I love pen and ink drawing. It has a visual charm and character unlike any other medium.

I assume that I came by my affection for it from realizing as a teenager that pen and ink drawing was the basis for comic books and cartoons, but I was also exposed at a pretty early age to the amazing pen and ink illustrations of Howard Pyle and other illustrators of the Brandywine School in my visits to the Delaware Art Museum, where I also encountered beautiful pen drawings by some of the Pre-Raphaelite artists.

It’s medium that doesn’t get as much attention as more colorful forms of expression, but it’s still there as the basis for much illustration, comics, cartoons and concept art, as well as standing on it’s own as a method of sketching or creating finished drawings.

There are some good resources out there on pen drawing if you dig for them, and you’ll occasionally find some for free.

A case is point is the Project Gutenberg eBook version of Pen Drawing by Charles Maginnis. (Amazon listing here)

This is a relatively short treatise published in 1903, at a time when pen drawing was in its heyday as a ubiquitous method of drawing that could be easily and inexpensively be mass reproduced as illustrations in books and periodicals.

The tone and attitude of the text are a bit dated, but is fascinating as a bit of history for that, and the instruction is basically sound.

The illustrations are not reproduced well, one of the frustrating things about Project Gutenberg that I’ve railed about before, but some of them fare better than others and can give you a taste for some of the excellent pen and ink artists featured from that era, including Joseph Pennell, Daniel Vierge, Herbert Railton, B. G. Goodhue (image above, top), Martin Rico and Maxime LaLanne.

Author Charles Maginnis was a noted architect and the book is slanted a bit toward architectural rendering and supplemented with the author’s own drawings (image above, bottom), but he also includes examples from more figurative artists like Howard Pyle, Will Bradley and Alfonse Mucha.

If this whets your appetite and you want physical pen and ink instruction books with high resolution images of great pen and ink drawing, look for copies of Joseph Pennel’s Pen Drawing, Pen Draughtsmen and Arthur Guptill’s Rendering in Pen and Ink.

[Link via ArtDemonstrations.com]

Illustration House is a venerable gallery, repository and auction house in New York that specializes in great illustration. It is the province of Walt Reed, who is probably the foremost expert on illustration that we have.

Reed is also the author of numerous definitive books on the subject, including The Illustrator in America, 1860-2000, Visions of Adventure: N. C. Wyeth and the Brandywine Artists and John Clymer: An artist’s rendezvous with the frontier West; as well as several excellent art instruction books from his association with the Famous Artist Schools, like The Figure: The Classic Approach to Drawing and Construction (this goes on the shelf next to your Andrew Loomis and George Bridgeman books), and a number of titles co-authored with others.

Some of his titles are sadly out of print, like Great American Illustrators and The Magic Pen of Joseph Clement Coll, but you can sometimes find them used.

In his role as curator and chief illustration expert and enthusiast at Illustration House, Reed created a focus for the interest in collecting great illustration that has become remarkably strong in the past few decades.

Though the gallery’s web site is kind of drab and left-over from he 90’s, it does feature succinct bios of some of the great Golden Age illustrators.

The really interesting part of the Illustration House site, though, is the previews of the seasonal auctions, for which images are posted of some of the finest illustration works that are currently available on the open market.

Usually linked from the bottom of the home page, you can choose links to View Lots, and get a list with thumbnails. The thumbnails aren’t linked, click on the lot numbers at the left for larger images of the works.

Here you will find an amazing treasure trove of great illustration, that just happens to be changing hands at the time. You’ll recognize many of the great names in illustration, including many that I’ve featured here on lines and colors.

The most recent auction, for example, includes pieces by Harry Anderson, John Berkey, Joseph Clement Coll, James Montgomery Flagg, Al Hirschfeld, Jeff Jones, Heinrich Kley, J.C. Leyendecker, Andrew Loomis, Al Parker, Howard Pyle, Maxfield Parrish, Norman Rockwell, Saul Steinberg, Haddon Sundblom and Gustaf Tenggren, along with many others. (The links are to my articles, I’m not linking directly to the auction posts because they change over time and will be replaced with newly offered pieces.)

Don’t miss the links at page top to subsequent pages, you can also choose at page bottom to view a linked text list by artist name.

Irene Gallo wrote a couple of nice posts (here and here) about the most recent auctions on her blog The Art Department.

If you have a few thousand extra dollars burning a hole in your pocket, and a blank wall begging for some of history’s greatest illustration art, Walt Reed’s Illustration House the place to go.

(Shown here, top to bottom: Gustaf Tenggren, Howard Pyle, J.C. Leyendecker, Harry Anderson, Heinrich Kley.)

There is something particularly appealing about images created by an artist who is strongly skilled in the medium of scratchboard. This slightly arcane and quite demanding medium is the through-the-looking-glass version of pen and ink; in which black ink is taken away from the coating on a clay-surfaced board, and the image is built from lights rather than from darks.

It may be the texture, the balance of dark to light, or the characteristic line work, but I often find scratchboard images particularly compelling.

Patrick Arrasmith is an accomplished illustrator who works primarily in scratchboard, and his work is an excellent case in point.

Arrasmith’s clients include The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, Reader’s Digest, Outside, The Weekly Standard and numerous other periodicals and book publishers.

As you look through the work on his site, you are likely to see stylistic similarities to other practitioners of the art of scratchboard that I’ve featured in the past, like Mark Summers, Scott McKowen and Elizabeth Traynor; but on further inspection you’ll see farther reaching comparisons like the amazing scratchboard/pen and ink master Virgil Finlay, and even the lithographs of M.C. Escher.

Even though you might often wish for larger images of Arrasmith’s work, the images on his site are large enough to get some idea of the total piece, and there are often detail crops that show a bit of the texture of the scratchboard technique (image above, with slice of detail image, right).

Arrasmith seems to be restlessly exploring some of the possibilities of the medium, and hie portfolio includes a series of figure studies, portraits of dogs and various experiments and personal pieces. At first I assumed that, like Finlay, he was combining “pure scratchboard” with pen and ink, but my impression is the most, if not all, of the pieces are completely brought out of the blackness of the ink coating with the finely scratched white lines.

There are some color pieces, in which the scratchboard drawing has had color applied over it, presumably digitally in Photoshop. A number of these have a nice balance of black and white to color in that the color has only been applied to selected areas of the image, leaving an appealing blend between the two approaches.

In all of them, though, there is that ineffable visual magic inherent in the scratching of white lines out of the dark mysteries of a flat black page.

I’ll let you in on a little secret.

Some of you may be under the impression from my posts on the subject that I’m an expert on the field and history of illustration, but that’s not the case. I simply know a little bit about some terrific illustrators that I’ve come across over the years. Compared to a real expert, like Jim Vadeboncoeur Jr., my knowledge is like a creek compared to a river (it might be the Brandywine Creek, but a creek nonetheless).

But that’s not the secret I wanted to let you in on. The secret is The Vadeboncoeur Collection of ImageS, at least it’s more of a secret than it should be (and no, the capital “S” is not a typo, that’s the way it’s written).

Since 2001, Vadeboncoeur has been publishing a periodical, I hesitate to call it a magazine because it defies the conventions of most magazines, featuring beautiful images from some of history’s greatest illustrators, both well known and obscure; as well as work from artists from the same time period as the Golden Age of illustration.

It’s a secret because, unless you frequent BPIB (formerly Bud Plant Illustrated Books), a web resource to which I have occasionally sent you in reference to the history of great illustrators, chances are you haven’t seen the modest link to the ImageS pages.

The web site itself is a little, um… stuck in the 90’s, (when entering the site through the home page, choose “No Frames“, because frames suck), but the heart of the site is a wonderful collection short but of terrific, and often definitive, articles on great illustrators, from Edwin Austin Abbey to Newell Convers Wyeth.

You could spend hours here lost among the articles and (unfortunately somewhat small) images from these greats, but why settle for that when you can get Vadeboncoeur’s beautifully printed collections full of stunning, high-resolution images of works that you just won’t find anywhere else.

These collections, (again, I hesitate to call them magazines, and they’re not quite books) are printed larger than most magazines (9″x12″), are up to 44 pages each; and, in recent issues, feature amazing reproductions by way of Stochastic printing (a process that eliminates the traditional limitation of process dots and looks amazingly like a photograph).

The early issues are starting to disappear, but a number of back issues are still available, including the special Black & White ImageS Annual Collections, which showcase some of the most amazing pen and ink illustration ever produced. These are thicker than the color collections, up to 112 pages, and the fourth one was just released. Like the color collections, these are printed on 100 lb paper and the reproductions are superb.

Unfortunately, the web site doesn’t do a very good job of presenting the collections, with a small, too-quick, GIF animations of a few pages, that you can’t even focus on for more than a second, as the only preview.

Vadeboncoeur should take a page from Dan Zimmer’s Illustration Magazine previews, which give a thumbnail of every page in the magazine (see my posts on Illustration Magazine); or, better yet, feature two or three large images to give some idea of how beautiful these pieces really are.

In the meanwhile, lacking better previews, take my word for it. These collections are head-spinningly beautiful and a must-have for any serious fan of Golden Age illustration.

But don’t let too many people in on our little secret, at least not until we get a chance to snap up those back issues.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Walt Kelley’s revision of an 1813 quote from Commodore Perry (”We have met the enemy, and they are ours”), and his famous reworking of a classic Christmas song as “Deck the Halls with Boston Charlie”, may actually be familiar to a larger number of people than Kelly’s masterwork of the comics art form, Pogo, which is downright unfortunate.

Walt Kelly was one of the all time great cartoonists. Pogo, his beautifully drawn, keenly intelligent, highly witty and politically daring syndicated comic strip ran for a quarter of a century. Amid hilarious funny animal hijinks, wonderfully loopy wordplay, and multi-leveled stories set in the Okefenokee Swamp (Georgia side), Kelly’s characters mouthed some biting social and political commentary, even to the point of taking shots at “Communist under every bed” witch-hunter Senator Joseph McCarthy, who he portrayed as a gun-toting wildcat named “Simple J. Malarkey”. McCarthy’s “if you aren’t with us, you’re a Communist” tactics had given him considerable power, enough to ruin numerous careers in Hollywood and elsewhere, and taking him on took some nerve.

Kelly also took on the far right-wing John Birch Society, J. Edgar Hoover, John Mitchell and Spiro Agnew and, during the 1968 presidential campaign, he ridiculed the group of hopeful presidential nominees he called the “wind-up candidates”, including Eugene McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, George wallace and Robert F. Kennedy. In 1952, Pogo himself became the possum of choice with a gag candidacy based around “I Go Pogo” buttons (lampooning Eisenhower’s “I Like Ike” campaign slogan).

Pogo can be read as a simple, and simply delightful, “funny animal” strip if you prefer, and kids love it as much as adults. It is one of the best drawn newspaper comics ever, owing a good bit to Kelly’s six-year stint working for Walt Disney Productions, during which he worked on such classic animated features as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia and Dumbo as well as a number of Donald Duck shorts. He also did comic book work for Dell Comics, during which he created the character that would become his life’s work.

Kelly’s Pogo strips are masterpieces of fluid, expressive brush and ink drawing and superb graphic storytelling. His elegant calligraphic brush lines are complimented by the judicious application of hatching and expertly balanced spotting of blacks. Kelly has been tremendously influential on subsequent generations of cartoonists. You can see direct inspiration in Jeff Smith’s beautiful work on Bone in particular.

There are a number of books that have been published over the years and are in various states of availability, including the famously titled We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us. Also out of print but available used is Ten Ever-Lovin Blue Eyed Years with Pogo, which is a good introduction and overview, and reprints some great strips.

Of particular interest, though, is the new series of complete Pogo strips from Fantagraphics, starting with Pogo: The Complete Daily & Sunday Comic Strips Vol. 1: “Into the Wild Blue Wonder”, and continuing with Pogo, Vol 2.

There is an “official” Pogo Possum site, with lots of news, info and links, but not much artwork. There are other sites that fit a similar niche, lots of info, not enough artwork.

The amazing ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive comes through again, however, with an article on Walt Kelly’s Pogo that features some absolutely great scans of Walt Kelly original Pogo art courtesy of Mike Fontanelli. There are three high-resolution Pogo Sunday pages, in which you can not only see Kelly’s beautiful brush and ink finishes, but his underlying blue-line pencils as well (click on the images for the larger versions). I’ve had the pleasure of seeing some of Kelly’s originals in person and these scans do a great job of showing the work of this master cartoonist as it actually looks.

In the meanwhile, if someone asks me who I’m supporting in the U.S. presidential primaries, I Go Pogo!.

Chris Ware, who I wrote about here and here, has just released The Acme Novelty Date Book, Volume Two: 1995-2000.

For those of you who are only familiar with Ware’s precise, carefully controlled marvels of precision comic art, these two volumes are something else altogether.

Basically they’re sketchbooks, not that different in essence from sketchbooks released by a number of comic artists and illustrators, with a mixture of sketches from life and fanciful doodling, often accented with handwritten notes.

You may notice a similarity in particular to the sketchbooks of Robert Crumb. Though not the marvellously expressive cartoonist that Crumb is, I think Ware is actually a better draftsman, despite his occasional notes of complaint about his own drawing ability.

What sets Ware apart from most, and invites comparison with Crumb, is the exceptional mind and original talent behind the sketches.

The drawings themselves are in turn loose, careful, freewheelingly imaginative, and when drawn from life, wonderfully observant, both of people and of everyday scenes.

Even those not familiar with Ware’s work, particularly if they enjoy sketchbooks, will find much to like in this volume. The sketches for the most part have a personal quality, the kind of honest, often casual, observations of what is a hand when one picks up a sketchbook. A far cry from the careful, self-conscious presentation drawings that many comic artists like to publish as “sketchbooks”.

Artists who frequently fill their own sketchbooks with observations from what’s around them whenever they get the chance will find common ground and inspiration here, quick sketches of people, sketched from angles the indicate the subject was often unaware of being drawn, and numerous room interiors and street scenes, drawn in simple line or detailed crosshatch pen and ink, and often colored with modest but very effective watercolor washes. There are travel sketches from Europe and “around the corner” scenes from Ware’s native Chigago. One is a very detailed watercolor and ink drawing of an airplane cabin, obviously filling as much time as possible on a trans-Atlantic flight.

There are lots of drawings of simple household objects, kitchen counters, tables, chairs and odds and ends like toy robots. There is also plenty of cartoon sketching, including sketches of classic early 20th Century comic characters, like those from Gasoline Alley, as well as sketches and doodles of his own characters, designs for his wonderful fake ads and other germinating ideas. There are lots of handwritten notes about where things were sketched, along with longer passages of various ideas, notions, ramblings, rants and diatribes, giving an unusual glimpse into his thought process.

There are also some comics stories, comics that are printed small enough to have you squinting, nose to the page, but comics nonetheless, and drawn much more freely than you will ever see in his finished comics.

I don’t know what size the original sketchbooks are, but most of the sketches have a feeling of being printed at the size they might have been done, so perhaps the comics were drawn that small.

Interestingly, the paper is off-white and flecked with spots and ink smudges, giving the book feeling of sketchbook pages that have been collected into a classic old library binding, another of Ware’s wonderfully imaginative an detailed book designs.

The image above is not an actual spread, but two separate pages I’ve put together to try to give an idea of the variety in the book.

All in all, this is a treat for fans of Chris Ware, and fans of sketching and sketchbooks in general. This is the second of two volumes, covering the years stated in the title. The first one was composed of sketchbook material from 1986-1995.

There are a few mentions of the first one on the web that include some images from that volume, and a scattering of mentions are begining to appear for Volume Two.

Here are two Acme Novelty Datebook Volume One posts on Book By Its Cover and Read About Comics; and and article from The Comics Reporter on Volume Two.

I’ve been wanting to write a post on Ron Cobb for some time now.

Cobb is a cartoonist, film production designer and concept artist from Los Angeles, currently living and working in Sydney, Australia.

When I went to write a post on Cobb last year, I was disappointed to find that there wasn’t much material available on the web. Cobb had an official site, but there was little to it but promises of “coming soon”. I was recently pleased to find that, despite continued protestations of the site being “under construction”, there is now sufficient material on his site for me to remind you of (or introduce you to) the work of this terrific and unjustly overlooked artist. In addition, new material has cropped up in a few other places.

Cobb began his career as an in-betweener and eventually breakdown artist for Disney, working on the ground-breaking feature Sleeping Beauty, but was laid off by Disney in 1957. (”In-betweeners” were junior artists who drew the frames in-between the “key” frames drawn by the senior artists; from which we get the term “tweening” as used in modern computer animation.) Cobb drifted between odd jobs for awhile before finding his new niche.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s there was a lively, energetic “alternative media”, consisting largely of small, independent “underground” newspapers, that opposed the deficiencies and corruption they saw the established order and viewed the mainstream media as tool of the corporate and political elite. (These days, of course, that function is largely served by the web.)

Cobb became the premiere editorial cartoonist for that generation’s countercultural voices. From 1965 to 1970 he drew editorial cartoons for the L.A. Free Press and in the early 70’s for The Digger in Melbourne, Australia; and his cartoons were distributed to other alternative papers through the Underground Press Syndicate.

I don’t use the term “political cartoons” when referring to Cobb because his work often transcended poiltics and dealt with larger issues. His caustic cartoons from the 60’s and 70’s exposed our follies, not just as a group or a party or a nation, but often as a species, in a biting, no-holds-barred commentary that few mainstream cartoonists could approach.

And what cartoons they were! His images were drawn with a raw, in-your-face energy and given a visual wallop by his use of intensely detailed crosshatching, contrasted with large open areas of negative space, and often dealt with subject matter that was disturbing and horrific. He pulled no punches when trying to point out to us how blind and short sighted we were; often portraying a stunned looking everyman who finds himself in some dystopian near-future, shocked with the outcome of our foolish species’ predilection for pollution, racism, violence, war and other monumental stupidity.

There were some collections of his cartoons printed, but they are unfortunately out of print. You may be able to find some used, if you can find someone willing to part with their copies. Personally, I treasure my battered copy of Raw Sewage.

Cobb also was in evidence as an illustrator, particularly within that same counter-cultural milieu; for example, did the terrific wrap-around cover for the Jefferson Airplane’s After Bathing at Baxters album (back when 12″x12″ record albums covers were the “big canvas” for illustrators).

Eventually, he moved back into the film industry, which answers the question for all of his cartoon fans of “Where has he been all these years?”

As a production designer and concept artist, Cobb has worked on films like Leviathan, The Last Starfighter, Conan the Barbarian, Dark Star, Back to the Future, Aliens, The Abyss, Total Recall and Firefly.

There is a somewhat scattered selection of work in various categories on his site, arranged by year. The best of the posted material is the selection of cartoons in the 1955-1987 section. Some of them are frighteningly prescient.

Cobb is currently continuing his work in the film industry, but I was surprised and delighted to see that he may return to editorial cartooning by way of his web site in the near future, something I would very much look forward to. I think this insane world could use a good dose of Ron Cobb cartoons about now.

Well, my friends, here is yet another tantalizingly different artist about whom I could find very little information without having to dig.

I first encountered Scott McKowen’s work in the form of his wonderful set of covers for the Marvel Comics limited series 1602 (in which Marvel superheroes are envisioned in that time period, and are of course assumed to be witches, among other things). As is common practice in American comics, the cover and interior comics pages for this series were done by different artists, and, as much as I like the work of Andy Kubert, who did the artwork for the series, this is one of those instances where I bought the comics for their covers (image above).

These are unlike any comic book covers I can think of, before or since, and look more like wood engravings than comic book illustration (making them perfect, of course, for the setting of the series). They are in fact drawn in scratchboard, a style of pen and ink rendering in which white lines are scratched with sharp instruments from areas of black ink that have been applied to clayboard. (See my posts on Virgil Finlay, Elizabeth Traynor and Mark Summers.)

The appearance of this traditional looking approach, which McKowen has used in the style of wood engraving book illustrations, works remarkably well when combined with digitally applied color.

He does not seem to have a web presence of his own, but McKowen is represented by the Marlena Agency, who has fortunately supplied an online gallery of his work. There in no bio information, however.

A search on Amazon provided more information than the rep’s site. McKowen has illustrated a number of books in a series of Unabridged Classics, including Frankenstein, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Gulliver’s Travels and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

These editions include some interior illustrations by McKowen, though the reviews indicate they are sparsely illustrated. If you like his work and are frustrated by the limited amount of material on his rep’s site, you may find it worthwhile going through the Amazon listings to look at the enlargements of the covers (or, of course, looking for the books in your local bookstore).

I also found out through an editorial review on Amazon that McKowen and his wife Christina Poddubiuk operate a company that specializes in design and illustration for theater and performing arts called “Punch & Judy, Inc.”, though it apparently has no web presence either. Their projects often involve historical research into period costumes and settings, leading us back to McKowen’s ability to create an wonderfully appropriate look for illustrated classics, or even a superhero period piece.

How cool would it be if we could actually see the whole intricate pattern of the influences of one artist on another that make up the brilliant, if ragged, cloth of art history. The best any one individual can hope for is glimmers and flashes of interconnectedness where the pattern reveals a small portion of itself, a brief hint at how the whole is tied together.

Occasionally we see threads that seem connected behind the surface in some way, an indication of a nexus of influence under the cloth, where parts of the pattern are pulled together and rewoven, an indication that some artists are seen more through their influence on other artists than in the wide recognition of their own work.

The more I investigate the work of engraver and illustrator Jean Ignace Isidore Gèrard, more commonly known by his pen name J.J. Grandville, the more I see his influence on other artists. Though he was tremendously influential on artists in his own time and on generations to follow, his own work and name have undeservedly faded almost into obscurity.

Grandville’s brilliantly imaginative pen and ink style engravings from the early 1800’s were one of the seminal sources of modern cartooning, comics and fantastic illustration, as well as numerous styles of fantastic art.

If you’re familiar with the Dadaists and Surrealists, who were quick to extol the virtues of artists they saw as precursors of Surrealism, it’s easy to see how Grandville’s fantastical drawings of griffin-like animal mash-ups, which he called “metamorphoses” and to which he devoted an entire book titled Les Animaux (The Animals), would be enough to put him high on their list; but his fantastic visions of anthropomorphic plants, audiences of opera goers whose heads have been replaced with single eyes, fancies of drawing instruments come alive, mechanical musicians and people with overlarge or tiny heads and otherwise distorted figures made him a shoo-in for the Surrealist hall of predecessors.

Max Ernst, in particular, demonstrates tremendous influence by Grandville in his Surrealist collage-novel (or graphic novel, if you will) Un Semaine du Bonté (A Week of Kindness).

The next thing I discovered about Grandville’s influence on other artists is how dramatically his work informed Sir John Tenniel’s wonderful and definitive illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Not only was Grandville’s style, treatment and subject matter inspirational to Tenniel in his interpretations of the Alice stories (to the point where Tenniel might be accused of “borrowing” some elements of Grandville’s drawings), I later realized that Grandville’s animal “metamorphoses”, his bizarre characters, anthropomorphic insects, plants and animals, and his visions of fantastic scenes like his tableau of playing cards come to life, were direct inspiration for Charles (”Lewis Carroll”) Dodson himself in writing the stories.

Grandville entertained us with dancing teapots and cavorting flowers a century and a half ahead of Disney. His city dwellers wiith distorted body shapes, often with heads disproportionate to the body, or with exaggeratedly tall and thin juxtaposed with squat and short, showed up both in Mutt n’ Jeff in the early 20th Century and Yellow Submarine in the 1960’s and his steam-powered musicians presaged steampunk by two centuries.

Thomas Nast and the generations of political cartoonists that were to follow, owe more than a nod to Grandville (along with Hogarth and many others). All modern cartoons involving social commentary can trace a thread back to Grandville, and the influence is certainly evident in the underground comix artists of the 1960’s, undoubtedly through the availability of a wonderful Dover book that I’ll recommend to you at the end of the article.

You can certainly see Grandville in the marvelously imaginative and wonderfully drawn fantasies of Heinrich Kley, the sketches of Jan Faust, the fantastic etchings of M.C. Escher and many others.

Some of Grandville’s illustrations can seem tame and ordinary, depending on the phases of his career, but many are wonderful flights of fancy.

Wild-eyed demons in top hats invite angels to dance, celestial garden keepers water both flowers and pedestrians with umbrellas, anthropomorphic lightning rods prepare one another to catch bolts, stage hands raise the curtains of night and use a gas lamp igniter to light the morning sun, an eclipse is revealed to be the result of a passionate embrace of the sun and moon, watched voyeuristically by astrolabes and other celestial mapping instruments, characters ares shown walking across celestial bridges or juggling planets.

Some of his drawings were playful explorations of perspective, many are fantasies of anthropromorphicised drawing instruments, and in fact mechanical devices in general; Grandville was active when the industrial revolution was just getting up steam (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Some are simply incomprehensibly bizarre, others are marvelous images that I can’t fathom the origin of, like the one in which dice, dominos, war medals and Egyptian obelisks grow like rock crystals.

Many of these drawings would be even more powerful if we understood the social context in which they were presented and the follies of which they were meant to satirize. He was engaged in social commentary, and was in that respect essentially a cartoonist, though his drawings are realized with a wonderfully controlled, richly detailed but clearly stated pen and ink like engraving style that would be worth study by anyone interested in creating prints or applying ink to paper (or drawing with the digital equivalent).

Fortunately, Grandville’s terrific drawings are available to modern audiences in several books, most notably an excellent and inexpensive Dover book, out of print but available used, Fantastic Illustrations of Grandville (Dover Pictorial Archives), which I believe is a repackaging of an earlier Dover book, Bizarreries and Fantasies of Grandville, my copy of which is dog-eared with years of delighted use. It collects his two most influential works, Les Animaux, and Un Autre Monde (Another World), which was a story loosely woven to tie together many of his existing illustrations so they could be issued as a book.

The best online source I’ve found for Grandville is on Visipix. Once you get past a pop-up ad and some other annoyances, there is a thumbnail gallery and click-through for 179 of Grandville’s drawings, many of the from scans of his two most famous books, the editions of which, apparently, had hand-applied color on some plates. While clicking through the drawings with the convenient “Next, Previous, Thumbnails” style navigation, you can choose at any time to view them in one of several resolutions, allowing you to breeze through them and then view your favorites in glorious detail. Wonderful!

It’s interesting to note, as this article in Time Magazine points out, that Grandville’s influence extends to the fact that, even though he has been dead since 1847, he has been, along with David Levine, one of the two major illustrators for The New York Review of Books in the 20th Century.

I’m constantly amazed at the way in which we, as artists, allow ourselves to be locked into restrictive little boxes by accepting and participating in an unspoken hierarchy of the artistic value of different genres of visual arts.

Those in the fine arts community, even within all of the strata it contains, look down on illustrators as “not artists”. Mainstream illustrators look down on science fiction and fantasy illustrators, who, in turn, look down on comics artists, and so on; stratification within stratification. By accepting these distinctions, we culture elements of mutual disdain to coddle our tender egos, in the process allowing ourselves to be classified and pigeonholed.

Not only is this unfortunate for individual artists, and the appreciation of different styles, it allows wonderful art to go ignored by those unwilling to cross boundaries within these strata. Fighting this tendency is actually at the core of what I try to accomplish with lines and colors, and I take particular delight in finding terrific visual art in areas that, while respected and valued within their own industry, are often ignored by the larger artistic community, like scientific, medical and botanical illustration, paleontological reconstruction art and entertainment industry concept art.

Closely related to the latter is the field of architectural rendering, in that it involves the imagining and visual conceptualization of things that don’t yet exist.

Unfortunately, this is a field where the convenience of 3-D CGI is replacing a lot of the traditional rendering with boringly adequate renderings of 3-D models. In the cases where the presentation requirements are more sophisticated, however, hand-drawn and painted renderings are still in demand.

What a delight it is to see a proposed architectural work portrayed, not as a blandly rendered CGI model, but as a fresh, clear ink and watercolor drawing, as in the beautiful work of James Akers.

Akers is an award winning architectural renderer whose work has been featured in shows for the American Society of Perspectivists and the New York Society of Renderers. His renderings (a convenient term in this case, as ink and watercolor works could easily be called either drawings or paintings) not only convey the appearance of the proposed structure, but have a refined sense of color and a superb feeling of texture, materials, place and atmosphere. If the buildings were not in the process of being imagined, you might assume that these were simply wonderfully precise works drawn and painted from life.

Akers has a knack for including just enough detail in the surrounding elements to make the proposed building fit seamlessly with its environment, while making it clear that the proposed structure is the highlight and subject of the image.

Akers works on a variety of projects and the galleries on his site feature renderings related to Hospitality and Entertainment, Institutions, Retail and Office, Sports and larger scale Planning and Urban Design. The highest resolution images, in which you can get the best feeling for his watercolor technique, are in the Recent Work section. (This is unfortunately displayed by way of a randomized script, so you may have to persevere through repeats of several images to see the larger variety.) There is also a Sketchbook section that includes travel sketches.

I would particularly encourage artists interested in concept design for the film and gaming industries to study the masterful way Akers handles the representation of structures and physical spaces in both linear and atmospheric perspective, and his naturalistic handling of the structures in their environment. (While you’re at it, also look at the work of Thomas Schaller).