Today is John Singer Sargent’s birthday.

A search for his work on the wonderful, recently redesigned website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art brings up over 600 images.

Yes, the iconic and astonishingly accomplished society portraits are well represented, and if you want to focus on those, you can limit your search to show only artworks on display, which sharply reduces it to 18 finished and beautiful works.

Part of the fascination for me, however, is exploring the less finished, less often seen works by Sargent in the museum’s collection, including watercolors, drawings and sketchbooks.

Sargent was prolific, and sketched and painted in watercolor for his own pleasure in addition to his more finished commissioned portraits.

The wonderful thing about browsing the Met’s website, aside from the amazing quantity and quality of their collection of Sargent, is that almost all of the images are viewable in large, sometimes wonderfully large, versions.

On each image’s detail page, click on the image or the “View fullscreen” link below it, and then zoom, or even better, use the download image arrow at bottom right to view the image larger.

This gets my Major Timesink Warning.

Enjoy.

I’ve written previously about a number of illustrators who are represented by Richard Solomon, a well known artists representative in New York whose list of represented artists reads like a who’s who of the top names in contemporary illustration.

In addition to the portfolios of represented artists on the Richard Solomon website (for which I’ll issue a Time-sink Warning), Solomon has in recent months been posting sketches from a number of the artists on a Tumblelog called Warm Up Sketches + Working Process.

These run the gamut from personal sketches and sketchbook pages to preliminary roughs for illustrations to relatively finished drawings. Though a few of the links from the index page are broken at the moment, there is more than enough wonderful material here to make a visit well worthwhile.

Many of the drawings and sketches are linked to the artist’s page on the Solomon website, or you can go in through the front of the site and look them up.

(Images above: Murray Kimber, James Bennett, David Johnson, Jon Foster, Gregory Manchess, Scott Brundage, Tyler Jacobson, Tim Bower, Thomas Ehretsmann, Hermann Mejia, Mark Summers)

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.]

Wow. Francis Vallejo has gifted us with a collection of drawings by the superb Russian-American artist Nicolai Fechin on his aptly named Inspiration blog.

Be sure to click on the images for the larger versions; in many cases they are quite large.

Some of the images are a bit rough, I don’t know if that’s a limitation of the photograph or the condition of the originals, but the drawings are so strong they shine through.

Absolutely wonderful.

[Via Paolo Rivera]

I’m most familiar with Victorian writer, art critic, draftsman and watercolorist John Ruskin for his critical defense of the fledgling Pre-Raphaelite group of painters, vital at a time when their ideas and approach were at odds with the prevailing values of the Royal Academy and the British art establishment in general.

His defense of their ideals is unsurprising, given that they were largely influenced by his own writing, particularly his elevation of “truth to nature” as a high ideal for artists in the midst of aesthetic philosophy that demanded idealization in artistic interpretations of the world.

That philosophy, and Ruskin himself, first attained prominence with an essay in Modern Painters in 1843 in which he defended the work of J.M.W. Turner.

Ruskin was also the author of a treatise on drawing entitled The Elements of Drawing, that is still relevant and continues to be reprinted and valued today.

Among his other accomplishments, Ruskin was a professor of fine art at University of Oxford, where he established the Ruskin School of Drawing, which continues today as The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (usually referred to as simply “The Ruskin”).

Also associated with the university is the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, which has placed online a resource titled The Elements of Drawing: John Ruskin’s Teaching Collection at Oxford.

It features digitizations of much of Ruskin’s collection of almost 1500 works that he assembled for use in his school. The collection includes drawings and watercolors by himself and a number of other artists as well as prints and photographs.

You can browse and search the collection in several ways, but the best introduction is probably the highlights assortment of 50 objects.

The objects listings have pages describing the works (click on “Details” for medium and size), and most are linked to larger versions of the images.

(Images above: top six: John Ruskin, bottom three: Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Samuel Prout, J.M.W. Turner)

[Via MetaFilter]

Throughout my life I’ve been fortunate to experience a series of wonderful “Ah-Ha!” moments when I’ve come across a new genre or artist that made me feel like I was opening my eyes on a new world.

Discovering the graphite portrait drawings of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres when I was an art student was one of them.

Ingres (pronunciation here) was a renowned French neoclassical painter and one of the finest draftsmen of the 19th Century, if not of Western art in total.

Though he drew in most traditional drawing media, chalk, “crayon” and pen and ink, it was his graphite on paper portrait drawings that wowed me. They have an uncanny presence and weight that belie their actual technique.

Ingres was primarily a portrait painter, and is considered one of the best in the history of art.

His portrait drawings have that amazing character of faces rendered with such skill that they have a palpable personality, but lead your eye into economically rendered bodies and hands that are clearly lines on paper.

I love the sensation produced by the contrast of responding to a drawing as a personality, and within the space of the same drawing, responding to it as a drawing.

I’m not sure if my description is adequate to explain what I mean, but I think anyone who has experienced what I’m trying to describe will recognize the delight it can bring to those who love drawings. (For another example, see Rubens’ portrait drawing of Isabella Brant.)

It also astonishes me how tight and detailed the faces in Ingres’ portrait drawings look on first inspection, but how freely they are actually rendered when viewed more closely.

I’ve been lucky to have seen several of Ingres’ drawings in person; these are relatively rare opportunities as works on paper cannot be exposed to light for long periods without shortening their effective lifespan. Several of those occasions have been at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, which counts several excellent examples of Ingres drawings in its permanent collection.

Those in the area can still catch an exhibition of sixteen of them titled Ingres at the Morgan, that is on display until November 27, 2011.

For those who can’t get to the museum in person, the Morgan has a terrific online feature, in which the drawings can be viewed in full-screen zoomable versions. The page of thumbnails is here. When viewing the detail page for an individual drawing, look for the inconspicuous “Full Screen” button at the right of the row of controls under the image.

There is also a nice accompanying feature on Ingres’ drawing materials and methods.

Ingres’ drawings may make you think differently about the capabilities of the humble graphite pencil.

Swedish artist, designer and teacher Nina Johansson subtitles her website “Because drawing is good for you”, and its pages are filled with the ripe, healthy fruit of that philosophy, lots of wonderful drawings, sketches and watercolors.

Johansson seems to take as her favorite subject that most perfect of all drawing subjects — what’s in front of her at any given moment, be it food, a street, cars, plants, buildings, train passengers, a camera, pens, hands, pedestrians or travel scenes.

Her efficient, casual notation, textural ink lines, pencil shadings and brilliant dashes of watercolor enliven her take on even the most mundane of subjects.

She also has a portfolio of more finished work and several galleries of sketchbooks. The home page of her site is arranged as a blog.

You can also find her work posted on Urban Sketchers.

[Via Escape Into Life]

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.]