Clarence Coles Phillips was an American illustrator working during the “Golden Age” of illustration, just before and after the turn of the 20th century.
Though his approach was not limited to the concept, he was known in particular for his series of illustrations called “Fade-away Girl”, in which he played with negative space and found multiple ways of defining a figure without actually delineating an edge.
For more, see my 2007 post on Coles Phillips.
Peter Jablokow is a watercolor painter from Illinois with a particular fascination for industrial forms, often weathered and rusted, which he renders with a feeling for texture as well as color and values.
Many of his paintings use dramatic compositions with severe perspective and unusual angles of view. In some cases the entire composition is overlayed with grunge-like texture.
Jablokow was trained as an architect, from which he moved to architectural rendering and then into illustration and gallery art. His website includes examples of his architectural watercolors as well as illustration and gallery art. There is also a selection of prints available.
Advertisment for Esty Residence Pipe Organ, pen and ink illustration by Franklin Booth, as it appeared in the November, 1923 issue of Country Life magazine. I don’t know the dimaneions of the original art. Link is to the Organ Historical Society.
Interesting to compare this illustration to another of his for the same company.
Who knew a pipe organ could be so transcendent, etherial and vaguely suggestive?
Franklin Booth was a master of pen and ink with a unique style – formed by his missinterpretation of woodcut illustrations as pen and ink when he was learning.
He was absolutely brilliant at creating a wide range of tones from hatching. I love the way he has so effectively and sparingly used areas of pure white — from the light globes to highlights on the figures to the emphasized area of the checkered tile floor.
Dave Malan is an artist an illustrator I’ve featured twice before, most recently back in 2015. Since then he has updated his website with more of his delightful illustrations, portraits, and drawings.
As you might guess from my choice of example images, I’m particularly fond of his pencil portrait drawings. These range from brief sketches to more developed drawings, but in all of them he combines solid draftsmanship with lose, gestural rendering — to wonderful effect.
His website doesn’t mention his old blog, which hasn’t been updated since 2017, but it’s still online and worth a visit, as it contains even more of his pencil drawings and other work. You can also find more on the social media accounts linked at the top of his website.
A beautiful Hal Foster 1939 Prince Valiant Sunday newspaper comic strip from the glory days of newspaper adventure comics.
This is a photo of the original art. It would have been printed in color as a full newspaper page, at a time when newspapers were much larger than the ridiculous size they’ve been reduced to today (in an apparent effort by publishers to remove the last remnants of what used to make newspapers a pleasure to hold and read).
I place Foster in the tradition of great pen and ink artists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as he, Alex Raymond, Winsor McCay and others followed in their footsteps.
Sourced from Heritage Auctions, large image here.
I believe this illustration by turn of the 20th century Danish illustrator Kay (pronounced “kigh”) Neilsen is for a collection of Grimm’s Fairy Tales that included The Twelve Dancing Princesses.
Image sourced from poulwebb.blogspot.com.
