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.

“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]

Aside from the human figure, trees are some of the natural forms artists find most interesting, and they have been drawn and painted in a myriad ways.

St Louis artist Mary Sprague creates ink drawings, sometimes in colors, often monochromatic, in which delicate sprays of line and hatching coalesce to create her tree forms.

When seen at the scale at which her work is reproduced on her website, her groupings of short but flowing lines, and the way she applies them in textural passages, give her drawings some of the feeling of softness and delicacy characteristic of etchings.

I suspect, given the scale of her previous work, that these drawings are relatively large, and some of the feeling of the line comes from the relationship of the size of her drawing tools ot the size of the composition.

In her online galleries you will also find older work with different subject matter. In particular a previous series centered on large scale ink drawings of chickens. These are occasionally worked in color with brush and either watercolor or colored inks.

You will find more of her work at the Duane Reed Gallery. There is an article about her from the March/April 2007 issue of Stanford Magazine.

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.

In drawing, particularly pen and ink drawing, stipple refers to the painstaking technique of creating tones by laying down areas of dots, the density of which creates areas of varying tone. It’s almost a handmade analog to the pre-printing screening of photographs, though the technique long preceded photography.

Stipple was important to classic illustrators, such as Dorothy Lathrop, and is associated in particular with noted pulp science fiction illustrator Virgil Finlay. The technique went through something of a revival in the 1960’s, both among science fiction illustrators who carried on Finlay’s tradition, like Robert Walters, and among underground cartoonists, notably Fred Schrier and Dave Sheridan.

In general, however, the technique doesn’t have many adherents due to the work intensive, patience demanding nature of the process. I’ve done some stipple illustrations myself, and I can testify to the demanding nature of laying down hundreds, if not thousands, of dots to create smooth tones.

Contrary to what you might think if you haven’t tried it, you cannot apply stipple mindlessly; the dots must be laid down carefully, with attention to the spacing between them. Get two dots too close to each other and you have a glaring error, dark enough to stand out in your otherwise smooth tone.

Given the difficulty of the technique, it’s a delight to have a bastion of modern stipple illustration in the form of the “hedcuts” (”headline cuts”) that have graced the pages of the Wall Street Journal since 1979, when the style was codified by Kevin Sprouls. The WSJ hedcut style, in which stipple is used in conjunction with engraving-like cross hatching, is employed for small portraits of well known figures, and has become an identifying characteristic of the paper.

Noli Novak is one of the few people who does these illustrations professionally. Her clear, crisp application of the process produces portraits with some of the feeling of traditional engravings, but with a fresh, modern edge.

Novak and her colleagues work from photographs licensed by the Journal, meticulously hand drawing the illustrations that are often so true to the appearance of the subject that many people misinterpret the technique as some kind of sophisticated Photoshop filtering process. While there are some filters that work in that direction, attempting to apply screen-like effects that mimic engravings or stipple, I’ve never seen any of them come anywhere close to the drawings of a talented hedcut artist like Novak.

There is a visual charm to these drawings that, despite their echos of engraving and other graphics, is unique and particularly pleasing to the eye (in a way analogous to the unique visual charm of scratchboard).

Novak has been producing some of the best of the WSJ’s Hedcut portraits since 1987. Her website includes galleries of her drawings of celebrities, corporate and public figures, along with categories like Men, Women, Bald, Headgear and Bearded (the latter hilariously including a teddy bear).

Just so you don’t think that each category only contains 2 pieces, take note of the inexplicably small arrow to the lower right of the drawings, which leads to subsequent pages.

Novak also has a blog, titled, appropriately enough, Hedcuts, in which she discusses her work; including cases in which her work has been “borrowed” by other artists.

Her website also includes examples of her collage works, in which she often uses bits of newspaper as elements.

Novak was featured in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Picturing Business in America.

I’m just guessing, but I have a notion that Seattle based illustrator Kathryn Rathke’s early fascination with art may have coincided with an interest in hand calligraphy.

Her drawings, both black and white and color, are based on wonderfully calligraphic lines — dancing, looping and jogging across the page; at times almost seeming to construct an image in their wake as a byproduct of their movement.

I don’t know whether she works in traditional media or works digitally with a stylus and tablet, but she prepares her finals in Photoshop or Illustrator.

Along with well spotted blacks and judicious applications of fresh color, the fluid and playful character of her lines, in the tradition of line wizards like Al Hirschfeld and Saul Steinberg, gives her images an additional level of visual interest beyond their immediate impact.

Rathke’s clients include The Washington Post, The Village Voice, Vanity Fair, The Economist, Time Warner and Paramount Pictures.

[Via LCSV4]

“…and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

I used the quote above, from the first paragraph of Lewis Carroll’s classic and newly popular story, as a preface to the “Dead Tree Edition” of my webcomic, ArgonZark! when it was published in 1997. I felt it was a perfect summation of the appeal of comics and graphic stories, as well as illustrated books in general.

Though hardly a graphic story in its initial form, the original appeal of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (which every proper Victorian child knows is the actual name of the book, emphasis on “adventures”) was deeply intertwined with the beautiful pen and ink drawings of Sir John Tenniel that graced the first printed editions (top two images above), along with the follow-up Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. (The story was first illustrated in manuscript form by Charles Dodson, AKA Lewis Carroll, himself.)

Those two stories area often mashed together in film, theater and comics adaptations, mixing characters and episodes from the separate stories with abandon. Granted, they are not the most linear or coherent of storylines (grin), but there is a general confusion even about which characters are from which story, and, though I haven’t seen it yet, it looks like Tim Butron’s new action/adventure version (emphasis on “action”) is taking the same license.

Part of the confusion arises from the fact that subsequent editions often presented both stories in one volume and publishers assigned their own illustrators to illustrate both at the same time.

There is a long list of illustrators who have taken on illustrating the two stories over time, but few have risen to the challenge of stepping into Tenniel’s large shoes (even after eating their slice of “Eat Me” currant-labeled cake).

Even noted illustrators of the stature and ability of Jesse Wilcox Smith have bowed to Tenniel as the master of Alice illustrations by basically reinterpreting his illustrations in their own. Others, like Maria Kirk, Harry Rountree, Bessie Pease Gutmann, Charles Robinson, A.E. Jackson and Willy Pogany created their own visual interpretation, sometimes beautifully illustrated, but none have the weight and force to shine without being lost in Tenniel’s glare.

Mervyn Peake did a set of excellent illustrations that were so idiosyncratic as to stand on their own, but lack the charm and enduring appeal of Tenniel’s pen and ink Wonderland.

Only one other illustrator, to my mind, created a series of illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that can hold their place at the tea party with Tenniel — the great British illustrator Author Rackham (above, bottom two images).

Rackham has given us a different Wonderland, still simultaneously dark and bright, stylized and grounded in reality, and rendered with undeniable visual charm.

My old pal Doc Ozone has graced us with a nice set of images of Rackham’s Alice Illustrations.

There is a reasonably good collection of Tenniel’s Alice illustrations on alice-in-wonderland.net and another here.

There are inexpensive editions of the Alice books with Tenniel’s beautiful illustrations in which the quality of the images is quite high: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass (Modern Library Classics) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Barnes & Noble Classics Trade Paper).

Unfortunately, the print versions of Rackham’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are out of print, though you can still find them used. (Amazon is muddying the waters now by listing Kindle eBooks in the same searches with real books in an attempt to push the Kindle, so it looks at first glance like there are more editions than exist physically.)

There are several sources for other Alice Illustrators.

In addition to the wonderfully extensive list of Illustrators of Alice, with links, on LewisCarroll.org, there is a terrific resource on Alice Illustrators, A-Z by Lauren Harman, in which she posts example images by each illustrator.

Also, there is a good series of llustrations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Artists other then Tenniel, with scans from has own collection by Dave Neal, and a sampling of various Alice illustrators on From Smiler, with Love.

The lists are long, and there are a number of great illustrators on them, plus you could spend considerable time looking through the work of John Tenniel and Arthur Rackham alone, so I’ll issue my customary Time Sink Warning, and point out that you could be down this particular rabbit hole longer than you intend.

Even among fans of his comic art masterpiece, Little Nemo in Slumberland (a group of whom I count myself an ardent member), few people are aware of the editorial cartoons of Winsor McCay.

During his stints as cartoonist for The Cincinnati Enquirer and The New York Herald, and through syndicated work for the Hearst papers, McCay did a remarkable series of editorial and allegorical cartoons. More social commentary than topically editorial, they were anti-materialism, anti-laziness, anti-drug and pro hard work and duty.

The best thing about them, of course, is that they were wonderfully drawn by one of one of the best draftsmen in the history of cartooning and comics.

In 2005 Fantagraphics published a terrific collection of McCay’s black and white work, Daydreams and Nightmares: The Fantastic Visions of Winsor McCay, 1898-1934 (more here), that is unfortunately out of print, but can be found used for essentially original cover price ($20).

In addition to McCay’s social commentary/editorial cartoons, the book includes pages of his early strips like Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, A Pilgrim’s Progress, Day Dreams and Little Sammy Sneeze. (Sunday Press published wonderful large-scale version of the latter, with color; my article here.)

Only a smattering of McCay material is online, but the generous and enigmatic “Mr. Door Tree” has published a number of McCay’s editorial cartoons on his blog Golden Age Comic Book Stories. Be sure to click on the initial images to see the large versions of the drawings.

Wonderful stuff.

[Link via BitterOldPunk on MetaFilter]

We are jaded by an abundance of color images.

Dazzled, distracted and spoiled by color’s overt and often brash appeal, we can easily lose sight of the sublime pleasures to be had in the appreciation of black and white artwork.

There is a visual charm and magic to black and white images that is difficult to describe, a sensation of value, texture and tonal contrasts that have their own kind of appeal quite separate than that of painting, or even drawings in colored media. (True aficionados of black and white film will confirm that appeal in a different medium.)

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the work of the master illustrators from the Golden Age of Illustration, roughly from the 1880’s through the 1920’s.

Particularly in the early part of that span, when reproduction techniques improved dramatically, but had not yet made color printing inexpensive enough to be widespread, black and white illustration flourished and bloomed, producing astonishing works from the masters of the genre.

Pen and ink drawing, in particular, achieved a kind of modern Renaissance, with masters like Howard Pyle, Franklin Booth, Joseph Clement Coll, James Montgomery Flagg, Arthur Rackham and many others producing drawings that are masterworks of the medium.

In addition, great illustrators like Howard Pyle and others painted beautifully evocative oil paintings in black and white (If you ever get a chance to visit the Delaware Art Museum, you’ll see what I mean).

Unfortunately, this work is overshadowed by color images, even those by the same artists, and is not widely reproduced these days, even on the web. Fine lined pen and ink drawing, in particular, does not fare well in reproduction on the web, suffering from the limitations of low-resolution display on screen.

As I’ve pointed out before, even though it’s not evident at first glance, computer monitors are low resolution (about 103ppi) — print images in glossy magazines and books are almost three times higher in resolution than your monitor (300dpi); and the difference in reproducing this kind of image is striking.

Fortunately, there is a source for some of the most beautiful black and white images from that period when great illustration was at its height, printed as they should be; and a terrific new collection has just been released.

Black & White ImageS: The Fifth Special Collection of Images from the Vadeboncoeur Collection is the latest in a series of annuals form the ImageS series of collections of great Golden Age illustration (see my previous posts on The Vadeboncoeur Collection of ImageS and ImageS 11).

As always, Vadeboncoeur has managed to feature work by some of the best known names along with discoveries that are likely to be new even to those already hooked on the beauty of great Golden Age illustration. The issue features over 35 artists, including Howard Pyle, Joseph Clement Coll, James Montgomery Flagg, Arthur Rackham, Rose O’Neill, Herbert Railton, Howard Chandler Christy, Dorothy Lathrop, Daniel Vierge and Elizabeth Shippen Green (links to my posts).

There is a preview on the ImageS site of the entire issue. Vadeboncoeur is showing larger previews for this issue than for previous issues (and I take a little bit of credit for encouraging him to do so), but I have to stress again that you cannot begin to appreciate the quality of these images, or their true visual appeal, from small reproductions on the computer screen. (As an example I’ve included at left, bottom, a detail from the image above it.)

In particular, the printing of ImageS goes beyond even normal high resolution printing, with image quality and printing standards comparable to limited edition prints. The edition is oversize at 9×12, on 100lb matte paper, and can be ordered from the publisher for $25 + $5 postage (U.S., postage is higher elsewhere). Many $100 art books don’t give you this many great images.

To order online, go here, click on “Product Overview”, then “The Vadeboncoeur Collection of Images” and then scroll down to Black & White ImageS Special #5. You can also contact the publisher by phone or email here.

Whether you’re reading by gaslight, or Edison’s newfangled electric bulbs, images like these are a rare treat.

(Images above left: Henri-Jules-Ferdinand Bellery-Desfontaines, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Wladyslaw T. Benda, Will Crawford)

David Levine was one of the great caricaturists of the 20th Century. He is best known for his drawings of notable figures published in The New York Review of Books over the course of more than 40 years.

The NYRB web site has a gallery of over 2,500 of his drawings that can be browsed by year or category.

Unlike caricaturists whose subjects are largely drawn from one or two sections of public life, Levine’s position called on him to portray a wide variety of figures from history as well as the present.

I’ve always been particularly fond of his caricatures of artistic figures, both historic and contemporary. The images above show Levine’s interpretation of Rembrandt, Rubens, Valázquez, Titian, Andrew Wyeth and John Singer Sargent (links to Lines and Colors articles on those artists).

Levine took the “large head small body” style of caricature and made it his own, giving emphasis to the faces. His pen and ink approach could be intricately detailed, wonderfully loose, or both simultaneously.

He studied painting at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and at Tyler School of Art here in Philadelphia. His work as a painter is less well known than his illustrations, but you can find galleries of his paintings on his web site and a few examples elsewhere on the web.

His caricatures were often searingly on target, focusing on the foibles and flaws of politicians and other public figures; sometimes definitively so, as in the case of his famous portrayal of Lyndon Johnson lifting his shirt to show his Vietnam-shaped operation scar.

There have been several collections of his work published, like his collection of American Presidents.

David Levine died today at the age of 83.

[Via Art Knowledge News]