Lines and Colors art blog

Month: December 2009

  • Happy Leyendecker Baby New Year 2010!

    In what is becoming something of a tradition, I’ll wrap up the year with four more Saturday Evening Post covers from the early 20th Century featuring New Year’s babies from J.C. Leyendecker, the illustrator who started the practice of representing the new year as a baby. For more on the history of Leyendecker’s New Year’s…

  • David Levine

    David Levine was one of the great caricaturists of the 20th Century. He is best known for his drawings of notable figures published in The New York Review of Books over the course of more than 40 years. The NYRB web site has a gallery of over 2,500 of his drawings that can be browsed…

  • Different Strokes From Different Folks Year End Portrait Swap

    I’ve written before about Karin Jurick, both about her own wonderful paintings and her ongoing group painting blog, Different Strokes From Different Folks in which numerous artists paint their own interpretation of the same photographic resource in periodic challenges. I also wrote last year about the Different Strokes From Different Folks Portrait Swap, in which…

  • John Watkiss concept art for Sherlock Holmes

    Ordinarily, concept art for film is created as a means of visualizing scenes before they are staged and filmed; giving directors, designers and production companies a guide as they develop the components necessary to actually bring the scene to to the screen. However, according to Borys Kit of The Hollywood Reporter, this is a case…

  • The 2010 Eustace Tilley Contest

    For the third year The New Yorker is holding a Eustace Tilley contest, in which participants are encouraged to submit their own (usually modernized) interpretation of the top-hatted and monocled character who has become the magazine’s iconic symbol. The original Eustace Tilley (above, top left) was drawn by Rea Irvin, then art director, for the…

  • Adoration of the Shepherds, by François Boucher

    This beautiful drawing in pen and brown ink, wash and brown, black and white chalks, Adoration of the Shepherds, by François Boucher, is currently on display at the Morgan Library and Museum in new York. It is part of an exhibit called Rococo and Revolution: Eighteenth-Century French Drawings, that runs until January 3, 2010. There…