David Wyatt is a UK illustrator known for his fantasy themed work.

He has illustrated books by a number of notable authors, including J.R.R. Tolkein, Terry Prachett, Phillip Pullman, Brian Jaques and Diana Wynne Jones.

After a brief bit of comics work on Tharg’s Future Shock for 2000AD, and a stint in a rock band, Wyatt focused on illustration.

He started working in traditional painting and drawing media, moved into digital illustration, and is now returning to occasional work in traditional media.

I was particularly taken with his pen and ink interior illustrations for Phillip Reeve’s Larklight series (images above, bottom). His intricate style is well suited to the “steampunk” settings of an alternate universe in which space travel is taking place in the Victorian era.

The pen and ink style carries over from his illustrations for The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

Unfortunately, Wyatt’s web site is a bit awkwardly arranged. There are sections listed at the bottom of the home page graphic, as well as a “current portfolio”, each of which must be entered separately, and browsing is made more difficult by uncooperative JavaScript thumbnail sliders.

Images in the current portfolio are a bit larger than the others, so you may want to start there. It includes work from his latest book project, Peter Pan in Scarlet by Geraldine McCaughrean.

[Via Eric Orchard]

Sandra Allen draws highly detailed and carefully rendered images of individual trees. Her charcoal and pencil drawings are large scale, often 6 feet (1.8meters) in height or more.

Allen received a BFA from UMass Dartmouth School of Art and an MFA from Yale University School of Art; and is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

In 2001 she started her series of tree drawings which she likens to “portraits”. They are represented without their foliage, and she revels in their structure as revealed by shadows of the forms overlapping other forms.

Her work is currently on exhibit at the New Britain Museum of American Art until January 24, 2010.

Walter Wick is a photo illustrator and children’s book author, best known for his highly popular “I Spy” and “Can You See What I See” books.

Wick works photographically, but instead of taking photographs of real world scenes, he constructs small dioramas, painstakingly designed, intricately crafted and carefully lit, that he then photographs. In a sense, his compositions are sculpted.

Wick starts with a sketch (image above, top), which is the basis for the model, often prepared by model makers out of polyurethane foam, then painted and finished, theatrically lit and photographed. Effects and certain elements, the sky in the case of the image shown here, are digitally painted in Photoshop.

The final images have a quality quite unlike either regular illustration or 3-D CGI. Perhaps the closest analogy is the models used in stop-motion animation, like Coraline.

There is a visual charm inherent in miniature scenes and dioramas that is unique. (I’m particularly fond of it, perhaps because my father, among his other skills, was a museum model maker.)

The Walter Wick site has a “Features” section with many delightful series of photographic mini-essays on how individual illustrations were created; several from each book series, as well as from his latest book, Walter Wick’s Optical Tricks.

There is an exhibit called Walter Wick: Games, Gizmos and Toys in the Attic, organized by the New Britain Museum of Art, that is currently at the Arkell Museum in Canajoharie, New York until February 15, 2010.

Painter, illustrator and blogger James Gurney (see my recent post on Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist) recently had the opportunity to visit Wick’s studio in Connecticut, and reports on the visit in this post on his blog Gurney Journey.

In the 1990′s, Richard Williams, the Canadian animator responsible for the brilliant animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, began teaching an Animation Masterclass in various locations around the world. It was attended by members of major studios like Disney, Pixar, ILM, Dreamworks/PDI and Warner Brothers; who knew a Good Thing when they saw it.

Williams’ Masterclasses became somewhat legendary, with participants often claiming that the course changed their lives, or at least the way in which they saw, understood and created animation. The courses, and Williams’ approach, are founded on an understanding and keen observation of motion, particularly human motion.

His influential lectures were later codified in a book called The Animator’s Survival Kit, considered a must-have standard by knowledgeable animators and animation students.

Williams also created a series of videos for which he gave his Masterclass lectures in front of the camera; and additionally created over 400 special animations illustrating various points and techniques.

A newly revised version of the series has been released as a 16-DVD boxed set, The Animator’s Survival Kit – Animated.

At over $1,000.00 USD, the set is not inexpensive; but neither would be a classroom course of this quality and depth, if you could find one.

Even the short clips on the web site, meant give you a taste of the video set’s major sections, are instructive and fascinating in themselves (4 bottom images above); though many aspiring animators may not like the first one (grin).

Just look at his brilliant description of how to make a character correctly mouth the word “Hello” (#13 Dialog 1, top left of this page). All of the others are worth watching as well.

I absolutely love the group walk cycle animation on the home page (still image at top), and the animated intro from which it is taken.

This review from Daniel Briney may give you some additional perspective on the course.

[Via Articles & Texticles, which has a 10 minute audio interview with Williams on the post]

I’m not one of those who thinks that the use of optical devices like a camera obscura (Wikipedia) or photographic reference is in some way “cheating” or diminishes the value of an artist’s work.

Artists have always used whatever visual aids were available to them, from grids of string across viewing frames to the old “thumb on the pencil” sighting trick. Thomas Eakins and Degas experimented with photographic reference when photography was in its infancy.

Noted American illustrator Norman Rockwell never made a secret of the fact that he used extensive photographic reference for his illustrations. Unlike Eakins and many other artists who used photography, Rockwell did not take his own photographs, preferring to leave the technical aspects in the hands of various professionals.

He did, however, compose the photographs, and every aspect of them, from composition to lighting to poses of the models (who were Rockwell’s friends and neighbors).

In effect he composed the photograph as a preliminary version of the composition of the painting, in much the same way as a preparatory drawing or study. The finished works often closely follow the layout Rockwell has established in the photographs.

There is a new book titled Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera that explores Rockwell’s process and makes many of the photographs available.

The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge Massachusetts (which incidentally has a newly redesigned web site) has mounted an exhibition, also called Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, in keeping with the release of the book. The exhibit is open now and runs until May 31, 2010

There are several examples on the site of the reference photographs compared with the finished paintings, a comparison I always find fascinating. You can find some more on the PDN Photo of the Day column.

There is also an article on NPR.org that gives additional background and includes audio of the Weekend Sunday Edition radio story.

[Via Gurney Journey]

Laurel Daniel is a painter from Austin, Texas, whose fondness for the practice of plein air painting gives her larger studio works a similar freshness and immediacy.

She studied at Wheaton College with additional coursework at San Francisco Academy of Art and Austin Museum Art School. In addition to painting full time she also teaches at the Austin Museum of Art.

Daniel has a web site on which you can see her plein air work, as well as studio pieces, divided into landscapes and waterscapes. Unfortunately, the images are small.

You will find larger images on her blog, on which she posts recent works and offers them for sale. She also has a second painting blog devoted specifically to small works; it’s an interesting and I think nice idea to sort them out that way.

Her former career in graphic design serves her well, in that it undoubtedly informs her strong compositions and clear, forceful use of color. Another aspect of her work, both in the studio and out, is a well developed sense of when to stop; avoiding the temptation to overwork a piece whose strength often comes from the crisp clarity of an immediate statement.

Don’t let my nit-picking about the web site dissuade you from visiting it as well as the blogs, there are delightful works to be found in all three locations.

Russian painter Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky (Hovhannes Aivazian) was born in Crimea, an island-like peninsula that extends the southern part of Ukraine into the Black Sea. In a career that spanned a good deal of the 19th Century, he painted nearly 6,000 canvases, over half of which were seascapes.

He painted the sea at rest and roiled with storms, studded with ships and clear of human presence, in day and night, Winter and Summer, through war and peace and from shore to open ocean. He is known as one of the great sea painters of the era.

Born into an Armenian family of few means, he earned a sponsorship to the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, from which he graduated with the Gold Medal at the age of 20. He was sent to Italy for further study and developed into a master painter who would earn the respect of greats like Delacroix and Turner, the latter referring to him as a genius.

His work is in the collections of numerous museums, including the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and his increasingly valuable work (at times fetching millions at auction) is reportedly a frequent subject of forgeries, perhaps because of the confusion of provenance created by his prolific output and the political instability of the region.

If Aivazovsky had a second fascination, it was with light. In his landscapes, light is an actor, moody, capricious and mercurial. In his seascapes, light and water are dancing partners, sweeping through a dizzying array of movement and theatrics. Illuminated clouds form a second seascape, an inverse of the subject in many of his works, and are portrayed in a dazzling variety of colors.

Fortunately there are several good resources for Aivazovsky’s work.

Addendum: Someone from All Art News was kind enough to remind me that Aivazovsky is also well represented on AllPaintings.org (see my post on AllPaintings.org). I’ve also added it to the list below.

Goro Fujita, who I wrote about in 2008, was kind enough to write and let me know about a new blog called Travisty’s Beard.

This is a collaborative art blog whose members are concept, production, character, and design artists from the art department of PDI/DreamWorks. The blog has no official relation to PDI/DreamWorks, it’s just the group of artists getting together to have fun.

The intention is to give themselves a challenge topic each month, and have the individual members respond by posting their interpretation of the topic. The blog takes its name from the initial topic, “What’s in Travesty’s Beard?”. The new topic for December is “New Year’s Resolution”.

This is a closed group, and the challenge is only among the members, but it should be fun to watch.

Though there isn’t a great deal of work posted yet, one of the most interesting parts of the blog at this point is the list of links in the right sidebar to the blogs and web sites of the participating artists, lots of work to see there.

(Images above: Goro Fujita, Lindsay Olivares, Shannon Jeffries)