If you stopped by Lines and Colors yesterday, January 18, you may have noticed that Lines and Colors had gone dark, along with a significant number of other sites, in protest, and to raise awareness of the “anti-piracy” internet censorship bills looming in the U.S. Congress.

If you didn’t happen to stop by yesterday, but would like to know more about why it matters, what I had to say about the issue, and why the continued existence of Lines and Colors and websites like it hinges on the defeat of these bills, here is the page that was up in place of the site yesterday.

The effort to raise awareness of this issue across the web has apparently begun to have an effect, as a number of legislators have withdrawn their support for the bills, at least in their current form. But the fight is far from over; the hugely powerful and influential lobbies that represent the entertainment industry will not slink quietly away and call it a day; they will continue to pressure congress to give them the kind of extraordinary and frightening control over internet content that these bills provide.

Those in other countries may feel this doesn’t affect them (it will if hundreds or thousands of websites go dark at the whim of the big corporations), or you may feel frustrated that you can’t affect it directly. Right now, the spread of information and awareness is important, and those of you in Europe and elsewhere will soon enough have your own fight on your hands over similar legislation that these companies are trying to force into law around the world.

Those in the U.S. can directly affect the immediate danger of these bills passing by calling or writing your U.S. senators and representatives and urging them to reject the bills. Here is a site called Stop American Censorship that has more information on how easy it is to do that.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that if these bills pass, Lines and Colors, and significant other portions of the web, will cease to exist.

-Charley

English artist and writer Patrick Woodroffe is self taught as an artist, having studied languages at the University of Leeds. He is noted for his illustrations for books and record album covers, basically in a fantasy vein, but with a unique approach and artistic roots in artists like Bosch and Bruegel as well as Surrealism and Magic Realism.

Since I wrote about him in 2007, Woodroffe has added to his site images of more recent projects that borrow some of the form of fold-out Renaissance altarpieces (which I’ve described before as the Gothic and Renaissance equivalent of hypermedia). In these, wooden panels, often intricately carved or painted on themselves, open to reveal triptych panels within.

In Woodroffe’s case, he has extended the idea of revealed images even further, with interior panel portions within images that apparently open or turn around to reveal additional image variations.

Unfortunately, his website doesn’t present these in a clear or consistent enough manner for me to be certain of how they are actually constructed, but they are fascinating nonetheless.

There are also paintings in other frames and settings, both conventional and unconventional.

His paintings have moved toward visionary art, with intricate, highly textural compositions that feel as though they carry symbolism as well as presenting landscapes of the fantastic. The images on his site are tantalizing, but frustratingly small given their level of detail.

There are also sections on his site for his “Tomographs” a phrase he coined separately before being aware of its use in medical imaging, meaning painted objects that are often photographed against the context of real scenes.

There is an additional section devoted to his earlier work, with even smaller images, but these are accompanied by detail crops that give you at least a glimpse of the nature of the full image.

There are also other sections on books, ideas and past projects that bear looking through, as well as a selection of works available for purchase.

A recent comment from a reader on a post I did back in 2006 reminded me that I haven’t written for some time about the great science fiction, fantasy and horror illustrator Virgil Finlay.

Though he worked in a variety of media, both in color and in black and white, Finlay is noted primarily for his astonishing ink illustrations, which were combinations of the meticulous and difficult techniques of scratchboard, crosshatch and stipple (the application of a myriad of tiny dots to make a tone).

His proficiency in the medium was matched only by his outrageous imagination, and the combination made him one of the most popular and in-demand science fiction and fantasy illustrators of his time.

Though his career spanned a longer period, Finlay was most active in the 1940′s in 1950′s when his illustrations appeared in numerous “pulp” magazines (so named because for the cheap grade of paper on which they were printed), and many of his images have a deliciously lurid pulp sensibility.

Since I last wrote about him, some new sources for images of his work have become available on the web, though the links I pointed to in my original article are no longer valid (the internet giveth and the internet taketh away).

Also unfortunately, the collections of his work printed in the 1970′s (like The Book of Virgil Finlay) and 1990′s (Virgil Finlay’s Women of the Ages, Virgil Finlay’s Phantasms, Virgil Finlay’s Strange Science and Virgil Finlay’s Far Beyond) are long out of print and have not been reprinted or compiled into a larger compendium as they deserve. However, you can still find used copies of some of them for reasonable prices.

Finlay’s extraordinarily detailed work in particular shines in the high-resolution medium of print, especially in those collections, which were printed on much higher quality paper than the original magazines. There are, however, a few resources on the web with reasonably good images.

One of the best is Golden Age Comic Book Stories (a blog with a much wider reach than its title implies, and for which I’ll issue a Major Time Sink Warning). My link is to a search which lists numerous posts in which Finlay is mentioned. If you’re inclined, keep clicking through “Older Posts” at page bottom, though they can be more or less relevant, the listed posts go on for several pages, and most images are linked to much larger versions.

Another good, and probably quicker, glimpse at Finlay’s work is a post on Monster Brains. There are also several pages of images on Collector’s Showcase (note links to 5 pages at bottom).

Finlay often brought scratchboard, hatching, stipple and deep chiaroscuro to bear in a single image, with masterful control of each technique. Though he was obviously influenced by pen and ink greats like Joseph Clement Coll, Franklin Booth and Howard Pyle, among others, Finlay created a style the was uniquely his own.

For more on Virgil Finlay, see Jim Vedeboncoeur’s article on BPIB, the Wikipedia entry and my previous post.

Tomasz Maronski is a Polish fantasy artist who started in traditional media, primarily oil, but after 10 years decided to move to digital painting.

Working primarily in Corel Photo-paint, Maronski creates richly textured fantasy landscapes, lush with fantastical forms that seem to take inspiration partly from biological sources and partly from Surrealist masters of textural suggestion like Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy.

Maronski often works with a restricted palette, casting the majority of the composition in a small color range, accented with sharply contrasting hues from the other side of the color wheel.

He also likes to play with light and shadow, often with dramatic shafts and beams of light giving his subjects a theatrical focus.

It seems Maronski no longer has a dedicated website, instead relying on galleries on sites like CG Society and deviantART as a substitute.

I can’t find an actual bio or working credits; so I’m unsure of the range of his clients or work, though he apparently had illustrated a number of book covers.

His work is featured in Masters of Science Fiction and Fantasy Art: A Collection of the Most Inspiring Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Gaming Illustrators in the World by Karen Haber.

Claude Verlinde is a French painter who works in the vein of “fantastic realism”, sometimes called “magic realism”, and his work shows the lineage of fantastical art from Bruegel and Bosch to the Surrealists and contemporary magic realists.

I would also suspect that a number of the Surrealists, and certainly contemporary magic realists, were influenced by his work (not to mention the production designers of the Harry Potter movies).

Verlinde’s website, which is in French, has works divided into thematic galleries. (Note that the link I give is direct to the gallery categories, the main page for “La Galerie” produces a looping JavaScript error, at least in my browser.) There is also a section for drawings and watercolors.

His often darkly themed works employ the dark earth tones of the early Renaissance, as well as some of the visual staging and precise rendering characteristic of that period. He sometimes uses a brighter palette, but his work always has a feeling of referencing another time, if not another world.

The images on his site are sometimes a bit larger than they appear (click for larger versions), but usually not as large as one might like, though a few of them are accompanied by detail crops.

There is a trove of larger versions on the Russian Blog Beyond time, beyond space. There are also galleries on beinArt Surreal Art Collective and Ten Dreams.

There is a French collection of his work, Claude Verlinde: Peintures et dessins (Visions), that is out of print, but may be found through used book sources.

[Via adamvasco on MetaFilter]

[Note: some images should be considered NSFW]

Arnie Fenner, co-founder and editor of the Spectrum collections of fantastic art, has written an article for Tor.com titled Lovecraft, Asimov, GRRM, Heinlein & More: Painting SFF Writers in which he collects some portraits of fantasy and science fiction authors by a number of artists.

Covering authors in the genre as far as Mark Twain (think Connecticut Yankee in King Author’s Court) the portraits are in a variety of media and styles, but all by outstanding artists.

Incidentally, the Tor.com site has a terrific gallery of fantasy and science fiction illustrators (major time sink warning).

(Images above: H.P. Lovecraft by Virgil Finlay, Robert A. Heinlein by Donato Giancola, Edgar Allen Poe by Michael J. Deas, Harlan Ellison by Iain McCaig, Jules Verne by Mark Summers, Mark Twain by Gregory Manchess.)

David Fuhrer is a Swiss concept artist, illustrator and designer based in Bern. His website showcases a range of his illustration, design and other images, both fanciful personal projects and more practical work for clients.

When visiting his site you can choose between Flash or HTML versions, but in either case, open your browser to full screen as the images scale up with the window, and Fuhrer’s digital paintings are intricately detailed and work on an expansive range of scale.

In both his freeform constructions in which fantastic landscape elements seem to melt and grow in wildly sculptural shapes and his glistening space scenes in which the lights of technological elements dot oddly shaped planes and structures, Fuhrer uses detail to convey a dramatic sense of scale.

I’ve tried to show this with detail crops accompanying each of the images above. Viewing them in large size on his site, however, gives a much better effect.

Fuhrer also has a gallery on Behance Network that includes work not currently on his site.

[Via io9]

Art Out Loud 7 is the latest in a series of group demonstrations by well known illustrators at the Society of Illustrators in New York.

Art Out Loud 7 takes place on Saturday, September 24, 2011 from 1 to 5pm.

Participating artists for this event are Donato Giancola, Greg Manchess, Rick Berry, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell (images above in that order, links are to artists’ websites).

Tickets are $40 for Members, $50 Non-Members and $20 Students; more information here.