Perhaps more than any other art form, cartoons can serve to foment dissent, arouse ire at injustice, mock the powers that be and shake up the status quo.

Which brings us to the brilliant cartoonist Ronald Searle, who died December 30, 2011 at the age of 91.

I’ve listed some obits below, along with links of general interest. The best single resource on Searle and his work is Matt Jones’ Ronald Searle Tribute blog.

A solo show of Searle’s work is scheduled to open this Saturday, January 7, 2102, at Gallery Nucleus in Alhambra, CA. It runs to January 29. Closer to the event, images from the show will be posted here.

For more, see my post from 2007 on Ronald Searle.

As I mentioned in my previous post about him from 2007, Elwood H. Smith has a delightful illustration style that carries echoes of great comic strips from the early part of the 20th Century, and somehow manages to look both retro and modern simultaneously.

Smith hits the right balance for me between old and new, minimal and textured, cartoony and whimsical, and I find his style particularly appealing.

His editorial illustration clients include the The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time, Barron’s, Forbes and many others, and his advertising illustration clients have included SONY, Samsung, Land’s End, Inglenook Wine and TGI Fridays.

Smith has also illustrated a number of children’s books, including, The Truth About Poop, Stalling and many others.

In addition to his original website, which was in place when I last wrote about him, Smith has a newer site called Elwood’s World, and maintains a blog on Drawger.

You can also find his short animations showcased on his website and on Vimeo, along with a 2D-3D collaboration between Smith and Brian Hoard called The Amazing Elwood.

Earlier this year, Smith’s work was featured in an exhibition at the Norman Rockwell Museum, titled Elwood’s World: The Art and Animation of Elwood H. Smith. He also gave a lecture on process at the museum in 2007, which can be seen on Vimeo.

Edward Sorel: Nice Work If You Can Get It is a 20 minute documentary about the well known cartoonist and satirist filmed by his son, Leo Sorel.

In it the cartoonist discusses his career, his freeform, direct-in-ink drawing process and his degree of self criticism. There is also commentary from some of his famous contemporaries and younger artists who have been influenced by his work.

For more, see my previous post on Edward Sorel.

[Via MetaFilter]

Here’s a fun notion; the Slate Magazine blog, Culturebox, has put together an interactive color wheel of cartoon characters arranged by their hue (and, correctly enough, by intensity, as indicated by our grayish friends at the center of the wheel).

In the original, you can mouse over the characters for identification.

[Via Cartoon Brew]

Ken Reid was a British comics artist who worked in newspaper comics in the middle of the 20th Century and later moved into working for comic books, notably for The Beano.

He is probably best remembered now for his later series of comically horror-themed posters called World Wide Weirdies that ran in a publication called Whoopee!.

These were often intricately detailed (the small reproductions here don’t do them justice) and wonderfully grotesque; as well as frequently quite funny. They were based on puns or other naming suggestions submitted by readers. Reid drew them in a circular frame surrounded by smaller drawings of oddball characters, of which there were at least two sets.

There is an extensive Flicker set of Reid’s World Wide Weirdies, as well as other articles and mentions that I’ll try to list below.

[Via BoingBoing]

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.

Charles Kaufman is a painter, cartoonist, illustrator and comics artist. His work has appeared in a long list of publications, from underground comix and CARtoons to the Wall Street Journal-Europe, Focus, Computer Artist, Editor & Publisher, New Media and a host of others, along with a range of commercial clients.

His is the creator of Fred and Frank, a long running comics series published for U.S. military personnel stationed in Europe from 1979-1992.

Kaufman works both in digital media and traditional media like acrylic and pen and ink, applying his off-kilter style to gallery paintings as well as illustrations and cartoons.

His paintings, in acrylic on canvas and sometimes other supports like wood or paper, are often of cubist influenced compositions involving women, or wine, or wine and women, as well as a few other subjects including a selection of stylized landscapes. Kaufman has a description of his painting process here.

Among his choice of unusual supports for paintings are crushed soft drink or beer cans, panted with acrylic. The finished piece is then framed for hanging. His crushed can art is featured on both a website and blog.

Kaufman also creates limited edition 3-D constructions that are probably a little difficult to convey in photographs.

In addition he creates “Fish Art” under the pseudonym of F. Frank.

Some of Kaufman’s work is collected in a book called Detail Views: Paintings within paintings, that is available from Back Wall Art. New collections of his 116 Faces and Crushed Can Art are due soon.

I don’t often talk about my own projects on Lines and Colors, but sometimes they’re enough fun to be worthy of note.

PumpkinMixer is my new app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Like my other apps, DinoMixer and MonsterMixer, it was developed with my friend and colleague Leon Stankowski, who created the coding to fit with my design and illustrations, worked with me on the functionality and coordinated the sound.

Similar to the other “Mixer” apps, PumpkinMixer is based loosely on the old Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse, in which artists would fold over paper and draw three independent parts of a drawing, head, body and legs, without seeing the outcome until all were in place. This concept made its way into popular culture as a children’s game (my friends and I played it in elementary school), and was eventually adapted in publishing as “mix-n-match” children’s picture books (usually spiral-bound, with stiff cardboard pages that are divided in three).

PumpkinMixer, like DinoMixer and MonsterMixer, is an electronic version of this. In the case of PumpkinMixer, you swipe side to side to swap sets of eyes, noses and mouths, with an extra horizontal band at the top to switch between three backgrounds. Swiping on the iPhone screen vertically switches between pumpkins and swaps out the colors of the animated “candle flame” behind the face cut-outs.

In designing the interface and creating the artwork, which was done digitally in Painter and Photoshop in the same way I draw my webcomic, Argon Zark!, I faced the same challenges I outlined in my post about creating the artwork for DinoMixer.

Like many illustration projects, this one, in addition to the design and technical challenges, had a deadline. Since PumpkinMixer just made it through the App Store approval process and became available today, one day before Halloween, you might say we just made it; though we obviously had an earlier release in mind.

On the other hand, you could say we’re just really really early for next Halloween!