Fred Lynch is an illustrator and gallery artist based in Massachusetts who is also a Professor of Illustration at Montserrat College of Art and a member of the Illustration Faculty at Rhode Island School of Design.

His illustration clients include Random House, Viking Penguin and the Atlantic Monthly, among others. You will find a selection of his illustration work on his website under the heading “illustrator” under “commercial art”.

In the section for “artist”, under “paintings” you can see some of his gallery art, focusing on a series of coffee cup subjects, several of which are liquified funhouse mirror interpretations of the humble cup.

In both the “illustrator” and “artist” sections you will find a section called “journalistic art”. These are a series of wonderful location sketches, apparently in pencil, ink and washes of either monochromatic watercolor or colored ink.

The versions on his site are unfortunately small, but you can see larger images, and many more of them, on Lynch’s Flicker stream and on the Urban Sketchers blog, which is where I initially encountered his work.

I particularly enjoy his evocative drawings (many of them are refined to the point it’s hard to call them “sketches”) of buildings and streets in small Italian towns. He has an architect’e eye for architectural details, but renders them with a beautifully free line and precise but lively application of washes.

I love the way he plays with light and shade in these, note the white awning in the piece at top, and in the detail, second down, as well as the highlights on the steps and sheet in the wonderfully odd building with the central staircase above, fifth down.

Lynch often travels to Italy in conjunction with the Montserrat College of Art’s Summer Italy Program. There is a blog titled Drawing Viterbo devoted to the program that showcases some of the student work from the program as well as some of Lynch’s location work.

[Addendum: Lynch has been kind enough to inform me that there is a Tumbleog of his Italy drawings, and a blog that features his illustrations and stories for Paul Revere's Ride Revisited.]

Long before the relatively recent advent of the iPad and the digital painting apps for it that have ushered in a new wave of “digital plein air painting”, some artists, myself included, were painting digitally from life using laptop computers and pressure sensitive tablets.

Most of these artists had backgrounds in other types of digital art — digital comics creation in my case, but for the majority of those of which I was aware, concept art, for which digital painting has become the standard medium. Examples would include, Nicholas “sparth” Bouvier, Robh Ruppel and Nick Pugh. (Many artists work on both digital platforms, and/or also work in plein air with traditional media, such as Erik Tiemens.)

Even now, despite the prevalence of ever more sophisticated iPad painting apps and styli (Apple’s insistence on showing artists doing iPad painting with their fingers is just marketing BS, it’s possible, but pointless), there are still many advantages to working on laptop with a tablet, as clunky as the setup may seem compared to the sleeker, lighter, all-in-one device.

For one thing the digital painting software for laptop and desktop computers is much more advanced than any iPad app, having had over 15 years to mature into professional level tools.

For another, the use of pressure sensitive tablets is a distinct advantage both in terms of the more natural drawing and painting application they provide and a degree of accuracy beyond that of the relatively clunky finger-sized iPad styli. (Whether the recent introduction of the Jot Touch pressure sensitive iPad stylus will change that remains to be seen.)

Another, often overlooked advantage is the two handed approach to digital painting and drawing available on a laptop — in which the non-drawing hand is free to simultaneously work modifier keys to switch tools, make adjustments, zoom and of course, undo, all of which requires stopping and tapping on the tablet.

It’s a matter of trade-offs then, lightness and ease of portability of the tablet vs. the stronger set of tools available for the laptop/pressure sensitive tablet combination.

A case in point for the latter is the personal work of concept artist Patrick Faulwetter, who I profiled in his professional capacity yesterday, and whose set of digital plein air paintings, done on an Apple laptop with a Wacom Bamboo pressure sensitive tablet, left me impressed enough to make them the subject of a separate post.

In addition to doing digital paintings on location in various places around his home in California, Faulwetter takes his digital painting tools on his travels to places like China, Istanbul and Greece, as well as other areas of the U.S.

His digital location sketches are striking in their handling of color, value and atmosphere. He also takes superb advantage of one of the strengths of digital location painting — the ability to work on location in low light conditions or at night, in situations that would be prohibitively awkward with traditional painting media, capturing nuances of twilight and nighttime color and light effects that a camera would easily miss.

Faulwetter also has a wonderful eye for the value and colors contrasts of dappled sunlight and the horizontal light of early morning or late afternoon.

Among his subjects, Faulwetter demonstrates the fondness for cars, ships, planes and related tech that was part of what drew him to concept art originally. In these, as well as his portrayals of city streets, highways overpasses, rock formations, parks and harbor scenes, you can see his economy of rendering, due in part to the speed of rendering made possible by the digital tools (one of which is a palette that never runs dry and always contains every color you’ve used in your current piece in the form of the eyedropper tool).

You can see a photo of Faulwetter sketching with his laptop and Bamboo tablet in a photo from his blog (image above, bottom).

Unfortunately, his blog is in one of those widgety Blogger templates that can be viewed in half a dozen ways, all of which, though graphically nice looking, are usability disasters. I found it easiest to use the “Classic” view, even though it’s one of those script driven arrangements that keeps loading more content in one long continous scroll, within which it is impossible to bookmark and return to a specific place (does anybody actually think these are a good idea?). Anyway, the interface issues are well worth dealing with for the delightful range and variety of Faulwetter’s sketches.

Those who are less familiar with digital painting may be tempted to think there is some digital “magic” that makes digital painting easier, but other than some of the advantages I’ve mentioned (for which there are also tradeoffs such as the lack of tactile feedback, etc.), I think you’ll find that most digital painters work in an approach similar to the preferred medium of many concept artists and illustrators prior to digital tools — gouache.

Eduardo Bajzek is an architectural illustrator based in São Paulo, Brazil. He is also an avid location sketcher and a member of the Urban Sketchers International and Urban Sketchers Brazil communities.

Though he also works in ink and pencil, when sketching on location Bajzek often works in markers, drawing/painting with them directly without preliminary line drawing in a method he calls “direct to colors”.

In this process he lays down areas of color and tone, gradually building up more detail and taking advantage of the transparency of some colors to build areas within areas.

Bajzek will be teaching this method in a Straight to colors workshop as part of the International Urban Sketchers Symposium in Santo Domingo, that runs from July 12-14, 2012.

On both his Flickr stream and his blog (in Portugese, Google Translate English here) you will find both finished commercial renderings and his loose painterly marker sketches, with more of the latter on the Urban Sketchers sites, along with some pieces in watercolor, graphite and ink. Bajzek also has a professional site (English version here) showcasing his architectural illustration.

Gérard Michel is a Belgian architect based in Liége, who also teaches courses in sketching and drawing at the school of architecture there.

Aside from that, I know little about him except for the wealth of his wonderful location drawings as displayed on the Urban Sketchers blog and on Michel’s own Flickr sets.

He sketches in pencil, pigment liners and watercolor.

In keeping with his background, Michel excels at rendering buildings and architectural forms and evidences a fascination with them. He has a wonderful knack, however, for leaving parts of his drawings open and sketch-like, even though they can be very exacting in their proportions and perspective.

He has been posting hundreds of his wonderful sketches from his sketchbooks, both of his home city of Liége and his travels elsewhere, to his Flickr stream. You can get a quicker overview by looking through his Urban Sketchers posts, but the Flickr sets are well worth exploring.

There is a brief clip of him sketching on Vimeo.

Kiah Kiean is an architect, designer and artist. He has a loose, gestural sketching style with which he renders scenes of his native Penang, Malaysia, as well as townscapes and cityscapes from his travels.

Kiean works in ink, wash, graphite and watercolor. He posts images of his sketches on his artblog and Flicker stream and on the Urban Sketchers website, which is where I encountered his work.

Occasionally he posts photos of his sketchbooks, which show that he often works at a size a bit larger than many artists who do location sketches. At times he works on large drawing paper and at other times on large Moleskine sketchbooks open two pages wide.

Since much of his work is in a large or distinctly horizontal format, the small images above don’t show it to best advantage, as the detail crops at top, second and fifth down, demonstrate.

I’ve written previously about a number of illustrators who are represented by Richard Solomon, a well known artists representative in New York whose list of represented artists reads like a who’s who of the top names in contemporary illustration.

In addition to the portfolios of represented artists on the Richard Solomon website (for which I’ll issue a Time-sink Warning), Solomon has in recent months been posting sketches from a number of the artists on a Tumblelog called Warm Up Sketches + Working Process.

These run the gamut from personal sketches and sketchbook pages to preliminary roughs for illustrations to relatively finished drawings. Though a few of the links from the index page are broken at the moment, there is more than enough wonderful material here to make a visit well worthwhile.

Many of the drawings and sketches are linked to the artist’s page on the Solomon website, or you can go in through the front of the site and look them up.

(Images above: Murray Kimber, James Bennett, David Johnson, Jon Foster, Gregory Manchess, Scott Brundage, Tyler Jacobson, Tim Bower, Thomas Ehretsmann, Hermann Mejia, Mark Summers)

Swedish artist, designer and teacher Nina Johansson subtitles her website “Because drawing is good for you”, and its pages are filled with the ripe, healthy fruit of that philosophy, lots of wonderful drawings, sketches and watercolors.

Johansson seems to take as her favorite subject that most perfect of all drawing subjects — what’s in front of her at any given moment, be it food, a street, cars, plants, buildings, train passengers, a camera, pens, hands, pedestrians or travel scenes.

Her efficient, casual notation, textural ink lines, pencil shadings and brilliant dashes of watercolor enliven her take on even the most mundane of subjects.

She also has a portfolio of more finished work and several galleries of sketchbooks. The home page of her site is arranged as a blog.

You can also find her work posted on Urban Sketchers.

[Via Escape Into Life]

Wil Freeborn is a graphic designer and illustrator based in Glasgow, Scotland.

Though his professional portfolio focuses on his (quite nice) graphic design rather than illustration, his blog features a number of wonderful sketches.

These are of a variety of subjects — cafe and store interiors, schoolrooms, townscapes, landscapes and a particularly nice series of people working on a steam locomotive (also here). There are also life drawings and pantings and a few other projects mixed in.

Most of his sketches appear to be in pencil and watercolor in the pages of Moleskine sketchbooks. They combine the informal, loose qualities of travel sketches with clear observation and occasionally more elaborate rendering in watercolor.