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]

I first wrote about Elizabeth Traynor in a post in 2006, in which I expressed my admiration in particular for her scratchboard illustrations (and gave a brief description of the scratchboard process).

In addition to her scratchboard work (images above, 1 & 4), her online portfolio also showcases her work in pen and ink, often used with watercolor (images above, 2 & 5), as well as her straightforward watercolor pieces (3 & 6, with detail, 7).

Traynor says that her clients appreciate her ability to work in all three mediums and that much of her work recently is in the latter two.

She was kind enough to pass on to me three recent illustrations, that are not yet on her site, to share in this post (4, 5 & 6, above, plus detail at bottom).

I initially encountered Traynor from her previous association with the Delaware College of Art and Design, where she was at one time the head of the Illustration Department, and where I taught (and continue to teach) a class in Adobe Flash.

Since then Traynor has been based in Massachusetts, but she was born in Alabama, and still has family and friends there who live in an area that was in the path of the extremely destructive storms that recently ripped through the U.S. south.

In a letter which I have quoted below with her permission, she offers a way for those who would like to help to contribute to a local, all volunteer, non-profit group; assuring that your help will go directly to communities in need and not be compromised by the overhead and administrative costs inherent in established relief agencies.

Dear Friends and Family,

Sincerely,
Elizabeth

Michael Reardon shows a master watercolorist’s skill for handling edges, from the delicate tonalist softness of mist shrouded foliage to the crisp sharpness of architectural forms, often contrasted in adjacent passages within the same work.

Reardon’s deft handling if architectural subjects, and the strong geometry underlying his compositions, no doubt owes something to his thirty plus years of experience in architectural illustration.

He paints his atmospheric and light filled landscapes and cityscapes both on location and in the studio. What I find particularly fascinating is his choice of strongly vertical compositions, which he uses to great effect in painting after painting.

In 2005, Reardon received the Gabriel Prize from the Western European Architecture Foundation, which included a three month residence in Paris to study some aspect of classical French architecture. He chose as his subjects the city’s 20th Century public fountains and painted many of them in watercolor.

These are the focus if an exhibit titled The Fountains of Paris currently at the Thomas Reynolds Gallery in San Francisco, which can be previewed on Reardon’s website. The exhibit runs until April 30, 2011.

Reardon has also collected works from the series into a a book: Fontaines: The Public Fountains of Paris, available from Blurb.

In addition, Reardon has paintings in current exhibitions of the Califorinia Art Club and American Watercolor Society, and is featured in the Spring 2011 issue of American Artist Watercolor magazine.

I found the news about the latter events from Reardon’s blog, which is also one of the best places to see his work, as the images are often linked to larger versions.

Watercolor, or watercolour, with an added “u” if you learned your English in England (grin), has a long history, perhaps going back to cave paintings that predate most of recorded history.

Watercolor involves the creation of paint by suspending pigment in a water soluble binder, for a long time animal hide glues or plant sugars, but as of the 19th Century, gum arabic, made from the sap of acacia trees.

Though watercolor has been around for all of that time, its use by artists was predominantly relegated to studies, location sketches and personal notation. It wasn’t until the 18th Century that artists, most notably in England, brought watercolor to the fore as an artistic medium for finished works.

A new exhibition at the Tate Britain seeks to celebrate and expand on that heritage. Simply called “Watercolour“, the exhibit traces the history of watercolor back over 800 years, features a wide variety of artists, styles, periods and subject matter, and of course brings forward the greats of the “English School” of watercolorists, including William Blake and JMW Turner along with the Pre-Raphaelites and a number of contemporary painters.

It seeks to broaden the perception of watercolor as a medium, beyond the bounds of the common association of watercolor with landscape, amateur painters and sketches.

Unfortunately the Tate hasn’t put much of the exhibition online, but there are a few images and some videos on the site (one of which shows you Turner’s portable watercolor palette), as well as other images on the Tate Blog.

The best selection of images from the exhibition is probably in the Guardian article, Watercolor at Tate Britain – in pictures, and accompanying the text articles Tate Britain makes a splash with watercolours and Tate Britain’s Watercolour: Awash with inspiration (they’re so witty, those British), and Watercolour at Tate Britain – review.

There is a book accompanying the exhibition, also simply titled Watercolour (also here), authored by its curator, Alison Smith.

Watercolor at Tate Britain runs until 21 August 2011.

(Images above: JMW Turner, Rachael Pedder-Smith, Paul Sandby, JMW Turner, William Blake, Thomas Girtin)

Adrie Hello ia a watercolorist based in Dordrecht, Netherlends. He paints townscapes of his city with atmospheric transparent watercolor and occasional touches of gouache.

Hello often finds interesting subjects in streets and canals seen through mist or light rain, using soft washes of muted color contrasted with accented edges on the objects he wants to bring forward.

He has a knack for suggestion, providing just enough detail and suggestion of textures that your mind fills in the rest.

His website has a section for Recent works and another for Paintings that is divided into sub-galleries.

Also of interest are his extensive lists of links to other artists and art resources, and his page on his favorite watercolor painters.

[Suggestion courtesy of Lyl and Aelle Ayres]

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.

Niccolò Machiavelli was a 15th Century Italian diplomat, philosopher and writer, from whose political treatise, The Prince, along with other writings, we get the contemporary usage of his name in the term Machiavellian, referring to the use of deceptive cunning and planning in politics.

Machiavelli himself, however, was hardly an example of the intricate political deceit with which his name is associated, and is largely unknown for his own life and deeds.

Machiavelli is an ongoing graphic novel written and drawn by Don MacDonald that explores the life and times of Machiavelli the man.

MacDonald is posting the story to the web, two pages week. He plans a story of about 170 pages. The home page of the site always opens up on the current page (as of this writing, page 42), but you will want to start with the first page.

He usually annotates each page with comments about Machiavelli’s life and the history and politics of the time, in which he has obviously immersed himself in preparation for telling the story.

The story is drawn in a slightly gestural informal line style with gray washes. MacDonald’s line and tone approach, in which he emphasizes light and shadow, is ideal for the subject and his evocation of 15th Century Florence.

The site also includes a blog, poster size images that can be printed out for free, and a small selection of his earlier watercolor portrait paintings (above, bottom).

You can check back periodically as he adds to the story, or be notified by one of several methods he mentions on the About page.

[Via BoingBoing]

Steve Hanks is a well known watercolor artist whose subject matter frequently focuses on female figures in interiors or landscapes. His subjects’ ages vary, from babies to women, as do their situations; some are nude studies, some evocative of mother and child tenderness, others children at play or women languidly posed on couches or beds.

Sometimes their is an erotic component, at other times, innocence itself seems to be a theme; but Hank’s work often carries a feeling of high-end illustration, in that there is an emotional context to the work, and with it, an implied story.

Hanks’ masterfully controlled watercolor technique manages to seem almost casual in its deft application of color, subtle textures and clear value staging. He captures the brilliant contrasts of sunlight, rich subtleties of rain and overcast and soft tones of interior light with equal aplomb.

After graduating from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, Hanks was pursuing realism in pencil drawings and impressionistic painting effects in oil, but an allergy affected his ability to work with oil and he moved to watercolor as his chosen painting medium.

SInce then he has received national recognition and numerous awards for his luminous, detailed and highly accomplished watercolors.

There is a collection of his work, Moving On: The Art of Steve Hanks. You can also find some video interviews with Hanks on YouTube, courtesy of Greenwich Workshop.

There is a good post on All Art News that gives a nice introductory overview of his work. The artwork on his official gallery is sometimes reproduced a bit smaller. I’ve listed some other resources below.

[Note: some of the work on these sites should be considered NSFW.)