I don’t know much about Jonatan Cantero; his blog doesn’t have much in the way of biographical information. He is a young illustrator living in Barcelona, Spain, and is apparently working toward a career in comics, though not yet published in the field.

His blog and deviantART page have some examples of his work, many of them featuring his small bean-like characters involved in things like harvesting strawberry pulp by mining operation or gathering pollen in buckets while incurring the displeasure of bees.

I was really taken with this piece, particularly when viewed large (large version here), and hope to see more from Cantero as he progresses.

[Via Monster Brains]

Illustrator and gallery artist Eric Fortune creates images that are at once fantastical and emotionally immediate. His subjects, often elongated and in motion, seem isolated but straining to connect, adrift in worlds just beyond their understanding.

His paintings, are done in acrylic on watercolor paper, and always have a strong element of texture, complimenting his often muted palette and tonally complex compositions. Shadows and half light play a frequent role, with areas of illumination moving your eye to the core elements.

Fortune studied at Columbus College of Art and Design. His clients include Simon & Schuster, Tor Books, Harcourt Brace, Scholastic and Realms of Fantasy. Lately he has been focusing more in gallery work with showings at Opera Gallery (NY), Copro Nason Gallery (LA), LeBasse Projects (LA), Roq La Rue Gallery (Seattle), Gallery 1988 (LA) and others.

There is a step-by-step process of the image above, bottom on Arrested Motion, and a step through of another image on a blog post from Irene Gallo on Tor.com.

Fortune also has a blog, and there is a nice introductory gallery on the Tor.com site.

Even among fans of his comic art masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland (a group of whom I count myself an ardent member), few people are aware of the editorial cartoons of Winsor McCay.

During his stints as cartoonist for The Cincinnati Enquirer and The New York Herald, and through syndicated work for the Hearst papers, McCay did a remarkable series of editorial and allegorical cartoons. More social commentary than topically editorial, they were anti-materialism, anti-laziness, anti-drug and pro hard work and duty.

The best thing about them, of course, is that they were wonderfully drawn by one of one of the best draftsmen in the history of cartooning and comics.

In 2005 Fantagraphics published a terrific collection of McCay’s black and white work, Daydreams and Nightmares: The Fantastic Visions of Winsor McCay, 1898-1934 (more here), that is unfortunately out of print, but can be found used for essentially original cover price ($20).

In addition to McCay’s social commentary/editorial cartoons, the book includes pages of his early strips like Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, A Pilgrim’s Progress, Day Dreams and Little Sammy Sneeze. (Sunday Press published wonderful large-scale version of the latter, with color; my article here.)

Only a smattering of McCay material is online, but the generous and enigmatic “Mr. Door Tree” has published a number of McCay’s editorial cartoons on his blog Golden Age Comic Book Stories. Be sure to click on the initial images to see the large versions of the drawings.

Wonderful stuff.

[Link via BitterOldPunk on MetaFilter]

Christine Lafuente studied at Byn Mawr College, The Barnes Foundation and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; and is continuing her study at Brooklyn College in New York.

Lafuente blurs the line between representational and non representational painting, and moves further over it than I am usually inclined to follow; but her use of color and value, and the way she treats her brush strokes as textural elements and objects in themselves, captured my attention.

She works with splashes of color, their borders often indistinct, dissolving but never quite losing the underlying form. There is sometimes a feeling that the paintings are in motion. Wonderful smudges and swipes of paint coalesce to suggest objects, dissolve again into the background and recombine as another object.

Lafuente currently has a solo show the Gross McCleaf Gallery here in Philadelphia that runs until February 24th, 2010. I can’t find a dedicated web presence for her, but I’ve added some other links below.

I don’t normally feature photography on Lines and Colors, not that I don’t think of photography as an art form; I just feel that it’s dealt with better on many other sites, and seems different enough to be in a separate category from the art forms I feature.

But the photographs of Michael Paul Smith just charmed my socks off, and there is more to them then excellent photography. In the images you see above, the houses, cars and streets are 1/24th scale (1/2 inch = 1 foot; 1 m = 4.16 cm).

The cars are die-cast models; the buildings are built by Smith, constructed out of Gator board, plastics such as styrene and Sintra, and found objects (and it looks like the old model makers standby of lichen for shrubs).

The outdoor scenes are set up on a table and photographed against real backgrounds. The interior ones, lit very simply but cleverly, are photographed in Smith’s garage.

There is no digital manipulation, no GCI, no Photoshop compositing; it’s all in the models and the original shot from the camera.

My father, among his other skills, was a museum model maker, so this has a particular resonance for me. He, my brother and I spent many happy hours working on train layouts and even helping him construct his museum models; but we never managed photographs of them that had this kind of emotional depth.

Smith says: “What started out as an exercise in model building and photography, ended up as a dream-like reconstruction of the town I grew up in. It’s not an exact recreation, but it does capture the mood of my memories.’

There is a two page Flickr set of his photographs, (and here), many of the compositions have been photographed in both color and black and white, the latter looking uncannily like actual photos from the era Smith is recreating.

I know little about Martin Ansin, save that he is a free lance illustrator living and working in Montevideo, Uraguay. His web site and blog don’t contain a great deal of biographical information.

His portfolio includes posters for The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, and Taming Light, a group exhibition in Dublin inspired by the films of Stanley Kubrick.

His approach varies from a semi-rendered line and tone style, as in the Phanton of the Opera poster above, to a more fully rendered technique. His archives also include comics and comics themed illustration.

[Note: a couple of images on these sites may be considered mildly NSFW.]

California artist Johathan Bernard Koch studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Since then, he has apparently has had a successful career as an illustrator, with clients like The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune and Rodale Books, and has been honored by the Society of Illustrators New York; but I can’t find an online portfolio of his illustration work.

What is available online, however, is Koch’s painting blog, A Small Painting. Crediting Duane Keiser, Julian Merrow-Smith and Justin Clayton with inspiring him to start, Koch posts his small paintings (and sometimes larger ones) of still life subjects and landscapes, and offers them for sale.

Unlike most painter/bloggers, Koch does not sell his paintings through auction, or even list their price on the blog, asking instead that interested parties contact him for information.

There is a page of Available Work, but it is a small fraction of the posted images. There is also an Archive page in which you can browse thumbnails, but I recommend browsing leisurely through the posted works by clicking on the left arrow, or simply clicking on the images of the paintings, to view them full size as you go.

Much of the appeal of Koch’s work is in his deft handling of texture, contrasts of rough and smooth and delicate shimmers of restrained color.

He has a more rendered style than most painters who frequently post small paintings, and he obviously posts when a painting is ready and not on a pre-determined schedule (note the absence of a frequency in the name of his blog).

His still life paintings are composed against textural or dark backgrounds, and have a feeling of Dutch master still life. Koch has a wonderful command of soft and “lost and found” edges.

Despite the fact that he often renders more smoothly than many contemporary still life painters, much of Koch’s work consists of suggestion; he hints at where the curve of an onion or the edge of a glass jar might end against a dark background, and lets your eye fill in the rest.

His landscapes likewise have a feeling of soft edges, soft light, controlled color and gentle atmospherics, frequently evoking stillness and contemplation.

Bill Watterson, the artist and writer of Calvin and Hobbes, to my mind the best late 20th Century comic strip after Pogo ceased publication in 1975, is almost as notable for the things he didn’t do as for his actual accomplishments.

He didn’t accept the idea of merchandising his popular characters to the hilt, and resisted his syndicate’s constant pressure to do so, allowing only the publication of book collections of the strip and calendars. No stuffed characters, no Hobbes dolls hung upside-down with suction cups to the inside of station wagon windows, no notebooks, sticker books, T-shirts, TV specials or Burger King soda cups. Just the strip, pure and simple.

And it was pure and simple, a classic humor strip, brilliantly written and wonderfully drawn. He didn’t overcomplicate it, try to make it too topical or stretch it beyond its natural limits. When he felt the strip had run its course, Watterson retired, and again resisted any desire on the part of the syndicate to keep it alive artificially and milk it into oblivion.

Watterson himself did not seek the spotlight, preferring to let his characters do the talking, and rarely gave interviews. There was a brief interview with Watterson published in yesterday’s Celveland Plain Dealer (which I believe is his hometown newspaper). The interview was conducted by email, and is very short and not particularly revealing, but worth noting just as an event.

You’ll see it marked as the first in 20 years, but that discounts the question and answer with fans that his book publisher, Andrews McMeel, conducted in 2005 to promote the release of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

The cleveland.com site has also posted a selection of rarely seen editorial cartoons by Watterson from his stint with Sun Newspapers in the 1980′s. Unfortunately, as in the images above, the reproductions in their slideshow have apparently been poorly resized and lost some of their original line quality.

At any rate, it’s a good excuse to stop, pick up a Calvin and Hobbes book you haven’t read in a while, and be reminded that “there’s treasure everywhere”.

[Via Daring Fireball]