Since the trans-continental railroad was completed in 1869, California’s warm climate, abundant sunshine and varied landscape has attracted plein air painters. (See my post on Granville Redmond.)

Jennifer McChristian came from Montreal, Canada, where she was born and began her study of art, moved to California, and received her BFA from Otis Art Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design) in Los Angeles.

McChristian devotes herself largely to plein air painting. Though some of her paintings are of the fields and trees that are routinely subjects for plein air painters, she more often finds interest in urban scenes, streets, roadways and, interestingly, highway overpasses.

She applies her paint in brusque, unblended strokes of color, giving her work a feeling of immediacy and directness. The rough edged patches of paint form a textural component and are at times combined with scumbled areas.

She uses a bright, slightly “pushed” palette, that imparts a lively energy to subjects like boarded up gas stations, construction sites and highway underpasses, that might otherwise seem like dull subjects for paintings. She also revels in the geometry of these subjects, working their bulky forms and cast shadows into interesting compositions.

Her online gallery features landscapes, figures and works on paper. Clicking on an image produces a pop-up window with a larger image, and a convenient forward and back navigation within it, allowing you to move through the large images without returning to the smaller versions. Unfortunately, this is hampered by a script that annoyingly resizes the window for each image, a case of the designer defining and defending a design space at the expense of user experience.

You’ll find slightly older works in the Archive section, showing a continued interest in the forms of bridges, culverts and overpasses.

Addendum: Thanks to Jason Waskey for reminding me that I neglected to mention Jennifer McChristian’s blog, on which she posts larger images of her paintings (click on the ones in the blog posts for enlargements), as well as discussing some of her experiences while painting them on location.

When I first wrote about Simon Rodgers about a year ago, I pointed out that I knew almost noting about him, except that he is a concept artist working in the film industry, who likes to work and sketch digitally.

His eerie and dramatic landscapes, imaginative environments, mysterious caverns and enigmatic structures are rendered with digital aplomb and a flair for dramatic lighting and dynamic composition. His oblong compositions, which have a distinctly widescreen cinematic feel to them, are often almost monochromatic, taking some of their power from intense highlights of complimentary colors. He seems to have a special knack for dramatic rock formations, elaborate caverns and wildly improbably stone bridges and pathways.

Simon was kind enough to write recently and let me know about the Colors! application for Nintendo DS, which he found out about from Sparth’s blog; sparking one of the more popular topics in recent lines and colors posts.

It occurred to me in the process that I hadn’t checked in on Rodgers’ site or blog, which are under his industry nickname, “Sim-r”, in a while. I was delighted to find that, in addition to his new quick thumbnails and sketches, some of which are done on the DS in Colors!, he has added to the galleries of his more finished digital concept paintings, illustrations and landscape paintings, as well as including a gallery of pages from an as yet unfinished graphic novel project.

I was unsurprised to find that I still know next to nothing about Sim-r. He seems to have intentionally left out of both his blog and his gallery site any mention of career, background, clients or projects, apparently preferring to let the art speak for itself.

I’ll follow suit and let you just click over and enjoy.

Jeffery Smith is a California illustrator who employs a palette of rich colors and deep chiaroscuro in the service of compositions that illustrate a broad range of subjects, from portraits, sports, romance and travel, to crime, mystery, conflict and war.

Smith seems to be able to break down the objects, figures and settings in his images into areas of color that feel like isolated shapes, while simultaneously serving as part of the representational image. Combined with his strong value contrasts and a peppering of texture, the result is at once graphic and modeled, conveying a strong sense of mood. His compositions often read as dark punctuated with light, rather than the other way around, even in daylight scenes.

Smith’s extensive client list includes publications like The New York Times, Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, Forbes, Time and Sports Illustrated, as well a numerous book publishers. He has received awards from Communication Arts, the New York Society of Illustrators, Print, the A.I.G.A., the Society of Newspaper Design and the Society of Publication Designers. His work regularly appears in major illustration annuals and he has been profiled in Communication Arts and How magazine.

Smith is now a full time professor at the Art Center College of Design, but still continues to take on freelance illustration assignments.

His web site is hampered by a somewhat awkward navigation system that requires you to use a series of back buttons, rather than offering simple navigation choices from all pages. Once in the galleries, however, and into a particular topic, you can at least navigate through the images in a given section with convenient forward and back buttons.

The galleries include a number of topics, including a section of figure drawings, which are nicely modeled with hatching, and sketchbook selections, as well as his designs for posters.

Since I first was introduced to computer graphics back in 1994, I’ve wanted a digital sketchbook.

My wife still kids me because that year, after I was introduced to digital art by working with Photoshop on a friend’s Mac, I took a Photoshop book to the beach with us and read it like a novel, before I had either Photoshop or a computer to run it on.

I also found myself right away imagining a Mac tablet computer, on which I could paint with digital colors on the beach, without the hassle and complications of carrying around the materials for plein air painting. I’ve been waiting not-so-patiently for Apple to release one for the last 13 years, and, though rumors are flying again about an iPod Touch style tablet, I’m still waiting.

In the meanwhile, I haven’t been willing to drop $1,200 plus on a Windows tablet computer that I would have to buy additional software for and that I would use for only one purpose, so I’m left with few options. I do some digital sketching with my Powerbook and a small Wacom tablet, but the combination isn’t as compact and portable as a tablet.

I’ve been running TealPaint, a fairly clever little digital painting application on my Clié (Palm PDA), but it’s frustrating in that there is no allowance for “soft” brushes that simulate painting with lowered opacity strokes; everything is hard edged, and blending can only be simulated with patterns.

Simon Rodgers, a concept artist who I profiled in 2006, and who enjoys painting digitally, was kind enough to write and let me know about what amounts to a pocket sized digital sketchbook for under $200. It’s a solution that allows digital painting with soft and hard brushes and varied opacity. Oddly enough, it’s by way of a portable game device.

Jens Andersson has written an application called Colors! that runs on the Nintendo DS portable gaming device (Amazon link). The Nintendo’s pressure-sensitive screen and stylus, combined with its small size and relatively low price, make it an excellent candidate for a digital sketchbook.

Though I haven’t had a chance to try this yet (I may wait till after Christmas to see if I can pick up a DS cheap, and just to make sure they don’t announce an Apple tablet at Macworld), but by all accounts Jens has done a nice job. The consensus seems to be “It may not be Corel Painter, but it’s pretty darn good”.

The app lets you use the aforementioned hard and soft variable opacity brushes, that by all appearances look like they do a pretty good job for digital painting, a color picker, eyedropper and other simple tools. Jens is still developing the app, but points out that his intention for it is to remain simple.

The site for the Colors! features an online gallery that includes some impressive work. There is also a YouTube vid in which a user gives a short tour of the app.

For more impressive images that show off the applications possibilities, see some of Simon Rodgers’ quick concept sketches, and some en plein air digital sketches by Sparth (Nicholas Bouvier) a concept artist who has long been an advocate of on location digital painting with a laptop (see my profile of sparth construct from 2006). You’ll also find his concept sketches in the Colors! gallery.

There is also a similar application for digital painting on the Nintendo DS under development by Bob Sabiston, who created the Rotoshop software used in the rotoscoped movies Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, under the working name of Inchworm. You can see some of Bob’s Inchworm images here, and a Popular Science article with a video tour of the app.

Inchworm has not been released. It may become an official Nintendo product, or it may be released to the homebrew circuit, but Colors! is available now and looks as good or better.

Unfortunately, creating a digital sketchbook with Colors! it isn’t quite as simple as buying a DS handheld game system (about $130) and downloading the software (free). You also need a “homebrew enabled cartridge” (about $50), which is a hardware adapter that allows you to put the application on a compact flash card that can then be read by the Nintendo’s top slot. I don’t know the ins and outs of this, as I haven’t purchased one, so I’m reluctant to recommend a cartridge or a supplier (it’s a specialty gaming item). There is a FAQ on the Colors! site, but it’s not aimed at newbies and non-gamers.

I’m writing to the Colors! developer suggesting a FAQ for non gamers who want to know how to get started with a “homebrew enabled Nintendo DS” required for running the app. I’ll append the post if I have news, or if I get one myself. [This has been added, see my addendum below.]

(Images above: Simon Rodgers, Sparth, Mattias Snygg, image of Colors! color picker in use over Snygg’s image, screen capture from video about Bob Sabiston’s Inchworm application in use on the Nintendo DS)

Addendum: Jens Andersson has written to say that they had been planning and have now added a section to the Colors! FAQ explaining the basics for those of us who are unfamiliar with the Nintendo DS and related hardware. (I just took a look and it’s an excellent introduction and guide, even for those of us who are gaming impaired.)

Also a couple of things I didn’t mention in the original post: the images are saved as PNG files at the root level of the memory card in a folder called colors/, and can be easily transferred to your computer and opened in Photoshop/Painter/whatever. The resolution is 512×384.

Another interesting feature of Colors! is that the sequence of creating a drawing or painting can be recorded, and then played back like an animated movie (similar, perhaps, to the feature in Corel Painter). These recordings can be shared between Colors! users, and frequently are through the online gallery.

There is a Java applet running on the Colors! Gallery that lets you play back the recording of the brushstrokes in your web browser, giving you a time-lapse animation of the making of the painting. If you click on the thumbnail images to go to the large versions, you will see a Playback button below many (but not all) of the images.

Addendum II: Chantal Fournier has written with a link to a very good step by step tutorial by Jannis Borgers on how to set up Colors! on the Nintendo DS in the ConceptArt.org forums. The detailed how-to includes photographs of the DS, example adapter cartridges like the M3 DS Simplify and the R4 Revolution, and the tiny microSD memory card. The article thread also includes three pages (at present) of lively discussion about using Colors! on the DS.

Raphael Piasek, who created and maintains the Colors! gallery, has written to let us know about a more advanced feature. The current version of Colors! allows you to email your images to yourself (or someone else) using Wi-fi. In the process, will reinterpret the native format DRW file (not the 512×384 PNG) into a 1024×768 JPEG. As an example he points to this image.

There is also a Java applet by Ben Jaques called ColorsDraw that is used on the Colors! gallery to display the recorded painting sequences, the desktop version of which will run on any computer with Java installed and can interpret the images up to 2084×1536. How this works is still a bit of a mystery to me, but so is the nature of the native DRW file format, which apparently stores a record of the brushstrokes.

Piasek has written to say that the application apparently records the brush strokes as vector information, and they can be played back at a larger size with larger brushes to create a new, enlarged version of the image. Piasek mentions that the Colors! FAQ has been updated to include information about the ColorsDraw applet. There is also some discussion of this on the ConceptArt.org post mentioned above.

Ever since I first saw Chuck Jones’ wonderfully imaginative and brain-tinglingly loopy Warner Brother’s cartoon Duck Amuck as a kid, I’ve had a weakness for cartoons that break the fourth wall (i.e. the invisible barrier between audience and characters in the entertainment), particularly in the oblique way of having an animated protagonist encounter the animator who is drawing the cartoon in which the character exists.

There’s just something surreal and magical that I find particularly appealing about the whole idea, perhaps the result of my inordinate fondness for Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon as a child. (As a side note, I understand the Harold and the Purple Crayon books have been made into an animated series for HBO, a situation that only makes me a bit sad, and instills me with no desire whatsoever to see the shows).

I posted in June about a Flash animation by Alan Becker that evokes the same animator/character relationship, and here is another short (one minute) animation that follows that pattern, in this case an ad for V Water.

This one is a bit different, though, in that our animated protagonist is enabled, rather than hindered, by the hands of the animator. Unfortunately I haven’t found creator credits for this one.

[Link via Digg and Drawn!]

Staring into the dark, bejeweled recesses of Gustave Moreau’s hallucinatory interpretations of a classical mythology that apparently came from some alternate dimension, it’s difficult to grasp the idea that, as respected professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he was an influential teacher of Henri Matisse, Georges Rouault and Pierre Bonnard, and hung out with Edgar Degas.

Moueau was generally despised by modernist critics and others, who pointed to his obsessively detailed, elaborately ornate and darkly textured settings, his stiffly posed figures, effeminate males, tragically portrayed females and bizarre interpretations of antiquity and myth, as a prime example of the worst in decadent symbolist art. Degas even dismissed his friend’s attempts to create a vision of an epic past that never existed with “He would have us believe that the gods wear watch chains.”

Of course, the Symbolists and Surrealists loved Moreau for the very same reasons. Andre Breton, the leader of the Surrealist movement, declared that encountering Moreau’s work at the age of 16 “influenced forever my idea of love”, (a bizarre notion which may account for something in Breton’s makeup).

There is a museum in Paris, Musée Gustav-Moreau, in the mansion that was his home and studio. The museum’s online presence has a nice selection of his drawings, which are otherwise underrepresented on the web.

There are books on Moreau, from the expensive to the inexpensive, and you can find him mentioned in context in Michael Gibson’s nice overview of the genre, Symbolism.

Moreau is considered a Symbolist, which is a pretty loose definition, as it wasn’t as much of a concerted art movement as the literary one, but I don’t think he was ever officially allied with a group. He was an influence on contemporaries like the Pre-Raphaelite Byrne-Jones and others. He was also influential on writers. His two paintings of Salomé, The Apparation and Salome Dancing Before Herod (image above) reputedly inspired Oscar Wilde to write his notorious play Salomé in French.

Contemporary comics writer Alan Moore, in the second volume of his wonderful, literary reference packed The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (not to be confused with the execrable movie nominally adapted from the series) played with the notion that Moreau was the nephew of H.G. Wells’ Doctor Moreau, and had based the form of his more disturbingly chimeric entities on the unfortunate victims of the doctor’s appalling experiments.

Critics, of course, find Moreau’s own experiments equally appalling, and they’re probably right about his weaknesses and excesses; but those of us who are wise enough not to let critics’ finely-honed narrowness of mind interfere with our enjoyment of things can find delight in Moueau’s striking monuments to l’esprit décadent.

It is sometimes pointed out that Americans have contributed two original art forms to the culture of the world, jazz and comic strips. Though both have precedents, they achieved the state for which they are identified here in the U.S.

One of the earliest pioneers of the latter is still one of its all time masters — Winsor McCay.

Most people who recognize his name (a name which, if there were any justice, should be as familiar as Disney or Picasso) associate him with his pioneering animated film Gertie the Dinosaur and his comic strip masterpiece Little Nemo in Slumberland.

Less well known are strips that ran prior to or concurrently with Little Nemo. The most familiar of these was Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, which presaged Little Nemo in its fancifully imagined dreams (brought on by gastronomic distress from eating Welsh rarebit) that ended with the dreamer waking and falling out of bed. A collection of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was published this year by Ulrich Merkl in an edition limited to 1,000. (You can see a DotRF strip here from a Library of Congress online feature, Cartoon America.)

This is a good year for Winsor McCay fans, as Sunday Press Books, who previously published the deliriously wonderful collection Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays, in which 100 of those classic strips were printed as they were meant to be seen, at the size of a full newspaper broadsheet; and followed up with Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, reprinting Frank King’s beautiful Gasoline Alley strips in a similar format; is back again with a collection of Little Sammy Sneeze, another of McCay’s less frequently seen comic strips.

Little Sammy Sneeze was based on a simple minded concept, a child who honks off a monumental sneeze at the most inopportune moments and in the midst of some delicately balanced undertaking or social setting, the participants of which are left dumbfounded by the result of the sneeze. Simple minded or not, McCay can’t help but elevate the idea several notches with his inevitably beautiful execution.

This volume collects the complete two year run of the Sunday strip, again printed at original size, in this case a newspaper half-page; as well as the complete run of another rarely seen McCay strip, Hungry Henrietta, a black and white Sunday feature that ran on the back of the color pages in the New York Herald.

See also my previous post on Winsor McCay, in which I go into more detail about Little Nemo in Slumberland: So Many Splendid Sundays; and my post on Frank King’s Sundays with Walt and Skeezix from Sunday Press Books.

You can also find other printings and books on McCay and his work, but the Sunday Press volumes are superb. I haven’t seen the Merkl volume of Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, but it has gotten good notice. The example of Little Sammy Sneeze shown above has been rearranged form it’s horizontal format into a vertical one, and is in black and white, where the new volume is true to the original format and in color.

If you’re uncertain about McCay suiting your taste, try your library. See if you can find some examples (preferably printed large) from the man who was perhaps the Duke Ellington of the comic strip.

It has been suggested that the Impressionists painted as they did partly because they deliberately abandoned their academic training before it was complete, and were therefore incapable of painting “realistically”; as though they were the punk rockers of their day, eschewing the facile technique of their predecessors for the “honesty” of making art without the “creative restrictions” of training.

I beg to differ.

As a case in point I present the early landscapes of Camille Pissarro, who, as much if not more than Monet, was responsible for the techniques of French Impressionism and the tenants of their philosophical approach to painting.

Pissarro actually did have little academic training, and that weakness shows when viewing the rather weak and stiff figures in his early work; but his command of the techniques of landscape, learned from his study with Jean-Babtiste Camille Corot, is visibly solid, if not particularly exciting, in his early landscapes (image at left, top).

Pissarro’s progression into the short, broken strokes we associate with French Impressionism, as seen in his painting of a haystack at left, was a gradual one. There is a sweet spot for me, in between his Corot and Courbet inspired naturalism and full-on Impressionism, where his early experimentation led him to use broad painterly strokes of color in a manner similar to later work by the “American impressionists” and others.

These paintings are fresh, open, lively, and rich with the sense of light and atmosphere that is evident in Impressionist work, but less overwhelmed with the staccato of individual brushstrokes; and drawing is not yet being sacrificed on the altar of color. For more, see my previous post on Pissarro.

Camille Pissarro was restless and relentless in his pursuit of the Impressionist ideals, which led him, ironically, to “Neo-Impressionism” and the Pointillism of Seurat, in which almost everything is sacrificed to the ideal of “pure” color. In Pointillism the individual daubs of unblended color were to be mixed in the viewer’s eye rather than on the artist’s palette or the canvas.

These, for me, are Pissarro’s least successful works (image at left, bottom); and presage modernism not only in their distance from academic realism, but in the reliance on theory over direct interpretation of the artist’s vision.

There is a new exhibit of Pissarro’s work that offers a broad view of his work over his entire career, a rare treat, as most exhibitions of Impressionist paintings concentrate only on the high period from which their most recognizable works are taken.

The exhibit, Camille Pissarro: Impressions of City and Country, is at the Jewish Museum in New York from November 4, 2007 to March 16, 2008.

There is an online feature on the museum’s website that, despite a poorly implemented system for scrolling text, offers a nice glimpse of the evolution of Pissarros’ work over time.

If you can, however, try to see the actual exhibit. The run is longer that most, which will hopefully give more people the chance to see this aspect of Pissarro’s artistic legacy. It may change your impression of how a major art movement arose and developed over the lifetime of one its most important figures.

I found myself in a sour mood the other day and in need of some distraction and entertainment that didn’t involve gunshots, car chases, fist fights, explosions, betrayal, murder, infidelity, gratuitous nudity, scandal, deceit, lies and horror.

So I turned off Fox News and looked to the list of web comics that I like to check in on periodically.

Much to my delight I realized that Zip and Li’l Bit, a lighthearted online comic by Trade Loffler, had progressed well into a new story since I had last visited.

If you haven’t encountered Zip and Li’l Bit, I’ll refer you to my previous post and suggest that you start at the beginning of the first story, The Upside-down Me. If, like me, you’ve read the first, but not the new story, start at the beginning of that story, The Sky Kayak.

The site is well arranged except that the home page always opens to the most recent page. This is a fairly common paradigm in web comics, but one of which I’m not fond. It’s convenient for current readers who are following along as new pages are added (in the case of Zip and Li’l Bit, Thursdays and Sundays), but can be disconcerting for first time visitors, who are presented with a “walked into the middle of a movie” situation.

The new story is up to page 19 as of yesterday, and the young brother and sister protagonists are accompanied this time by a couple of new characters, notably Zip’s shadow and Willoughby, a talking stone lion on a cornice of their house.

In describing these gentle, well crafted adventures, the word “charming” springs to mind, both in terms of being charmed by the characters, setting and unhurried pace of the stories, but also in terms of being charmed by Loffler’s drawings, which are deceptively simple, but reward closer inspection.

Closer inspection is conveniently provided using one of the site’s great “only on the web” features. Clicking on any of the panels produces a pop-up enlargement of the panel in which you can see it in detail. This works particularly well in Loffler’s chosen format of uniform panel shape.

You can click through the enlarged panels with a hidden arrow at the upper right of the panel, until the end of the page. Notice, in the enlarged drawings, the loose but restrained linework in the backgrounds, accented with a bit of texture and a carefully controlled color palette.

Notice particularly, though, Loffler’s nicely varied and beautifully controlled ink lines on the figures and foreground objects.

Zip and Li’l Bit was originally planned as a print project, and I hope it makes it’s way to print at some point. The strip would charm children at bedtime just as much as adults at their computers.

I don’t know about you, but I can sometimes be a little intimidated by my own sketchbooks, specifically in cases where I’ve made some drawings that I feel were particularly successful, and become reluctant to add to them, either from worry about carrying a sketchbook with drawings I like in it around and losing it, or simply feeling like I have to be confident I’m going to make a comparably good drawing with my next entry.

This is completely silly, of course, and counter-productive for an artist, but I venture to think some of you can identify.

How much more intimidating would it be, though, if the sketchbook in which you were drawing were full of wonderful drawings by other artists? Daunting? Perhaps, but how inspiring might it be as well? This is the situation facing the artists participating in Sketchtravel.

Sketchtravel is a project jointly managed by Daisuke Tsutsumi, a multifaceted artist who I profiled on lines and colors last May, and Gérald Guerlais, a French illustrator and background designer, who informed me about the project.

Sketchtravel revolves around a single sketchbook to which 50 artists will make contributions at it travels around the world.

Each artist contributes a single page of art, be it drawing or painting, though the rules suggest that care must be taken not to damage previous or subsequent pages with invasive tools or techniques. The drawings are scanned, both as a precaution in the event of the worst case scenario of the book being lost or stolen, and also so the virtual version of the physical sketchbook can be updated on the project’s web site.

The theme of the works varies widely, though it often focuses on the book itself and its travels.

One of the more interesting aspects of the process is that the sketchbook is making its zig-zag journey around the curve of the horizon not by post or package service, but carried by hand. It travels in a custom made, felt lined, oak case with brass hardware.

Each invited artist receives the sketchbook from the previous contributor in person, adds their contribution, and, in turn, hands it off to the next artist; though I found no mention of how the artists are selected or how the logistics of travel were determined. The site has a map marking the book’s recent travels and current location (as of this writing, the west coast of the U.S.).

The project was started in 2006 and the sketchbook currently has 24 artists represented in the virtual version on the site. You can view the contributions to date, along with photos of the book and pictures of the hand-offs from artist to artist. There is also a list of the participating artists with links to their individual web sites or blogs.

Guerlais also maintains a blog for the project, with more details about the sketchbook’s travels, the hand-offs and related news. The blog and the web site have content in both French and English.

As each artist adds to the book, presumably more inspired than intimidated by the work of those who have added their drawings before them, the book will grow organically into its final state as a collaborative artwork. When finished, the original sketchbook will be exhibited at the Arludik Gallery in Paris, after which it will be auctioned off to a charity association selected by the artists.

(Images at left, from top: Gérald Guerlais, Dominique Louis, Claude William Trebutien, Ronnie Del Carmen, Nash Dunnigan, Benoit le Pennec.)