Anyone who is familiar with Watchmen, the darkly dystopian and very adult graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, or the much anticipated feature film adaptation that is being released today; and/or those familiar with 1980′s style Saturday morning superhero cartoons; will get a kick out of this perfect and spot on send-up by Harry Partridge.

He’s got it all down perfect, Ozymandias and his mutant pet recast as Shaggy and Scooby-Doo, the light and happy take on Rorschach (“I’m nutty!”), the Josie and the Pussycats girl band version of Silk Spectre, and the gang sitting around eating pizza, encouraging you to say no to drugs and be in bed by 10; plus lots of “in” jokes for those familiar with the graphic novel… absolutely hilarious.

The funniest thing is that you know for certain that it could have happened. The people who made these cartoons were so monumentally clueless about their formulas that they would have cheerfully taken on the material and “cleaned it up” for the little Saturday morning cereal consumers.

Who watches the Watchmen, indeed.

[Via Geekdad/Wired]

Jean-Baptiste Monge is a French fantasy illustrator with a specialty in portraying the world of faeries, elves, goblins and related faerie folk.

Monge’s detailed, beautifully rendered paintings have a textural quality and subdued color palette ideally suited to his portrayal of the denizens of the unseen world at our feet and the edges of our vision, living lives in miniature on the floor of the forest.

His images are mercifully free of the cloying cuteness sometimes associated with the subject in the hands of lesser artists, and carry a wonderful feeling of 19th century Victorian art and Golden Age illustration.

Monge is well known in France, where his books are quite popular, with titles like Halloween, Baltimore & Redingote, and In Search of Faeries, Volumes I and II (my loose translation of the titles may not be accurate), and the new Celtic Faerie. Monge also contributed heavily to The World of Dragons and has published a sketchbook (Carnet de Croquis).

Unfortunately for those of us on the other side of the Atlantic, there are no English language editions of his work yet, though you might be able to find a couple of French editions through Amazon’s extended suppliers, such as: A la recherche de féerie, volume 1: La Révélation and Baltimore & Redingote; or through importers like Stuart Ng Books.

Fortunately, however, Monge has a web site with a considerable selection of his work. Non-French speakers will be less put off by any language barrier than by a few navigation quirks. First you need to be aware that the primary navigation on the home page is hidden in a pop-out menu accessed from the little pot-O-gold at the top right of the page.

Journal de Board is the link to Monge’s Blog, Bibliographie & Galeries is where you will find a list of his books. Clicking on their covers gives you access to galleries of art from each title.

There is also a useful list of links (Liens). Interestingly, many of Monge’s links are to American fantasy artists, like James Gurney, Tony Diterlizzi and Peter de Séve (see my posts on James Gurney, Tony Diterlizzi and Peter de Séve). There is also a link to the work of Brian Froud, an artist more English speakers are likely to associate with faerie images, though I have to profess a preference for Monge’s take on the subject.

English speakers can also try a Google Translate version of Monge’s site.

Monge recently received the Spectrum Silver Award (video) for Book Illustration. (Via Tor.com)

I’ve mentioned before my fascination with scratchboard, that magical inverse of pen and ink, in which light areas are scratched out of a coating of ink on a clay-covered board (and sometimes a white surface is scratched away from a black-coated board), producing a line drawing with some of the characteristics of pen and ink and some of the feeling of woodcuts (see some of my posts involving scratchboard).

Tm Foley is a Michigan based illustrator who worked for a long time in variations of traditional scratchboard technique, and moved over to digital illustration in the late 90′s.

Foley has found great freedom in the combination of his scratchboard style and computer color, a flexible alternative to the traditional methods of applying color to scratchboard drawings, which is usually a difficult, messy and often frustrating process because of the surface dust created by the scratchboard technique.

Foley’s color scratchboard illustrations have the visual charm of scratchboard lines with the added punch of well applied color. The other ingredients in his visual mix, a fertile imagination and strong drawing skills, have combined to garner him a roster of clients that include The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, Barrons, Highlights for Children and others.

Foley also maintains a blog, Illustratorium, where you you can find an archive of his illustrations, arranged by dated posts, or by subject categories. You can also find a few of his illustrations in other media both here and in his iSpot portfolio, as well as some of his scratchboard style work in black and white.

Victorian art in particular, I think, suffered at the hands of the modernist art establishment of the late 20th Century, who considered it the dry and repressive standard from which modernism had “liberated” art.

As a result, much of the art from the time was marginalized and trivialized for the better part of half a century, and is still denigrated in modernist circles.

In general, however, there is a revival of interest in Victorian art, with its fascinating glimpses of a complex period, historical events and engaging stories, as portrayed by some masterful painters.

The Delaware Art Museum, a bastion of Victorian art in the form its Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite Art (see my post on the Pre-Raphaelites), is currently hosting an exhibition of sixty works from the Victorian period, Paintings from the Reign of Victoria: The Royal Holloway Collection.

Many of them are dramatically large in scale (you can see some photographs of the exhibit being installed here).

Though I was a bit disappointed in my hope for more of the heavy hitters from the period, I was still delighted to see the show and to be introduced to a few artists who were unfamiliar, but terrific.

There are some real gems in the show, like Edwin Longsden Long’s The Babylonian Marriage Market (image above, top), John Evan Hodgson’s Relatives in Bondage, James Holland’s beautiful scenes of Venice and Verona (image above, middle right), Edwin Landseer’s grim Man Proposes, God Disposes (image above, bottom, larger version here – click to enlarge), and William Powell Frith’s fascinating classic The Railway Station, which tells multiple stories in a panorama of figures.

It was particularly interesting to note in Frith’s piece, that a painting of an apparent high level of finish when viewed from a few steps back reveals pencil construction and perspective lines on close inspection.

Tito Conti’s exquisite small scale paintings of women in glowing gowns, like Paying Her Respects to His Mightiness (image above, middle left), reminded me of William Holman-Hunt’s highly finessed detail painting, and John Syer surprised me with the loose, painterly handling of his Welsh Drovers. See the slideshows listed below for more images from the exhibition.

Paintings from the Reign of Victoria: The Royal Holloway Collection is on view at the Delaware Art Museum until April 12, 2009.

There is a catalog from the exhibition (link to Delaware Art Museum store, I could only find the hardback on Amazon).

Museum admission is currently free on Sundays. While there, don’t miss their collection of American illustration, an extended exhibit of which is on the second floor.

For those not within reach of the exhibition, there are an increasing number of resources on the web for Victorian art. I’ve listed a few at the bottom of the links below.

An excellent book on the subject is Victorian Painting by Lionel Lambourne.

In what is probably a nod to their dominant demographic, Smashing Apps, a blog/webzine devoted to online resources for designers and web developers, named the article collecting these Photoshop tutorials “17 Mind-Blowing Digital Painting Tutorials Of Beautiful Girls“.

That being said, it’s still a collection of useful Photoshop digital painting techniques of potential interest to many concept artists, illustrators and comics artists, with a variety of styles and approaches, from anime and traditional comics to more realistic and fully rendered images.

Most are brief, but they cover various stages of sketching and rendering, discuss brushes, layer compositing, brush modes and other aspects of digital rendering.

(Image above, left to right:
David Munoz Velazquez, John Kearney, Melanie Delon (see my post about Melanie Delon)
Jim Zubkavich, Marta Dahlig, Shilin Huang
Artgerm, Artgerm, Yu Cheng Hong)