Sketch Theatre collects step-through demonstration videos of artists from comics, film and game design, animation and related fields.

Created by Alex Alvarez, founder and director of the Gnomon School of Visual Effects and the Gnomon Workshop, and produced by Lily Feliciano, Sketch Theater allows artists in these fields to give quick instructional demonstrations that pass on some of their techniques and working methods to other interested artists.

Some are longer and more elaborate, others are short, but usually still informative. Many are extracted from longer instructional DVD’s offered commercially by Gnomon Workshop, but usually stand on their own as a demonstration piece.

The videos are all shown within the amusing conceit of a mock theater interface.

There is a list of artists, apparently arranged alphabetically by first name, many of whom have more than one video clip.

There are also video interviews with a number of the artists, news, a forum and a store.

(Images above: Travis Louie [top 2], Christian Lorenz Scheurer, Jordu Schell, David Krentz and Syd Mead; see my posts on Christian Lorenz Scheurer, Jordu Schell, David Krentz and Syd Mead.)

I’m sorry to report that Al Williamson, one of the greats of 20th Century comics art and a personal favorite of mine, died on Sunday at the age of 79.

For more see my posts on Al Williamson and Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic.

[Via io9 and CBR]

François Baranger is a French concept artist, illustrator and comics artist. He has done concept design for both gaming and film, and his film credits include Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, parts I and II, and Prince of Persia, though you won’t yet find art from those films in his online portfolio, as they are still under a non-disclosure agreement.

You will find art for Arthur and the Invisibles, a new film by Luc Besson, director of The Fifth Element, and Ek-Tor an interesting but cancelled project, also by Besson.

There are also galleries of Baranger’s work for other film and game projects, as well as fantasy and junior books illustration, and comics.

Baranger uses both digital and traditional media, along with some 3-D rendering. His concept work appears largely like digital painting, in which he maintains a nice feeling of a painterly surface and often utilizes limited, almost monochromatic palettes to great effect.

The pieces of his that I enjoy most are concept illustrations for environments, both interior and exterior, in which he can be very evocative of place.

[Via io9]

Frank Frazetta was one of the best and most renowned fantasy illustrators in the history of the genre. Frazetta died yesterday, May 10, 2010 at the age of 82.

Frazetta began his career as a comics artist, starting as a teenager as an assistant to other artists. He worked for smaller comic book publishers, producing a number of memorable “funny animal” comics (see my previous post on Frank Frazetta’s Funny Animal Comics), and a number of adventure titles.

He was eventually given the opportunity to crate his own comic title, Thun’da, King of the Congo, but his run on the comic was only two issues. He then went to work in newspaper comics, doing “ghost work” (uncredited assistance) on Dan Barry’s Flash Gordon. He continued to work for comic book companies, including EC Comics and DC Comics, and contributed covers to the Buck Rogers comic books.

In 1954 Frazetta went to work for Al Capp, assisting on his extremely popular Li’l Abner strip, he also continued to work on his own newspaper strip, Johnny Comet. On leaving Capp’s studio he did work for the Warren horror comic magazines, Creepy and Eerie, contributing many of those publications’ most memorable covers. At the same time he contributed to Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s Little Annie Fanny strip for Playboy (see my post on Will Elder).

From there, Frazetta moved into paperback cover illustration and achieved his greatest renown for his lushly painted covers for novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and in particular, Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian books.

In addition to the influences of his colleges at E.C., like Al Williamson, Roy Krenkel and Wally Wood, Frazetta picked up on the techniques of the great 19th century pen and ink illustrators like Joseph Clement Coll and became a first rate pen and ink draftsman.

In his painting, Frazetta carried forward the traditions of the great swashbuckling adventure illustrators like Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth and Frank Schoonover, bringing them into the modern era with a touch more menace, implied violence and sex. In the process Frazetta became tremendously influential on a new generation of adventure fantasy artists, many of whom are working today.

Frazetta’s figures, beasts and monsters seem to inhabit a world in which gravity exerts more force than normal; and that great sensation of weight translated into a suggestion of immense power, either heroic or menacing.

Frazetta’s color palette, again with a direct lineage to Pyle and Wyeth, was often dark and moody, punctuated by bright passages for emphasis. His use of theatrical lighting for dramatic effect gave his compositions an immediate visceral impact.

To my mind, it is in the bridge he forms between those Golden Age illustrators and the newer generation that grew up in awe of his barbarian images that Frazetta is most notable, carrying forward traditions of great adventure illustration in a lineage he happily acknowledged in illustrations like Galleon (image above, bottom), a direct homage to Pyle’s Attack on a Galleon (see my post on Howard Pyle).

Frazetta remains extremely popular and there are a number of books that collect or feature his work, and there is a video interview with the artist on DVD, Frazetta: Painting With Fire.

There is a museum devoted to his work that was run by the family. I don’t know what its status will be going forward. The museum site doesn’t have much information, but it does have a selection of Frazetta’s work in the form of prints.

I’ve listed some other resources below.

[Note: Some images are NSFW.]

The great cartoonist, caricaturist and humorous illustrator Jack Davis is best known for his contributions to Mad Comics and Mad Magazine, particularly during the title’s heyday in the 1950’s and 1960’s, but he was a prolific illustrator and his work appeared in a variety of venues.

One of them was TV Guide, for which he often did covers. In 1965, the NBC television network commissioned Davis to draw a multi-page panorama featuring their entire fall lineup for the new season. The network took out a 6 page ad in TV Guide to display the ad.

This is one of those great Davis illustrations in which he fits dozens of caricatures into a single image, as he sometimes did for movie posters, like this one for Stanley Kramner’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Someone has posted an image of almost all of the NBC multi-page feature from TV Guide on the MAD Mumblings forum. Mark Evanier points out that it is still missing the page for the Sunday shows, and has asked if anyone can locate an image of the sixth page, or even better, rescan the entire set of pages at higher resolution.

[Via Metafilter and Mark Evanier]

[Addendum:} Evanier has posted a link to a larger version of the entire image on TV Series Finale. (Thanks, Rand.)

The Realist is a graphic story by illustrator and comics artist Asaf Hanuka about one family’s search for a new home after their current living arrangements are upset.

The strip was originally serialized in a Hebrew language version in the Israeli Newspaper Calcalist. Hanuka has re-lettered it in English and is publishing it on the web, one page a week.

English speakers may find it interesting to compare some of the English language pages with their Hebrew counterparts in that the Hebrew pages read right-to-left, creating some challenges for the conventions used by comics artists to guide your eye through dialog balloons in the proper order by their position in a panel.

It looks as though Hanuka may have had this process in mind when originally laying out his panels as they work pretty well, with a few exceptions (like a reference to a GPS telling characters to turn right, when the flopped image shows an arrow pointing left).

Hanuka has a spare, single line weight comics art style that is well suited to the nature of the story. His controlled, muted coloring is accented occasionally with brighter colors specifically for dramatic effect.

As of this writing, the posted story is up to week 6.

Hanuka also maintains a more general topic blog, Tropical Toxic, and has a web site with galleries of his illustration and comics work.

I previously wrote about Asaf Hanuka, and his brother Tomer Hanuka, also a noted comics artist and illustrator, back in 2007.

[Via Drawn!]

Working under assumed names for obvious reasons, writer “Amir” and artist “Khalil” chronicle events in Iran in the wake of the disputed elections of 2009 in an ongoing story called Zahra’s Paradise.

Zahra’s Paradise is a graphic story that is being published as a webcomic in installments every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It just started on February 19, and will continue to include current events as they happen in the context of a fictional story. It follows a young Iranian blogger’s search for his brother, who has disappeared following his participation in the post-election protests.

The author is an Iranian-American human rights activist and the artist is a sculptor, ceramics artist and cartoonist who is taking on his first graphic novel.

The webcomic is being published simultaneously in English, Farsi, Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch. First Second Books will publish the story in book form in 2011.

The site conveniently opens on the first page of the story (unlike the majority of webcomics, who open their site with the most recent page on the mistaken assumption that convenience for current readers is more important than orienting new ones.)

The art is clear and straightforward, with enough touches of style to add visual charm without distracting from the storytelling. Simple tones and hatching, along with well spotted blacks, provide depth and visual balance.

The characters are immediately accessible, even to Westerners who might assume they have little connection to people and events in Iran. As we follow along with the search for Mehdi, we may find out more about how similar, and different, our lives are.

[Via BoingBoing]

Even among fans of his comic art masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland (a group of whom I count myself an ardent member), few people are aware of the editorial cartoons of Winsor McCay.

During his stints as cartoonist for The Cincinnati Enquirer and The New York Herald, and through syndicated work for the Hearst papers, McCay did a remarkable series of editorial and allegorical cartoons. More social commentary than topically editorial, they were anti-materialism, anti-laziness, anti-drug and pro hard work and duty.

The best thing about them, of course, is that they were wonderfully drawn by one of one of the best draftsmen in the history of cartooning and comics.

In 2005 Fantagraphics published a terrific collection of McCay’s black and white work, Daydreams and Nightmares: The Fantastic Visions of Winsor McCay, 1898-1934 (more here), that is unfortunately out of print, but can be found used for essentially original cover price ($20).

In addition to McCay’s social commentary/editorial cartoons, the book includes pages of his early strips like Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, A Pilgrim’s Progress, Day Dreams and Little Sammy Sneeze. (Sunday Press published wonderful large-scale version of the latter, with color; my article here.)

Only a smattering of McCay material is online, but the generous and enigmatic “Mr. Door Tree” has published a number of McCay’s editorial cartoons on his blog Golden Age Comic Book Stories. Be sure to click on the initial images to see the large versions of the drawings.

Wonderful stuff.

[Link via BitterOldPunk on MetaFilter]

Bill Watterson, the artist and writer of Calvin and Hobbes, to my mind the best late 20th Century comic strip after Pogo ceased publication in 1975, is almost as notable for the things he didn’t do as for his actual accomplishments.

He didn’t accept the idea of merchandising his popular characters to the hilt, and resisted his syndicate’s constant pressure to do so, allowing only the publication of book collections of the strip and calendars. No stuffed characters, no Hobbes dolls hung upside-down with suction cups to the inside of station wagon windows, no notebooks, sticker books, T-shirts, TV specials or Burger King soda cups. Just the strip, pure and simple.

And it was pure and simple, a classic humor strip, brilliantly written and wonderfully drawn. He didn’t overcomplicate it, try to make it too topical or stretch it beyond its natural limits. When he felt the strip had run its course, Watterson retired, and again resisted any desire on the part of the syndicate to keep it alive artificially and milk it into oblivion.

Watterson himself did not seek the spotlight, preferring to let his characters do the talking, and rarely gave interviews. There was a brief interview with Watterson published in yesterday’s Celveland Plain Dealer (which I believe is his hometown newspaper). The interview was conducted by email, and is very short and not particularly revealing, but worth noting just as an event.

You’ll see it marked as the first in 20 years, but that discounts the question and answer with fans that his book publisher, Andrews McMeel, conducted in 2005 to promote the release of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

The cleveland.com site has also posted a selection of rarely seen editorial cartoons by Watterson from his stint with Sun Newspapers in the 1980’s. Unfortunately, as in the images above, the reproductions in their slideshow have apparently been poorly resized and lost some of their original line quality.

At any rate, it’s a good excuse to stop, pick up a Calvin and Hobbes book you haven’t read in a while, and be reminded that “there’s treasure everywhere”.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Nate Simpson is a concept artist who has worked in the gaming industry since 1993. He has worked for companies like The Dreamers Guild, Taldren, GoPets Inc. and Gas Powered Games.

His credits include leading the art team for Demigod, a 2009 game from Gas Powered Games and Stardock, from which you can see an image in the Concepts section of is web site.

According to a short note on his site, Simpson is “…currently taking year off to learn how to make comics”. Judging from the sample pages he has posted, particularly those in the section of his site for “New Comics“, which are for a an endeavor Simpson calls “Project Waldo”, he is learning quite well indeed.

Simpson’s comic art sensibilities are distinctly European, having a feeling in keeping with some French and Belgian comics artists (which is a Good Thing in my book).

When clicking through the galleries on his site, click on an image to make it larger and then step through with the arrows. Much of the appeal is in the rendering and contrast between levels of line weight in the inks. This is again more in keeping with European (or Japanese) comics than mainstream American comics, in which line weight is frequently varied throughout the delineation of every figure.

You can find even larger images, including inked pages prior to the application of color, on Simpson’s blog, which is named for and devoted to Project Waldo.

His tagline for the blog reads “Follow along as I learn how to make a comic by making a comic. I hope you’re not in a hurry.”

Those who aren’t in a hurry, and can take the time to go back to the beginning of Simpson’s posts and follow through, will find a good deal of insight and valuable information that he has accrued in his learning process, and offered up in the course of the past year.

The image above shows page two of the story, along with detail crops below of inks and final color from the lower center portion of the middle panel. (See the original large image on Simpson’s blog here.)

Simpson puts a great deal of detail into some elements, leaving others open to be carried by the application of color. His background landscapes have more in common with Bruegel’s landscape drawings than with mainstream comics.

The color itself is in the style of European comics albums, bringing to mind the work of Moebius in particular (when he is coloring his own work, not handing it over to someone else to bury under inappropriate Beltran-like over-rendering, but I digress; that’s a topic for another post).

Word is that Simpson has gotten expressions of interest from some publishers, but there are no specifics yet, and it has now been a year since his first post on the Project Waldo, and he is only up to page 8 (out of how many pages total, I don’t know). It looks like those of us who, like myself, are looking forward to reading the finished story, will also have to not be in a hurry.

In the meanwhile, whether in concept art or comics, Simpson is a artist to watch.

[Via Drawn!]