When I was in my late teens, earnestly trying to learn the art and craft of comic book illustration, I stumbled across a find in the dusty shelves of a used bookstore that popped my eyes open and sent me home feeling like I had struck gold.

It was a copy of Figure Drawing for All it’s Worth (also here) by Andrew Loomis, and in a way it was gold — a classic instructional art book by a master illustrator that has come to be regarded as a “must-have” by comics artists, illustrators and artists of all kinds, particularly those who must “invent” the figure — draw people in a variety of positions without model or reference.

Those artists, like myself, were lucky to have found a copy. Classic that it is, the book has been out of print for decades, leaving those who understand its worth (if you’ll excuse the expression) wondering when, if ever, the book would be republished.

Used copies in good condition have been selling in the $100 to $200 range (and higher), and though images of the book’s pages have appeared in various places on the internet, they leave much to be desired in comparison to the actual book.

Extracts of Figure Drawing for All its Worth, and its superb companion volume, Drawing the Head and Hands, were published as Drawing: Figures in Action and Drawing: The Head, respectively, from Walter Foster Books some years ago. Large in dimensions and inexpensive, they were worth picking up, but at 32 pages they were more pamphlets than books, representing a small fraction of the original books’ actual content and a poor substitute for the real thing.

So artists were left haunting used bookstores, hoping copies would show up from someone’s attic for which the bookstore owner would not know the value. Having copies of Loomis books became a bit of a status symbol in certain artists’ circles. And why, we would repeatedly ask, have these treasures not been republished?

So it was with a combination of delight and reservation that I responded to the news that Figure Drawing for All its Worth had finally been republished; the question being what kind of treatment it would receive in terms of quality of reproduction.

When I received my review copy of the new edition from Titan Books, not only was I pleased that they have been respectful of the original edition and the importance of the book, I was delighted to see that they have gone well beyond that. This is an absolutely beautiful facsimile edition, superbly reproduced with crisp, beautiful illustrations on softly textured, slightly off-white paper — looking for all the world as if you had just pulled it off the shelf in 1943.

Wow.

Not only that, they have been respectful of the wallets of starving artists everywhere, pricing the hardcover edition at only $40. A steal.

Andrew Loomis was a well respected and influential mid-20th Century illustrator (see my post on the extensive article that appeared in Illustration magazine), but he is better known today for his series of instructional books, of which Figure Drawing for All its Worth and Drawing the Head and Hands are the stars.

Though his instruction is valuable to those studying from life as well as those who are inventing the figure, his emphasis is on constructing the figure, understanding the underlying anatomy and geometry and on perceiving the figure as form, with volume. The figure exists in, and occupies, space. Loomis gives you keys to placing figures in perspective, working with foreshortening, and getting an intuitive grasp of elements of the human body as volumetric forms.

Countless artists (myself included) credit Loomis with opening their eyes to these concepts and revolutionizing their approach to drawing the figure. Loomis has been influential on generations of illustrators and comics artists in particular, as he speaks directly to the challenges they face in constructing figures and placing them in relation to their environment in a variety of positions and views, as well as in dynamic poses showing the figure in motion.

Not only is Loomis knowledgable, insightful and good at conveying what he knows about drawing (which is considerable), his own drawings are elegant, with graceful gestures, economy of notation, fluid lines and crisp rendering.

The combination qualified him to create some of the best art instruction books ever written. Long deserving of being republished, they are as relevant now as they were when first published, if not more so. The text is as sharp and crisp as the drawings, leading you through a course of discovery and offering a solid grounding in the traditional fundamentals of drawing the human form, as well as tips from one of the notable illustrators of the 20th Century.

In short, Figure Drawing for All its Worth is a treasure.

The next best news? Titan is set to release another Loomis Classic, Drawing the Head and Hands, in October!

[Important note: the images of the book interior above are taken from internet scans of older editions and do not give an accurate representation of the superb quality of the illustrations in the new edition.]

The great American illustrator Howard Pyle was influential both in his own work and as a teacher whose ranks of students contained a generation of America’s finest illustrators. Artists like N.C. Wyeth, Frank Schoonover, William James Aylward, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Violet Oakley, Maxfield Parrish, Ellen Thompson Pyle, Olive Rush, Phillip Goodwin, Stanley Arthurs, Allen Tupper True and many others passed through his classes at the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia and his own school in Wilmington, Delaware.

Of them, Harvey Dunn stood out not only for his masterful paintings, but for his own contributions as a teacher, carrying forward Pyle’s teachings, along with his own learning and strongly held convictions, to a new generation of illustrators, a list that also includes many notable names. After only two years as Pyle’s student, Dunn opened his own studio in Wilmington and began to take on illustration students.

Dunn created vibrant, energetic canvases that sing with drama, emotion, adventure and excitement. Even though many of his paintings were printed as black and white illustrations, he painted them in strikingly rich color, perhaps partly to please himself and partly to honor the extremely high standards of his mentor.

His illustrations appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s Weekly, Harper’s Magazine and Scribner’s as well as in numerous books. He emphasized the emotion and feeling of the image, taking Pyle’s advice to project oneself into the scene being painted, and he became a master of dramatic composition.

Dunn is particularly renowned for his portrayals of the pioneer west and of the prairie, as exemplified by the area in South Dakota where he was born. His ouevre, however, was much broader than that. In World War I Dunn volunteered as one of the first to be an official war artist (see my posts on Art of War and They Drew Fire), traveling with a fighting unit and sending his pictures of the battlefield back to the U.S., bringing the war home in personal and emotionally powerful manner.

On his return from the war, Dunn found himself unenthused about returning to editorial illustration, but his plans to continue expanding his wartime sketches into fully realized canvasses were dashed by a lack of interest from the war office, and a public apparently eager to put the war behind them.

He began a series of more personal works, some of them among his best known, of the prairie and prairie life, including The Prairie is My Garden (above, top) and a series of beautiful nudes.

Dunn continued his commercial work, but eventually moved to New Jersey, just outside of New York, where he opened a school of illustration with Charles Chapman and also began teaching in Manhattan at the Grand Central School of Art.

Like N.C. Wyeth, Dunn was a restless experimenter, always working with the application of paint and color, observing and absorbing influences from many quarters, including, to my eye, French Impressionism, German Expressionism and even Fauvism. His work can be a dramatic amalgam of the traditional and the modern.

Dunn’s work and contribution to American painting are greatly undervalued, and even in these days of increasing appreciation for classic illustration he doesn’t get the recognition he deserves.

Fortunately, a new book may help remedy that, Flesk Publications has just released a wonderful new book of Dunn’s work, Harvey Dunn: Illustrator and Painter of the Pioneer West, compiled, researched and written by Walt Reed.

Reed, for those unfamiliar with the name, is a well known author of several books on artists and illustration, the founder of Illustration House, the foremost art gallery devoted to illustration in America, and a lifelong devotee of the work and methods of Harvey Dunn. Though he couldn’t study with Dunn directly, Reed, an artist himself and faculty member of the Famous Artist Schools, studied with Dunn’s student Harold Von Schmidt.

I had known this book was in production, but I have to say that when I received a review copy from Flesk I was stunned. First of all, the book is absolutely beautiful. Flesk may have even raised the bar on their own high standards of art book production.

What really took me by surprise, however, was the depth and extent of the book. With almost 300 color plates and more than 70 additional black white illustrations, the book is a sweeping account of Dunn’s career and prolific output. The pages just pop with his intense color, dramatically three dimensional application of textural paint and striking compositions.

It displays a deep appreciation of Dunn’s approach and artistic concerns, follows his development and displays his range with exceptional reproductions, wonderfully selected and arranged.

Though the majority of the book is a monograph on Dunn and his work, there is a second aspect of the title that I didn’t expect, a look at Dunn as a teacher, including a section on his working methods, and an overview of some of his notable students, which included Harold Von Schmidt, Arthur D. Fuller, Charles Andres, Saul Tepper, James Edward Allen and the incredibly accomplished Dean Cornwell and Mead Schaeffer.

There is also a remarkable treasure in the form of an almost-facsimile reproduction of An Evening in the Classroom, a compendium of notes from Dunn’s students (who revered him) of his comments, criticisms and advice given in the course of his classes.

Reed says in his introduction that, though he was unable to study with Dunn directly, he has become a student of Dunn after the fact in assembling this book. In doing so, he has allowed us to share in that privilege.

The volume goes on to include a bibliography, a listing of Dunn’s work in museum collections, and a record of Dunn’s published work.

The book is available from Flesk Publications as both a trade hardcover for $50 and a deluxe slipcased limited edition with additional features for $125. There is a preview of some of the pages on the page for the book, but it just doesn’t do the book, or Dunn’s striking work, justice. This is unfortunate, because the book isn’t being distributed to mass market stores, so you can’t pick it up and look at it, and those not already familiar with Dunn may miss out.

The price, however, is the other thing that amazed me. An art book this extensive, authoritative and strikingly beautiful (even as a coffee table art book) in the hands of most other art book publishers would be priced over $75 or $100. I don’t know how Flesk has kept it to $50, perhaps a labor of love on their part as well, but I’m glad they did. Anyone with an appreciation for the Brandywine School, or American illustration, or for that matter, painting in general, will find it a treasure, and Dunn’s work deserves to be much more broadly known.

This is obviously more than a book on Harvey Dunn, this is a labor of love by Walt Reed, a beautiful tribute to a great American artist and a stunning volume that, if not a catalogue raisonné, is without question the definitive book on the artist and his work.

This is one of those books for which the binding is key.

Nita Leland’s Confident Color: An Artist’s Guide to Harmony, Contrast and Unity is published by venerable art instruction book publisher North Light Books.

Like Leland’s previous book, The New Creative Artist (which I reviewed here) and Bert Dodson’s Keys to Drawing with Imagination (my review here), North Light has published it in their hybrid hardback/spiral binding, giving the overt clue that this is a book meant to be used, rather then simply read.

The spiral binding allows for laying the book flat on your drawing table, the hardcover allows for rough and continued handling, and the combination allows for propping the book open upright on the rail of an easel.

The intention of the publisher clearly matches that of the writer, to get the most out of this book, it needs to be used, worked with over time; and will have shown its best service when ragged at the edges and spattered with paint.

Not that you couldn’t settle into the Comfy Chair and find lots of interest to read through and look at; Leland drills through a concise introduction to color theory, history and terminology and covers the basics of understanding palettes and pigments, all augmented with her selections of works from a variety of contemporary working artists and a few of her own. The real value, though, is in the exercises, trials, procedures and processes that form the core of the book.

If you’re lucky, you may have encountered a teacher like Leland in your formative years, one who will, however gently and politely, continue to poke and prod and push you to try something new, move out of your comfort zone, experiment, play and explore.

This isn’t random try-whatever experimentation, however; in Confident Color Leland provides you with guided exploration, designed to systematically familiarize you with the ranges of relationships presented by your color choices.

There is a “Look Inside” preview on the Amazon listing, though as is often the case, the pages represented don’t give the best indication of the actual content of the book. The index is actually better for that.

The book is aimed at beginners as well as more advanced artists, and though watercolor is Leland’s medium and some of the pigments mentioned are particular to watercolor, the general palettes are set up with colors that work well across most mediums that involve color.

In some ways this is an extension of and companion to Leland’s 1998 book Exploring Color, which has become something of a standard among books on working with color. That book, though without the advantage of the lay-flat binding, was also meant to be worked with.

Both volumes focus alternately on the split-primary process of color mixing and on the exploration of variations on the red/blue/yellow triads that serve as the basis for several of many possible color wheels.

She urges you to work with and understand the difference between palettes composed of muted, intense and earth-toned colors, as well as the “workhorse” colors that form the basis of most artist’s palettes.

In pursuing her exercises and explorations, you might work with colors and combinations that you would’t use in other circumstances, which may seem counter productive; but just as contour drawing is rarely used as the style for a finished work, knowing artists will work at it with dedication, letting the practice inform and strengthen their finished style.

This isn’t the kind of book that says “mix two parts Cad Yellow to one part Ultramarine to paint this foliage”; in Confident Color, Leland is suggesting if you experiment with these excursions into color harmony and contrast, work through the mixtures possible with variations of of the primary triad and really get the feeling for how colors act and react with one another, you’ll instinctively know what to mix when you want to paint something.

The book’s binding is the key. Confidence comes from doing.

Long time readers of Lines and Colors will know of my fascination with dinosaurs and paleo art, my fondness for science fiction and adventure stories and their accompanying illustrations, my admiration for the beautiful ink drawings of classic illustrators, the inspired adventure comic strips from the 1930′s and 1940′s that carried their traditions forward, and the wonderfully lurid E.C. Comics comic books of the 1950′s that, in turn, evolved out of them.

Together, those leanings make me a prime candidate to love the work of comics artist, writer and illustrator Mark Schultz, whose long running series Xenozoic Tales, also known as Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, has been delighting similarly minded readers since its surprise appearance in the comics anthology Death Rattle in the mid 1980′s.

Like his predecessors, Schultz has been taking the influence of the comics and illustration greats that inspired him, weaving it into his own always progressing style and applying it to telling the kind of stories that fired his enthusiasm for the comics medium when he was younger.

Schultz is now inspiring a new generation of comics artists and illustrators, who recognize that the very best in a given medium or genre is often slightly outside the mainstream, where those with eccentric visions can create the work that is unrestrained by the latest corporate sponsored “fads” and based instead on the artist’s love of the medium and subject matter.

Which brings me to Xenozoic, the new collection of Schultz’s Xenozoic Tales stories published by Flesk Publications. Flesk sent me a review copy, but I have to say that even though I have much of the material already in other formats, I would have picked this volume up anyway because it’s such a satisfying way to enjoy these stories and art.

Xenozoic collects the range of the stories, from early ones that lay out the groundwork for Szhultz’s fantastic world, to the latest and best, where his artwork, already striking in its intricate detail and deep chiaroscuro, develops to its peak of sweeping vistas and extraordinarily realized characters, animals and settings.

Did I mention that the comics are in black and white (with beautiful touches of tone)? Did I mention that this is a Good Thing? In the same way that classic black and white films have a feeling, mood and atmosphere that can’t be matched in color, so black and white comics and illustration can evoke mood and utilize visual texture in a way that the addition of color would only diminish.

In Schultz’s hands, areas of rock, foliage or background skies that otherwise might be simple areas of color become intricate marvels of ink line, texture and pattern, drawing you deeper into the scene and slowing down the pace with which you read, a technique that most contemporary comics artists have not learned to use effectively.

Many contemporary comics artists indulge in detail for its own sake, Schultz is one of the rare few who understands how to use it effectively to control how a story proceeds.

I won’t go into detail here about the history of Xenozoic Tales or the work of Mark Schultz, but will instead point you to my previous post on Mark Schultz, where I’ve already done that.

Fans of Schultz’s work should also be aware of the books collecting his drawings also published by Flesk, the latest of which, Mark Schultz; Various Drawings Volume 4, is still available in paperback though sold out in hardcover.

These, unlike the toss-off sketchbook drawings sometimes compiled into collections by other comics artists, are more often fully realized, finished drawings. Volume 4 includes a wonderful 2 page fold-out of a John Carter of Mars illustration, along Schultz’s preliminary drawings for it, along with an assortment of other terrific drawings and even a one page comic strip, Paleonauts, in which he pays tribute to another Schultz.

Xenozoic is a big, heaping helping of fantasy adventure comics at their best, transporting the reader into pulp-inspired tales of high adventure in a mildly dystopian eco-disaster future (making it possible to have dinosaurs, people and, of course, Cadillacs within the same fantastic landscapes).

This is the kind of “plop down in the Comfy Chair with the big adventure book” experience that not enough pop culture fans have encountered. If you know someone who loves the modern takes on classic adventure movies, like the Indiana Jones movies, Jurassic Park, Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake, or even Pirates of the Caribbean, but for some reason thinks they don’t enjoy comics, here is a possible bridge into that world (and a treat of a present).

There is a preview of Xenozoic on the Flesk site, where you can click to see a few images from the book. Even though Flesk is getting better about this, showing somewhat larger preview images, the previews still don’t do the pages justice. If you’re not already familiar with Schultz’s work, look for the book in a bookstore so you can see how these pages look printed full size.

There is also an additional Mark Schultz gallery on the Flesk site (Schultz doesn’t have a dedicated site or blog of his own as far as I know).

Xenozoic and Mark Schultz; Various Drawings Volume 4 can be purchased directly from the Flesk Publications online store.

Color. What other factor in art is so simultaneously fascinating and frustrating for artists?

Numerous books have been written on the subject; some are less than worthwhile, some are good, some are excellent, and a few have become so relied on that over time they have become standards.

Each takes a certain approach to the subject, emphasizing color choices, color mixing, experimentation, analysis, etc., but of the many books on color that I’ve encountered over time, there always seemed to be key parts of the puzzle that hadn’t been addressed yet — a certain kind of book on color that was missing.

I didn’t really know what that book was until James Gurney wrote Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter.

In Color and Light, which has just been released, we get the printed version of having an experienced painter leaning over our shoulder, giving us his best advice and taking us beyond the basics into the subtleties of the practical application of color in the process of creating paintings.

This is the “other” book on color, the one that takes the practice of working with color, and the understanding of color and light and how we perceive them, to the next level.

Gurney, who I have written about previously on several occasions, has culled a treasure trove of insightful observations, practical tips, experimental trials and artful technique from years of painting a wide range of subjects in a variety of visual approaches.

He has been a renowned illustrator, portraitist, landscape artist, plein air painter and scientific artist; and beyond that has for years been a restless experimenter, investigating the work of master artists, thinking about and working with color in all of its aspects as related to painting.

For the past several years, Gurney, best known as the creator of the popular Dinotopia series of illustrated fantasy stories, has been writing a blog called Gurney Journey. Those of us who have been following Gurney Journey since its inception have reaped the benefit of a generous bounty of art related information, advice, observations, experiments, discoveries, and links that he has made available in his frequent posts over the past few years.

Some of this material, along with new material culled from Gurney’s expertise as an illustrator, were codified into a book in 2009 called Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist, which I reviewed here.

In Color and Light he has also pulled from those observations and expositions (you can see some of the topics by searching for Color and Light book, or simply color on the GurneyJourney blog), but gone well beyond that into a great deal of new material written specifically for the book.

While I think of this book as advanced in many ways, Gurney does go into many of the fundamentals of color and color theory, with succinct chapters on the history of color theory, pigments, the academic tradition, plein air painting, magazine illustration, chroma and value, warm and cool, local and reflected color, atmospheric perspective, color schemes, limited palettes, reflections, highlights and shadows and many others. Beginners as well as advanced painters will find a wealth of information.

However, he goes beyond the ordinary with thoughtful excursions into topics like understanding gamuts, subsurface scattering, specular reflections, different natural and artificial light sources, and expert techniques for handling difficult problems like reflection and transparency, fog and mist, skies and foliage, nocturnes, cloud shadows, and premixing colors for a painting.

Though some of the information may be familiar, I think that most artists will find the book to be a treasure trove of small but significant revelations, as if dozens of little “Ah-ha!” lightbulbs (of varying spectrums) were appearing over your head as you read.

I consider this book, if not a “must-have”, at the very least a “must-see” for any representational painter. I urge you to pick it up and look through it in a bookstore.

I’m a little concerned that “fine art” painters might assume from a casual leaf-through that the presence of fantasy illustrations would indicate the focus of the book is not in their direction, particularly because the fantasy illustrations often have a “jump off the page” quality to them and seem dominant. Nothing could be further off the mark, the material is exactly on target for realist painters of any background who want to get a better handle on light and color.

You can get a virtual “pick up and leaf through” from the nicely extensive preview on the Amazon.com listing (click on the “Look Inside” cover image), as well as a video flip-through from Spectrum, reposted on Gurney Journey, and another on Parka Blogs.

In addition to being available through bookstores and online booksellers, you can order directly from the the Dinotopia store and have your copy signed by the author.

Like any book from James Gurney, this one is a visual treat; in this case illustrated with works from great painters and illustrators of the past, as well as Gurney’s own illustrations, sketches, diagrams and paintings. Just like his previous instructional book, it can also be enjoyed as a coffee table art book.

Only time will tell, of course, but I think Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter will take a place as a new standard text among books on color, destined to be a fixture on the bookshelves of painters and illustrators for years to come.

Tim, a Lines and Colors reader, wrote me to say that he had recently become inspired to return to the practice of drawing. He had purchased a copy of Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (see my post here), and was looking for other books and resources to pursue his interest from there, hopefully with a classical or Renaissance method.

Edwards’ book is an excellent place to start for someone who has a new or rekindled interest in drawing. I frequently recommend it as the book concentrates of the fundamental and most difficult problem adults face in learning to draw, and that is learning to see what is actually before them, and not what they think they see.

I feel her book, however, is lacking the other “half” of drawing, the art of it, the finesse and artistic choices that separate “art” from “just drawing” and that separate the masters from the ordinary. Though she has attempted to address this somewhat in recent editions, there are better sources for pursuing the art of drawing.

This is not meant to be a comprehensive list, certainly not of drawing books, or even of drawing books and resources that answer the particular question at hand, but a few suggestions drawn (if you’ll excuse the expression) from my personal experience.

A book I will recommend, though it is not specifically related to drawing but to art and art study in general, is Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit.

As for drawing instruction in a classical or Renaissance method, there isn’t a great deal in the way of drawing texts from the Renaissance; techniques were passed down from master to apprentice, rarely committed to writing. Modern representational drawing texts concentrate on Academic teachings, which are derived from principles developed in the Renaissance and subsequent years up to the late 19th Century.

The dedicated path:

Classic drawing textbooks (not necessary “Classical”) These two volumes have been standards in art schools in the U.S. for decades. Look for them used online, in used bookstores or on eBay; they’re overpriced and current printings are apparently of poor quality.

A Guide to Drawing, Daniel M. Mendelowitz

Art of Responsive Drawing, Nathan Goldstein

The study of drawing:

The Natural Way to Draw: A Working Plan for Art Study, Kimon Nicolaides

If you’re really committed, Kimon Nicolaides has the game plan, but it’s a demanding course of study.

The Practice And Science Of Drawing, Harold Speed

A valuable text, with insights and practical information. There is a full version on Project Gutenberg, though the reproductions leave something to be desired. [Addendum: There is a better Facsimile Edition on the Internet Archive. See my more recent post on The Practice And Science Of Drawing.]

Other titles:

Charles Bargue and Jean-Leon Gerome: Drawing Course, Gerald M. Ackerman

A 19th Century Academic approach, form a student of master Jean-Léon Gerome

Drawing Lessons from the Great Masters, Robert Beverly Hale

I had the good fortune to have Robert Beverly Hale as my artistic anatomy instructor when I was a student at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His teachings have been codified in a series of books, illustrated with selections of old master drawings.

The Artist’s Complete Guide to Figure Drawing: A Contemporary Perspective on the Classical Tradition, Anthony Ryder

See my post on Tony Ryder, and here

Classical Drawing Atelier: A Contemporary Guide to Traditional Studio Practice, Juliette Aristides

A modern take on Academic techniques

The gentle path

Keys to Drawing, Bert Dodson

Keys to Drawing with Imagination: Strategies and Exercises for Gaining Confidence and Enhancing Your Creativity, Bert Dodson

Dodson eases you into some of the same techniques and concerns covered by Mendelowitz and Goldstein, with a friendlier approach and less of a brusque college textbook manner. See my review of Keys to Drawing with Imagination

Bridgman’s Complete Guide to Drawing from Life, George Bridgman

The Human Figure, John H. Vanderpoel

Put solidity and an understanding of form into your figure drawing with Bridgeman and Vanderpoel.

Study master drawings

Look for used books of collections of master drawings, study them and copy from the masters (as they did from previous masters) to understand what they have done with line, tone, space and form.

Dover Books has many titles with master drawings that are inexpensive new. Though the reproduction is not superb, they are still very good for study and enjoyment.

150 Masterpieces of Drawing by Anthony Toney

Look for other inexpensive collections like Drawing ideas of the masters: Improve your drawings by studying the masters by Frederick Malins

Libraries

Look to your local library for everything mentioned here and more. If you live near a state university, you may find their library open to residents, including borrowing privileges.

Online:

Line by Line is an introductory drawing course running in weekly installments on the New York Times (see my post here). There are many other online resources that should be the subject of a separate post.

Studying the real thing: master drawings

Seeing old master, Baroque and 19th Century drawing in person is a treat, inspiring and very instructive. Drawings reveal their subtleties in person even more than paintings. They can’t be kept on display because of light damage, so you have to look for shows.

On the East Coast of the U.S. The Met in NY, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery rotate out selections from their collections of works on paper in small dedicated galleries. Look for other major museums to have similar small spaces devoted to works on paper. The Morgan Library in NY often has great drawing shows.

I try to list museum shows of drawings (along with shows of comics, cartoons and illustration) in the right hand column of this blog. Not always up to date or comprehensive (I try), but a place to look.

Studying the real thing: life drawing

This is a directory of life drawing (figure model) open sessions, workshops and other easily accessible classes: Figure Drawing Open Studios, Workshops, and Continuing Education Classes, see my post on the Directory of Figure Drawing Sessions.

Fake it from home: life drawing

Poser, Pose Maniacs and Virtual Pose let you practice life drawing from home.

The most important things

The most important thing: keep drawing. If it’s not a dedicated course of study, make it a hobby, a habit, a coffee break, a meditation. A quick sketch once a day is better than an elaborate plan of study that you can’t maintain.

Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation by Frederick Franck

This is an essay on drawing, and the special kind of seeing associated with drawing (that I think is at the core of the techniques in Drawing on the Right side of the Brain and other texts) as a form of meditation.

More importantly, it is instructive in drawing as a practice, an activity, something you do, rather than something you are trying to accomplish. It’s hard to understate what a dramatic difference in frame of mind this seemingly small shift can make.

Drawing for Pleasure, Valerie C. Douet

I mention this title, not because the drawings within are treasures of old master accomplishment, but because of the attitude and approach expressed by the book and its title.

Unless you mess it up by trying too hard, hanging all kinds of expectations and self-measurement on it or make the gross mistake of comparing your current level of ability with others, drawing is, after all, fun.

So my best word of advice? Draw and have fun drawing. The rest will follow.

[Addendum: On rereading this post, I wanted to add one of my favorite quotes.

From Howard Ikemoto:
When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college — that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" ]

Serbian artist Petar Meseldžija, who I wrote about in 2008, has a career that has included outstanding work in comics, illustration, posters and gallery art.

He has taken elements from all aspects of his skill range and applied them to the classic form of the illustrated storybook in The Legend of Steel Bashaw, an adaptation of a Serbian folktale known as Baš Čelik.

To bring the book to U.S. readers, Meseldžija worked with Flesk Publications, whose consistent high standards in reproduction and printing for art books make them an ideal choice to bring Meseldžija to the attention of a wider audience.

Flesk sent me a review copy and they’ve hit it out of the park again.

Meseldžija brings his rich, painterly style to classic fantasy settings, quite cottages on sunny hillsides, paths through darkened green woods, mountain streams and ancient castles; and in particular, gnarled trees, wet with moss and tinged with fall colors, that are like characters themselves.

Into these settings he brings grotesque giants, fearsome demons and cunning dragons, along with our hero and heroine, who play out a story cast in the mold of great man vs. monster legends like Beowulf and Homer’s Odyssey.

With an eye for subtle color contrasts and vibrant textures, Meseldžija brings the story to life in the first two thirds of the book. In the latter third, Flesk has worked with Meseldžija to bring the making of the story and its images to light, with initial sketches, concept drawings, and highly refined preliminary tone drawings, as well as color sketches and some of the artist’s relevant landscape paintings.

The result is two books in one, the illustrated story and the “making of” chapter that reveals Meseldžija’s working methods.

You can see some images from the book on the Flesk Publications site, as well as in the Illustration section of Meseldžija’s site.

The book can be ordered through Flesk’s new online store, or via snail mail.

Petar Meseldžija’s website has been revised and expanded since I last wrote about him, and includes examples of his work in multiple areas.

[Update 11/23/10: Petar Meseldžija now has a blog at http://petarmeseldzija.blogspot.com/. Though it was only recently started, he has already added fascinating information about his working methods.]

Once upon a time, there was an English painter who moved to Provence, a part of southern France long associated with artists seeking the colors nature might reveal to them in the region’s legendary sunlight.

This painter was not working in the time of the Barbizon School and the Impressionists, however, but in the blossoming days of the internet, as an early participant in painting/blogging and the nascent practice of “painting a day”.

Before “painting a day” acquired its current connotations of artists latching on to the term as a way to drive eyeballs, and hopefully purchasers, to their web based storefronts and auctions, the regimen of painting one small painting a day had a different purpose. It was (and still is for those who practice it in the right spirit) a form of artistic discipline, a way to focus and hone one’s painting skills and artistic vision.

Our English painter in Provence, Julian Merrow-Smith, thought of it as a project, painting a small painting every day over a period of time, and posting each day’s painting on the internet for sale and comment, a practice he admired in the hands of its originator, Duane Keiser.

Merrow-Smith’s small paintings were essentially the size of postcards, and the act of posting them on the web akin to sending them out to someone, thus his project took on the name “Postcard from Provence”.

Now, five years and over 1,300 paintings later, in a small abstract of that project, winnowing down the work of those years into 140 selections, Merrow-Smith has released a book of paintings titled, simply enough, Postcard from Provence: Paintings by Julian Merrow Smith.

The book, as one who has been following Merrow-Smith’s work for some time might expect, is beautiful, and wonderfully produced. Representative of the project as a whole, the paintings are divided more or less equally between still life subjects and landscape. The book design is elegant and simple; the printing well balanced, the colors rich and vibrant (and, for those who are into such things, the book is printed in one of those ink and paper combinations that smells wonderful).

In addition, there is a conversation with the artist in talks with Michael Gitlitz, that delves into his history, the origins of the project and his approach to painting.

The book can be ordered, signed and numbered, directly from the artist, or without signature, through Amazon in the UK and Alibris in the US. There is also a list of selected bookshops in the UK that have the book on shelf.

There is a preview widget on the book page of the Postcard From Provence blog, that allows you to step through 50 pages of the book. Be sure to choose the “full screen” option.

I have long been a bit frustrated with the reproductions of Merrow-Smith’s work on the web, in that they feel small, even though the paintings themselves are small.

Here they are displayed in the high resolution of print (much sharper than images on the web, as I frequently remind my readers). With only a few exceptions, they are also, much to my delight, presented at their actual size.

In print we can see, in a way that is not clear in the low resolution images on the web, the painterly brush strokes, sensual textures and deft painting handling that Merrow-Smith has worked so hard to acquire and now wields with apparent ease.

In selecting the paintings for the book he has not done what I might have hoped. I’ve mentioned before that I see his story as one of artistic growth and struggle, told over that five year period in the sequence of over a thousand paintings, and I might have wanted a temporal sequence showing that advancement.

In retrospect, of course, that would have been a bad and unworkable idea in the limited space of a book. (That story is there, however, on his site in the form of his archive of paintings.) Instead he has taken the much more reasonable course of selecting some of the best of those paintings, which is to say, mostly recent ones [Correction: see this post's comments].

These are the fruits of his labors, the result and reward of the daily painting discipline, and they display the current state of his abilities, his deft draftsmanship, crisp and lively paint handling, superb sense of chiaroscuro, firm command of composition and negative space and, most dramatically, his evocation of color and light.

In a way, the book has a storybook feeling to it, as if a writer had decided to depict the life of a painter in Provence and the paintings had been chosen and arranged to communicate that perfectly; here is the painter on the edge of the vineyard, bursting with greens on the edge of shadow; here is the painter at the foot of the hill, distant mountains washed in haze; here is the painter in his house, this evening’s fish waiting to be prepared, scales glistening in the kitchen light; here is the onion, hints of transparency in its film of skin; here the garlic, rounded in deep chiaroscuro; here the simple glass of wine, reflective and refractive, the day’s fruit from the local market or the artist’s garden, ripe with color.

Here is the artist and the bits of his life he has chosen to share with us, whether in sunlight or on a kitchen counter, sparkling with the colors that Provence has revealed to him.