Andrew Bosley is a concept artist and illustrator currently working with Red Storm Entertainment in North Carolina.

I first encountered Bosley back in 2007, when he had just graduated from the Illustration program at San Jose state University, and was kind enough to write and share with us a blog he had posted called A Little Bit of J.C. Leyendecker Greatness (my post here) in which he had scanned and posted 30 some Leyendecker covers and made them available to illustration lovers everywhere.

At the time, Bosley was just beginning to post his own work, but not much was available. Since then, I’m happy to say, Bosley has not only continued his blog, but has put up a website with a portfolio of his work, which is just a delight.

A mixture of professional and personal projects, the portfolio showcases Bosley’s stylistic range, from rendered cartoony illustration to retro fantasy to straight ahead concept characters and environments. All of them, though, demonstrate a comfortable and unforced approach to composition, color and execution.

His cover illustration for the new novel by Mike Resnick, The Doctor and the Dinosaur, (above, second from bottom) makes me want to pick up the story just to see if it carries the same paleo-steampunk feeling as the cover.

In addition to his site and blog, there is a portfolio of Bosley’s work on Concept Art World.

There is also an interesting additional feature on Bosley’s website — The Brainstormer. This is a codified version of a tried and true creativity jumpstarting process usually practiced by desperate artists and writers in the dead of night with scribbled lists of words on scraps of paper.

Bosley, with help from John Mitchell, created a wheel based version done in Flash for the website, in which three lists of words can be randomly or systematically aligned against one another, forming three word juxtapositions to spark creative imagery.

Better yet, there is now a Brainstormer iPhone/iPad app (above, bottom), created with the help of Joel Davis (article here) that takes the concept to another level, and offers additional add-on wheels of subjects specifically for characters, world building and imaginary animals.

• 

In my years of drawing from the model in life drawing sessions, as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts through additional classes at the Delaware Art Museum School, the Fleischer Art Memorial, the Philadelphia Sketch Club, the Plastic Club, the Delaware College of Art and Design and other venues, I’ve learned a couple of things about artist’s models.

One is that posing for artists is much more demanding than outsiders realize. There is a tendency to think that modeling is “just sitting there” or “standing still”, and as such should be easy, but that’s simply not the case, particularly not when well done.

That’s the other thing I’ve found — that some models take it quite seriously and work to be very good at what they are doing. From an artist’s perspective, it makes a big difference.

Often in open studio sessions, as opposed to more formal classes, there is little guidance from the proctor other than length of pose or standing, sitting, etc., and it’s left to the model to invent the poses. Ideally, these should be interesting, with some suggestion of movement or dynamics, but not so off balance as to be difficult to hold for the pose sessions (usually 20 minutes at a time, often with the same pose repeated over several sessions).

The best models manage to be creative in these situations, as well as knowing how to hold a pose — again, not as simple as it sounds. I’ve never had a problem with models who will “shake out” in the middle of a pose, and then resume it accurately. Models who are not good at holding a pose are more likely to gradually slump into a different position over time, like a melting glacier.

Poor models will also make it obvious that they are bored, or just biding their time until they’re paid. Good ones make it obvious that they are doing what they do well, with thought and attention to the pose, even if they’re mentally in another world while holding the pose.

Artist models are generally not paid well, certainly not in comparison to the skill that some bring to the task, in particular those with a bit of dance or theater training who know how to use the position of their body expressively.

Artists who are fortunate to work with a good model, however, have a much better chance of producing interesting, expressive work. At its best, it’s something of a collaborative effort.

Models, however, remain something of a forgotten element in the art community (even though some of them are also artists), with fewer resources available than for artists in general.

It’s nice to see a new (to me at least) website called artmodeltips.com that collects a number of resources of interest to those in involved in life modeling, as well as those who run drawing sessions or classes and hire and work with models.

It includes links to resources for life drawing sessions in 40 countries around the world, books and videos of interest to models, life model guilds and associations, instructional materials and other items of interest both to both models and to artists who do life drawing or painting.

The resources include The Art Model’s Handbook, and the Figure Drawing Classes, Workshops, Open Studios website (which I have written about previously), in itself a considerable resource for both models and artists.

[Via @StudioIncammina]

• 

The Google Art Project, which I have written about previously, continues to add to its impressive list of participating museums.

Every once in a while, something truly delightful pops up in the “Recently Added” section of the Collections page, and the Museuo Sorolla, a museum dedicated to the works of brilliant Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, is now one of them.

In addition to the glorious high resolution images of 33 works now available on GAP (as of this writing), you can find some additional high res images on Wikimedia Commons (also here). To sort the high-res images on Wikimedia, look under the caption for those for which the file size is listed in MB rather than KB.

You can also find some large (mixed with smaller) images on WikiPaintings. I’ve linked to my related posts on Sorolla below, many of which contain links to additional sources of Sorolla images.

I will also recommend the beautiful recently published collection of his work, Sorolla: The Masterworks.

• 

Kevin Sloan’s paintings reflect his interest in natural history, narrative painting, allegory, magic realism and the often underrated painting approach of John James Audubon, as well as Audubon’s subject matter.

In carefully composed and deftly rendered arrangements of everyday objects, landscape elements and in particular, birds, Sloan opens windows into staged moments that seem a bit out of time and a touch haunted by something unsaid or not quite remembered.

His homages to the posed life-in-death tableaux of Audubon are stirred in with time crossing elements like electrical cords and candelabra chandoliers, birds hidden under sheets or birds interacting with teacups, fruit and other traditional still life subjects.

The resulting “cabinet of curiosities” is given a patina of age by his painting approach, as though you had found his work in the attic of an old house that possibly had been in an alternate reality at some point.

[Via Symbiartic]

• 

Studies In Expression. When Women Are Jurors, Charles Dana Gibson

Beautifully confident pen and ink by a master.

This large version of the image is on a Russian site called Artscroll, which features a list of additional Gibson images.

• 

Scottish artist Thomas Millie Dow, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, traveled and painted subjects in The US, Franc, Morocco and Italy, as well as in the UK.

I came across his painting Trees, above, top, and was fascinated by it. Unfortunately, I can’t find many examples of his work on the web.

• 

Ming Fan (or “fanming” as he is sometimes credited) is a Chinese concept artist and illustrator based in Shanghai.

He specializes in environments — fantastical imaginary landscapes and cityscapes. He renders them in lavish detail, often creating compositions in which there is a primary focal point along with two or more secondary areas of interest that, if isolated, would make interesting compositions within themselves.

He never loses the coherent overall focus, however, and accentuates the powerful sense of scale in his images with a command of both linear and atmospheric perspective, as well as a knack for creating multiple planes of content at various distances from the observer.

His own website/blog is in Chinese, and unfortunately plays music and ads at you when you enter, so it’s easier to view his work in his CGHub gallery.

Once you click through a thumbnail to a bigger image, click again for the larger image in a pop-up. Once in the enlargement, you can click through other images with side arrows.

It’s good that he has provided larger images, as much of the delight in his work is in the imaginative details, texture, and the feeling of sweeping scale that he brings to his subjects.

Rather than show a greater number of example images above, I’ve chosen four and included a detail crop from each.

• 

Fontainebleau: Oak Trees at Bas-Bréau, Camille Corot

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Click “Fullscreen” and use zoom controls or download arrow.

•