I have long been fascinated by pen and ink drawing, and its mirror world cousin, scratchboard.

Both are demanding mediums, but scratchboard is additionally difficult in that the unfamiliarity of working by subtraction rather than addition takes some practice, as well a mental shift (in common with some printmaking techniques); but the rewards are a kind of textural quality and visual appeal unlike any other medium.

There are some excellent contemporary scratchboard artists carrying forward the tradition; perhaps the best known and most accomplished of which is Canadian illustrator Mark Summers.

Summers combines superb draftsmanship, a talent for whimsey and humorous exaggeration and a knack for likenesses, both contemporary and historic, with a flair that have made his unique illustrations in demand and a common sight for readers of Time, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Book Review and numerous other publications and a range of book publishers an corporate clients.

He has received awards form the Society of Illustrators and been featured in juried shows, collections and publications like Step by Step Graphics, Communication Arts, Print and Applied Arts.

If you are a book lover, you may in remember his wonderful series of literary portraits that were prominent in Barnes and Noble bookstores a few years ago (I particularly loved his portrayals of Edgar Allan Poe).

Summers was born in Ontario and studied a the Ontario College of Art. He was introduced to scratchboard by Duncan Macpherson, an editorial cartoonist who drew for the Montreal Standard and the Toronto Star.

Summers doesn’t have a dedicated website, but since I last wrote about him in 2007, a new resource for viewing his art has become available. In addition to the portfolio on the site of his artist’s representative, Richard Solomon, and his portfolio on The iSpot, he now has a presence on the relatively new Behance Network.

In the latter you will find a section of delightfully Wicked Portraits, with Summers’ portrayals of notorious heavies from history, such as Edward VII (image above, top), in the company of such cheery chums as Torquemada, Rasputin, Genghis Kahn and Atilla the Hun.

In these and many of his recent illustrations, he enlivens his scratchboard drawings with tones of watercolor and sometimes oil glazes. There is a step through and description of his working process on the Richard Solomon site, and the same process is also shown a little larger at the bottom of this page on the Behance site. In addition, Summers has left a few replies to comments on my earlier post about his work with answers to questions about his technique.

Summers’ illustrations are featured in a new book, Vanity Fair’s Presidential Profiles: Defining Portraits, Deeds, and Misdeeds of 43 Notable Americans–And What Each One Really Thought About His Predecessor.

Christopher Denise is a visual development artist who has worked with companies like Fox/Blue Sky Studios and Treanor Brothers Animation. He is also a children’s book illustrator whose clients include Candlewick Press, Penguin, Harcourt Brace McMillan and McGraw Hill.

His website portfolio includes sections for character design, props design, environments and more. The work on display here owes much to his children’s book illustration style, which has a classic fairy tale and animal character feel, with delicate linework, a subdued color palette and nice attention to texture.

He also maintains a blog in which he discusses ongoing projects both in visual development and book illustration. You will also find occasional posts about plein air painting and other topics.

Denise works in both traditional and digital media, though he doesn’t always indicate which pieces are created in a particular medium.

The books section of his website portfolio doesn’t include information about the books themselves, you can find links to many of them in the right hand column of his blog.

James Christensen’s paintings range from straightforward portraits to fantasy tinged depictions of angels and Renaissance ladies to phantasmic tableaux of fantasy subjects that look as though the books in a children’s library had been run through a fan and reassembled by a cross-eyed surrealist.

Christensen seems to swim in a rich sea of influences, from medieval, Renaissance and baroque art to Golden Age illustrators like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Kay Neilsen, John Bauer, and Gustaf Tenggren. You can even see suggestions of the obsessively detailed fairy paintings of Richard Dadd.

At his most expansive, Christensen’s wonderfully detailed and brightly garbed fantasy world denizens parade across lavishly textured landscapes, awash in saturated colors, sprinkled with luminescent details, carrying with them a trove of references to literature and folklore.

Christensen was born in California and studied at Brigham Young University and UCLA. His work has been featured in a number of publications and books, including Voyage of the Basset, A Shakespeare Sketchbook, Rhymes & Reasons, A Journey of the Imagination: The Art of James Christensen and James Christensen: The Greenwich Workshop’s New Century Artists Series.

I don’t know if the artist has an “official” site; jameschristensen.com is associated with the Jerry W. Horn Gallery, and offers original art as well as reproductions. Unfortunately the images are small and the site is poorly organized, but it shows a broad range of Christensen’s work and styles.

Larger images can be found at the Greenwich Workshop’s online gallery, B&R Gallery, Hidden Ridge Gallery and Swoyer’s Fine Art.

One of the best pages for a quick overview of his fantasy themed work is this unofficial page on 2photo.ru. I’ve listed other resources below.

[Via Monster Brains]

The Haggin Museum in Stockton, California has the largest collection of works by the great American illustrator J.C. Leyendecker held by any museum.

The collection had been on tour for some time and returned to the museum in May. Since then work has been completed on a newly remodeled gallery in which the collection will be on display until December 31, 2010 (just long enough for the next installment of my traditional Happy Leyendecker Baby New Year post).

Unfortunately, the museum has not matched the renovated gallery display with a much needed revision of their online image gallery, which still suffers from images with camera lens distortion and color aberration (I’ve straightened out a few of the above images with the Lens Correction filter in Photoshop).

The images are also frustratingly small, but you can get an idea of the breadth and depth of the collection, which contains some superb examples of Leyendecker’s work, as well as unique early pieces.

The museum’s website does include an article about the exhibit and a Leyendecker biography, which includes a history of the collection and of Earl Rowland, the museum’s former director who assembled the museum’s holdings of Leyerdecker and other noted illustrators.

As far as I know, there is not a printed catalog of the museum’s Leyendecker collection, but a new, long awaited book on Leyendecker was released in 2008, J.C. Leyendecker, by Laurence S. Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler.

J.C. Leyendecker, for those who are unfamiliar with his work, was one of the finest illustrators in the history of the art form. His relative obscurity continues to amaze me; he should at least share the spotlight usually focused on Norman Rockwell, if not eclipsing him to some degree.

For a quick selection of large images, see these two articles on Golden Age Comic Book Stories. For more on Leyendecker, including additional links to large images and other resources, see some of my previous posts listed below.

[Addendum: Since publication of this article, the Haggin Museum has updated their online gallery with some higher quality images of 8 of the works.]

I’ver written before about Illustration magazine, the beautiful quarterly periodical published by Dan Zimmer that showcases in-depth, lavishly illustrated articles on classic illustrators, both well known and undeservedly obscure, all presented with stunning production values.

Illustration 30 is out, featuring articles on Ellen B. T. Pyle, one of Howard Pyle’s students who married his brother Walter (images above, top); the strikingly colorful works of Edwin Georgi (above, middle) and the bizarre egg tempera and scratchboard illustrations of Douglas Walters (above, bottom).

The Ellen Pyle article is particularly timely in that it coincides with an exhibit currently at the Delaware Art Museum, Illustrating Her World: Ellen B. T. Pyle, that runs until January 3, 2010. The museum participated in the preparation of the article.

The issue, which is 96 full color pages, also includes a nice In Memoriam to Frank Frazetta by Ralph Bakshi, a personal remembrance of Ernest Chiriaka by Zimmer, plus the usual letters, reviews, exhibition and event listings and ads of interest to those who love classic illustration.

But why just take my word for it when Zimmer has placed the entire Issue 30 online for you to flip through, not just in thumbnails but in full screen and zoomable (click on the preview at bottom or the “View the Digital Edition” link, when in the full screen version click on the pages to zoom).

In addition to the current issue, Zimmer has made a number of past issues available the in the same full screen zoomable format through the Issuu.com interface (see the related issue thumbnails in the right column).

These will give you a great idea of the beautiful art and incisive writing in the magazine. I’ll stress again, though, as I have often pointed out, that the onscreen versions of the images, not matter that they’re full screen, are low resolution compared to the way they appear in print, particularly with Illustration’s superb color and reproduction standards.

The print version of issue 30 can be ordered directly from the publisher for only $15 U.S., which includes shipping ($30 U.S. for international delivery); and a number of back issues are available for the same price. In addition there are special publications, books and DVDs of interest to fans of classic illustration, including the ability to pre order the the new H.J. Ward book shipping in November.

Zimmer is also now presiding over The Illustration Gallery, a new online gallery of illustration art originals for sale.

“Predictable” is a word that, sadly, often applies to the contents of modern newspaper comics pages (what remains of them). In February of 2004 readers of the San Francisco Chronicle suddenly found themselves confronted with a new feature on the comics page called “All Over Coffee” by Paul Madonna that set that notion nicely askew.

As an East Coast resident, I don’t get the Chronicle, but I can imagine that, for some, the feature was a source of confusion, despite the paper’s introductory article; but for others the reaction must have similar to the one I had when I first encountered All Over Coffee on the web: “Wow. What is this?”

The feature consists of a drawing, usually a beautiful pen and wash drawing of buildings, streets, rooms or architectural elements in San Francisco (and sometimes Paris, Amsterdam and elsewhere) accompanied by a short bit of writing, a few lines to a few paragraphs.

The writing consists of seemingly random musings, comments, suggestions, observations and generally enigmatic phrases written into and juxtaposed against the subtle beauty of the wash drawings. The “strip” ostensibly revolves around two unseen characters, Maurice and Sarah, whose abstracted thoughts and conversations form the text.

The drawings themselves are sometimes as wonderfully quirky and thought provoking as the writing, bits of seemingly incongruent architecture, flashes of streets, textural patterns of rooftops, storefronts, house sides, museum interiors, apartment lobbies, alleyways, cornices, telephone wires and TV antennas, often wrapped in geometric shadows and rendered with an intense affection and attention to detail

Is it art? Sure. Is it literature? Yeah, that too. Is it poetry? Sometimes. Is it comics? Well, no (in that it’s not sequential storytelling as far as I can discern). Is it fascinating and rewarding? Almost always.

Madonna’s wash drawings are simply wonderful; his sensitive linework, sure draftsmanship, masterful applications of wash and keen eye for light and shadow produce images that are uncannily evocative of place, even for those of us who have never been to San Francisco.

Even though I have been to Paris, I don’t find those images any more or less resonant than the ones of San Francisco; the “place” he evokes isn’t as much a geographical location as the immediacy of one’s own surroundings, the sense of noticing the scene, and the moment, in which you find yourself.

Combined with text that, almost regardless of its actual content, has the common thread of causing you to slow down and contemplate, the final piece produces a poetic suspension of the ordinary; or more accurately, a reframing of the ordinary as extraordinary.

Madonna’s drawing style manages to retain some of the informality of travel sketches (and some of the journalistic immediacy of sketchbooks by Robert Crumb and Chris Ware), even while refined to the point of a finished work. He seems to have found a delicate “just right” spot between the two. He exercises that balance within individual drawings, with passages of intense detail against blank walls and great negative shapes of skies, often criss-crossed with telephone wires, window frames and the edges of architectural forms in a rich and playful compositional geometry.

His website opens in rather newspaper like columns with news, announcements and links to various features and projects. All Over Coffee has it’s own section.

There is a book collection of All Over Coffee that is available from Amazon or directly from the publisher, City Lights. As announced on the All Over Coffee main page, a new collection, Everything Is Its Own Reward (the name of which is taken from this panel) is due in April of 2011.

Madonna has also provided illustrations for other books, including A Writer’s San Francisco: A Guided Journey for the Creative Soul by Eric Maisel, and Nikko Concrete Commando by Delfin Vigil (a magazine-like MagCloud publication, click on “Show Preview” on the page).

The bulk of the All Over Coffee images available online are in the Purchase section, in which you can purchase either original art or fine art prints of All Over Coffee pages. You will find some redundancy between the two, but the features are numbered, and I doubt you will object to seeing a given piece more than once.

In his presentation of the images on the site, Madonna gives the date and location of each drawing and a brief comment on the piece and its creation.

All Over Coffee is also, of course, a continuing feature in the San Fancisco Chronicle and its online edition SFGate. You can follow the online version here and access the archives here.

In whatever form, in print on online, take Paul Madonna’s invitation to slow down, look around and maybe contemplate a bit, all over coffee.

[Vis Escape into Life]

Pájaro (pronounced páh-hah-ro), who takes his name from a childhood nickname meaning “bird”, is a Venezuelan artist who spent much of his youth and adolescence in Spain.

He embarked on his path as a self taught painter at the age of 23.

Returning to Venezuela he brought back with him the influence of European Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque art that expresses itself in an interesting mixture of styles, creating a form of visionary magic realism that he terms “Metarealism”

Pájaro draws on those aspects of classical art that he chooses and mixes them at will; Renaissance garbed figures, rendered with Baroque or even modern sensibilities, might appear in landscapes with the intricate detail and false atmospheric perspective of Medieval painting.

His subjects are dreamlike juxtapositions of figures, objects, times and places, rendered with an appealing eye for texture and tone, and usually painted with a muted, carefully controlled palette; though he occasionally applies high chroma passages.

Pájaro presents his subjects in compositions that feel somewhat theatrical, as though implying that he has stories to tell us, and with an intensity of rendering that imbues them with a feeling of personal significance.

On opening his website, there is a choice at bottom right to view the site in English. There is an “Enlarge” button to the lower right of most paintings; unfortunately, the JavaScript that opens the window for the enlargements takes some time, particularly on a large monitor.

Pájaro also has started a blog, though there is little content as yet.

Concept and visual design artist Mark Selander studied industrial design in college, and took that experience to work for Will Vinton Studios (now known as Laika) creating models, sets and concept art, and then to Microsoft Games, where he worked as a concept artist for six years.

He now works as a freelance concept artist, designer and illustrator for the entertainment industry, gaming, toy design and illustration. His website, titled Machines and Humans has galleries of his work divided between environments, machines, characters, illustrations, sketches and graphics.

He also maintains a blog titled Rockets and Rabbits.

Recently, Selander launched a site called Commutapult (image above, top), a take off on the utopian transportation fantasies that have sparked the pages of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics for years.

In it he gives us genuine looking illustrations and infographics of a proposed urban commuting system for his hometown of Seattle, in which commuters are hurled in ballistically launched pods, their cups of “hyper caffinated Commutacinno™” rotating in gimbaled holders, until caught in great funnel and lowered into the transportation hub; allowing the highways to be replaced with idyllic green pedestrian pathways.

Spot on.

[Via Metafilter]

They Draw and Cook is a great idea, a series of short recipes submitted by illustrators and other artists who cook (or cooks who illustrate), accompanied by or in the form of illustrations, and served up fresh daily in blog form.

The entries are varied in both illustration style and approach to food and drink, making a nice stew of topics and images. The images are reasonably large (much larger then my small previews above); and the entries include the location of the artists, who are from around the globe, as well as links to their websites or blogs; so They Draw and Cook also serves as an illustration blog with links to lots of artwork and portfolios.

Note that it may be easy to miss the link to older posts, as it is small and not quite at the bottom of the page (above the “Submit a Recipe” section).

They Draw and Cook is maintained by the brother/sister design and illustration team of Nate Padavick and Salli Swindell, who comprise Studio SSS. Salli also writes the wonderfully titled blog manic expressive.

It looks like the authors are planing a print version of the idea, their submission requirements include permission to use the material in print and ask the artists to consider the gutter in their design.

Padavick and Swindell also maintain a charming offshoot blog, Kids Draw and Cook.

(Images above:
Alya Mark
Emilia Szewczyk
Krista Hamrick
Jennifer Lorton
Abz Hakim
Johnathan Hawker
Aneu Martinez
Michael Robertson)

[Via Metafilter]

Long time readers of Lines and Colors will know that I have long been an admirer of the work of William Stout. Stout is well know as a paleontological artist, film concept designer, illustrator and comics artist.

His style ranges as widely as his areas of endeavor, but I take particular pleasure in his ink and watercolor drawings.

Stout has a terrific pen and ink style, and his black an white illustrations pop with judiciously applied texture and finessed line work; but when he combines that skill with his talents as a painter, he creates images with visual charm that I find wonderfully appealing.

There have been a number of his illustrations that I’ve encountered over time, scattered here and there for different publications or purposes, that I’ve long wished were available in some more complete form.

I was delighted, then, to receive a review copy of a new book from Flesk Publications that is the first of a pair of editions collecting some of Stout’s best ink and watercolor images.

William Stout: Hallucinations collects his images of characters from film, pulp fiction, pop culture and even Aasop’s Fables, all rendered with that wonderful snap and zing of his pen style and the rich depth of his watercolors. Dragons, fauns, trolls and monsters fill the pages, along with character from the Wizard of Oz and John Carter of Mars.

There are sample images that can be viewed on the Flesk site. You can see more of Stout’s work on his own website.

It’s actually no surprise that I like Stout’s ink and watercolor style so much, in that the list of artist that Stout credits in the introduction with influencing this style are also among my favorites from the great Golden Age of illustration: Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, William Heath Robinson, John Bauer, Gustaf Tenggren and John R. Neill.

Flesk Publications is offering the book in two editions, a hardbound, signed limited edition of 500, and a paperback edition.

The companion volume, William Stout: Inspirations, which collects his ink and watercolor images of women from fantasy and fairy tales, will be released in September of this year.

Both Flesk Publications and William Stout will be at this week’s Comic-Con international in San Diego, CA.