Tibor Nagy is an artist from Slovakia who paints his plein air landscapes and townscapes with brusque, rough edged shards and chunks of color.

Over a base of thinly applied darks he layers thick paint, sometimes with a loaded brush and sometimes apparently troweled on with a painting knife. These applications are mixed in with scumbled passages, painting knife scrapings and areas in which the underlying block-in is deliberately left unfinished.

The resulting compositions are energetic and lively, with the paint surface providing texture to the landscapes and cascades of geometric substructure in his portrayal of weathered buildings.

In addition to the galleries on his website, there are two YouTube videos that are essentially slide show walkthroughs of his process.

Arthur Rackham was one of the greatest illustrators of the turn of the 20th century Golden Age of Illustration, that is to say one of the greatest illustrators of all time.

Though many are familiar with his beautiful illustrations for Rip van Winkle (images above, top), which established his reputation, and Gulliver’s Travels, as well as a number English and Irish fairy tales, and even his superb illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (above, second down) which I think are the only set to hold their own against John Tenniel’s definitive drawings, fewer have see what is perhaps Rackham’s masterwork, the illustrations for J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (above, 5 & 6), or his stunning interpretations of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (above, third down).

Fewer still are familiar with his dramatic and powerful illustrations for the three books of Wagner’s The Ring of the Niblung (above, bottom three).

Rackham’s pen and ink and watercolor illustrations could be alternately (and at times simultaneously) delicate and forceful, idyllic and frightening, refined and grungy, brilliantly light and eerily dark.

Since I first wrote about Rackham back in 2006, at which point I found very few resources for his work online, the internet has continued its Jack and the Banstalk-like growth, presenting us with new gifts on every leaf.

One of the best current resources for Rackham’s work, particularly his remarkable Ring illustrations, is the deceptively named Golden Age Comicbook Stories blog, in which our mysterious benefactor, “Mr. Door Tree”, has an amazing knack for finding and posting large high-quality images. Here is his post for The Ring of the Niblung, and here the set for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

If you click on his left column heading for Arthur Rackham, which does a search, keep going back through “Older posts” at page bottom for several pages of articles that include Rackham or are specifically about his work.

The other great resource on Rackham’s illustrations, and likely the most extensive one, is Art Passions. This is a landing page with links. Some of the links are to individual illustrations, others, however, are to entire sets from his major projects.

In print, you can find a number of reproductions of Rackham’s books and collections of his illustrations (Amazon link), with varying degrees of fidelity and quality.

The July, 2012 issue of ImagineFX magazine, which is currently on sale in the US (#84) has an article on Arthur Rackham.

I’ve listed some other resources below.

I’ll give this my Major Time Sink Warning.

I first wrote about Belgian painter, illustrator and photographer Ben Heine back in 2010, when I highlighted his delightful series called “Pencil vs. Camera“, in which he draws a continuation or substitution for part of a scene, usually in pencil on a ragged edged piece of paper or card, and then photographs the drawing held up against the original scene (images above, bottom four).

I’m delighted to say that among his other projects, Heine is continuing Pencil vs. Camera , and you can view the series either on his website or on his deviantART page.

One of Heine’s more recent projects is a series of images he calls “Digital Circlism”. For these he creates portraits with digital tools in which the image is formed from a series of discreet circles of flat color against black backgrounds, in a process he describes as a cross between pop art and pointillism.

As with his other projects, you can view the galleries on either his website or deviantART. (I found the deviantArt pages easier to browse than the website.)

Heine also maintains a blog in which he discusses his work and features new images and in progress works.

[Via Neatorama]

The Feast of Acheloüs, by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder.

Rubens painted the figures, Brueghel the richly detailed setting.

A feast, indeed.

In the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click on “Fullscreen” and zoom or download.

OK, now this is how you do an online wedding invitation.

I can’t possibly do better in describing “Jess and Russ” than Scott McCloud did in his tweet this morning:

“Another day, another stunning, collaborative, parallax-scrolling, infinite canvas wedding invitation.”

Exactly.

Collaborative refers to the contributions that the couple, both designers, elicited from their friends — many of whom are apparently talented illustrators (and some of whom I’ve featured previously on Lines and Colors).

The “infinite canvas” refers to McCloud’s own long term experimentation with the capabilities of the web in presenting comics and other graphic material without limitations of dimension as in print.

In an infinite canvas presentation, separate panels, text blocks or other bits of content are tied together in directional continuity by lines, borders or other graphic connectors, in this case in a long vertical scroll (image above, top).

“Parallax scrolling” is a method of limited animation achieved by dividing HTML content into planes that are moved by different degrees when scrolling a page.

The images I’ve shown above are just to give you a glimpse of the surprising quality and variety of the illustrations the project encompasses, but they don’t give you any of the feeling of the effect of the parallax scrolling animation.

There is an About page that describes the project and gives contributor credits.

(Images above: Josh Cochran, Christopher Silas Neal, Frank Stockton, Alex Eben Meyer, Sam Weber, Neil Swaab, Chris Buzelli, James Gulliver Hancock)

[Via Scott McCloud]

D Eleinne Basa is a painter from New Jersey whose landscapes and florals can range from refined, as in her large studio paintings, to nicely rough edged and painterly, as in her plain air paintings. Her approach likewise can vary from softly tonalist to more straightforwardly realist.

I was immediately impressed by Basa’s painting Fall’s Approach (above, top) a large (30×40″, 76x100cm) and striking work that I had a chance to see in person recently. It’s one of those paintings that invites you to walk into it, but simultaneously exhibits a painterly surface.

Her painting Afternoon Light (second down) was awarded first place in Plein Air Magazine’s 2012 Annual Plein Air Online Salon.

I particularly enjoy the way she works with the play of late evening or early morning light as it cuts across some of her compositions, revealing form and color in intermittent shafts.

Following up on my recent Eye Candy post about an Ingres graphite portrait, I couldn’t help but think of this well known and beautiful portrait painting.

Comtesse d’Haussonville, by Jean-August-Dominique Ingres, on Google Art Project. Use controls at lower right to zoom in.

Note the way he has carefully handled the reflection of the back of her head in the mirror and the attention given the incidental objects in the room.

Here is the painting on the site of the Frick Collection.

Japanese artist Nagai Hideyuki has created a fun series of drawings that span two sketchbooks propped at 90° to one another, and when viewed from the proper angle, give the illusion of continuous three dimensionality.

You can see a selection on his website and on his deviantART page.

There is a video on YouTube that gives a clearer picture of the relationship between the two sets of drawings.

[Via Visual News by way of Colossal and io9]