Since I wrote about illustrator Larry Roibal last year, he has been continuing his wonderful practice of daily sketches of prominent figures.

Roibal draws his newsmakers on newsprint, literally. It’s common for artists to draw on “newsprint”, meaning the cheap pulp paper, similar to that on which newspapers are printed, that is used for quick sketches and throw-away drawings, but Roibal’s “newsprint” drawings take on a whole new meaning.

He sketches his portraits of politicians, world leaders, entertainers, sports figures and other newsworthy individuals directly on sections of newspaper articles about them.

Roibal’s ballpoint pen drawings are defined enough to give a sharp likeness of the individual, but open enough to let the newsprint come through.

Roibal has just assembled a remarkable collage of his drawings from the past year. My excerpt above is just a tiny fraction of the whole. You can also see a tabloid size excerpt here.

Of course, for the larger and more detailed drawings, take a meander back through his blog posts over the course of a fascinating year of news and personalities.

Impressionism – Painting Light is the title of an exhibition at The Albertina in Vienna, Austria, on view through 14 February, 2010.

The exhibit draws from the collections of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and Foundation in Cologne, as well as the Albertina and the Batliner Collection, with additions from private collections and other museums.

Those of us not in the neighborhood can enjoy the Albertina’s online tour of some Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works that are rarely seen outside of the region.

The exhibition includes work by Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters like Monet, Cezanne, degas, Manet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Morisot, Seurat, Renoir, Caillebotte and Sisley, as well as less well known painters like Albert Besnard, Maximilien Luce and Maxime Maufra.

(Images above: Gustav Caillebotte, Maxime Maufra, Alfred Sisley)

[Via Art Knowledge News]

Originally form Chicago, NYC based illustrator and gallery artist Chris Buzelli cites painting alongside his grandfather in his TV repair shop as a child as a major influence on his choice of career.

Buzelli studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, and his illustrations have appeared in publications like Time, Rolling Stone, Playboy and The New York Times.

His confidently rendered illustrations juxtapose disparate elements in logic-teasing arrangements. Forms, objects and expected contexts are stretched and re-imagined, the unexpected becomes the norm.

Often his images deal with wonderfully grotesque animals and other elements of the natural world, though they appear to be illustrating concepts related to modern industrialized life.

Buzelli’s web site has a gallery of his work (note that there are 4 pages of thumbnails, accessed by a small row of dots about the thumbnail area). There is also a Shop, in which both prints and original art are available.

The images on his site are unfortunately a bit small. You will find some larger images on the Tor.com site, and accompanying an interview with the artist on LCS and another on Woosta. There is also an interview with Buzellii on the Communication Arts site.

Buzelli has a blog on Drawger.

After spending much of her career in the animation industry, working for companies like Walt Disney Feature Animation and Hanna Barbara, Allison Proulx turned her attention to gallery painting.

She studied at Rhode Island School of Design and Art Center College of Design and worked briefly as a freelance illustrator before entering the animation field.

Her web site featured galleries of work from both sides of her career, including figurative work.

Her simply and clearly stated landscapes come from direct observation, and are a marked contrast to the stylized animation background art that is also featured on her site.

I always find it fascinating when an artist does both real and fanciful landscapes, as the comparison speaks volumes about the intent and techniques employed in the creation of each.

This post finds me simultaneously elated and frustrated.

I’m elated because, like many other fans of William Stout’s paleontological illustrations, I’ve been waiting several decades for a suitable follow-up to his terrific 1981 book The Dinosaurs. (There was an expanded update, The New Dinosaurs in 2000, that was welcome, but not the same as a new book.)

A beautiful book of Stout’s Prehistoric Life Murals for the San Diego Museum of Natural History was released last year; but as much as I enjoyed that book, it still wasn’t the follow up to The New Dinosaurs, that I and many others have been hoping for.

The reason for that is that the murals, as striking as they are, are direct paintings, but the illustrations for The New Dinosaurs were in a style that is unusual for paleo art, but at which Stout particularly excels.

Most dinosaur art is either fully painted, or monochromatic pen and ink (there are exceptions, of course, like Douglas Henderson’s wonderful charcoal drawings); but the majority of Stout’s images for The New Dinosaurs were pen and ink with watercolor. This approach has all of the visual charm of Stout’s refined pen and ink work, combined with a beautiful application of color.

Pen and ink with watercolor is an approach that I enjoy in general, but particularly in the case of Stout’s application of it to images of dinosaurs, in which the textures of the animals and their environments are ideal subjects for the style.

(I like this approach so much that I used it, or a digital variation of it, for my own dinosaur illustrations for my dinosaur themed iPhone app; but I’m nowhere near Stout’s degree of mastery.)

The good news is that Flesk Publications, a small publisher that specializes in superbly produced books on art, illustration and comics (and which printed the aforementioned book of Stout’s paleo murals) has released not one but two absolutely beautiful new books of William Stout dinosaur art, Dinosaur Discoveries and New Dinosaur Discoveries A-Z.

The first is the true long-awaited successor to The New Dinosaurs, surpassing it in many ways. Beautifully produced in the tradition Flesk has established, Stout’s prehistoric pen and ink and watercolor marvels just jump off the page. It showcases 61 new dinosaurs that have been discovered in the last 20 years.

The hardback is a limited edition of 500 copies, numbered and signed by the artist with a bound-in plate not published in the subsequent paperback edition.

The second book is a smaller edition in which some of the material from the larger volume has been elegantly arranged into an A-Z children’s dinosaur book. While it shares content with the larger volume, Stout fans will want both, as they present the material differently enough to not seem redundant (plus they’re just so wonderfully designed and printed).

You can read publisher John Fleskes’ account of The Process behind the New Stout Books on his blog.

Though Amazon lists the books as not yet released, all three (New Dinosaur Discoveries A-Z and the hardbound and softbound editions of Dinosaur Discoveries) are available now from the Flesk Publications web site, as well as William Stout’s site.

OK, so why the part about being frustrated when Dinosaur Discoveries is, indeed, the Stout paleo art book I’ve been waiting for all these years?

Well, my frustration centers on my limited ability to point you to images from the books. Neither Flesk or Stout have seen fit to show a gallery of work from the books on the web, though there are a few scattered images you can look at.

I know that both artists and publishers have concerns about images (particularly terrific dinosaur images) being “borrowed” and spread around the web; but if you want to sell these books, you should let people know how great they look (with some detail images, come on)!

Anyway, below is what I can find on the Flesk site; but the best, and largest, images I can point you to (short of the books themselves, of course) are to be found in a download the Flesk Catalog from the right hand column of the Flesk site’s home page (from which I extracted the detail image above, bottom).

In the meanwhile, I’m happily camping out in the comfy chair with a cup of tea and my copy of Dinosaur Discoveries.

Linda Olafsdottir was born in Reykjavík, Iceland, studied at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, and then moved to San Francisco to study at the Academy of Art University. She now resides in California.

Her web site has examples of both her illustration and her gallery paintings, as well as a sketchbook section and a blog.

Olafsdottir’s illustrations have an appealing innocence and charm, and range from sketch-like to more naturalistically rendered. Her gallery painting likewise show a range of approach. I found many of the drawings in her sketchbook particularly appealing.

Her blog includes many preliminary sketches for her finished illustrations, and often puts the images in context with the book project for which they were completed.

Nancy Friese is a painter and printmaker who studied at the Yale University School of Art, the graduate painting program at the University of California, Berkeley and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. She divides her time between Rhode Island and North Dakota and teaches at Rhode Island School of Design.

Her landscape paintings have a bright, almost effervescent feeling of splashes of color, with radiant high-chroma passages contrasted with more subtle hues.

At times her oil paintings have a bit of a feeling of gouache, in areas of color that are perceived as shapes, rather than blended passages or impressionistic dabs.

Her skies are frequently filled with roiling cumulous clouds, glowing with violets and reds. There is often a feeling of motion in her canvasses, not in the sense of depicting objects in motion, but a feeling that the colors themselves are in motion.

The color feels like it is straining against its bounds, as if trying to burst from the canvas, but is securely held in place by her firmly balanced compositions.

One might think from looking at her work that they are studio paintings, but my understanding is that most, if not all, of her canvasses are painted on location; and many of them are large scale.

Her web site has a gallery of oils, as well as a selection of prints and watercolors.

There is a good article about the artist on Painting Perceptions, which is where I encountered her work.

Matteo Pericoli is an Italian architect, illustrator and author. His drawings have appeared in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Travel and Leisure and Conde Nast Traveller.

He is known for his Manhattan Unfurled project, in which he drew two 37 foot (11 meter) long scrolls with detailed skylines of the East and West sides of Manhattan. The drawings took two years and encompassed over 1,500 buildings and 19 bridges.

These were collected into a book, presented as a 24 panel, 22 foot (6.7 meter) long fold-out. You can see a very small scrolling version of them on Pericoli’s web site.

Pericoli also did a 397 foot (121 meter) mural called Skyline of the World for The American Airlines terminal at JFK Airport, depicting an amalgamation of many of the world’s great buildings and skylines.

Pericoli has a new project, also released as a book, The City Out My Window: 63 Views on New York; in which he captures the view, not out of his own window, but out of the windows of notable New York residents, like David Byrne (image above, top), Stephen Colbert, Tom Wolfe, Nora Ephron, Wynton Marsailis, Philip Glass, Annie Leibovitz, Mikail Barishnikov and many others.

Along with his drawings, Pericoli has collected comments from the individuals about their view; many of whom also say that his drawings have caused them to see their familiar view with fresh eyes. There is a pop-up from the link in the title on this page, that shows a few of the drawings and comments.

There is an article and slide show of drawings from the project on the NYT site; and there was a story on Pericoli this morning on the CBS Sunday Morning magazine show.

There is also a selection of other drawings on Pericoli’s web site.