In drawing, particularly pen and ink drawing, stipple refers to the painstaking technique of creating tones by laying down areas of dots, the density of which creates areas of varying tone. It’s almost a handmade analog to the pre-printing screening of photographs, though the technique long preceded photography.

Stipple was important to classic illustrators, such as Dorothy Lathrop, and is associated in particular with noted pulp science fiction illustrator Virgil Finlay. The technique went through something of a revival in the 1960′s, both among science fiction illustrators who carried on Finlay’s tradition, like Robert Walters, and among underground cartoonists, notably Fred Schrier and Dave Sheridan.

In general, however, the technique doesn’t have many adherents due to the work intensive, patience demanding nature of the process. I’ve done some stipple illustrations myself, and I can testify to the demanding nature of laying down hundreds, if not thousands, of dots to create smooth tones.

Contrary to what you might think if you haven’t tried it, you cannot apply stipple mindlessly; the dots must be laid down carefully, with attention to the spacing between them. Get two dots too close to each other and you have a glaring error, dark enough to stand out in your otherwise smooth tone.

Given the difficulty of the technique, it’s a delight to have a bastion of modern stipple illustration in the form of the “hedcuts” (“headline cuts”) that have graced the pages of the Wall Street Journal since 1979, when the style was codified by Kevin Sprouls. The WSJ hedcut style, in which stipple is used in conjunction with engraving-like cross hatching, is employed for small portraits of well known figures, and has become an identifying characteristic of the paper.

Noli Novak is one of the few people who does these illustrations professionally. Her clear, crisp application of the process produces portraits with some of the feeling of traditional engravings, but with a fresh, modern edge.

Novak and her colleagues work from photographs licensed by the Journal, meticulously hand drawing the illustrations that are often so true to the appearance of the subject that many people misinterpret the technique as some kind of sophisticated Photoshop filtering process. While there are some filters that work in that direction, attempting to apply screen-like effects that mimic engravings or stipple, I’ve never seen any of them come anywhere close to the drawings of a talented hedcut artist like Novak.

There is a visual charm to these drawings that, despite their echos of engraving and other graphics, is unique and particularly pleasing to the eye (in a way analogous to the unique visual charm of scratchboard).

Novak has been producing some of the best of the WSJ’s Hedcut portraits since 1987. Her website includes galleries of her drawings of celebrities, corporate and public figures, along with categories like Men, Women, Bald, Headgear and Bearded (the latter hilariously including a teddy bear).

Just so you don’t think that each category only contains 2 pieces, take note of the inexplicably small arrow to the lower right of the drawings, which leads to subsequent pages.

Novak also has a blog, titled, appropriately enough, Hedcuts, in which she discusses her work; including cases in which her work has been “borrowed” by other artists.

Her website also includes examples of her collage works, in which she often uses bits of newspaper as elements.

Novak was featured in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Picturing Business in America.

National Geographic has posted a selection of WPA sponsored Great Depression era posters created as promotions for the nation’s national parks.

There are no artist credits, and the selection is small, but the posters are graphically beautiful.

You can see more of these, though reproduced much smaller, on the Ranger Doug’s site, where they are offered as modern posters.

[Via BoingBoing]

I first encountered painter Justin Clayton when I included him in one of my early posts about Painting a Day blogs (and a subsequent post). Clayton has since moved away from the painting a day convention, but still posts small still life, landscape and figurative paintings to his blog on a frequent basis.

Clayton’s approach is direct and painterly, often with roughly textured backgrounds in his still life compositions, in which he also shows his fascination with the play of light and shadow.

Clayton studied at BYU, the Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art and the California Arts Institute; and cites as inspiration painters like William Nicholson, John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

In addition to his blog, Clayton has a website on which his paintings are arranged in thumbnail galleries by date or subject. You can also start with the latest work and click through them in sequence.

He also maintains a secondary blog devoted to his Beach Paintings, in which he continues to post paintings and photographs from a 2007 trip down the California coast, and additional work of a related nature since then.

He is also a member of the Daily Paintworks group of painters, who display their latest work together on a joint page. In addition there are three of Clayton’s process videos available on Vimeo.

The Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009 at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery was, as the name implies, held in 2009, but the exhibition of 49 works selected from the 3,300 entries is on display until September 6, 2010.

The museum has posted the finalists on this page, click on the thumbnails for larger versions.

The portraits encompass a range of styles and media, and the competition is meant to demonstrate the widening definition of portraiture and the role of portraits in art.

The website also has a Portrait of an Artist feature, in which several of the participating artists are highlighted and clicking through takes you to a statement by the artist and often additional images.

(Images at left: Phillip Schirmer, Chuck Close, Margaret Bowland, Jen Bandini)

Linear perspective is an attempt to codify the way that we perceive the relationships between the size of objects, and the shapes of objects, based on their relationship to us in three dimensional space and convey that perception on a two dimensional surface.

The most important rules of linear perspective are that objects appear smaller in the distance, and parallel lines converge on a hypothetical distant vanishing point.

In true reverse (or inverse) perspective, these rules are reversed, in that objects are larger in the distance and parallel lines converge in the direction of the observer’s position.

Reverse perspective is sometimes called Byzantine perspective because of its use in icon paintings, in which objects like thrones or platforms are depicted as wider on the portion farther from the observer. The notions that have been applied for explanation are that the important point of view is that of God, not of the human observer. Whether this is the actual intent is unknown, but it’s worth remembering that the invention of linear perspective postdates the Byzantine, so they could not have been using the reverse of codified rules they presumably didn’t have.

For those of us who have been exposed to linear perspective in images for all of our lives, the idea of reverse perspective is hard to visualize, but Jeremy Mooney-Somers has used 3-D graphics software (a modified version of Art of Illusion) to make an animated visualization of True Reverse Perspective.

I have to emphasize that the images above do not convey the idea. You must see the animated version to get the effect.

(It’s interesting to contrast this with with the Reverspective of Patrick Hughes; though not actually true reverse perspective, it’s an interesting variation on the way we perceive three dimensional relationships.)

[Via BoingBoing]

I’m sorry to report that Al Williamson, one of the greats of 20th Century comics art and a personal favorite of mine, died on Sunday at the age of 79.

For more see my posts on Al Williamson and Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic.

[Via io9 and CBR]

Enemy of the Impressionists, vilified by the modernists, autocratic teacher of Mary Cassatt, Thomas Eakins and several painters who would later be labeled American Impressionists, and one of the most controversial, successful and popular painters of the last half of the 19th Century, Jean-Léon Gérôme stood out from the labels of Orientalist and Academic that are usually applied to him.

Despite the criticisms that can be leveled at him (and there are justifications for several), Gérôme was above all a masterful painter; and it seems to be in that spirit that the Getty Center in Los Angeles is presenting The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme, an exhibition of his work over a span of 40 years.

The exhibition runs from tomorrow, June 15, to September 12, 2010.

For more, see my previous post on Jean-Léon Gérôme.

[Addendum: The exhibit is co-curated by Musée d'Orsay and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux in collaboration with the museum Thyssen-Bornemisza of Madrid. The exhibition will be at the Musée d'Orsay from 19 October 2010 to 23 January 2011.]

Massachusetts based fantasy artist Scott Fisher counts among his clients Simon and Schuster, Warner Brothers. Tor Books, Lucas Film Harcourt and Wizards of the Coast.

For the latter he has done a number of illustrations for their iconic Magic: The Gathering game, for which his work has a pleasantly different look than many of his contemporaries.

In the images of his that I like the most, he often divides the backgrounds into roughly geometric patterns, swathed with color and infused with interesting textures.

His subjects are then set against these patterns, with stylized garments swirling through the compositions, interweaving with areas of contrasting or blending values in the backgrounds.

Fischer’s website has examples of these, as well as his his work in concept design, book covers and a selection of personal work.

Fischer also works in a very different style in his alternate role as a children’s book illustrator. His work in this field is so different form his other illustrations that he has a separate section of his website with example of his illustrations for both younger and older kid’s books. He also does readings and performances for schools, and is the author of his own children’s book titles, Twinkle and Jump!.