I’ll let you in on a little secret.

Some of you may be under the impression from my posts on the subject that I’m an expert on the field and history of illustration, but that’s not the case. I simply know a little bit about some terrific illustrators that I’ve come across over the years. Compared to a real expert, like Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr., my knowledge is like a creek compared to a river (it might be the Brandywine Creek, but a creek nonetheless).

But that’s not the secret I wanted to let you in on. The secret is The Vadeboncoeur Collection of ImageS, at least it’s more of a secret than it should be (and no, the capital “S” is not a typo, that’s the way it’s written).

Since 2001, Vadeboncoeur has been publishing a periodical, I hesitate to call it a magazine because it defies the conventions of most magazines, featuring beautiful images from some of history’s greatest illustrators, both well known and obscure; as well as work from artists from the same time period as the Golden Age of illustration.

It’s a secret because, unless you frequent BPIB (formerly Bud Plant Illustrated Books), a web resource to which I have occasionally sent you in reference to the history of great illustrators, chances are you haven’t seen the modest link to the ImageS pages.

The web site itself is a little, um… stuck in the 90’s, (when entering the site through the home page, choose “No Frames“, because frames suck), but the heart of the site is a wonderful collection short but of terrific, and often definitive, articles on great illustrators, from Edwin Austin Abbey to Newell Convers Wyeth.

You could spend hours here lost among the articles and (unfortunately somewhat small) images from these greats, but why settle for that when you can get Vadeboncoeur’s beautifully printed collections full of stunning, high-resolution images of works that you just won’t find anywhere else.

These collections, (again, I hesitate to call them magazines, and they’re not quite books) are printed larger than most magazines (9″x12″), are up to 44 pages each; and, in recent issues, feature amazing reproductions by way of Stochastic printing (a process that eliminates the traditional limitation of process dots and looks amazingly like a photograph).

The early issues are starting to disappear, but a number of back issues are still available, including the special Black & White ImageS Annual Collections, which showcase some of the most amazing pen and ink illustration ever produced. These are thicker than the color collections, up to 112 pages, and the fourth one was just released. Like the color collections, these are printed on 100 lb paper and the reproductions are superb.

Unfortunately, the web site doesn’t do a very good job of presenting the collections, with a small, too-quick, GIF animations of a few pages, that you can’t even focus on for more than a second, as the only preview.

Vadeboncoeur should take a page from Dan Zimmer’s Illustration Magazine previews, which give a thumbnail of every page in the magazine (see my posts on Illustration Magazine); or, better yet, feature two or three large images to give some idea of how beautiful these pieces really are.

In the meanwhile, lacking better previews, take my word for it. These collections are head-spinningly beautiful and a must-have for any serious fan of Golden Age illustration.

But don’t let too many people in on our little secret, at least not until we get a chance to snap up those back issues.

Richard Parkes Bonington was one of the great English landscape painters at the height of the grand era of landscape painting in the 1800’s, and a notable figure in the English watercolor movement.

He is credited with carrying the influence of both of those artistic waves to Continental Europe and inspiring many European painters to take up the practice of painting with watercolor, including Delacroix.

In his tragically short life of twenty six years, and a career as a painter that lasted only ten, he produced a notable body of work; with fresh, atmospheric paintings that bent the rules of what was acceptable in painting at the time, and helped lay the groundwork on which later sharp breaks with tradition (i.e. Impressionism) would be based.

He preferred to work outdoors, and took his compositions from modern life rather than composing “history paintings” in which the landscape was subservient to some concept of classical antiquity or religious significance.

His paintings are notable for their sweeping skies, atmospheric haze and quick suggestions of texture in place of labored rendering.

Mark Bischel is another of those illustrators whose work I’ve encountered, but about whom I know little. His web presence is minimalist to a fault, consisting of a series of (unfortunately horizontally) scrolling thumbnails and the larger images they link to; which can also be navigated (fortunately) by forward and back arrows.

His images range from dark and thickly textured monochrome charcoal drawings to brusquely textured oil paintings to graphic and somewhat monochromatic silkscreen, and what appear to be ink and watercolor paintings.

As fascinating as the slikscreens are, it’s the ink and watercolor pieces I find most appealing. They have a a loose, fresh feeling, and carry the best qualities of an on-location sketch, with free line work and lightly applied areas of color.

A brief search for Bischel produced little additional information other than the fact that he is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts. He has also been in the Communication Arts Illustration Annuals, which is where I encountered his work.

Perhaps Bischel will update his site at some point with additional images and maybe even a little information.

I’ve always been fascinated by self-portraits (not that I’ve done that many myself). Here is not only the artist’s personality expressed through their work, but through their own inner or outer vision of themselves.

Many of history’s great paintings have been self portraits, from Durer and Rembrandt to Sargent and Van Gogh, artists have made self-portraits into powerful statements with the full force of their personality and artistic skills.

One of the most intriguing things about self-portraits is the variety of approach, in terms of materials, the nature of the composition, attitude of the artist as sitter, and the background, setting and objects an artist can choose to surround themselves with.

American Artist, the venerable artists’ magazine, has opened the entry process on this year’s Self-Portrait Competition, in which the selected winners will have their self-portraits published in the magazine. The magazine’s web site has a slide-show of recent entries, about 70 of them at this point, which already constitute a colorful (in more ways then one) assortment of approaches and interpretations of the idea of self portraiture.

In addition, they have provided an inspirational gallery of self-portraits from the history of art, including some greats like Durer’s Christ-like advertisement for his painting skills as a young artist, Chardin’s lifted-eyebrow self-appraisal of his scarfed head, three of Rembrandt’s always remarkable self-images, Sargent’s dignified banker-esque stare, Élisabeth-Louis Vigée-Lebrun’s beautiful 3/4 length portrait with palette, brushes and full-dress finery, Anders Zorn’s frank self-appraisal, several of Ergon Scheel’s stark, gaunt visages and van Gogh’s hauntingly electric, blue and green study of intensity and emotional chaos.

That said, you can submit your own portraits, haunting or otherwise, to the competition for their entry fee of $20, and $5 for additional entries. The info page has general information and the registration page has the terms and conditions. The deadline is May 1, 2008 and entry is limited to U.S. residents.

I don’t know how many pieces will be displayed in the magazine. At any rate, it should be worth checking the recent entries page occasionally just to see the the variety and range of the entries.

(Image above, left to right, Row 1: Ted Burn, Dianne Panarelli Miller, Virginia Blechman; Row 2: Daniel van Benthuysen, Peter Nuchims, David Frank; Row 3: Johanna Uribes, Jim Kilmartin, Koo Schadler; Row 4: Cesar Santos, Spencer Sharp, F. Michael Wood, Ying-He Liu. The unfortunate shadow at the top of each image is the product of the cheesy slide show application the magazine has, for reasons that are beyond me, chosen for this display.)

In 1934, Surrealist Max Ernst created an extraordinary collage novel (or, as I pointed out a few years ago, “graphic novel”), composed of collage images constructed of cut-outs from popular French periodicals and catalogs of the time.

The result is a fascinating, spooky, wondrous and eye-opening excursion into the mind of a Surrealist master on the cusp of World War II. Here is my post about Une Semaine de Bonté, ou Les Sept Éléments Capitaux (A Week of Kindness, or the Seven Deadly Sins) from 2005.

This month, the Albertina museum in Vienna is displaying some of Ernst’s original collages for the book (how many is unclear). This is the first time the works have been exhibited since 1936. The show runs until the 9th of April, 2008. The museum’s site has a 6 thumbnails posted of images in the exhibition, though, inexplicably, no larger versions. I’ve found corresponding images in my files and posted them above.

Though I consider it legitimately a “graphic novel” (and long-time lines and colors readers will know I’m cranky about the inaccurate use of that term), it is not arranged in comic-strip form, as my composite above might suggest. Each of these images is a full page, but they are part of a narrative sequence (the images above are out of sequence from various parts of the book). The narrative is loose and dreamlike, or “stream of consciousness”, if you will. This is actually in keeping with the Surrealists’ prose and poetry, and could more correctly be called “stream of unconsciousness”, as one of their professed aims was to create art directly from their unconscious minds.

For those of us for whom a trip to Vienna is not practical, good old Dover Books is still keeping their delightfully inexpensive version, Une Semaine De Bonte: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage, in print after all these years (as well they should, it’s a classic, despite their slightly off title). I’ve had my dog-eared copy since I was a teenager, and the work still manages to surprise and delight me with repeated viewings.

When I wrote my previous post, there was an online version of the entire book available that has since disappeared. But, as the Internet giveth and the Internet taketh away, there is now a version on Google Books that looks reasonably complete.

You will also find some images, often with larger versions, on Giornale Nuovo and La Boîte à Images.

If you are at all intrigued, though, opt for the print version.

We catch concept artist Robin Chyo at the very beginning of his career. A graduate of Academy of Art University with a BFA in Illustration, Chyo is working to build a career in the gaming and/or film industry as a concept designer and illustrator.

He has begun by establishing a presence in publications like the Spectrum collections of fantastic art (Spectrum 13 and 14, which is where I encountered his work), Ballistic Publishing’s Painter digital art showcase and D’artiste: Concept Art collection, as well as ImagineFX and 2DArtist Magazine.

He has also created a reasonably extensive portfolio, showcasing his abilities in the major areas of concept design for gaming and special effects centric movies, such as characters, environments, props, creatures and mechanical devices.

He has also, wisely, created a web site to make his portfolio readily available. Though it isn’t fancy (probably also a wise decision), he’s done a good job of providing the essentials — bio, resume, contact information and galleries of work that can be viewed by either thumbnails or Previous and Next navigation. He has also added a subtle id mark of his web site address to his images without marring them with ugly watermarks (are you listening, all of you watermarking fanatics?). (I should point out, though, that the “http://” in URL on the image is unnecessary.)

The baseline, of course, is that all of this is in support of very nice work. Chyo’s concept designs show a youthful verve and freedom of imagination that is sometimes more subdued in older veterans in the field. His creatures, in particular, seem more truly alien and less clichéd than most. His mechanical devices, props and character accouterments often have an interestingly organic feeling.

There is a certain brusqueness to his rendering that I find appealing, with an emphasis on textures and a muted palette with highlights of more intense hues.

Chyo lists a number of 2-D and 3-D digital graphics applications in his resume, along with traditional media like pencil, oils and acrylics. It looks like the majority of work in his portfolio is relatively straightforward digital painting in Painter and Photoshop.

All in all, it looks like he’s doing a lot of things right, and it’s probably only a matter of time before we see credits for gaming or film projects on his resume. I just hope that working within industry standards doesn’t take away his imaginative wild streak.

Some of us are waiting with bated breath for the Academy Awards (and some of us are waiting for them to be over so we can get back to more important things, like new episodes of The Daily Show), but it’s a time of year when movies become a topic of discussion.

Movie Poster Addict, a blog with the nice subtitle “Because we all like pretty pictures”, has posted 79 years of Best Picture Winners in Posters, featuring a series of the posters that accompanied the past Academy Award winners for Best Picture from 1927 up to last year.

These aren’t the best movie posters ever (by any means), simply the ones associated with the Best Picture winners, but some of them are pretty good, and it’s fascinating to see the mish-mash of quality between the posters and the movies; some of each are classic, and some of each are eminently forgettable.

If you click on most of the images in the blog post you’ll get an larger version. The links underneath lead to the source for the poster image which sometimes includes an even larger version and some information about the movie.

Unfortunately, many of them don’t include credits for the poster artist or designer, though some do. Some of them are the work of well known illustrators, like Bob Peak’s poster for My Fair Lady, John Van Hamersveld’s Amadeus poster and Richard Amsel doing his best to emulate J.C. Leyendecker in his poster for The Sting.

Credits for some of the older illustrations are apparently lost in the mists of time, or at least out of the reach of a quick Google.

For some more interesting posters, see Movie Poster Addict’s post on the 2007 Key Art Awards, which actually are awards for artwork associated with movie promotional materials.

[Link via Neatorama]

ArtDemonstrations.com is a blog in which the author has collected and shares links to various art demonstrations and tutorials he has come across on the web.

Some of them are more useful than others and they take several forms, from a few steps in a painting process shown as photos, to longer step-by step breakdowns, to time-lapse videos of the creation of drawings or paintings (like the portrait drawing by Barrett Bailey shown above), to full half hour or more videos of painting demonstrations.

At first I thought that the blog might be from someone associated with SmartFlix, an instructional video rental service that features a number of art instruction DVDs, because of the ubiquitous banner. There is also a list of text links under his Google ads that look like a blogroll, but are actually links (presumably paid links) to items in the SmartFlix store. These are videos that might be of interest, but the listings feature no actual online demos or articles.

Apparently, though, SmartFlix is just a sponsor the author encountered after doing a short post on them. (They’ve contacted me as well, but I haven’t had a chance to check into the service yet. I’ll try to rent a video or two and give you a report in the near future.)

Some of the ArtDemonstrations.com posts are links to short promos for artists’ commercial video releases, including short excerpts from a new instructional painting video, The Portrait Sketch, by Jeremy Lipking, as well as other video clips of him.

In addition to Jeremy Lipking, the blog points to demos by other artists that I’ve mentioned on lines and colors, including Tony Ryder, Duane Keiser, and a couple by William Whitaker (from the blog’s listings for November, 2005)

Other posts mention books and web archives of books, as well as tidbits like old film of Picasso at work and a PDF of an article on Sargent’s painting methods (PDF link 28k) posted by Craig Mullins.

In addition to Mullins there are a few mentions of concept artists, though that’s one of the largest areas of available tutorials on the web, particularly in the portals like CG Society and ConceptArt.org. Still, most people with a particular interest in concept art are aware of those sources and I think ArtDemonstrations.com is better aimed at the broader art community.

Unfortunately, the author, who I can find referenced only as “Jeff” (and is apparently an artist himself and has contributed one or two of his own demos), doesn’t seem to post often; and has not yet included a number of readily available painting demos I’ve come across on YouTube and other places.

The idea of trying to collect a central reference for available art tutorials on the web is a terrific one, and I would love to see it pursued more aggressively; but instead of complaining, I should be thanking Jeff for sharing what he has.

Had I come across John Beder’s children’s book illustrations on their own, rather than finding them on his web site after seeing the realist still life paintings on his painting blog, I would not have thought them to be the work of the same artist.

His illustrations for children’s books are loose, almost roughly realized, and at times cartoonlike. His still life paintings, on the other hand are precise, detailed and contemplative. Both sides of his work show a fondness for bright colors.

His still life paintings are most often of arrangements of fruit. Though his subject matter and blog format shares some similarity with the blogs of many “painting a day” artists, it’s obvious at first glance that these paintings are the work of much longer painting sessions.

They are often wonderful explorations of the way light cascades across and wraps itself around the forms of the fruit, sometimes lighting them as if with an inner glow. The forms of individual grapes or the surfaces of plums are revealed with dedicated attention to the appearance of their textural and light reflective qualities.

In a number of paintings, Beder challenges himself with the rendering of the play of shadow and light across the complex folds of striped cloth, arranged as a backdrop to the still life, in what must be an very painstaking process.

As you might expect, Beder doesn’t post new paintings often. My one real disappointment, though, is that he doesn’t post larger versions of them. The “detail versions”, such as they are, are hardly larger than the images on the blog page; leaving you to imagine as best you can what the paintings might look like in person, as they are reasonably large, in the range of 30″x 20″ (75×50cm).

You can also find some of his paintings on his (somewhat awkwardly arranged) web site, which is devoted largely to his illustrations and his “Feeling Faces” line of emotion flash cards.

Kevin Turcotte is another of those artists who has a somewhat vague web presence. I don’t think he has a site of his own, but he posts his small paintings as a participant in the group blog, Paintopolis.

He shares Paintopolis with James Martin, Jeremy Engleman and Marty Havran. There is little direct information about any of them on the blog, but I’m guessing that they all work for Disney animation in some capacity, as the one other bit of information I’ve been able to come up with on Turcotte is his IMDB listing; which credits him as background artist or background supervisor on films like Sinbad: Legend of the Seven seas, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, The Road to Eldorado, The Prince of Egypt, Pocahontas, The Lion King and Aladdin.

You’re left with the impression that the blog exists basically for the benefit of the artists themselves and/or their friends, because, except for the artist’s names and a few short notes about the posted images, no background information is provided.

Turcotte seems to be the most prolific contributor, frequently posting small landscapes that he describes as “lunchtime paintings”, quickly realized and fresh with the painterly immediacy that the limited timeframe implies. These are done primarily in oil and occasionally in watercolor. Likewise he often posts both oil and watercolor figure paintings, from appearances done in a classroom or workshop setting. These are also wonderfully painterly and quickly but surely rendered.

There are also quick studies of flowers and still life subjects as well as a few more fully realized paintings.

In browsing through the blog, which unfortunately is one of those Blogger affairs that doesn’t have an “earlier posts” link and requires you to fidget through the archives links to see past the first page, you’ll also encounter the work of his fellow Paintoplois bloggers, whose “off-hours” work is also worth attention, even if they don’t think it’s worth any explanation, bios, or other background information.