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.

Chinese artist Yu-Tang Yang draws intensely intricate pen and ink drawings of landscapes, in which his detailed approach creates evocative representations of the visual textures of trees, bark and grasses.

This approach is particularly effective in his depictions of winter forest snow scenes, like Bewildering (image above, with detail, larger image here), in which the white of the paper becomes the smooth surface of snow covered ground.

I’m not certain I have a correct grasp of his artist’s statement about Realistic Penart, but I come away with the impression that he feels his approach has as much in common with the way paintings are composed as they do with traditional pen and ink (bringing to mind Franklin Booth’s reputation for “painting with a pen”), and holds the practice as worthy of comparison to painting.

Yu-Tang was born in Chung-chuen in northeastern China, and though showing artistic ability at an early age, he failed the entrance exams to art college twice. He worked for a time on a farm camp during the Cultural Revolution, later went to work for a design firm; and eventually set out on his own as a freelance artist.

He went to Japan to study, was deeply impressed with the training, and delved into his intensive research in to pen art. He returned to China and began his series of drawings of the Chinese landscape. He published two books on the subject, Detailed Analysis of Penart Technique and Collection of Penart.

There is a gallery on the artist’s site, with works arranged by year. (The images are slightly marred by watermarking, but it’s not too intrusive.) There is a less extensive, but easier to navigate (and non-watermarked) gallery on the Art Renewal Center.

You will often hear the phrase “big shoes to fill” applied to the task of filling a role formerly held by someone whose accomplishments were significant and difficult to achieve.

Illustrator and comics artist Gary Gianni put on some big shoes when he stepped into the role of illustrator for Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant newspaper comic strip.

Hal Foster (who will certainly be the subject of a future lines and colors post) was one of the three or four greatest newspaper comics artists in the history of the medium; and, to my mind, should be on the list of all time best pen and ink artists.

Gianni took over the illustration chores on the strip from John Cullen Murphy, who was Foster’s assistant, and had taken the reins on the strip when Foster retired in 1970.

Gianni’s previous work included illustrations for versions of classics like Moby Dick and Kidnapped, and he created graphic novel versions of Tales of O. Henry and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. He also worked for mainstream American comic book companies on titles like Indiana Jones and The Shrine Of The Sea Devil, Batman: Black and White (for which his story won an Eisner Award in 1997) and The Monstermen Mysteries, which ran as a backup feature for Mike Mignola’s Hellboy.

The Prince Valiant Page is a new book from Flesk Publications (see my previous posts on Flesk Publications) that showcases Gianni’s work on the strip, and also offers a glimpse into his background.

The book is written by Gianni, and offers an insightful look into his working process, and his collaboration with Mark Schultz, a terrific artist himself, who handles the writing on the current strip.

Gianni talks about his admiration for Foster, as well as other great pen and ink artists like Joseph Clement Coll and Franklin Booth, an admiration that is evident in his refined ink drawing style.

In the process of describing how a modern Prince Valiant page is created, including the use of models and reference, we get to see a number of pages of Gianni’s pencil drawings before they were inked. These, though not meant as finished art, have a wonderful tonal quality that is very different from the final ink drawings.

I have to admit that I didn’t have a proper appreciation for Gianni’s work prior to seeing this volume; partly because I had not seen much of his other illustration and comics work except in scattered examples, and partly because of the terrible job that modern newspapers do of presenting their comics.

One of the things that newspapers do to render their comic strips ineffectual, particularly those few remaining adventure strips, is to print them too small to allow for any real visual excitement. The original Prince Valiant pages, like those of Little Nemo in Slumberland and many other comic strips in the early 20th Century, were sized to full newspaper pages. (See my post on Winsor McCay.)

As time went on, and the role of newspaper comics as one of the major forms of home entertainment was superseded by movies and then television, newspaper editors (or more likely, owners and accountants) continually reduced the size of newspaper comics. In an age where home video screens and computer monitors keep getting bigger and bigger, this is a trend that, if continued, will eventually result in microscopic panels; which will undoubtedly help in the efforts of newspapers to remove all entertaining content as their circulation drops.

Prince Valiant is now down to 1/5th of a page at most in the newspapers, but several of the Gianni & Schultz strips are printed in the book as fold-out pages, doubling the book’s 9×12″ (23×30cm) size; nice and big, though still far short of a full newspaper page. It’s enough to let Gianni’s work shine, and make you wish for a volume of the strips at this size.

There is a collection of the Gianni & Schultz strips, Prince Valiant: Far From Camelot due in the (presumably near) future, but the Amazon pre-publication listing doesn’t include that book’s dimensions.

You can see a recent Prince Valiant strip on the King Features site, but you apparently can’t see the current one, or search the archives, without getting a membership of some kind, in an effort to… well, I don’t know why; I guess as part of the continuing effort on the part of newspapers and syndicates to discourage reader interest.

In the meanwhile, we have this beautiful volume to appreciate Gianni’s work. The Prince Valiant Page can be ordered directly from Flesk Publications in either hardback or limited edition signed, slipcase hardback. The book includes a foreword by Hellboy’s Mike Mignola and an introduction by Robert Wagner, who played the character in the 1954 Cinemascope movie.

Flesk has done their usual superb job of showcasing the art, jamming the book cover-to-cover with wonderful examples and using the highest production values. It certainly makes you wish newspapers would treat their comics with half as much respect.

Gianni and Schultz continue their work on the Prince Valiant weekly strip, trying to give us a taste of the former glory of newspaper adventure strips within the restricted confines of their 1/5th of a page.

It’s a valiant effort.

I’m always particularly pleased when the art establishment of museums and traditional galleries shakes itself out of its self-imposed blindness and recognizes comics (”graphic narrative”) as the art form it is; so I was pleased to learn that the work of comics artist Jeff Smith, creator of the highly regarded series Bone, is featured in a new exhibit at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus Ohio, Jeff Smith: Bone and Beyond.

I’ve written about Jeff Smith and Bone before (and here).

The exhibit features 80 of of Smith’s pen and ink pages from Bone, several color covers as well as some of his work on projects since wrapping up the thousand-plus page series, including his Shazam series for DC Comics and his new ongoing series Rasl.

Bone (Amazon link) was published as black and white trade paperbacks, then collected in a 1,300 page graphic novel (in the true sense of that term, not the way it’s misused by the comics industry as a catchall for squarebound comics), and then rereleased as a series of color trade paperbacks, with coloring by Steve Hamaker.

The exhibit at the Wexner Center also includes a selection of classic comics art from artists that Smith considers direct influences on his work and style, including original pages and panels from Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Will Eisner’s The Spirit, Carl Barks’s Uncle Scrooge, Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury, and E. C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre.

There is a catalog created to accompany the exhibit, which also includes the work of the other artists. There is a five minute video on the Wexner site with an interview with Smith.

The exhibit at the Wexner Center runs until August 3, 2008.

A related exhibit, Jeff Smith: Before Bone is running concurrently at the nearby Cartoon Research Library of Ohio State University. It features his work on Thorn, Smith’s strip for the campus newspaper, The Lantern. There is also a catalog to accompany this exhibit.

You can always catch up on the latest news about Jeff Smith and his work on his Boneville blog. You can also order Bone, Rasl and related items directly from Smith’s online Shop.

[Exhibition link via Art Knowledge News]

Leonardo da Vinci is one of those artists, like Rembrandt, Monet or Van Gogh, who is obscured from us by the brilliance of his fame.

It is almost impossible to look at Leonardo without the attendant baggage of his reputation as the ultimate embodiment of the Renaissance, one of the most brilliant minds in history, and the creator of iconic images; including what is arguably the most famous painting in the World, the Mona Lisa (which I have attempted to show you with fresh eyes in my post La Giaconda (The Mona Lisa), flipped for your viewing pleasure).

Leonardo, despite his reputation as an inventor, proto-scientist, anatomist, and philosopher, was primarily an artist. To look at him as an artist, as freshly as we can, perhaps we should step back to that most basic of an artist’s skills, drawing.

Even here, Leonardo’s reputation confounds us; even his drawings are famous, from the iconic Virtruvian Man, to his drawings for flying machines, weapons of war or fantastically advanced notions like submarines and helicopters. His notebooks are the most renowned collections of sketches, drawings and notes in the world. Some of his drawings from them are among the most famous in the world and have been reproduced widely, even animated.

To most artists, drawings are an exploration of the visual world and their response to it, and preparatory studies for finished works. To Leonardo they were that and more; explorations of scientific inquiry, logistics, inventiveness, anatomical study, investigations of motion and natural phenomena, and an essential tool in his relentless quest to know and understand the world around him.

So we step back again, and try to look at his drawings simply as those of an artist, to see if we can get to know him on that level; drawing what he saw with the materials at hand, largely pen and ink and silverpoint, and less frequently, chalks.

Here, in the details of his firm line work, delicate shading and expressive textures, perhaps we can meet Leonardo the artist; observing, studying and interpreting the world before his eyes with uncanny intensity and consummate skill.

Here we see his mastery of tone, his robust draftsmanship, but ultimately his struggle as an artist, like that of most serious artists, to make his skill the measure of the fantastic wonders of the world he wanted to portray.

There is a site devoted the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci with about fifty of his drawings. A better selection, though not as easy to navigate, can be found on the Web Gallery of Art (if an image doesn’t come up in the pop-up when you click for the detail image, try reloading the pop-up window).

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a selection of Leonardo’s drawings as part of a previous exhibit. I’ve listed some other online resources below.

Also, see my previous post The Face of Leonardo?, in which I talk about how Siegfried Woldhek analyzed Leonardo’s catalog of drawings to find those that most likely qualify as self-portraits.

There are a number of books devoted to Leonardo’s drawings. The inexpensive Dover edition, Leonardo Drawings, is viewable online through Google Book Search.

The second volume of the two volume set, Leonardo da Vinci, Vol I: The Complete Paintings; Vol II: Sketches and Drawings by Frank Zollner is beautiful, contains many of his well known and lesser known drawings, nicely reproduced and remarkably inexpensive. Though, not listed in print on Amazon, you can find it online, sometimes even discounted new, or even cheaper used.

Leonardo’s Notebooks, edited and arranged by Anna Suh, is more an appreciation than a catalog, and features many of his translated writings along with the sheets to which they relate.

There are numerous other books on Leonardo’s drawings and his notebooks. Many of them quite inexpensive; so don’t be deterred by the fact that Bill Gates at one point paid over 30 million dollars for one his original notebooks, the Leicester Codex, making it the most expensive book ever purchased.

Shitao (Yuanji Shih T’ao, original name Zhu Rueji) was a Chinese painter of the early Quing period, active in the late 1600’s.

Shitao was a member of Ming royalty, and survived the fall of that house to invaders from Manchuria, changed his name and became a Buddhist monk.

He is classed as an “individualist” painter. Along with some of his contemporaries, he broke with staid and restrictive traditions of the time and utilized new ways of handling washes, perspective and composition.

My knowledge of Chinese ink painting is frustratingly meager, but I see in Shitao’s calligraphic impressions of misty cliffs and cloud filled valleys many of the visual charms that I find so mesmerizing about the best examples of traditional Chinese painting I have seen.

The Shitao section at the Metropolitan Museum of Art contains a series of images called Returning Home, that includes translations of the poems accompanying the images, as well as background information on the artist, the time and the paintings. There is also a stunning handscroll called The Sixteen Lohans.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has several of his pieces,

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art had a nicely zoomable image of Mountain on the Other Side of the River in which you can see the brushwork and washes close up.

The Princeton Art Museum has some good-size images and a short bio.

One of the most extensive resources is a series of 8 unconnected gallery pages of 20 images each on ImageNETion, which can be accessed from this Artcyclopedia page. They are worth the annoying banner ads with which they are saddled.

In Shitso’s remarkable paintings there is a gestural fluidity and marvelous range of line weights, textures and tones (often referred to as “colors” in the context of ink painting) that can be fascinating over extended viewing. Just the contrast between passages of intricate, delicate detail and disarming simplicity can be captivating.

If you’re not familiar with Chinese ink painting, my suggestion is to flip through a few of Shitao’s images to find one that seems appealing or interesting, but then put the others aside and spend some time with that image.

Let Shitao’s magical lines lead you into and through the painting. Though Chinese ink painting is actually more truthfully representational than many Western observers think (you can actually find those “fanciful” mountains in photographs of rural China), the intention is not so much to convey the literal scene, but the spiritual essence of nature, and humankind’s place place in the broader landscape.

Contemplation, as they say, will be rewarded.

I’m not going to attempt to write an appreciation of Calvin and Hobbes here, I don’t have the time or the room.

I’ll simply say that if, for some bizarre reason, you’re unfamiliar with the greatest comic strip of the last quarter of the 20th Century (and one of the best for that entire century, which which is to say the history of newspaper comics in general), run right out to the bookstore and restore this unbalance in your life by picking up a copy of The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, The Indispensable Calvin And Hobbes, The Authoritative Calvin And Hobbes or any of the other Calvin and Hobbes collections; and immersing yourself in the worlds within worlds inhabited by a young boy who fits nowhere and everywhere.

Barring the long-windied tome I have spared you about how wonderful Calvin and Hobbes is, I want to talk instead about Watterson’s drawings, which are also among the best in the history of newspaper comics.

Though you won’t find the grandeur of Winsor McCay, or the representational draftsmanship of Hal Foster or Alex Raymond, you will find a lineage to greats like Greorge Herriman, Walt Kelly and Charles Schultz.

Watterson’s drawings, like his writing, scintillate with whimsical charm, leading your eye around swooping calligraphic lines that are punctuated with the kinetic exclamation mark of his wonderfully out of control lead character.

His short, “Peanuts-headed” kids and lean, liquid-backboned tiger are rendered with a stylistic confidence and visual aplomb that would make his drawings a treat even if you were to delete the dialog and randomize the panels.

Look at something as simple at his trees, a couple of thick, wiggly lines delineating a trunk, some curved hatching for texture and form and a few light lines suggesting limbs, put together with that lively, casual feeling sometimes achieved by the most accomplishes political cartoonists in their line work.

Simplicity was more than a matter of choice, though. Unlike the great newspaper strips of the early 20th Century, which often had the full width of the newspaper sheet across which to unfold their pen and ink worlds, modern newspaper comics have been squeezed smaller and smaller over the last 50 years, to the point where they are more like icons tagged onto word balloons than visual stories.

(Hey, here’s a great idea for newspapers. Circulation is dropping, so let’s take the things people like most about newspapers, like comics and political cartoons, and shrink them down, reduce their number or leave them out entirely, so we can fill more space with ads and flyers and drive more people away and reduce circulation further and then eliminate more features that people like, and so on…, and then complain about how the internet is killing newspapers! Brilliant.)

Watterson bemoaned the stupid shrinking of the comics, but actually had enough clout to change that, even if only slightly and only for his strip, but it was a great change nonetheless. He managed to get his syndicate to offer the Sunday C&H as a solid block, not the collection of individual panels preferred by the editors so they could rearrange (and drop out) panels to fit them into their tiny spaces.

Watterson took advantage of this with marvelously imaginative and adventurous layouts. His colors for the Sunday strips were extraordinary as well. Not that he had any extra colors, he just used them better. At the time, I was convinced that newspapers had reduced the color available to Sunday comics artists, but when Watterson started doing his beautiful, subtle coloring for Calvin’s “Spacemann Spiff” and dinosaur adventures, I realized that the other cartoonists just weren’t taking the time, or trouble, or simply lacked the artistic skill, to take full advantage of what newspaper comic coloring could do.

Unfortunately, the real subtlety of some of this work doesn’t always come through in the reproductions in books. Much like the reprints of comic books from the 1960’s and 70’s, these strips were originally printed on newsprint, a rough, cheap paper that, particularly at the time, was off-white. When reproduced on bright white high-quality book paper, the strips lose some of their tonal subtlety, like a Baroque bistre pen drawing that was originally done on cream paper being reproduced in black and white (that’s right, I’m talking about things like tonal subtlety in reference to a late 20th Century newspaper comic strip).

His longer format strips, done specifically for publication in some of the books, fare better in reproduction and will give you an idea of what I mean about his subtle coloring.

Not to get too high-minded here, I’ll also mention that Watterson drew great dinosaurs, a subject I particularly enjoy; and there were rumors at one point of an actual dinosaur book from him. Though I don’t know if many paleontological artists would worry about him as competition, I do think that most of them would immediately buy a copy if it ever came out.

Watterson retired from Calvin and Hobbes after 10 years, and seems to have been largely quiet since, at least in terms of work available the public; but he left us a great legacy of not only a treasure of a comic strip, but 10 years worth of comic strip drawing at its best.

There are some nice online resources now for Watterson drawings, including much material outside his work on the strip, notably the extensive tribite site Calvin and Hobbes: Magic on Paper which includes a great section of Rare Bill Watterson Art and lots of links to other resources.

Wikipedia has a nice article on Calvin and Hobbes and a shorter one on Bill Watterson, that have links to other resources.

The Universal Press Syndicate’s Calvin and Hobbes official site is rerunning the original strip, just to make our daily routine a little brighter.