Though he painted other subjects, Aelbert Cuyp is best known as one of the premiere landscape painters of the Dutch Golden Age.

His scenes of ships on the waterways of his native Dordrecht are filled with shimmering light effects, illuminated sails and glowing clouds. Even his humble scenes of cows grazing are given a romantic intensity, bathed in the glow of dramatic early morning or late evening light.

Cuyp’s landscapes have something of an Italian influence, even if only second hand through the work of other Dutch painters like Jan Both, who traveled there.

I particularly enjoy Cuyp’s drawings, of which made many, both as preliminary studies for paintings and apparently, like Rembrandt, for their own sake.

In fact I find in his drawings some of the same degree of simple observation, economical rendering and uncannily strong sense of place and atmosphere as I admire in Rembrandt’s drawings.

The best quality images I’ve found for Cuyp’s work on the web are the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Google Art Project, National Gallery, London and the Rijksmuseum. Cuidad de la pintura is a great source for his drawings.

Dorian Vallejo is a portrait painter based in New Jersey. Though he sometimes sets his portraits in the more traditional toned or textured plain background, he often creates a kind of portrait that I particularly enjoy, with the subjects in background settings that are in some way relevant to the their personality.

In particular, his portraits in landscape settings are nicely evocative of time and place, giving the portrait a context that would be otherwise missing from a plain background.

His website includes a range of his portrait approaches, as well as a variety of subjects, from children to families to more formal professional settings.

There is also a selection of Sketches. These range from sketches in pencil and charcoal to more finished drawings to oil sketches. The oil sketches are much more free and informal than the finished paintings, and have a very different appeal.

There is also a selection he titles “Intimate Portraits“. These, as well as related life drawings, are done in very loose, gestural applications of mixed media (images above, bottom four).

A number of the life drawings have been collected in a book: Drawings: Inspired by Life, and there is a separate website devoted to them. This site has a more extensive selection, and though they are displayed somewhat small, they are in a zoomable interface.

Vallejo is the son of renowned fantasy artist and illustrator Boris Vallejo. He studied illustration at Parsons and the School of Visual Arts in New York and traveled and studied in Europe before devoting his attention to portraiture.

[Suggestion courtesy of Kelly Houghton]

[Note: some of the drawings on the "Drawings from Life" site could be considered NSFW.]

Fred Lynch is an illustrator and gallery artist based in Massachusetts who is also a Professor of Illustration at Montserrat College of Art and a member of the Illustration Faculty at Rhode Island School of Design.

His illustration clients include Random House, Viking Penguin and the Atlantic Monthly, among others. You will find a selection of his illustration work on his website under the heading “illustrator” under “commercial art”.

In the section for “artist”, under “paintings” you can see some of his gallery art, focusing on a series of coffee cup subjects, several of which are liquified funhouse mirror interpretations of the humble cup.

In both the “illustrator” and “artist” sections you will find a section called “journalistic art”. These are a series of wonderful location sketches, apparently in pencil, ink and washes of either monochromatic watercolor or colored ink.

The versions on his site are unfortunately small, but you can see larger images, and many more of them, on Lynch’s Flicker stream and on the Urban Sketchers blog, which is where I initially encountered his work.

I particularly enjoy his evocative drawings (many of them are refined to the point it’s hard to call them “sketches”) of buildings and streets in small Italian towns. He has an architect’e eye for architectural details, but renders them with a beautifully free line and precise but lively application of washes.

I love the way he plays with light and shade in these, note the white awning in the piece at top, and in the detail, second down, as well as the highlights on the steps and sheet in the wonderfully odd building with the central staircase above, fifth down.

Lynch often travels to Italy in conjunction with the Montserrat College of Art’s Summer Italy Program. There is a blog titled Drawing Viterbo devoted to the program that showcases some of the student work from the program as well as some of Lynch’s location work.

[Addendum: Lynch has been kind enough to inform me that there is a Tumbleog of his Italy drawings, and a blog that features his illustrations and stories for Paul Revere's Ride Revisited.]

I’ve written before about my admiration for the classic instructional books by the early to mid 20th century American illustrator Andrew Loomis.

In particular I’ve enthusiastically reviewed two of the superb new editions from Titan Books of his too long out of print classics, Figure Drawing for All it’s Worth and Drawing the Head and Hands (links to my reviews).

My recommendation for the relevance for these volumes from the 1940′s and 1950′s to contemporary artists comes under two principles: “What’s old is new” (or fashionably retro) and “Some things are timeless.”

The latter, of course, is the primary qualification for Loomis’ teachings; they go to the heart of figure drawing, and in his signature work, Creative Illustration, he also goes to the heart of composition, line, tone, narrative imagery and creative idea generation.

The book, published in 1947, was aimed at professional illustrators; and while some of the advice about the nature of the business may be dated, some is not, and the principles of composing and creating illustrations in various media are essential and timeless.

Some may find Loomis’ style “old fashioned” — others, myself included, find it both timeless and wonderfully retro, as fresh as when he was working.

There is plenty of it to be seen in Creative Illustration. Loomis has packed it with instructional drawings, layout diagrams, sketches, process sequences, paintings and illustrations in diverse media. It’s a visual treat as well as a treasure of art instruction.

He even goes into his admiration for the work of the great American illustrator Howard Pyle, including some tone studies he made of Pyle’s works (above, 7th down).

Once again, Titan Books has gone beyond a respectful reproduction and brought us a beautiful edition of this classic work, from the facsimile cream-colored paper to the color reproductions to the crisp black and white and tone illustrations.

The images above are rough scans from an old edition and don’t by any means do the current volume justice. So far I’ve been unable to convince Titan to provide more in the way of previews. In lieu of that, see the reviews that include previews on Parka Blogs (including a video flip-through), Parka Blogs Flickr stream, Boing Boing and Wings Art.

Creative Illustration is a 300 page tome bursting at the seams with essentials of image creation and Andrew Loomis’ beautiful work, sage advice and straightforward instruction.

The link between movies and comics is a strong one. Even without the obvious bridge of their wonderful merging in animation, they share numerous qualities.

Both are visual storytelling mediums, and share a common concern with establishing shots, close-ups, framing a scene, conveying the spatial relationship of characters one to the other and other elements of essential visual continuity from scene to scene.

Both involve the element of time and of visual compositions that change over time.

Both have a “director’s” viewpoint, and the impact of choices of lighting, contrast and visual mood cannot be understated in the effectiveness with which a story is told.

Storyboards, which are used to plan movies, television and animation, are in essence a from of comics.

It’s not surprising then that there is crossover between the two fields; a number of comics artists and writers have moved into the fields of film and television and visual development artists have ventured into comics.

Marcos Mateu-Mestre, who I have profiled previously, has moved back and forth — he started as a comics artist for newspapers in his native Spain, moved into production design for animation and is currently a visual development artist working at Dreamworks.

In his excellent book, Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers, which I reviewed here, he applied his expertise in both fields to create a superb framework for narrative illustration.

In his new book, Trail of Steel – 1441 A.D., Mateu-Mestre places those skills in the service of a graphic story about mercenary soldiers in 15th century Spain. The artist provided me with a review copy.

The storytelling, as you would expect, is dramatically cinematic, conveyed in Mateu-Mestre’s wonderfully fluid drawing style. He has an uncanny ability to combine precision draftsmanship and free, energetic rendering. I’ve spoken before about the delight I take in his drawing style.

The real highlight for me, however, is his mastery of tone. To say that the drawings are in black and white and grays is to miss the point. Here is a story told in both subtle and dramatic value contrasts that would not have been as effective if rendered any other way.

Mateu-Mestre uses value here in much the way skilled film directors use black and white film in many classic movies, creating a mood and atmosphere that would actually be difficult to achieve in color. These are images in which color would be a distraction and actually lessen the impact.

He has posted some images from the book on his blog in which he plays with the application of subtle colors to some of the pages (images above, second from bottom). As much as I like them as images and interesting experiments, I much prefer the panels as presented in the book.

Even though this is a story, students of comics (and visual storytelling in general) could consider Trail of Steel effective as a continuation of the lessons in Framed Ink — a textbook use of cinematic comics storytelling and the application of light and dark in narrative illustration.

The book is appended with a few notes on process, preliminary drawings and thumbnail page layouts. It is available as both a European style hardcover album (the best format for comics, IMHO) and a trade paperback.

You can find more mentions of the book on Mateu-Mestre’s blog, along with more of his visual development work, including some beautiful tone and color images from his work on Puss In Boots.

Lebbeus Woods was a visionary experimental architect whose designs, though they were seldom realized as actual structures, were tremendously influential on a generation of architects.

His work took on concepts generally considered beyond the purview of architecture, exploring aspects of life and human society as well as the nature of space as defined by structures — and the way humans exist within current and imagined realities.

Woods produced wonderful drawings, both of his visionary projects, such as his design for “Einstein’s Tomb” as an orbiting space station (above, top) and his unique take on extant structures, like his remarkable imagining of Manhattan as a plateau above a deep gorge in the New York bedrock.

Woods died in October this year at the age of 72.

There is an official site and blog, but it’s not that easy to find his drawings. A better source is this gallery exhibition at Friedman Benda gallery from earlier this year, as well as some of the articles on Bldg Blog and others sources listed below.

[Suggestion and links courtesy of Henry Wing Han Lau]

Mathew Borrett is a Canadian illustrator and visual effects artist who works with architectural illustration and also creates wild and sometimes elaborate imagined structures, some underground, some in cityscapes.

His underground structures, with their maze-like and Escher influenced explorations of divided space, may have grown out of his more traditional architectural subjects, some of which feature cut-away sections.

The “Drawings” section of his website portfolio has selections from the “Room Series”, done with Pigma Micron ink marker pens, as well as pencil drawings and other ink drawings. The “Illustrations” section has some of his more traditional illustration work.

Borrett also maintains a blog, in which you can find preliminary sketches and works in progress. There is also a selection of his images on the Fine Art America site, where they are available as prints.

[Via BoingBoing and Illusion]

Etchings, for me, have a kind of visual magic.

There is something about the character of etched lines that is entrancing in a way quite distinct from other forms of drawing or graphics.

I find it hard to isolate exactly why. Partly, I suppose, it’s the fine line available with an etching needle and carefully prepared plate, and the process by which the ink is transferred to the usually off-white paper, producing muted value contrasts.

A major part of the appeal, though, I think I can assign to the approach and style of line that the medium seems to inspire in its masters — a kind of casual, quick hatching, almost scribbled in places, that is at once subtle and dramatic, quiet and lively, tonal and linear, hard edged and remarkably soft.

Of all of the artists who are masters of etching, my favorites are Rembrandt and Whistler.

They are from different times and sensibilities and have very different approaches as painters, but share a command of the qualities of etching that brings the medium to its highest level.

No doubt Whistler was aware of and studied Rembrandt’s etchings, taking many lessons from the master, as well as the numerous other influences available to him, and putting them in service of his own sensibilities.

In some ways, I think Whistler actually surpasses Rembrandt, particularly in his use of lines to suggest softness, as in his sensitive portraits.

Etchings, by their nature, are drawings meant for reproduction; the artist could make many impressions of his original drawing and sell them, signed and numbered as a limited series, less expensively than paintings.

While Rembrandt’s subjects were often Biblical, Whistler followed the new path of the young artists of his day in taking his subjects from the real world — in particular in scenes of London and Venice.

When I first wrote about Whistler’s etchings back in 2006, the resources available for viewing them on the web were quite limited.

The internet, bless its big ol’ silicon heart, is constantly serving up new resources, and among the best since my original article are the amazing high-resolution collections on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website.

They have an extensive and superb collection of Whistler’s etchings, and have made most of them available in high resolution.

The link I’m providing is just a search of the collection for the terms Whistler and etching. At the bottom of the page is navigation to subsequent pages and a selection of how many results to view per page.

When you click through to an individual image, click on “Fullscreen” under the image and then use the zoom controls at upper left, or even better the Download arrow a lower right, to view the high resolution images.

Bear in mind as you view the etchings that you are essentially seeing them magnified; Whistler’s originals are not large, perhaps 5×7 to 8×10″ (13×18 to 20x25cm) or similar for most of them.

For more information, see my previous post on Whistler’s etchings, in which I recommend some books, and also describe the etching process.

If you respond to the magic of the etched line as I do, I’ll give the selection of Whistler’s etchings on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s website my Major Timesink Warning. I could get lost there for hours, wandering through his beautifully drawn intimate views of London wharves and Venetian canals.