Urban Sketchers, a terrific group sketchblog that I wrote about previously here and here, celebrated its first year anniversary this month.

Urban Sketchers is devoted to drawing on location in urban environments, and it has come a long way in the year since it was established by Gabi Campanario, an illustrator and journalist based in Seattle, Washington.

The blog now boasts a long list of invited corespondents from numerous cities and countries around the world, with a delightfully broad range of styles, mediums and approaches. Their first anniversary press release has the stats.

With its wide base of contributors, Urban Sketchers is updated often, making frequent visits rewarding. There is always something new and interesting.

You can browse by artist, listed in the left sidebar by name and home base location, or by subject tags on the right sidebar.

If you want to just flip through the entries in reverse chronological order, look for the small “Older Posts” link at the bottom of the center column.

Going forward, the group plans to formalize as a nonprofit organization, raise money for scholarships and grants, publish a book and organize international meetings; all in support of promoting location drawing, and enabling others to “See the world, one drawing at a time”.

(Images above: Matt Jones, Thomas Thorspecken, Benedetta Dossi, Gérard Michel, Stephen Gardner)

Anyone who has read my previous post about comics art great Al Williamson, knows that he is high on my personal list of adventure comics artists, but I have to admit that even I was surprised by the new book from Flesk publications, Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic, that collects all of his art for several comic book incarnations of Alex Raymond’s iconic space hero.

I had seen a few of the the stories collected here, but by no means all. The 5 or 6 collections I have of Williamson’s work hinted at even more terrific Flash Gordon pieces by Williamson, with short excerpts and individual panels, but until I got this collection I didn’t realize how consistently amazing his Flash Gordon work was.

In terms of his wildly imagined and intricately detailed science fiction settings, it easily rivals his stunning work for the classic EC Comics stories from the 1950’s, but the sophisticated renderings of figures and faces from some of the later stories bring with them the elegance of his work from the Secret Agent Corrigan strips.

In many ways, Williamson was the inheritor of Alex Raymond’s role as one of the artists who carried the superb draftsmanship and refined pen and ink techniques of the turn of the century illustrators into the 20th Century world of adventure comics

The book collects three periods during which Williamson worked on Raymond’s most recognizable character, from the King Comics stories of the 1960’s, the 1980’s adaptation of the campy motion picture (of which it was by far the best aspect) and the easily missed Marvel Comics miniseries from 1994, as wall as including much supplementary and related art in its 256 pages.

I have Williamson’s 1980’s Flash Gordon movie adaptation as published by Golden Books, in which the printing is terrible and the art is lost in sloppy over-saturated color and poor reproduction values in general. I didn’t realize how beautiful the art for that story actually was until I saw the same story printed here in it’s original glorious black and white.

This kind of comic art, when printed in black and white, is like having a book of classic pen and ink illustration that happens to tell terrific pulp adventure stories.

If you look at the pages in the book you’ll see that in many places the black areas are shades of dark gray rather than solid black. This is not because the quality of the printing is in any way off; Flesk Publications is a small niche-publisher devoted to creating superb editions of books about classic illustrators and comics artists, and the standards of book design and printing from Flesk are always high.

Those areas are, in fact, not quite black because the quality of the printing is superb, and the majority of the art has been reproduced not from stats or mechanical copies, as wold be the usual procedure with this kind of collection, but from brand new scans of the original artwork, allowing you to actually see the tones of ink as laid down by the artist! Wonderful.

Mark Schultz, who acknowledges being tremendously inspired by Williamson’s work, was instrumental in working with John Fleskes to assemble the book, and contributes the major essay. There is an interview with Schultz about the collection on Newsarama.

For admirers of great adventure comics art (and I obviously include myself here), Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic is one of the must have books this year. It can be found in better bookstores and comics shops, or ordered from Amazon and other online bookstores, as well as directly from the Flesk Publications.

For more on Al Williamson, see my previous post.

Al Williamson is one of the unsung greats of comics art. Well, perhaps “undersung” is a better word (if it is a word), in that those aware of his contributions are usually great admirers, but his work is not as widely known among contemporary comics readers as it should be (not by a long shot).

Williamson occupies a unique place in the history of comics, acting as a kind of bridge between the dazzling full page newspaper adventure comics of the early 20th Century (and the traditions of the great 19th Century pen and ink illustrators that they embodied) and the modern comics upheaval and revolutions of the late 20th Century.

At the early stages of his career, Williamson fell smack in the middle, going to work for the notorious EC comics in 1952, where he was the youngster amid legendary comics greats like Frank Frazetta, Roy Krenkel, Wally Wood and others. His striking science fiction work graced the pages and covers of EC titles like Weird Science and Weird Fantasy, and influenced the generations of comic artists who were growing up at the time, goggle-eyed with flashlights under the covers, reading his lavishly illustrated tales of outer space adventures and outlandish monsters.

Prior to his work with EC, Williamson studied with Burne Hogarth, and assisted him on pages for his Tarzan Sunday newspaper strip. Newspaper adventure comics were dying at the time, however, under pressure from other forms of entertainment and economic squeezing from newspaper editors, and what would have seemed Williamson’s natural place became something of a dead end.

Though he worked within the increasingly restrictive format of small daily adventure news paper strips off and on for years, he also moved into comic books, where adventure comics went and morphed into something different in the middle of the century, and he followed them into the latter half of the century, working for the Warren comics magazines (image above, 2nd from top) and Marvel Comics in its heyday, where he was known in particular for his work on a series of Star Wars comics.

All the while he carried forward his love for the great adventure comics, and especially his admiration for the work of Alex Raymond, creator of Flash Gordon, and one of the all time greats of comics art (more on Alex Raymond in a future post).

Williamson had a chance to step into Raymond’s considerably large shoes on several occasions, taking over his spy adventure newspaper strip Secret Agent X-9, which became Secret Agent Corrigan and moved from film-noir to James Bond style adventures (image above, bottom and detail), ably scripted by Archie Goodwin. He also assisted John Prentice, who took the reins of Raymond’s Rip Kirby strip.

Williamson worked on several versions of Raymond’s star character Flash Gordon (image above, top), the strip that had obviously been such and influence on him, from the amazing King Comics version in the 1960’s to the Marvel Comics version in the ’90s (more on Williamson’s Flash Gordon work in a subsequent post).

Unfortunately, though there are scattered resources, I can’t find a major repository of Williamson’s work in the web, so it’s hard to convey the grace of his figures, the elegance of his pen lines, the chiaroscuro drama of his spotted blacks, the dynamics of his compositions or the ground breaking inventiveness of his storytelling and panel layouts. I also can’t lead you directly to great examples of his astonishingly rendered details, applied with a delicate finesse that never leaves the impression of gratuitous unnecessary fiddling, unlike so many lesser artists whose grasp of the use of pen and ink textures will never approach Williamson’s.

The only thing I can supply, apart from those resources I can list, is a hearty recommendation that those of you with any appreciation for great adventure comics art, or graphic stories told with superb draftsmanship and a subtle command of the visual language of the great pen and ink illustrators, who are not yet familiar with Williamson, treat yourself to one of the many printed collections available that feature his work.

There is a recent book collecting some of his short story work, titled Al Williamson Adventures, from Insight Studios (more here). The limited edition hardcover has apparently come and gone, and I’m unsure of the status of the softcover edition (if it’s out, Insight needs to promote it better, I couldn’t even find mention of it on their web site.)

Fortunately, there is a great new collection from Flesk Publications, Al Williamson’s Flash Gordon: A Lifelong Vision of the Heroic. This book is so terrific I’m going to make it the topic of a separate post.

It’s a common practice among contemporary comics artists to do commissioned sketches or even fully realized drawings for fans and collectors.

Often collectors will commission drawings by a number of artists on a single theme, and create over time a collection of themed works by an extensive and diverse list of creators.

Such is the case with the collection displayed on a site titled Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobberin’ Time!, by a collector whose name I don’t know (email address suggests “sgettis”, presumably S. Gettis).

The collection is centered on the theme of asking each artist to portray a favorite literary figure, author or character. This collection has been in progress since 1998, and has been displayed on the web in several forms. I wrote about it in one of its previous incarnations back in 2005 as Artistic interpretations of Literary Figures.

Since then the collection has continued to grow and now includes an impressive list of artists and a fascinatingly diverse list of literary figures. You can browse the collection by either from lists in the right sidebar.

The collection includes a number of comics artists and illustrators I’ve featured previously on Lines and Colors. In the list below, the first link is to the original drawing on the Hey Oscar Wilde! site, second is to my post about the artist.

Images above: Oscar Wilde by Stephen Silver, Alan Moore by Frazer Irving, Captain Nemo by Chris Sprouse, Jim Harrison by Tommy Lee Edwards, Alice in Wonderland by Steve Rude (in Gibson Girl style), Hayao Miyazaki by Kazu Kibuishi (see my post on Hayao Miyazaki), Frankenstein’s Monster by William Stout, Raymond Chandler by Adam Hughes and George Orwell by Kevin Nowlan.

Addendum: the collector’s name is Steven Gettis. [Thanks to Dennis van Zwieten for the tip.]

Long time readers of Lines and Colors will know that I have a particular fondness for pen and ink drawing; a medium with a long history and many great practitioners but one that is assigned little glamour in this day of inexpensive color reproduction and computer imagery.

Melissa B. Tubbs is an Alabama based artist who takes inspiration in the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer and the traditions of past pen and ink artists, an finds particular delight in the patterns of light and shadow created by sunlight cascading against the details of architectural forms.

Her pen and ink drawings are rendered in textures and tones created in finely detailed crosshatching, used in places almost like washes. She utilizes them to give her architectural elements visceral textures of stone, brick, wood siding and other building materials. She also has a nice feeling for the textures of bark and leaves, flags and drapery and cloth awnings.

As you browse back through her blog posts, be sure to click on the images for the larger versions. Some of the older posts, in particular, feature linked images that are large enough to get a feeling for her hatching technique (image above, with detail below: Hunt Memorial, NYC).

Tubbs is represented by the Stonehenge Gallery in Montgomery, Alabama; and her drawing of Carnegie Hall in NYC will be featured in the drawing collection Strokes of Genius 2: Light and Shadow, by Rachael Rubin Wolf, to be published in October.

[Via EmptyEasel]

Cheeming Boey draws on styrofoam coffee cups with a sharpie pen.

Those of us who have a tendency to doodle on whatever surface is handy may not think that surprising, but the degree of skill and work that he puts into his unusual medium is outstanding.

His subjects range from cartoons to detailed stippled portraits to elaborate decorative drawings inspired by the style of Japanese prints.

The drawings use the entire circumference of the cop, connecting with themselves in a continuous band. The flicker set of his cup drawings features them set against a mirror and also often includes multiple views of the same cup.

There is a photo sequence of his process and a video as well.

Boey’s cups sell in galleries for $120 to $220 and are sometimes placed in plastic cases. There is an article on him on the OC Register.

You’ll often hear disparaging remarks about unorthodox art materials, particularly when they’re not “archival”. I dont’ know about the Sharpie ink, but Boey’s styrofoam “canvas”, as any eco-warrior will tell you, will last for a long long time.

Addendum: The Sharpie blog has an interview with Boey

[Via digg]

Inspired in part by Ed Ruscha’s photogrphic series of “Every Building on the Susnset Strip” and Matteo Pericoli’s panoramic drawings in his book Manhattan Unfurled, artist Paul Heaston decided to draw every building on Main Street in the historic district of his hometown of Bozeman Montana.

Some of us who have never been to Bozeman think of it as a literary location, having been the setting for part of Robert Pirsig’s remarkable Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and a surprising number of other cultural references, including being the nominal location of the Star Trek: First Contact movie (co-written by Bozeman native Brannon Braga). It is also the site of Montana State University and is apparently rich with other colorful points of history.

Heaston focused his interest in the historic architecture of Bozeman, the town’s Main Street, from Grand to Rouse Avenues, and as a challenge to himself, drew every building on every block in that area, on both sides of the street, from direct observation in his Moleskein sketchbook (which he apparently filled exactly, without intending to). The project started in October of 2008 and just wrapped up on May 10 of this year.

It’s interesting to note that the seasons changed over the course of his project, giving it in interesting dimension of time as well as space.

Heaston’s approach, is an immediate and direct drawing in pen (that I assume is a fine point marker like a Pigma Micorn or Staedtler, though I didn’t find a mention of drawing instrument), with a casual feeling, even while enjoying the portrayal of surface textures. He even seems to have a cavalier disregard for making his architectural lines straight.

In some drawings, he winds up with what looks like curved perspective – like a photograph through a wide angle lens (which some have suggested is truer to the way we actually see than traditional “straight line” perspective).

The casual feeling of his drawings brings to mind the sketchbooks of Robert Crumb and Chris Ware.

I came across Heaston’s Bozeman Main Street Project on Urban Sketchers, where he is a correspondent. There is an article about the project, as well as one about its completion. The entire project is posted as a Flicker set.

Heaston has a web site with galleries that include other drawings and graphics, as well as his oil paintings. The latter are largely a series of gestural, painterly standing portraits, that are informal both in composition and the sitter’s (stander’s?) attire.

Heaston also maintains a blog, three letter word for art, on which you will find many other sketches and the stories behind them.

Perhaps you’ve seen his unforgettable drawings in the introductory animation for the PBS Mystery! series (animated by Derkek Lamb); perhaps you’ve seen one or more of his over 75 published books; or perhaps you’ve somehow encountered stray examples of his wonderfully eccentric pen drawings, filled with enigmatic figures in long coats or longer dresses, as likely to hold a knife as a croquet mallet (though either could be equally suspicious of being a murder weapon), and children of questionable intent and even more questionable future; and, of course, perhaps you’re already a devoted Edward Gorey fan.

Gorey himself was something of an enigmatic figure, considered eccentric by some, with a perhaps undeserved association with grim, morbid or horrorific work, when in fact his work has always been whimsical, with just a twist of macabre humor.

Gorey’s wonderfully retro drawing style, at times spare, but often filled with luxurious swaths of pen and ink texture, lends itself perfectly to his off-kilter view of the world and the charming denizens with whom he populates it.

His small, utterly charming and disarming picture books (which you may or may not consider children’s storybooks, depending your thoughts about books in which terrible things happen to the children involved), are wonders of wordcraft as well as spellbindingly drawn. The seemingly simple haiku-like captions make you pause, and pause again, while a slow motion laugh arises, ghost-like, from the bottom of your brain pan and finds its way to your mouth as you stare.

Gorey is sometimes associated with Charles Adams, the two were acquainted and shared the same literary agent as well as admiration for each other’s work. An association I like to make is with the wonderfully off-kilter cartoons of B. Kliban, who I’m certain must have been influenced by Gorey, (as he was by Saul Steinberg), and who, in turn, was a prime influence on the Far Side’s Gary Larsen (along with Gorey, Adams and Gahan Wilson – it all comes around, folks).

Gorey said his fascination with the macabre began at age 5 when he discovered Bram Stoker’s Dracula, was “scared to death” and began to teach himself to draw. Though he worked in Doubleday’s art department for years, his own book ideas were rejected by publisher after publisher until The Unstrung Harp made it to press and began a string of successful titles.

He later did set designs for the Broadway version of Dracula, in which the entire sets were large reproductions of his pen drawings, intricately detailed castle interiors and drawing rooms; and entirely black and white, except.. one object in each set was brilliant blood-red.

You can now buy a fold-out and fold-up toy book version of the sets as Edward Gorey’s Dracula: A Toy Theatre: Die Cut, Scored and Perforated Foldups and Foldouts.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a major repository of Gorey’s work on the web, so I’ve gathered some scattered resources below, though most of them are not representative of his best work..

If you haven’t exposed yourself to Gorey’s brain-tweaking and eye delighting books, I might recommend Amphigorey, an inexpensive collection of several of his small books (which was followed by several other collections in similar format). There are, of course, many other titles.

If you live within reach of Southeastern Pennsylvania, you can still catch a terrific show of Gorey’s originals, Elegant Enigmas: The Art of Edward Gorey, at the Brandywine River Museum until May 17, 2009. (Here is a review of the show, and background about Gorey, from the Philadelphia Inquirer.)

The Edward Gorey House, in his former home in Yarmouthport, MA, is open to the public on a regular basis.

Addendum: Michael Connors of Morguefile has written to add this link to reproduction of Gorey’s Gashleycrumb Tinies, his “Alphabet Book” (delightful!).

For lovers of all kinds of art, the internet just keeps getting better and better.

Grandma’s Graphics is a little treat that popped up recently with some vintage public domain illustration. Though some of the images aren’t of as high reproduction quality as one might like, it’s still worth a look, even if it’s just to familiarize yourself with some art you might not have seen, and seek out printed copies of better quality later.

The collection, mostly pen and ink of course, given the eras, includes some of Harry Clarke’s intricate penwork, and illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through The Looking Glass by Sir John Tenniel (above, top) and Harry Rountree (above, bottom), one of the few who doesn’t wilt in Tenniel’s presence when tackling Lewis Carroll’s flights of fancy. (See my post on Sir John Tenniel.)

I love the fact that the Colouring section includes two of Tenniel’s more intricately detailed (and non-coloring book like) illustrations, including the image above (larger version here). (You can see my own nod to this particular drawing by Tenniel in this cartoon from my book of Dinosaur Cartoons.)

[Link via Illustration Inspiration]

I’ve mentioned before my fascination with scratchboard, that magical inverse of pen and ink, in which light areas are scratched out of a coating of ink on a clay-covered board (and sometimes a white surface is scratched away from a black-coated board), producing a line drawing with some of the characteristics of pen and ink and some of the feeling of woodcuts (see some of my posts involving scratchboard).

Tm Foley is a Michigan based illustrator who worked for a long time in variations of traditional scratchboard technique, and moved over to digital illustration in the late 90’s.

Foley has found great freedom in the combination of his scratchboard style and computer color, a flexible alternative to the traditional methods of applying color to scratchboard drawings, which is usually a difficult, messy and often frustrating process because of the surface dust created by the scratchboard technique.

Foley’s color scratchboard illustrations have the visual charm of scratchboard lines with the added punch of well applied color. The other ingredients in his visual mix, a fertile imagination and strong drawing skills, have combined to garner him a roster of clients that include The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, Barrons, Highlights for Children and others.

Foley also maintains a blog, Illustratorium, where you you can find an archive of his illustrations, arranged by dated posts, or by subject categories. You can also find a few of his illustrations in other media both here and in his iSpot portfolio, as well as some of his scratchboard style work in black and white.