Your First Print is a rich media eBook by David Bull. Bull is an English born Canadian printmaker, now living in working in Japan, who has an extraordinary devotion to the art and craft of Japanese woodblock printing.

That devotion is evident not only in his own work, but in his study of the art, and in the efforts he has made in assembling and disseminating information about the process. He has presented that information for a number of years in his extensive and highly informative website, woodblock.com, and is now extending that through a series of eBooks as part of a new publishing venture, Mokuhankan.

For background on the artist, his process and work, please see my previous post on David Bull.

Your First Print is an offshoot of the Mokuhankan venture, the primary purpose of which is to publish woodblock prints by other artists. Bull points out that though the devotion to making woodblock prints, a strong tradition in Japan, is very much alive among devotees of the art, the publication and sale of prints has faded. However, those exposed to woodblock prints for the first time are often dazzled by how beautiful they are and and how fascinating they can be.

Likewise, even those knowledgeable about western printmaking may be surprised and fascinated by the differences in the traditional methods of Japanese Woodblock printing. For example, no press is used in making an impression. The traditions of Japanese and European printmaking (which began to cross-pollinate in the 19th Century, see my post on Hokusai), have fascinating parallels as well as divergences.

Your First Print is an elegant and painstakingly crafted electronic book, in rich media PDF format, that introduces the reader to the process, providing an introduction to both those interested in pursuing the art and those who simply wish to deepen their appreciation of the process behind the art.

The eBook is divided into chapters and subchapters, taking the reader through the entire process, from selecting the materials to final printings and even troubleshooting things like misregistration and chipped or damaged blocks.

The text and photographs are supplemented with audio and video files. There are two versions. The downloadable version calls its multimedia files from the internet, the CD-ROM version is self contained. Both require version 9 of the free Adobe Reader in order to access the multimedia content (and convenient drop-down navigation). Those Mac users who, like me, prefer Preview as a PDF reader will need to use the Adobe reader if you want to access the video and audio.

There is a Sample Download PDF available (toward the bottom of this page) that gives you a preview of 24 pages from the the book (“pages” in this case actually refer to horizontal screen-wide spreads). There is also a Support Forum on the Woodblock.com site, in which readers can compare notes, ask questions and generally discuss the process of traditional Japanese printmaking.

In addition to Your First Print, there is a Catalogue of other items, with gems like classic texts by great Japanese printmakers, including Japanese Wood-Block Printing by Hiroshi Yodhida, one of my favorite printmakers.

For more on David Bull’s own work, you can view a number of his print series on the site, including his Hanga Treasure Chest small print series and the 12 prints for My Solitdes. The latter has a fascinating companion page, in which you can view interactives that allow you to click through the stages of printing impressions for the individual pieces. It is in pieces like these that I enjoy Bull’s work most, where European and Japanese visual traditions meet and blend, as in the image at left, The Seacoast in Autumn (original here).

For more on traditional Japanese woodblock prints, see some of my previous posts on Hiroshi Yoshida, Kawase Hasui, Katsushika Hokusai, Ito Shinsui, Utagawa: Masters of the Japanese Print 1770-1900 at the Brooklyn Museum and Exquisite Visions of Japan.

Freelance illustrator and concept artist Jason Caffoe works on a number of projects for which he can’t show or talk about his recent work, but his blog does have some work from older projects, along with engaging images from personal projects.

There is one current project that he can discuss, his contributions as colorist, background painter and concept artist for the second and third books of Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet graphic novel.

The first two books of Amulet are now available, The Stonekeeper, and The Stonekeeper’s Curse . The third book is still in production. You can see some of the pages from book 2 on this interview with Kazu Kibuishi on Newsarama that also references Caffoe’s involvement with the project. (For more see my posts on Amulet and Kazu Kibuishi.

Caffoe also did some color art for Jake Parker’s Missle Mouse (here’s my post on Jake Parker).

Among Caffoe’s personal pieces on the blog are landscape concepts, fantasy themed drawings and dinosaurs, a subject always of interest to me (grin). Though his site doesn’t include an online portfolio, one is available in PDF form from links on the splash page or sidebar.

Caffoe is a co-founder with Matt Kohr of the collaborative blog Concept CoOp.

He also contributed to the Terrible Yellow Eyes project that I reported on here, (my post included his piece for the project at top). He was included in the Gallery Nucleus show for the project.

Caffoe’s work is currently part of another group show at Gallery Nucleus, Lift Off: The Art of Airships (image above, top) that runs to February 1, 2010.

Stephen Bissette is an American comics artist known for his drawings of monsters and dinosaurs and his work on horror comics titles, in particular for several award winning series of DC Comic’s Swamp Thing with writer Alan Moore.

The home page of Bissette’s site serves as a blog, though there is also a specific blog section called MYRANT, and he also maintains an archive of his old version of MYRANT.

There is a Gallery of comic pages, though they are too small to really see his drawing style unless you engage the “Full Screen” mode at lower left of the slide show. There is also a gallery of his original art for sale on ComicArtFans.com.

The current site also includes a new online comic series, King of Monster Isle, and there is a Comic Archive of some of his previous online comics and sketches.

Bissette currently teaches classes in drawing and comic art at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont (see my 2007 post on the Center for Cartoon Studies).

A series of videos from two of Bissette’s CCS lecture/demos are viewable on YouTube (images above, links at the end of this post), in which he demonstrates various comic rendering and inking techniques, including markers, brush and pen. He also shows techniques for working back into inked drawings with white out dispensers and by scratching with razor blades.

The demos include segments in which Bissette works on two of his illustrations for Joseph A. Citro’s The Vermont Monster Guide (more info here). A shorter series of video demos are here on his web site.

[Video link via Lexington KY Comic Creators Group, King of Monster Isle link via Paleoblog]

Gwenn Seemel is an Oregon based portrait artist with an unusual technique. her colorful portrait images are built up from a series of cross hatch strokes in acrylic, a process she developed from an interest in printmaking.

As you can see from the demo on this page, she starts with areas of color shapes, often with a modernist, geometric feel that often carries through to the final piece, and works up the surface gradually with several passes of hatching and shape delineation.

The end result is often a very graphic surface of multiple marks, a textural array of colors that blend to form the portrait image, as in the detail image above, bottom.

Seemel works from digital photos taken during an hour long interview process in which she asks the subject to talk about themselves.

The image above, top right is a self-portrait.

[Suggestion courtesy of Karin Jurick]

I don’t often talk about my own work here on Lines and Colors, but every once and a while there’s something interesting enough to mention.

I was particularly pleased when I learned that my dinosaur mix and match iPhone app DinoMixer was given a very nice review this morning on Wired.

The review, Build Your Own Dinosaurs With DinoMixer, is by Jonathan Liu and is on Wired’s GeekDad blog. GeekDad is a fascinating and always well written blog about technology, science and related topics, ostensibly aimed at parents, but really of interest to anyone who still has a inner child (grin).

DinoMixer is an iPhone app for which I created the concept, art and design, and partnered with Leon Stankowski of Mobomia, who did the programming.

I wrote a previous article about my experience creating art for the app: DinoMixer: on creating art for an iPhone app, and I’ve since created the design and illustration for another iPhone app called MonsterMixer.

There is a web site for DinoMixer here. You can also see some of the DinoMixer illustrations on my CafePress T-shirt store for Dinosaur Cartoons. I’ll soon be adding them to a similar Zazzle T-shirt store for Dinosaur Cartoons (and perhaps be reporting on the relative value of each).

The GeekDad review was nice not only for the positive comments, but for the helpful suggestions (like adding an audio pronunciation of the dinosaur names). Creating something like an iPhone app is in many ways similar to the creation of an individual illustration or other artwork, a process of learning and refinement, constantly striving to get better.

But, also like illustration and other art, it’s nice when you get some positive feedback.

Since I last wrote about painter Karen Hollingsworth in 2006, she has continued exploring her luminous room interiors, which have evolved into “windowscapes”.

Many painters will work to fill rooms with light, but Hollingsworth’s rooms are volumetrically filled with the palpable presence of light and air. Sea air lifts gossamer curtains, through which sunlight slides, scatters and bounces, playing across polished wooden floors and chairs, cascades of linen bedsheets or tablecloths arrayed with colorful fruit.

Light and air almost seem like competing forces, light filling a space like water in a jar, and air stirring it around, moving your eye through the space across the diagonals of swept up curtains.

In the galleries on her site you can browse through her recent archives of windowscapes, along with “roomscapes” with somewhat weightier contents, as well as portraits, still life and commissioned work.

Karen Hollingsworth is married to painter Neil Hollingsworth, who I profiled here and here.

When I revisited the Cover Browser site in the course of writing my recent post on CBR’s 50 Best Comic Covers of 2009, I discovered that an entirely new sister site had been added, Vintage Ad Browser.

The collection includes ads in a variety of genres, arranged within them by decade. Some categories go back into the 18th Century, but I focused on the turn of the 20th Century, looking for some of the ads done by “Golden Age” illustrators, both well known and obscure, before the emphasis in advertising shifted to photography. Unfortunately, there is no attempt to give artist credits (it would be a daunting task, to say the least), but you can just browse for interesting images.

You can select a category (I had some luck with “Beauty & Hygiene” and “Clothes“) and search back through the years for images of ads from that era. Once inside a particular decade, there are usually several subsequent pages of ads (small “Next” link at bottom).

There are sections on propaganda posters (see my post on Propaganda Posters, and here), movies, toys, food, cars, military topics, sports, tobacco and all manner of stuff that has been advertised over the years. It’s a amazing conglomeration of advertising styles, approaches, topics and, best of all, illustration styles.

Some of the initial images are a bit rough, but many of them are linked to higher resolution versions that look much better.

They’re not all gems, of course, far from it in some cases; but the gems are there if you’re willing to do some clicking and searching.

I’ve mentioned before (also here) that the attribution of works to artists from the past is often an inexact science, perhaps more of an art in itself.

Attributions change, and works once identified with one artist are subsequently assigned to another, or often, to pupils of the artist. Sometimes the reverse happens, and works once assigned to another hand are recognized as coming from that of the master.

The Getty Museum is currently exploring this concept with an exhibit titled Drawings by Rembrandt & His Pupils: Telling the Difference.

In the web site material for the exhibit is an interactive that compares drawings by Rembrandt side by side with similar drawings by his students and contemporaries; many of the latter drawings having once been attributed to Rembrandt.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about the exhibit that also has an interactive. In this case they present the compared sets of drawings without initially identifying the artist, letting you play detective in determining which is by Rembrandt. (It’s hard to predict if this article may disappear behind a pay-wall at some point.)

The interactive on the Getty’s site allows you to zoom in on the images, affording a detailed view of the drawings.

Drawings by Rembrandt & His Pupils: Telling the Difference runs to February 28th at the Getty Center. There is a concurrent exhibit, Drawing Life: The Dutch Visual Tradition, that should provide a rich context for the Rembrandt show.

There is also a virtual exhibit called Rembrandt in Southern California, that features images of 14 Rembrandts on view in five Southern California Museums.

For more background, and lots more Rembrandt drawings, see Rembrandt’s Drawings on Jonathan Janson’s Rembrandt van Rijn: Life and Work, and my posts on that site (formerly called Rembrandt: life, paintings, etchings, drawings and self portraits), and Jonathan Janson.

There is a book published to accompany the exhibit: Drawings by Rembrandt and His Pupils: Telling the Difference; and there is also a nice book of Rembrandt drawings that came out in 2007: Rembrandt Drawings: 116 Masterpieces in Original Color.