Comic Crits are book reviews done by artist John Bonner in the form of one page comic strips.

The reviews are often (though certainly not always) of books in the science fiction or fantasy genres, such as Neal Stephenson’s Reamde (above top), and The year’s Best Science Fiction 28, edited by Gardner Dozois (above, bottom).

The reviews can be read either on Bonner’s Comic Crits blog, or on the Tor.com site, which is where I encountered them.

On researching John Bonner, who I had assumed was an illustrator and cartoonist, I learned he is a painter. I’ll make his paintings the subject of a separate post.

in the 1940′s well known illustrator and art instructor Andrew Loomis wrote a series of drawing books that have become standards in the field of art instruction, prized by generations of illustrators, comic book artists, concept artists, character designers and others, particularly those who must “invent” the human form without constant recourse to a model.

Ironically, these tremendously valuable and influential texts were long out of print, leaving artists to discover them by word of mouth and prowl used bookstores, and later the internet, hoping used copies would turn up for a reasonable price. Copies of them in good condition would often sell for $250.00 to $300.00, sometimes more.

We all scratched our heads, wondering why these obviously popular books hadn’t been reprinted, until this summer, when Titan books finally reprinted the most prominent title, Figure Drawing for all it’s Worth (see my review here).

Much to the delight of myself and countless other artists, Titan did a superb job, bringing to life the character and appearance of the book in a facsimile hardback edition that actually surpassed the printing quality of the original.

The edition has been a tremendous success, and Titan has followed up with what is considered the second most important and sought after title in the series, Drawing the Head and Hands, and they provided me with a review copy.

As I expected, Titan has once again done Loomis justice with a superb job of reproducing the book. I can say without hesitation that the original book and its content are of tremendous value, and the beautiful reproduction makes it a joy to follow the instruction.

Here, Loomis expands on demonstrating how to draw the human figure in correct proportion by constructing it from a knowledge of its basic forms, and goes into the details of the head and hands with subtle, yet clear and strong drawings and diagrams.

In addition to building his approach on the fundamentals of human anatomy, he gives construction methods based on the underlying geometry, allowing you to turn and move the head and hands in your mind and position them in space when drawing. By marking off spatial divisions related to the major features, Loomis guides the reader through an understanding their basic proportions, and how those of the face in particular can vary from individual to individual.

He also demonstrates the correct proportions of the face relative to the head (solving one of the most common problems of those learning to draw people — making the face too large), and shows how to construct the head not only from different angles, but in perspective.

The book goes into better detail than I have seen anywhere else on understanding the change in proportions that the human face and head undergo as we move from infancy through childhood into adulthood.

His section on hands brings similar focus to the proportions of the various parts of the hand, an understanding of the hand’s underlying geometry, and the distinction between the hands of the young and old, male and female.

In case I haven’t gotten it across, I can’t recommend these books highly enough for those learning to draw the human form without reference to a model. For those who are drawing from a model, you might be surprised how much a study of the Loomis construction methods can inform your drawings with an underlying strength and dimensionality.

Priced at under $40.00 US, the book is a bargain. Don’t allow yourself be put off by the fashions and hair styles in the drawings, which reveal the book’s origins in the 1940′s (I rather like them myself); the drawings and instruction are as relevant as if the book had been written today.

In addition, I think the drawings are beautiful, and the book serves as an art book as well as an instructional text.

The great news is the series has been so successful that Titan is extending it; the next title, Successful Drawing, is due to be released in May of next year.

For more, see my review from earlier this year of Figure Drawing for All it’s Worth.

[Important note: with the exception of the cover image, the sample pages above, with which I've tried to give you a taste of the content, are taken from poor scans of the previous editions and do not do justice to the quality of the images in the new book. Those, in fact, are superbly printed on a lightly off-white paper, bringing out the beautifully subtle quality of the drawings.]

Originally released 20 years ago, Dinotopia: A Land apart from Time was the first of artist/author James Gurney’s acclaimed and popular illustrated adventure story books placed in the same mythical land.

Presented as an adventurer’s sketchbook, which the author has “found”, the story resonates with some of the sense of wonder and discovery to be found in classic 19th Century adventure stories.

The original edition has been out of print for some time. Dover books has released a new 20th Anniversary edition, with images digitally scanned from the original transparencies and 32 new pages of material, including sketches, photos and unused plates and a discussion by Gurney of the creation of the original book.

Those in the U.S. can order signed copies directly from the author.

Here is Gurney’s post about the new edition on his blog, Gurney Journey.

As I mentioned in my post from last year, They Draw and Cook is a site on which illustrated recipes (or recipes as illustrations) are posted on a regular basis.

Created either by artists who cook or cooks who draw (for whatever difference that may be), the recipes are a far cry from your old style scribbles on an index card or new style entires in a database, illustrating the food and its preparation with style and often humor.

The site’s creators and editors, Nate Padavick and Salli Swindell have collected over 100 of the recipe/illustrations and published them in a new book, They Draw and Cook: 107 Recipes Illustrated by Artists from Around the World (Amazon link here).

In addition to the brief preview on the website and the “Look Inside” feature on Amazon, there is also a promotional video for the book, as well an unofficial flip-through video here.

It wasn’t until I saw the latter that I understood the layout of the interior pages, in which the oblong formated illustrated recipes are presented as big double-page spreads.

The They Draw and Cook website has lost some of its original blog format simplicity, and now offers numerous features and sections. Past recipes are offered in themed collections and the “Most Recently Added Recipes” section serves the function of the old blog-based site.

I’ve written before about Flesk Publications, a small specialty art book publisher that concentrates on presenting illustrators and comics artists. Among the artists are many that I’ve featured here on Lines and Colors.

Flesk has published a book called Flesk Prime in which five artists are highlighted in the same volume. Four are artists who have been featured in previous dedicated books: William Stout, Petar Meseldžija, Mark Schultz and Gary Gianni (links to my posts); one, Craig Elliott, is the subject of an upcoming title.

The book serves both as an introduction to those artists and as a kind of sampler and introduction to the Flesk line of books — in that the artists exemplify the kind of terrific and often underappreciated talent Flesk spotlights, and the book’s beautiful production values are consistent with the publisher’s consistently high standards.

Flesk Prime also serves as an art book on its own, a beautiful selection of work from five talented illustrators and comics artists. For those like me who already have many of the books in the Flesk line, the features and images are not redundant, each showcasing work that has not appeared in the publisher’s other volumes on these artists.

Unfortunately, the previews of the book on the Flesk site, while they do give you an idea of the book’s appearance, don’t show the artwork itself to best advantage and don’t do the book justice (though the images certainly look better there than in the limited space I have to show them above). If you’re not familiar with these artists, you would do better to look through the site for the individual volumes on them for better examples of their work.

Flesk Prime is available through the Flesk Publications store.

Ruth Phillips is an English cellist living Provence, France. She is married to Julian Merrow-Smith, an artist I have written about previously.

After Duane Keiser, Merrow-Smith is one of the earliest pioneers of the “painting a day” painter/blogger model of creating small daily paintings and offering them for sale over the internet. He also happens to be one of my favorite contemporary painters. I’ve been following his daily paintings blog, Postcard from Provence, since 2006.

In one of my previous posts about Merrow-Smith, I pointed out that watching the images of his postcard paintings arrive by email day after day, as well as traveling back through time by looking through his extensive archive of previous work (over 1,600 at this point), was particularly appealing because I saw within the series of paintings a story, as the landscapes and the fruits and vegetables gathered from local markets for still life paintings changed with the seasons, and as Merrow-Smith worked, experimented and grew as a painter over time.

Here, then, is another side of that story, along with Phillips’ own, as she works to balance her life as a cellist, a wife, an artist’s assistant, an Englishwoman in Provence, a homeowner and an observer of the life, and lives, around her.

In her book Cherries from Chauvet’s Orchard: A Memoir of Provence, Phillips has given us a verbal parallel to her husband’s postcard sized paintings — small colorful glimpses of other places and other lives.

In succinct, three or four page chapters, she paints vivid short scenes of life in Provence, lives of the villages in which she and her husband have lived, lives of the individuals they have encountered and lives of some of the people who have purchased Merrow-Smith’s paintings.

The latter glimpses are often told in the individuals’ own words, included in italics as chapter beginning or chapter ending quotes. They were gathered in response to a request Phillips sent out for the purchasers to write with short accounts of their particular Merrow-Smith painting or paintings, where they were hung and what they meant in their lives. She received a much more extensive response than expected, from which she culled down selected accounts to season the book.

Each chapter of Cherries is titled as one of Merrow-Smith’s paintings, sometimes directly related to the subject of the chapter, sometimes just in a metaphorical relationship. The quotes, likewise, are sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely related to the subject of the chapter.

Within these short postcard-like glimpses, Phillips manages to tell the story of her relationship with Merrow-Smith, the beginnings of their marriage and their efforts to make an uninhabitable shell of a house in Southern France into a living home and studio against the tide of an arcane rural French bureaucracy, as well as the story of how “the painter who never painted” became an early practitioner of the “painting a day” discipline, and eventually one of the most successful of the painter/bloggers — artists who pioneered the use of the internet to bypass traditional gallery markets and take their work directly to their patrons around the world, even from a small village in rural France with spotty dial-up internet access.

The book, save for its cover, is not illustrated, but the perfect companion volume exists in the form of Merrow-Smith’s beautiful collection Postcard from Provence: Paintings by Julian Merrow-Smith (my review here). Of course, if you already have Postcard from Provence, Cherries from Chauvet’s Orchard makes the perfect companion to that book.

I found it particularly enjoyable to have my copy of Postcard from Provence handy as I read Cherries, and leisurely turn between them, each providing “color” for the other.

Cherries from Chauvet’s Orchard can be ordered directly from Merrow-Smith’s website, as can the Postcard from Provence volume. Both are also available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other booksellers in the US and UK (links are provided on the site). You can read a sample of Cherries on fReado.

In addition to her website, Phillips writes two blogs, cello notes and meanwhile (here in France). In the latter, she chronicles her life in Southern France, in some ways providing a continuation and extension of Cherries from Chauvet’s Orchard.

The episodes in the book’s short chapters, some sweet, some sour, are like the eponymous cherries picked from their Provençal neighbor’s orchard. They can be read as a memoir, a love story, a series of character sketches, an account of an artist’s progress or the chronicle of the early stages of a shift in the paradigm of how art is created and sold in the 21st Century. Take your pick.

It’s customary for many comic book artists and illustrators to publish “sketchbooks”, collections of sketches and drawings of varying degrees of finish, which are frequently more of interest to their dedicated “must have anything” fans than to the more general readership.

And then there’s Mark Schultz.

Flesk Publications, a small artbook publisher who has a record of publishing beautiful volumes of work by terrific illustrators and comics artists, has been publishing collections of his drawings for some time.

It’s worthwhile noting that these collections have been titled “Various Drawings” rather than “sketchbooks”, and very appropriately so; not only are Schultz’s sketches and preliminaries more highly developed than many artists’ finished drawings, his finished drawings are exquisitely finessed.

These volumes include both — Schultz’s beautifully finished brush and ink drawings, and preliminary drawings, usually in pencil, that were done in preparation for the final.

The subject matter follows Schutz’s fondness for adventure fantasy, pulp novels, science fiction and, of course, dinosaurs.

For the uninitiated, Schultz is the creator of the wonderful comics series Xenozoic Tales, a version of which was known for a time as “Cadillacs and Dinosaurs”. I reviewed Flesk’s beautiful collection of the strip last December. The book has since then sold out of its initial press run, but Flesk has just announced that it is again available in a second printing.

Fan’s of Schultz’s comic art, among which I certainly count myself, have long waited for him to return to the series, which is still unfinished. Until he does, there is great delight to be taken in these collections, and they would also be of interest to anyone who enjoys superbly realized action adventure illustration.

I was delighted to receive a review copy of the latest collection, Mark Schultz: Various Drawings Volume 5, which continues to maintain the high level of terrific drawings showcased in the rest of the series.

Some of the drawings are commissions, many referencing existing adventure fantasy characters and stories, including Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, for which the image above, third down and the detail crop below it are of one of several preliminary drawings. The finished brush and ink drawing is presented in the book as a stunning double page fold-out.

All of these collections are an absolute treat. Mark Schultz: Various Drawings #1 and #2 are sold out, volumes #3, 4 and of course this new volume #5, are still available and can be ordered through the Flesk Publications store, along with the Mark Schultz: Blue Book (a collection of his preliminary drawings in non-photo blue pencil), a Xenozoic Tales print and the new printing of the Xenozoic collection.

In addition to the preview images available on the publisher’s pages for the individual titles (which have fortunately been getting a bit larger in more recent presentations), there is a general gallery of Schultz’s work on the Flesk site. Schultz, as far as I can determine, does not have a dedicated website or blog of his own.

I was provided with a review copy of PaintWorks, a new eMagazine from Interweave, the parent company of American Artist and their corresponding website Artist Daily.

The debut issue of PaintWorks is Summer 2011 and the theme of the issue is “The Essentials of Still Life Painting”.

The eMagazine itself is an application, with a version for Mac or Windows (see the note below on compatibility). I downloaded the installer for Mac (364mb). It installs as an Adobe AIR application; I assume that users without Adobe AIR will be prompted to install that initially.

The installer can be set to open the eMagazine automatically when installation is complete. A brief introductory video drops you on the “cover” (home page?) of the issue, without a clear prompt or indication of where to go from there.

Poking around in the control/navigation bar at the top reveals a menu of contents, zoom control, help feature and forward and back arrows. (I think they are using an eMagazine package from Adobe, which has been providing them for a number of publications, and I assume any navigation issues are to be laid at the feet of Adobe, rather than being specific to PaintWorks.)

I found the eMagazine best enjoyed at full screen.

Following through in sequence, the structure is familiar and magazine-like, the initial page after the cover features an Editor’s Note, masthead, table of contents and link to a User’s Guide (which should have been provided on the cover page, but I’m being picky.)

The fact that it is an electronic magazine starts to become apparent with the Editor’s Note, which is a video. In it, editorial director Michael Gormley provides a brief introduction to the issue and its features, along with short clips of some of the featured artists giving their thoughts on the issue’s topic. The table of contents items are links to the sections, and a menu of them is always available as a pop-out from the left side of the interface. There is also a hidden pop-up navigation slider accessed by moving your cursor to the bottom of the interface.

The next page is an ad (clearly labeled as such in the table of contents) for American Artist’s print publication.

Next up is a 360° panorama of painter Nelson Shanks’ studio. There is an apparently unrelated section of “Tips on how to equip your own home studio” on the left, which is essentially an ad for Dick Blick artist materials. The pictures of particular brushes, paints, etc. are links. Clicking on them suddenly leaves the eMagazine, opens your web browser and takes you directly to the product pages on Blick’s online store.

I don’t so much object to the ad (though it should be labeled as such) as I do to the disconcerting jump from one application to another without warning. To me, this is simply poor interface design.

Next is the first actual article, and at this point the “next page/previous page” paradigm breaks down and you’re expected to scroll down to the article’s accompanying interactive features.

The first of these is a completely pointless bit of rollover text, a prime example of how most print publications don’t know how to use interactivity properly; but the second is a reasonably effective gallery of works from the article’s co-author, Sam Adoquei. The feature includes a “detail loupe” (my phrase, not theirs) in which you can move around the selected work to see small sections in more detail (image above).

The next article is a photographic essay on arranging and lighting a still life subject, with links to downloadable PDFs of the photos and an invitation to paint them and submit your paintings to them via Facebook.

The next section is another bit of pointless “interactivity”, with pop-up speech bubbles over photos, where simple captions would actually have been better; giving the feeling that the editors were struggling to make things “interactive” to justify the eMagazine format.

The next actual article, Draw it First, is another in which you scroll down for the article’s interactive features, in this case a nicely done step-by-step through a beautiful pencil drawing by the article’s author, Patricia Watwood. This includes the “detail loupe” feature used in the Sam Adoquei gallery (image above).

There is also a quote from another artist, Sadie Valeri (my post here), that is a link. Clicking on it again unexpectedly yanks you out of the eMagazine and into a browser, where you’re taken to an article on the Artist Daily site.

Next up is another interactive ad for one of the “Free eBooks” they’re constantly promoting with pop-ups on the Artist Daily site (they really need to get rid of those pop-ups, but I digress).

The next article, “All About Color” is another scroll-down article, thin on content and heavy on pointless rollovers.

Next is an article on Painting with Complementary Colors (image above), which consists of a series of short videos by painter Kristin Künc. These are instructive and well done, and provide more of a feeling of substance than some of the other articles.

Next is another interactive ad, this one for videos from C.W. Mundy. In this case, the video previews in the ad actually contain some useful information. The ad includes a link that again yanks you out of the eMagazine and into a browser where you are whisked to the Artist Daily online store.

Then another article in which the actual valuable information is in the form of short videos, these from artist Martha Erlebacher. Again, the videos are instructive and well done (though supplemented with another unnecessary “interactive”, with rollovers of the names of colors on her palette where simple labels would be more helpful).

The magazine rounds out with a gallery of very nice still life paintings from 16 artists, most of whom I found worth following up on (including David Ligare, who I recently featured), though this is lacking the detail magnification feature found elsewhere.

The last page is an ad for the American Artist Weekend With the Masters workshop and conference in California in September, 2011.

I’ll give American Artist and Interweave credit for jumping into the uncharted waters of digital publishing, and try to keep in mind that this is their first effort, but they don’t quite have it yet.

This is a publishing medium with exciting potential, but the editors haven’t learned how to use it to advantage.

The most valuable information is in the familiar format of instructional videos, while the instructive potential of interactive features has gone essentially untapped. Instead we’re presented with an array of unnecessary rollover text and other unhelpful “interactivity”.

The format holds great promise, but they need to hire experienced interactive designers to take advantage of the medium.

Think of what could be done with an interactive color wheel that shows artists’ colors in different views for complements, value range, chroma or mixing gamut. How about step-through demos in which the final piece can be moused over to reveal underpainting steps, videos of process and original sketches as layers in a single image? What about interactive color charts in which sliders reveal tints, shades and complementary mixes?

You could have interactive demos of how different brush angles produce different paint strokes, or painting demos in which information about the color, brush type and mixing palette are available as pop-up extensions to the main image. You could use sliders to show a work with the hues removed as a study in values, or instructional videos with integrated links to still images of the work in various stages for closer study.

There are lots of possibilities that could make the eMagazine format shine for an instructional art magazine. Rollover speech bubbles aren’t among them.

They also need to restrain the urge to link out to the web without warning. If you want to constantly link to web resources, put the primary content on a website. If you’re making a separate downloaded application, make it self-contained. Even the advertising, if there is work put into it, could be instructive and entertaining, and actually feel like valuable content. (Advertisers would expect a link out to their website via the user’s web browser, just label it as such.)

The potential is there, the editors just need to learn to use this new publishing medium for its real strengths. Hopefully, future issues will take the strong aspects of this issue, abandon the weak ones and build from there.

That being said, the editors certainly do know how to select excellent artists with valuable painting knowledge to impart, even if it’s mostly in the videos at the moment, and there is a beautiful selection of still life painting on display in the issue.

PaintWorks eMagazine, Summer 2011: The Essentials of Still Life Painting is available from the Artist Daily shop for $9.99 USD. There is a description page with a preview of the table of contents and some introductory videos.

Requirements, from Interweave: “To view this eMag, your computer needs to have these requirements: PC with Intel Core Duo or faster processor or Mac OS X v10.5 or v10.6, plus 512MB of RAM or greater available (1GB recommended). Note: Mac computers with PowerPC processors are not supported, and this version of the eMag is not compatible with the Apple iPad (but we’re working on it!).”