Though she is a recent graduate of the illustration program at the University of West England, Kate Barley’s style has a mature feel.

She takes inspiration in the work of great Golden Age illustrators like Kay Nielsen, Edmund Dulac and Harry Clarke, with a bit of Aubrey Beardsley and perhaps a touch of early 20th century New Yorker cartoonists thrown in for good measure.

When looking through her website portfolio, be aware that though clicking on the images themselves simply advances to the next image, there are text links to the left for viewing the larger versions, which I recommend to really appreciate her work.

There is also a quick sampler of larger images from The Olive Fairy Book on the cizgili masallar blog.

[Via MetaFilter]

Tomislav Tomić is an illustrator from Croatia whose illustrations carry influences of both Golden Age illustration and Renaissance printmaking.

Tomić works with technical pens (Rotring Isographs), adding color for some pieces with colored inks, watercolor and occasionally acrylics.

There is a recent feature on his tools on The Tools Artists Use, which is where I encountered his work.

In addition to the portfolio on his website, you can find additional examples of his work on Arena Illustration.

As I reported back in 2011, Italian illustrator and comics artist Massimo Carnevale has for some time been posting to his blog, Sketches’natched, a series of his interpretations of various movies (and occasionally tv series).

These are apparently done for fun, and it’s fascinating how he pics elements from the movies that, while characteristic of them, are not necessarily what you might expect. He often zeros in on incidental and otherwise unimportant scenes, though most are, in essence, portraits.

Carnevale renders them with a wonderfully breezy style, utilizing the economy of painted notation to which digital painting lends itself.

On Carnevale’s blog, you must flip back through the archive one image at a time. For a quicker overview, see his portfolio on CGHub, and some places in which others have collected and posted some of the images in a group, like this post on imgur (via Metafilter), and this one on theCHIVE.

See my previous post on Massimo Carnevale for more information and additional links to examples of his work.

There is something special about the appeal of scratchboard. In skilled hands it can combine some of the visual charm of woodcuts or engravings with the best characteristics of pen and ink.

The work of Douglas Smith is a prime example of the medium’s strengths.

Smith is an illustrator, originally from New York, who established his career in Boston and now lives on the coast of Maine.

His illustrations are often filled with visual drama; but are grounded in the textural characteristics he gives them with his painstakingly executed areas of pattern and linear tone. That anchoring gives them a weight that invites your eye to linger, moving over the drawings more slowly than might ordinarily be the case.

Smith often brings his scratchboard illustrations to a color finish, applying washes of watercolor to a copy of the scratchboard piece. There is a nice description of his illustration process on the site of his artists representative, Richard Solomon, along with an extensive portfolio of his work.

Though the color pieces are presented first, and are indeed wonderful, I recommend continuing back into the “pure” scratchboard, both for a comparison and to enjoy the beautiful linear tones of the black and white work.

Though I can’t find a dedicated website or blog for Smith, you can find additional galleries of his work on Behance and Workbook.

It’s been a while since I checked in on fantasy and concept artist Ed Binkley, so I thought I’d pull back the deep forest undergrowth and see what’s happening under the leaves.

The good news is that Binkley has posted additional images to his blog and his Holy-Men and Monsters gallery.

Binkley’s wonderfully textural evocations of fantasy subjects may carry echoes of Golden Age illustrators like Arthur Rackham and Victorian faerie artists like Richard Dadd and John Anster Fitzgerald, and perhaps a touch of contemporaries like Jean-Baptiste Monge, but Binkley is, if you’ll excuse the expression, in his own world.

I consistently admire his ability to balance intricate detail with atmospheric open passages, as well as his striking use of value and texture contrasts to lead the eye and suggest layers of depth.

Glenn Gustafson is an illustrator from North Carolina whose crisp clear illustration style takes advantage of the graphic properties of vector art, along with a keen sense of light and atmosphere, to produce a range of work that has both punch and subtlety.

In his website’s portfolio section you will find subsections for various subjects and approaches. I particularly enjoy the pieces in the “Retro” section.

You can find additional examples of his work on Directory of Illustration and Workbook.

Mike Bear is a concept artist, illustrator and comics artist. His clients include Rockstar Games, Hasbro, Devil’s Due Publishing, Royal Elastics, Lolapps, Inc., Popcap, and EA.

Bear’s sketchblog includes some examples of his professional work but more often works in progress, personal flights of fancy, sketches, life drawings, and other graphic meanderings — a visual grab bag that includes lots of fun stuff.

Bear also has another blog, Techno Vikings, devoted to a personal project, and contributes to the group blogs, Pop Sketch and The Plein Air Cheaters. In addition, he has a gallery on deviantART.

[Via Neatorama]

Like that irresistibly alliterative title, Bill Carman’s work seems to have bounced out of his imagination fully formed, too wonderfully refined in its execution to be so delightfully off-kilter in its subjects.

After solo shows in New York and California, Carman’s characters, beasts and undefinable others — rendered in pen and ink, watercolor, acrylic and mixed media — will be on display at Brumfield’s Gallery in Carman’s home town of Boise, Idaho from March 16, to April 28, 2013.

The gallery has a slideshow preview of a few of the pieces in the show, many of which are new and have not been exhibited previously. There is a pubic opening this Saturday, March 16, from 6-9pm.

You can see more of Carman’s work on his blog, and in his Flickr galleries of paintings, drawings, book illustration and editorial illustration.