Hobo Lobo of Hamlin is a side-scrolling webcomic by Stevan Zivadinovic that uses multiple planes scrolling at different rates to give a nice dimensional effect, augmented with other touches of animation.

My screen captures above attempt to give some idea of the changing relationship of the planes, but they’re inadequate to the task; you need to see the actual effect.

You can use the controls at top to move through the panoramic images one “scene” at a time, or just grab the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the window and have at it.

The animation and multi-plane scrolling are apparently created in HTML and JavaScript rather than Flash, which means you should be able to view the effects on the iPad, but outdated desktop browsers may have issues.

On his “What is this thing?” page, Zivadinovic implores users of Internet Explorer to get a real browser, as well as explaining a few other technical considerations and indicating his intended update schedule; according to which an update should be coming 1:25am (CDT) on this Friday, April 29th, 2011.

The strip, which appears to be loosely based on The Pied Piper of Hamlin, is only two sections long at the moment, but looks promising to be watched for coming updates.

Zivadinovic also has a primary website called The Nihilist Canary, where you can see more of his work.

[Via Scott McCloud]

Contemporary realist Rachel Constantine is based here in Philadelphia, where she studied at the University of the Arts, The Fleisher Art Memorial and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Her work is featured in Alla Prima: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Direct Painting by Al Gury, current chairman of the Painting department at PAFA; as well as in a number of other features and mentions in various periodicals.

Constantine has a nicely painterly approach, with rough edged areas of color contrasting with smoother passages in her definition of form.

She focuses primarily on figurative and portrait subjects, but you will also find lively still life subjects and muted, quiet landscapes, as well as a selection of drawings, on her website.

[Via Mike Manley]

Tokyo born artist Ray Morimura creates woodblock and linocut prints that manage to feel at once traditional and modern.

His crisp, sharp edges of color delineate forms that often repeat or combine to form patterns, at times varying in size to suggest perspective and distance.

Morimura studied painting at Tokyo Gakugel University. He originally worked in abstraction but, inspired by the prints of Shigeru Hatsuyama and Sumio Kawakami, he took up the study of woodplock prints.

[Via BibliOdyssey, on Twitter @BibliOdyssey]

I don’t know how small long-eared mammals (not to mention the shelled embryos of certain avian species and similarly shaped confections) came to be associated with the Christian holiday observance of Easter, but there they are, popping up in popular culture all over the place.

Jonathan Jones, writing in his OnArt blog on Guardian.co.uk, uses that association with the upcoming holiday to suggest his top five rabbits in art.

It’s a fun idea, but for one reason or another, his article is only accompanied (at least online) by a single image. I won’t second guess his choices (as I’m all onboard with four out of five), but I’ve take the liberty of supplementing his article with images and, where possible, links to better examples of the works he mentions.

Images above: The Virgin and Child with Saint Catherine and a Shepherd, known as The Madonna of the Rabbit by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), Young Hare by Albrecht Dürer, the March Hare from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Sir John Tenniel, Rabbit by Jeff Koons, early Bugs Bunny model sheet by Robert Givens.

Russian graphic artist and painter Boris Indrikov was born in Lenningrad and currently lives in Moscow.

He worked for some years as an illustrator and book designer, and now creates gallery art in oil, sculpture and graphics. Aside from that, there is little additional information on his website bio (English passage below the Russian).

The gallery page showcases his oil paintings, fascinatingly detailed and, as revealed in the close-up crops provided for some of the newer images (above, second down), wonderfully textured.

I see possible influences in his work from Aisian art, Renaissance painting, Art Nouveau, contemporary science fiction and fantasy illustrators like Jean “Moebius” Giraud and perhaps a touch of Max Ernst, all of it woven into Indrikov’s own unique style.

In addition to the gallery links on the navigation bar, don’t miss the link from the home page to the Violina Pattern gallery (above, bottom).

[Via BoingBoing]

Leif Peng, whose terrific blog Today’s Inspiration never fails to inform the mind and dazzle the eye, has recently published two posts on the great American Illustrator J.C. Leyendecker, adding to his already extensive posts on the subject: Leyendecker, Kuppenheimer, Arrow… and Beach and J.C. Leyendecker: “… a recluse locked in struggles of power and love in an ivory tower, driven by impossible goals that led to tragedy.”.

In them he has had the gracious cooperation of Roger Reed of Illustration House, extracting fascinating nuggets for the posts from Reed’s text for the brochure of the November ’97 – May ’98 J.C. Leyendecker Exhibit at the Norman Rockwell Museum.

Peng has accompanied the text with relevant illustrations drawn in large part from the Leyendecker Pool on Flickr, from which I have also sourced the images above.

When I was in my early teens, I spent many hours staring in goggle-eyed fascination at the illustrations in “science magazines”, like Popular Science, Popular Mechanics and Science and Mechanics, that depicted future tech.

The illustrators created scenes of potential space missions and spacecraft, both actually proposed and wildly imaginative, fantastic airships, monorails, undersea cities and other views of a promised idealized tech-wonderland future.

Apparently my adolescent counterparts in then-Soviet Russia were doing the same, as this wonderful Russian blog is showing us by posting vintage Russian science and space illustration from the 1960′s and 1970′s.

Like entertainment concept artists, these illustrators are showing us things that don’t exist, but might; in many cases, giving us and “X-ray” view with cutaways.

Even though most of the more fanciful future tech didn’t come to be (I’m still waiting for my personal rocket pack and driveway gyrocopter), fascination with this kind of illustration remains strong.

[Via ModernMecanix by way of BoingBoing]

Michael Reardon shows a master watercolorist’s skill for handling edges, from the delicate tonalist softness of mist shrouded foliage to the crisp sharpness of architectural forms, often contrasted in adjacent passages within the same work.

Reardon’s deft handling if architectural subjects, and the strong geometry underlying his compositions, no doubt owes something to his thirty plus years of experience in architectural illustration.

He paints his atmospheric and light filled landscapes and cityscapes both on location and in the studio. What I find particularly fascinating is his choice of strongly vertical compositions, which he uses to great effect in painting after painting.

In 2005, Reardon received the Gabriel Prize from the Western European Architecture Foundation, which included a three month residence in Paris to study some aspect of classical French architecture. He chose as his subjects the city’s 20th Century public fountains and painted many of them in watercolor.

These are the focus if an exhibit titled The Fountains of Paris currently at the Thomas Reynolds Gallery in San Francisco, which can be previewed on Reardon’s website. The exhibit runs until April 30, 2011.

Reardon has also collected works from the series into a a book: Fontaines: The Public Fountains of Paris, available from Blurb.

In addition, Reardon has paintings in current exhibitions of the Califorinia Art Club and American Watercolor Society, and is featured in the Spring 2011 issue of American Artist Watercolor magazine.

I found the news about the latter events from Reardon’s blog, which is also one of the best places to see his work, as the images are often linked to larger versions.