Good medical illustration, to my eye, can be as exciting and visually fascinating as the most far out science fiction illustration or movie concept art and as bizarre and intriguing as the wildest surrealist imaginings. The striking thing about medical illustration when viewed in this light is to remember that it is essentially realism. It is realistic depictions of things that in many cases can’t be viewed with the unaided eye, but a form of realism nonetheless.

I’ve found medical illustration to be a vastly underappreciated branch of illustration, but I’ve always liked it. (I’ve even done a bit myself, in a way, in the form of the illustrations and Flash animation for The Interactive Body feature in the Gift of a Lifetime web documentary.)

Edmond Alexander and Cynthia Turner, who share a studio under the name of Alexander & Turner, have been notable names in the medical illustration field for over 20 years.

Alexander seems to specialize in envisioning biological processes at the cellular, and sometimes molecular, level (image above, left). He utilizes intense color relationships and dynamic contrasts of value to make the processes snap into clear relief in a way photomicrography can’t. The result can be dramatic compositions filled with fascinating forms, often intertwining in dramatic relationships.

Cynthia Turner works more often at the macroscopic level, portraying organs or other parts of the human body that need to be diagramatically sectioned or otherwise have elements accentuated, again in the service of making things clear and dramatic that would be difficult, if not impossible, with photography. Turner tends to work in a way that feels more traditionally illustrative, and I’m particularly fond of the illustrations in which she brings part of the painting or drawing to a high degree of finish and leaves other parts to blend out into the recognizable lines of the initial sketch (image above, right).

The Alexander and Turner site has short bios of each artist and a gallery of their work. Unfortunately, like many artists who have posted their images on the web, and particularly those in the field of medical illustration, Alexander and Turner have felt compelled to mar their larger images with watermarking, in the vain hope that it will somehow protect them from being swiped.

At the risk of being repetitive, I feel I have to point out again to artists on the web in general, that this will only protect images from the laziest of image swipers. If your work is in print, anyone with a $50 scanner can produce higher resolution files of your images that you will ever post on the web.

I tend not to feature artists on lines and colors whose web based work is watermarked, but I found some unblemished examples of Alexander and Turner’s paintings on the Medical Illustration Source Book site for you to enjoy.

When approaching medical illustrations as artworks, particularly those of microscopic terrains, try thinking of them as abstract at first, then let them resolve into realism. In the case of Turner’s work, look first at the drawings around the edges, in those images where where she has left them as part of the composition, and then move to the more rendered forms.

Shaun Tan is an Australian artist who creates and illustrates “picture books“, which in his case usually means wonderfully bizarre and imaginative flights of fancy that look, at least at first, like somewhat dark children’s fantasy, but are often aimed at both younger and older readers.

He sometimes works with a writer, as in the award winning The Rabbits (image at left, bottom), written by John Marsden, and sometimes writes the stories himself, as in The Lost Thing (image at left, top), which is also a theatre production and in development as a short animated film (more information here).

Tan starts his paintings with thin layers of acrylic over white lines on a dark background, working from dark to light and continuing with oil for the final rendering. He also works in other media, including sctatchboard, pen and ink , pastel crayons, gouache and watercolor, collage, assemblage and digital media.

You can see the multi-media and assemblage techniques in many of his illustrations which employ a stratified and multi-planed approach, with areas broken into smaller images within a larger whole, unified by textures and patterns playing across their surface.

Tan also mixes design elements with more painterly areas, and also works in a more straightforward painterly approach at times, creating a fascinatingly varied array of work.

Tan’s books have been translated into multiple languages and have received book awards in several countries. Tan is also involved in other interesting projects, including murals, theatre productions and a children’s “Art Trail”.

Some of his books, like The Red Tree (image at left, middle), feature experimental narratives, or absence thereof, leaving the reader to wander amid the images and form their own narrative, almost like a Surrealist collage-novel.

Link and suggestion courtesy of Jesper Svedberg

[Note: we seem to have run poor Shaun's site past his (apparently not very generous) bandwidth allotment. I'm not sure how long that will last, perhaps the rest of the month. My apologies to Shaun (and I suggest he look for a more reasonable web host). In the meanwhile, I've found some Shaun Tan images on the French site La Boîte à Images.]