Japanese artist Sagaki Keita creates drawings in which the textures and tones are composed of smaller drawings, down to striking levels of detail and complexity.

The large images are of cityscapes, faces, famous paintings, prints or sculpture, even atomic explosions. The images within the images are of little faces, figures, animals, fish, and assorted bizarre monsters and creatures, legions of them, waves of them (sometimes literally).

The drawings are done in pen and ink on paper mounted on board, some in relatively large scale, others not as large as you might assume. The works section of his website includes the dimensions of the individual pieces.

Even with Google Translate, I could find little other information specifically about the artist and his work, but the gallery includes a number of images with close ups that offer a fascinating glimpse of the nature of the works.

The images I’ve shown above, each with a corresponding detail, are still somewhat small. You can find a nice zoom-in on his interpretation of the Mona Lisa on Darizine, and several images previewed on Colossal.

Some of the images on his site are larger than they appear in the page, like his wonderful interpretation of Katsushika Hokusai’s In the Hollow of a Wave off the Coast at Kanagwa (see my post on Katsushika Hokusai).

It’s worth clicking on some of them to open the images in another browser tab or window to see if they are larger than the size they are represented in the page.

[Via MetaFilter]

When I first featured the work of Scott McKowen back in 2007, I couldn’t find a web presence or much information about him or his wonderful scratchboard illustrations.

Since then he has established a joint website with Christina Poddubiuk, highlighting McKowen’s abilities as an illustrator, art director and graphic designer and Poddubiuk’s skills as a costume and set designer (images above, bottom 3).

Their paths intersect in theatre oriented illustrations by McKowen, as well as costume design by Poddubiuk for some of McKowen’s illustrations, such as the Alice in Wonderland cover shown above, and the illustration of the Queen of Hearts, for which she was also the model.

When I featured McKowen previously I highlighted his striking covers for the Marvel Comics series 1602, which is where I first encountered his work.

You can see more of his book covers and interiors on the Marlena Agency site. You can also search out his book covers on Amazon and view some of them on JacketFlap (click through the titles to the book detail, then click on the cover image for a larger version).

There is little background information on either artist on the Punch & Judy site. There is an interview with McKowen on the Schuler Books Weblog, and another on Lucid Forge.

Though it’s not highlighted on the Punch & Judy site (for reasons that are lost on me), there is a book collection of McKowen’s illustrations, A Fine Line: Scratchboard Illustrations by Scott McKowen from Firefly Books.

When viewing the website, be sure to open your browser window to maximum, as the images are displayed with a clever script that resizes them to the available window area. Be aware that in each section there are additional images accessed from the numbered links at the top, and don’t miss the sketchbook section.

[Via Drawn!]

Long time readers of Lines and Colors will know of my fascination with dinosaurs and paleo art, my fondness for science fiction and adventure stories and their accompanying illustrations, my admiration for the beautiful ink drawings of classic illustrators, the inspired adventure comic strips from the 1930′s and 1940′s that carried their traditions forward, and the wonderfully lurid E.C. Comics comic books of the 1950′s that, in turn, evolved out of them.

Together, those leanings make me a prime candidate to love the work of comics artist, writer and illustrator Mark Schultz, whose long running series Xenozoic Tales, also known as Cadillacs and Dinosaurs, has been delighting similarly minded readers since its surprise appearance in the comics anthology Death Rattle in the mid 1980′s.

Like his predecessors, Schultz has been taking the influence of the comics and illustration greats that inspired him, weaving it into his own always progressing style and applying it to telling the kind of stories that fired his enthusiasm for the comics medium when he was younger.

Schultz is now inspiring a new generation of comics artists and illustrators, who recognize that the very best in a given medium or genre is often slightly outside the mainstream, where those with eccentric visions can create the work that is unrestrained by the latest corporate sponsored “fads” and based instead on the artist’s love of the medium and subject matter.

Which brings me to Xenozoic, the new collection of Schultz’s Xenozoic Tales stories published by Flesk Publications. Flesk sent me a review copy, but I have to say that even though I have much of the material already in other formats, I would have picked this volume up anyway because it’s such a satisfying way to enjoy these stories and art.

Xenozoic collects the range of the stories, from early ones that lay out the groundwork for Szhultz’s fantastic world, to the latest and best, where his artwork, already striking in its intricate detail and deep chiaroscuro, develops to its peak of sweeping vistas and extraordinarily realized characters, animals and settings.

Did I mention that the comics are in black and white (with beautiful touches of tone)? Did I mention that this is a Good Thing? In the same way that classic black and white films have a feeling, mood and atmosphere that can’t be matched in color, so black and white comics and illustration can evoke mood and utilize visual texture in a way that the addition of color would only diminish.

In Schultz’s hands, areas of rock, foliage or background skies that otherwise might be simple areas of color become intricate marvels of ink line, texture and pattern, drawing you deeper into the scene and slowing down the pace with which you read, a technique that most contemporary comics artists have not learned to use effectively.

Many contemporary comics artists indulge in detail for its own sake, Schultz is one of the rare few who understands how to use it effectively to control how a story proceeds.

I won’t go into detail here about the history of Xenozoic Tales or the work of Mark Schultz, but will instead point you to my previous post on Mark Schultz, where I’ve already done that.

Fans of Schultz’s work should also be aware of the books collecting his drawings also published by Flesk, the latest of which, Mark Schultz; Various Drawings Volume 4, is still available in paperback though sold out in hardcover.

These, unlike the toss-off sketchbook drawings sometimes compiled into collections by other comics artists, are more often fully realized, finished drawings. Volume 4 includes a wonderful 2 page fold-out of a John Carter of Mars illustration, along Schultz’s preliminary drawings for it, along with an assortment of other terrific drawings and even a one page comic strip, Paleonauts, in which he pays tribute to another Schultz.

Xenozoic is a big, heaping helping of fantasy adventure comics at their best, transporting the reader into pulp-inspired tales of high adventure in a mildly dystopian eco-disaster future (making it possible to have dinosaurs, people and, of course, Cadillacs within the same fantastic landscapes).

This is the kind of “plop down in the Comfy Chair with the big adventure book” experience that not enough pop culture fans have encountered. If you know someone who loves the modern takes on classic adventure movies, like the Indiana Jones movies, Jurassic Park, Peter Jackson’s King Kong remake, or even Pirates of the Caribbean, but for some reason thinks they don’t enjoy comics, here is a possible bridge into that world (and a treat of a present).

There is a preview of Xenozoic on the Flesk site, where you can click to see a few images from the book. Even though Flesk is getting better about this, showing somewhat larger preview images, the previews still don’t do the pages justice. If you’re not already familiar with Schultz’s work, look for the book in a bookstore so you can see how these pages look printed full size.

There is also an additional Mark Schultz gallery on the Flesk site (Schultz doesn’t have a dedicated site or blog of his own as far as I know).

Xenozoic and Mark Schultz; Various Drawings Volume 4 can be purchased directly from the Flesk Publications online store.

I am unabashed in my enthusiasm for the work of William Stout, and I’ve written about him previously several times here on Lines and Colors (links below). In particular, I take great delight in his beautiful drawings in pen and ink with watercolor.

I’ve been looking forward to the release of William Stout: Inspirations from Flesk publications since it’s companion volume, William Stout: Halllucinations, was released back in July (my review here).

Stout has been prolific in his career, and there are a number of illustrations and other drawings that are difficult to find in print. Much to the delight of Stout fans like myself, the two books have collected a number of these from various sources and presented them in the kind of beautifully produced and printed art volumes that are Flesk’s specialty.

The two collections are arranged thematically, the first focusing on monsters, trolls, dragons and creatures, the new one on women from fantasy and fairy tales.

In both volumes we see Stout having fun, gleefully drawing on his inspirations from traditional stories and pop culture as well as paying tribute to some of his artistic roots.

In Inspirations, we find Stout working with subjects from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Shakespeare, The Wizard of Oz (Baum’s not MGM’s), Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Rima the Jungle Girl, The Bride of Frankenstein and even a humorous take on his own dinosaur illustrations; in the process creating playful homages to late 20th Century artists like Frank Frazetta and Dave Stevens, and Golden Age masters like Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac and the great but under-appreciated Gustav Tenngren and John Bauer (links to my posts).

In fact, in his Foreward, Stout outlines what he calls his “Rackham/Dulac Technique” in a step-by step walkthough of the process that many illustrators will find enlightening.

Stout has been influenced by a number of great Golden Age pen and ink illustrators, with a variety of approaches, and in his own style he has managed to distill a balance of linework, rendering and application of color that I find particularly appealing. Combined with his accomplished draftsmanship and fervent imagination, he serves up a smorgasbord of visual treats in these collections.

There is a small gallery of preview images on the Flesk site (click on the image to pop up the gallery), along with more detail about Inspirations and the companion volume Hallucinations, as well as the other Stout titles from Flesk: Dinosaur Discoveries and New Dinosaur Discoveries A-Z.

The titles can all be ordered directly from the Flesk online store (or the old way via mail).

The limited edition signed hardback version of William Stout: Inspirations is already sold out from the Flesk site, though you may still be able to order copies of the hardback directly from William Stout’s site.

You can also find more of Stout’s work, in a variety of media, subjects and approaches, in the galleries on his site.

UK based illustrator Laura Barnard specializes in cityscapes and architectural subjects, “the more complicated they are the better”.

She works in both traditional and digital media, mixing them at times. Her fine line approach works well in her portrayal of complex jumbles of buildings, latticed with detail and texture.

She has an informal line, allowing her freedom in her portrayal of buildings at odd angles with one another, and license in her use of perspective, as well as lending the work a feeling of informality that softens the hard geometry.

In addition to the textures created with hatching and line, she often mixes in passages of tone or color, sometimes restricting them to certain parts of the drawing.

Her website has a gallery of her work, a blog-like news section and a shop in which she sells posters and prints.

You can also find her work on the Behance Network, Flickr and in this post on Neatorama, which is where I encountered her drawings.

It has been frequently pointed out that there is a close relationship between comics (or “graphic stories”), and film; in that both are visual storytelling mediums.

The two arts share many of the same fundamental processes in constructing a visual story: scene composition, visual continuity, establishing shots, close ups, downshots, upshots, and so on; they even share a common terminology. The comic panel and the movie (or video) screen both frame the story.

Hence an appropriate name for Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers, a new book from Marcos Mateu-Mestre, whose career spans both art forms.

Mateu-Mestre, as I pointed out in my post on him back in 2006, is primarily a visual development artist for feature animation, with credits that include We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story, Balto, The Prince of Egypt, Toto Sapore, Asterix and the Vikings and Surf’s Up.

He is also an illustrator and comics artist, and he brings his understanding of visual storytelling from both fields to bear in Framed Ink, which is a textbook for an often overlooked but vital aspect of both endeavors, composition.

Illustrators and other artists who work with single images are used to composition as a static aspect of an image, arranging elements to convey the intention of the work as strongly as possible. But in film and comics, composition is dynamic, it changes and flows with the story, and in fact, is vitally important to the process of telling the story.

It is through composition that viewers are given their bearings and understanding where the players are and what their physical relationship is to one another. It is through composition — camera angles, close ups, and other language of the camera — that much of the drama of both mediums is expressed.

After an overview of narrative art, Mateu-Mestre starts Framed Ink with the fundamentals of composing a single image within a story, the techniques of creating drama, focusing interest and expressing emotion with the composition. He demonstrates the use of complexity and simplicity, light and dark, size and distance and point of view to communicate the writer’s intention to the viewer.

He then moves into conveying motion, using sequential frames and changes in the drawings to create motion in the viewer’s mind (or in the case of concept art, to convey the writer or director’s intention for motion to the animators or cinematographer).

His subsequent focus is on continuity, a term you will often hear in reference to film and comics, but one that is often poorly understood, particularly given how vital it is in telling a story with comics. (In my own experience in creating comics, I’ve found continuity one of the most difficult aspects to handle properly, but one of the most important in successfully telling a visual story.)

The last chapter of Framed Ink delves into elements of composition that are specific to comics and graphic novels, as opposed to concept art or storyboards — the composition and arrangement of panels on a page, the relationship of story flow to panel layout, pacing a scene and the placement of word balloons.

Of course all of this is illustrated in Mateu-Mestre’s own drawings, and they are a treat. As I pointed out in my previous post, he has a wonderfully lively drawing style, with springy, zippy linework that seems to be dashed casually off the end of his pen, but somehow lands in exactly the right spot. He combines that with a masterful command of chiaroscuro and a comics artist’s gift for spotting blacks (reminding me at times of Alex Toth), to which he adds intermediate gray tones for a series of panels that look like a cross between classic adventure comics and film noir.

The drawings are beautiful and you could simply enjoy this as an art book, but for those involved with the challenges of visual storytelling, whether in visual development and storyboards for film, or in comics and graphic storytelling, Framed Ink is a must-have addition to an artist’s bookshelf.

I’ve posted a few frames from the book above, for more detail see the “Look Inside” feature for the book on Amazon.

(I noted with interest that Amazon (or the publisher) has used a quote from my previous post about Mateu-Mestre, in which I rave about his drawing style, as part of the Editorial Reviews for the book.)

For an even better look at the inside of the book, see the review on Parka Blogs.

Mateu-Mestre also maintains a Framed Ink news blog specifically for the book, as well as mentions on his regular blog, where you will also find examples of his concept art, graphic novel work and more.

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, “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 its 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.

[Via Escape into Life]