Mattias Adolfsson is a 3D artist living outside of Stockholm, Sweeden and currently working for gaming developer Simbin Development Studios.

Having apparently put aside traditional drawing for a while, Adolfsson returned to regular drawing when he started his sketchblog Mattias Inks, in 2006. Since then he has populated it with a wonderful and fast growing assortment of whimsical drawings on a variety of subjects and themes.

Usually drawing with a Namiki Falcon fountain pen and Noodler’s American Eel ink, and often in the pages of Moleskine sketchbooks, Adolfsson draws charmingly offbeat characters, animals, robots and architectural fantasies, as well as more straightforward sketches of his surroundings.

He often fills out his drawings with watercolor to varying degrees, usually with light touches that leave the feeling of the ink drawing intact.

For someone who has only been drawing recently for a couple of years, Adolfsson has been prolific; his Flickr galleries go on for dozens of pages.

He also has a web site with galleries of his drawings, doodles and sketch books; as well as an Etsy shop in which he sells original art.

One of his excursions into fanciful imaginings is his interpretation of “Star Wars, the baroque version” (expanded page version here), with a curly-wig helmeted Darth Vader, blunderbuss and balloon-pak equipped Bobba Fett, and Han Solo being harassed by the puritan police at the base of his eminently baroque Millennium Falcon (top, left).

I particularly enjoy Adolfsson’s architectural imaginings, like his houseflowers (top, right) and ornate, leaning, single-room-stacked “skyscraper prototypes” (left).

Mattias Adolfsson is giving a workshop in drawing this July 29-31 (more information here, in Swedish); and is currently working on a children’s book titled Till mitt barnbarn.

[Via 'skine art]

Drawing Day is an event initiated last year by Mick Gow, creator of the Rate My Drawings site, with the simple intention of drawing attention (if you’ll excuse the expression) to art by encouraging artists worldwide to create 1 million drawings on a single day, and coordinate, cooperate and share the experience through a variety of social networking sites.

Participants can upload and share their drawings, or even draw directly online, through sites like deviantART, YouTube, Red Bubble, Drawspace, Rate My Drawings, Flickr and a number of others. (It’s worth investigating the list of participating sites just to see if some of them are new and of interest to you.)

The ambitious goal of 1 million drawings may or may not be reached, but the event is a fun way to capture a little attention for the act of drawing, and perhaps kindle some contact and community among participants.

The Drawing Day web site gives an overview of the turnout from the first event, and points to some galleries of uploaded drawings from the day, as well as videos of users drawing on YouTube and even virtural drawing in SecondLife.

There is also a blog associated with the event, which covers news about participating sites and, of course, is counting down time to the event.

Drawing Day is the first Saturday of June each year, and this year it’s this Saturday, June 6, 2009.

(Image above, a detail from Rembrandt’s etching Landscape with a Man Sketching a Scene, in which the artist caught a fellow artist sketching the same cottage that was his subject.)

Jorge Colombo is a Portuguese artist living in the U.S. who has been getting much attention lately for this week’s cover of The New Yorker, which he “fingerpainted” on his iPhone using a painting application called “Brushes“.

The app lets you record the painting process and play it back, and the New Yorker article linked above includes a time laps video of his process.

I say “fingerpainted” because unlike other small mobile computing platforms, the iPhone and iPod touch is a touch-screen interface, meant to be used without a stylus, so your finger becomes the “brush”. This seems a little ungainly compared to stylus based small screen painting applicaitons, but the results indicate that you can do some interesting work with it.

Colombo did his sketch in about an hour while standing outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

On Colombo’s web site you will find some of his iPhone sketches, along with other done in pencil and colored digitally. He is also offering prints of some of the iPhone work.

In addition, there is a section of video and press coverage of his New Yorker iPhone sketch cover.

[Suggestion courtesy of Jack Harris]

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.

I came across the work of Mark Taro Holmes when I was struck by these two watercolor sketches on the Urban Sketchers blog. They were from his participation in the recent Sketchcrawl in San Francisco (see my posts on a previous Sketchcrawl, and here).

I then looked him up and found his sketch blog, SKETCHtaro, which has a wonderful array of his sketches, largely in watercolor or pen and ink, of both landscapes and figures.

His figure drawings have an engaging looseness, within the framework of accomplished draftsmanship. He has an unusual approach, sometimes drawing the figure in line, but multi-colored watercolor line, applied in brushstrokes that vary in weight and translucency as well as color .

His black ink drawings are frequently concerned with shadow and the play of light across architectural details.

Holmes is professionally a gaming concept artist and art director. According to his short bio on ConceptArt.org, he is currently the Studio Art Director at Ensemble Studios, and and has worked on gaming titles like Neverwinter Nights and The Lord of the Rings Online. MobyGames lists some of his other credits here. [Correction: Holmes has moved on from Ensemble and is now doing concept art for the film industry. See this post's comments.]

Urban Sketchers is a group blog that I first wrote about last November.

Since then, hundreds of additional sketches have been added; and the blog’s layout has been updated, with a wider format and better organizatation (though I still wish they would somehow limit the Flickr slideshow widget at page bottom to a single page and make the “Older Posts” link bigger).

Urban Sketchers has kept the tagline of “See the world one drawing at a time”, and continues to a be a source of constant delight, filled with location sketches in a variety of media, size, approach and degree of finish.

There is an increasing list of contributors, as well as an impressively extended list of represented cities and countries from around the world; though much of the content is still provided by a core of frequent contributors, including founder Gabi Campanario. (Sadly, Gabi’s recent sketches have been chronicling the impending demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a terrific newspaper; image above, top right)

Many of the images are linked to larger versions, and most of the contributors have their own blogs and web sites to which you can go for even more sketches and finished work. Some of them are profiled on the Meet the Correspondents page, but others are worth tracking down through links at the bottom of their posts, or looking up via Google.

Updates are frequent and you can check in with Urban Sketchers any day and find fresh new sketches to enjoy and take inspiration from. In fact, it’s sometimes hard to check in frequently enough to keep up with the new posts.

(Images above, left to right: Pete Scully, Gabi Campanario, Tommy Kane, Tis Boon Sim, Roger O’Reilly, Gerard Michel, Stephen Gardner, Maarten Ruijters)

Larry Roibal is an illustrator known for his work in children’s books and romance novels. His portfolio has examples from those areas as well as landscapes and portraits.

Roibal’s blog is often devoted to portraits of another sort, chronicling his practice of sketching character studies of people currently in the news directly on newspaper articles about those people.

This is one of those cool ideas that obviously came about as the result of doodling and daydreaming (you know, the stuff you’re told not to do in school), and maintains some of that feeling of informal happenstance even though he’s been at it for a while.

If the article isn’t from a corner of the paper that happens to include the date, Roibal clips out a dateline and pastes it on the piece. (I’m surprised he resisted the temptation to call this “Faces in the News” or something similar.)

I picked a couple of significant events out of his recent crop, showing Obama drawn on an article about his victory in the presidential election, and ace Cole Hammels sketched over an article about the Phillies’ long-overdue clinching of the World Series (YAAAAAAAAAA!!!…er, sorry, where was I?…)

Both the ephemeral nature of newsprint and the informal character of ballpoint pen give the drawings a sense of immediacy and make them feel like a natural part of the daily newsflow.

This should be a syndicated feature.

I just discovered the Urban Sketchers blog a couple of weeks ago, and it immediately became one of my favorites.

I enjoy location sketches done in an urban environment, particularly travel sketches, and the blog has much of that feeling, even though the contributors are often sketching in their home city.

I came across Urban Sketchers by way of Katherine Tyrrell, who is one of the correspondents, and contributes from London (see my post on Katherine Tyrrell).

In addition to Tyrell, contributing artists that I have featured previously on Lines and Colors include Lok Jansen and Laura Frankstone.

Other contributors are from various cities in France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Russia and other locations in Europe; a number of cities in the US, including New York, San Francisco, and Seattle, as well as cities in Canada and other parts of the globe, like Tokyo, Bangkok, Tal-Aviv and Sao Paulo. You can see the contributors listed by location in the side bar.

There is also a Meet the Correspondents page, on which some of the contributors give short profiles of themselves, their subject cities and their sketching practices.

There is a variety of approaches in medium, drawing style and subject matter, though some common themes, like the frequent use of the ubiquitous and oh-so-convenient Moleskine sketchbooks, and a consistently high level of quality.

The blog is an extension of the Urban Sketchers Flickr group started in 2007 by Seattle illustrator/journalist Gabi Campanario.

The subtitle of the blog is “See the world one drawing at a time”, and though the blog has only been up since October, with an “official” launch on November 1st, there is already a world of images posted from the multiple contributors.

Next to traveling and sketching yourself, what better way to see the world than through the eyes and pens of artists?

(Images above, left to right, top to bottom: Alessandro Andreuccetti, Rob Carey, Gabi Campanario, Lok Janssen, Laura Genz, Matthew Cenich)

For the benefit of those in other parts of the world, I’ll point out that today is Veterans Day here in the U.S., a day set aside to honor those who have given or risked their lives, endured hardships and put themselves in the service of their country in military service.

The same date, November 11, is also observed in many other countries as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day, a date taken from the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I.

Harold Kerr Eby, usually known as simply Kerr Eby, was an artist who made first hand observations of both World War I and World War II, the former as an artist/soldier, the latter as a civilian member of the combat art program sponsored by Abbott Laboratories (see my posts on They Drew Fire: Combat Artists of World War II and Art of War: Eyewitness U.S. Combat Art From the Revolution through the Twentieth Century).

You can see his impressions of World War I in the form of his dark and emotional etchings, done after the fact but carrying the weight of first hand observation. His World War II images (image above, top) were more direct, often done on the spot with charcoal, pencil and other dry media, with piercing observations of the horror, extremes and physical and emotional fatigue suffered by the soldiers.

Eby was born in Japan, where his father was as a missionary for the Canadian Methodist Church. He studied at Pratt Institute and the Art Students League in New York, at the later studying with George Bellows. He also frequented the Cos Cob artist colony in Connecticut and became friends with Childe Hassam, giving lessons in etching to the senior artist.

He enlisted in the Army and served as ambulance crew during World War I (known at the time as “the war to end all wars” because of its horrible scale; little did they know).

Eby was never officially commissioned to cover the war as an artist, but recorded many of his impressions on his own, later rendered into a series of lithographs that were published as a book.

At the entry of the U.S into World War II he attempted to enlist again, but was over the age limit. Instead he participated in the combat artist reportage program in the Pacific, landing with the Marines at Guadalcanal and Tarawa. He died of a disease contracted while covering the war.

In between the wars, Eby created a a body of work, apparently mostly in the form of etchings and lithographs. If he was a painter to any great extent, I’ve been unable to find any examples.

His etchings, though, are wonderful, with scenes from his trips abroad as well as domestic subjects, and to my eye showing the influence of etchers like James Whistler and Joseph Pennell. The best display of these is on the Old Print Shop site.

There is a long series of Eby’s drawings from WW II on the Navy Art Collection. (The server can be a bit slow, give it time, and note the links to multiple pages at the bottom.)

At times while looking through Eby’s WW II battlefield sketches, I found myself thinking about Gustav Dore’s illustrations for Dante’s Inferno, not from any stylistic similarities, but from the emotional weight of the images.

These are the hardships we’re called on to remember and honor on Veterans Day.

[Suggestion courtesy of Robert Tracy (see my post on Robert Tracy)]

As I noted when I first wrote about it back in 2005, SketchCrawl is a series of outdoor group drawing events, originally conceived by Pixar artist and illustrator Enrico Casarosa, as the artistic equivalent of a pubcrawl (seem my post on Enrico Casarosa, and here).

He started to organize the events ahead of time, in which artists would gather at a predetermined point and wander the city (originally San Francisco) sketching in various places, usually with small sketchbooks and portable watercolor equipment.

Since then the event has continued, expanded and spread to multiple locations worldwide, each organized by a local individual, but timed for the same day and coordinated through the SkwtchCrawl site and forums.

The next event, World Wide SketchCrawl #20 is this this Saturday, October 25th, 2008.

You can see listings of some of the events in various locations around the world in the SketchCrawl Forums (note at the bottom a link to the second page), view some suggested materials (image above, left, both images by Enrico Casarosa), or view the page on how to participate, even if starting your own local SketchCrawl with as few as one participant.

You can find more on the SketchCrawl site or blog.

[Link to current event via Drawn!]