As usual, this year’s wonderfully talented (and obviously superbly instructed) crop of students from the Gobelins, l’école de l’image (Goeblins School of Communications) in Paris have created short (60-90 second) animated films that are shown as introductions to the events of each day of the years’ Festival International du Film d’Animation d’Annecy (Annecy Animation Festival).

Also as usual, these are wonderful, whimsical, charming, beautifully realized and reaffirming of the lively state of hand drawn animation.

(Film titles for image above: M. Eustache, Soapy Trip, Chaman, Junk Space, Red River Bay)

[Via Articles & Texticles, as usual)

Sandra Wakeen is a Connecticut based painter who transitioned from a career in illustration and commercial art into portraiture, then added still life and landscape to her subjects.

She has traveled and studied in Europe, most recently with Tony Ryder at Studio Escalier in France.

Wakeen’s portfolio website showcases her crisp, sharply focused still lifes, portraits, drawings and landscapes. My favorites are the landscapes that incorporate objects like large vases and similar objects, making them in a way outdoor still lifes. Her other, less extensive website has a few examples of her illustrative works.

Threadless is an online T-shirt store in which designs are solicited form the community and put up for popular vote. A few of the highest rated designs are then selected by the company for sale and the designers are paid a set fee.

The designs are usually gently humorous, wry or clever in some way.

Coty Gonzales, who writes a blog in which he reviews T-shirts, has posted a series of Threadless T-shirt designs with corresponding preliminary sketches, 76 Threadless T-Shirts From Sketch to Print.

I always enjoy seeing the preliminary sketches for finished illustrations or paintings.

(Images above, in sketch and final pairs: Justin White, Terry Fan and Eric Fan, Alvaro Arteaga Sabaini)

After a career as an illustrator with clients in the recording and movie industries, California artist Craig Nelson transitioned into gallery art full time.

Nelson has a lively, painterly approach in his paintings of landscapes, towns and portraits. Some of his recurring subjects include workers in vinyards, the narrow streets and canals of Italian towns, New York City, fishing boats, the California coast and patrons in cafes.

His palette is often high chroma, but at times subdued. He enjoys exploring the play of light and contrasts in value between foreground and background elements.

Nelson graduated form the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and retuned to teach there. He is currently Director of Fine Art, Drawing and Painting at Academy of Art College in San Francisco.

In addition he teaches occasional figurative and plein air workshops and has series of instructional videos and a book, 60 Minutes to Better Painting: Improve Your Skills in Oil and Acrylic.

Mary Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale was an Edwardian period English artist who achieved some success as and illustrator, gallery artist and stained glass designer.

She studied at the Crystal Palace School of Art and then at Royal Academy, and was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society.

She illustrated children’s books, Authurian ledgends and poetry by well known authors including Tennyson and Browning, initially in pen and ink and later in color.

Her gallery paintings were in the spirit of the Pre-Raphaelites, rich with jewel-like color, literary themes and the luxurious detail characteristic of the style.

At a time when women artists were restricted in their access to art instruction and often compartmentalized as lesser than their male counterparts, Fortescue-Brickdale earned the respect of both the fine art and illustration establishments with her outstanding work.

[Via Victorian / Edwardian Paintings]

I’m just guessing, but I have a notion that Seattle based illustrator Kathryn Rathke’s early fascination with art may have coincided with an interest in hand calligraphy.

Her drawings, both black and white and color, are based on wonderfully calligraphic lines — dancing, looping and jogging across the page; at times almost seeming to construct an image in their wake as a byproduct of their movement.

I don’t know whether she works in traditional media or works digitally with a stylus and tablet, but she prepares her finals in Photoshop or Illustrator.

Along with well spotted blacks and judicious applications of fresh color, the fluid and playful character of her lines, in the tradition of line wizards like Al Hirschfeld and Saul Steinberg, gives her images an additional level of visual interest beyond their immediate impact.

Rathke’s clients include The Washington Post, The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, The Economist, Time Warner and Paramount Pictures.

[Via LCSV4]

Tough perhaps not definitive in terms of image quality or resolution, the Vincent van Gogh Gallery is nonetheless a terrific resource on the iconic Dutch artist, notable for the breadth of the material it presents.

As a labor of love for 14 years, Canadian David Brooks has attempted to collect an online catalog raisonné of Van Gogh’s works, no mean feat given the artist’s prolific nature.

There are catalogues of Van Gogh’s paintings arranged chronologically, alphabetically or by category in both text and thumbnailed listings. There are also galleries of his watercolors, graphics and letter sketches, as well as his wonderfully textural and often unjustly overlooked drawings.

Even if you have a dozen books on Van Gogh, you will likely be delighted here to encounter paintings and drawings that you have never seen.

I found it particularly enjoyable to browse by category, getting that way more of a mix and juxtaposition of time periods, from the dark earth tones of his early work to the brilliant sunbursts from Arles and Saint-Rémy.

You can also browse another Van Gogh Gallery that offers a complete catalog of paintings, though in a less flexible variety of access.

For a more definitive view of Van Gogh and his works, see the excellent resources on the site of the Van Gogh Museum, which I recently mentioned in my post about the restoration of his famous painting The Bedroom.

For additional resources on the artist, including museum listings and other image archives, see the Van Gogh listings on Artcyclopedia.

The joy here, though, is in the discovery of works by Van Gogh outside the 100 or so that you usually encounter.

Lisa Brawn is a Canadian artist working in the medium of woodcut. Unusual enough these days, she adds several elements to the process that make it even more unique.

One is her choice of wood. Woodcut a painstaking relief printmaking process in which the “negative” areas, those not to be printed, are carved away leaving the parts to be inked raised as part of the original surface (as opposed to intaglio processes, like etching, in which the lines that receive ink are lower than the surface).

Most artists working in woodcut choose wood with an even grain and smooth surface, commonly beechwood, cherry or walnut. Brawn has worked that way, but she responded to the opportunity a couple of years ago to by five truckloads of salvaged douglas fir beams from dismantled grain elevators and the restoration of the Alberta Block in Calgary, wood that has knots, holes and gouges and is often peppered with rusty nails, wood with a history, as she puts it.

Brawn has matched her quirky choice of materials with a quirky range of subjects, largely portraits of figures from history and pop culture, as well as several series of animal subjects. When searching through her online gallery of woodcuts, which you can do by year or alphabetically by subject, you can have a single page in which the subjects include Da Vinci, Dirty Harry, Dorothy Parker, David Suzuki, David Bowie, Don Cherry, the Dalai Lama, a deer and a duck.

Another aspect of her work that is unusual is the role of the woodblock itself. Usually prints are pulled from the block until it is retired at the end of the decided upon run. While Brawn pulls a small run of monochromatic prints from her blocks, it is the blocks themselves that stand out and are presented as art objects, with the raised areas painted black, as though inked, and the recessed areas painted in bright colors.

The other unusual feature of Brawn’s work is her use of patterns and decorative elements in the backgrounds, and sometimes within the faces, of her subjects.

She follows up on her other eccentricities with a penchant for alternative display spaces and unusual venues for her work, including Surgarmobile, a 1935 silver travel trailer that she used for a time as a mobile gallery.

[Via Metafilter]