If your impression of the paintings of French-American naturalist, ornithologist and artist John James Audubon is based on small reproductions of some of his more subdued bird images, you may be surprised by the views afforded in this terrific online resource.

The University of Pittsburgh, which owns a rare complete edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, has digitized and made available online high resolution reproductions of the over 400 plates.

Birds of America was the culmination of Audubon’s quest to paint every known bird in North America. Though he fell short of that goal due to reaching the limits of his personal finances, he painted 435 beautifully detailed paintings, from which he created a most remarkable book.

Engravings made from his paintings were the basis for the plates, and the final pages were hand colored by assistants using Audubon’s paintings as a guide.

Audubon insisted that the birds be represented life-size, and the edition was printed on the largest mold made paper available at the time, known as “double elephant folio” size (26 x 38 inches, 66 x 96 cm). This is also why many of the larger birds are portrayed in somewhat contorted positions to fit the limits of the page, and why many of the smaller species are are shown in tableaux that fill the large spaces with multiple animals and surrounding environment.

The University of Pittsburgh’s online resource for Birds of America includes a history of the book and the digitizing project. They have also digitized his related text, Ornithological Biography and its accompanying plates as well.

The plates for Birds of America can be browsed by name or by thumbnail. You can choose thumbnail browsing options at the upper right.

The plates themselves come up in a viewing box that allows you to zoom way in on the detailed, high resolution images. What’s not obvious, and is key to enjoying the high res images, is that the zoom box has small adjustment grippers on the right and bottom edges that allow you to open the zooming window as large as your monitor will allow. In addition to the plus and minus controls, there is a triangular slider above them that allows for finer control of the zooming. Click and drag to pan.

Many of Audubon’s images involve more complex compositions and more visual drama than you might expect, particularly in cases where he has illustrated their relationship to natural predators or prey.

The details are also eye-opening. The anatomical details of talons and legs in particular will be notable for those interested in paleo art, and the backgrounds are surprisingly rich and varied, interesting in themselves as artworks.

Audubon, though he was creating a scientific treatise, was concerned with the book as a work of art. The plates were arranged for the esthetic impact on the reader rather than then being presented according to taxonomy, for which he was criticized by scientists at the time.

I don’t think that Audubon had to worry too much about his critics. After his remarkable achievement, and its enthusiastic reception worldwide, he could just flip them the bird.

[Via MetaFilter]

Bulgarian watercolorist Atanas Matsoureff has a deft command of the medium that allows him to be simultaneously exacting and free, textural and spare.

In his still life subjects, Matsoureff’s paintings have a feeling of quiet contemplation, in his landscapes, a sense of quietly observing and listening to nature, and in his figures and portraits, a striking feeling of texture and physical presence.

Matsoureff’s website is divided into sections for those subjects as well as sections for drawings and a separate gallery for book illustration.

[Via Jeffrey Hayes]

Early 20th Century painter and printmaker Hiroshi Yoshida is known in his native Japan as a Western style artist, and his work is very much in demand.

Having trained in Western style painting, he carried those influences with him when he moved into traditional Japanese woodblock printmaking, also taking inspiration in subjects from his travels in the U.S. and Europe, as well as India and other parts of the world.

Yoshida is considered one of the foremost proponents of the shin hanga (or “new prints”) style, but combined some of that style’s return to the collaborative printmaking of the ukiyo-e system, in which the artist worked with a carver and block printer, with the personal involvement more common to the sosaku hanga (“creative prints”) style emerging at the time.

His depictions of the Swiss Alps, U.S. national parks and related landmarks, as well as scenes in Japan and elsewhere, resonate with superb drawing and beautifully chosen color.

In addition to returning to favorite themes, like scenes of landscape reflected in water, sailing boats, mountains and clouds, Yoshida often would print the same block in different color schemes, producing dramatically different atmospheric and emotional effects.

(See also my previous post on Hiroshi Yoshida.)

Originally from Kyoto, Japan and now living in San Diego, California, watercolor artist Keiko Tanabe has traveled extensively and applied her eye and brush to scenes from Japan, China, France, Italy and the U.S.

Her beautifully atmospheric watercolors capture a sense of time and place, accomplished with careful control of color, suggestions of texture and insightful skill at defining soft and crisp edges. The latter skill, in particular, enlivens her renderings of street scenes and architecture, which I particularly enjoy. She also excels at portraying water and wet surfaces, often with a wonderful economy of brushwork.

The galleries on her website are divided by geographical location. She also maintains a blog and a gallery on Daily Paintworks as well as a selection of works, along with comments from collectors and other artists, on FASO.

The interactive Reykjavík Center Map, which at first glance might appear to be a Google Earth style map with computer modeled buildings in isometric perspective, is in fact a hand-illustrated image, apparently in pen and ink and watercolor.

I can’t find specific credits for the art, but one of the team who worked on the map said it took over two years and 3,000 hours to create.

Beautifully done, with wonderful little touches of detail and local texture, the map can be zoomed in on to appreciate the drawings.

Oh yes, you can also use it to find your way around the center of Iceland’s capital, along with places to eat, sites to visit and stores to buy your Sugarcubes CDs.

[Via The Map Room by way of MetaFilter]

[Addendum: Snorri Þór Tryggvason was kind enough to write (see this post's comments) and let us know that he and a group of friends are the creators of the map. They are architects and go collectively by the name of "Borgarmynd" ("City-Image"). He points out that their names are scattered throughout the map (one more fun thing to look for).]

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.