Lines and Colors

Lines and Colors is a blog about painting, drawing, sketching, illustration, comics, cartoons, webcomics, art history, concept art, gallery art, digital art, artist tools and techniques, motion graphics, animation, sci-fi and fantasy illustration, paleo art, storyboards, matte painting, 3d graphics and anything else I find visually interesting. If it has lines and/or colors, it’s fair game.

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Promoting some friends and some clients of my website design business

Francis Livingston

November 2, 2006

Although influenced by Sargent and Whistler, Francis Livingston painted for a while almost monochromatically, but eventually embraced color with a vengeance, apparently after studying the painters of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, the California Impressionists and their inspiration, the original French Impressionists.

I wouldn’t put Livingston’s work in the Impressionist mold, though. Instead of small strokes of color optically blended to make larger shapes, he uses big bold blocks of color, chips and chunks of color, (perhaps troweled in with a palette knife in places) to define his forms.

In fact he seems to luxuriate in the physical presence of the paint, using wonderful fat strokes of buttery oil paint, laid on with three-dimensional thickness, stroke defining edges raised above the surface of the canvas. The effect is one of energetic abandon to the luxury of color, and a feeling of the rich sensuality of paint, looking as if it was just squeezed from the tube.

His subjects vary from urban scenes, particularly theater fronts and amusement parks, to landscapes of the American west, specifically Idaho where he moved with his family after living in San Francisco for a number of years. His color range varies with subject, at times with bright contrasts and other times in muted, atmospheric harmony. He also seems particularly intrigued with the geometry of his subjects, and his compositions often emphasize the primitive shapes he sees in them.

Livingston’s bios list him as having been a successful illustrator, although I haven’t been able to find much in the way of examples of his illustration on the web. Fortunately, there are plenty of examples of his gallery work on several sites for commercial galleries, a couple of which have large enough versions of the images to get a feeling for the rich, painterly quality of his canvasses.

Bio and images (click into subsections) on Medicine Man Gallery
Thomas Reynolds Gallery
Leslie Levy Fine Art
Lindgren & Smith Gallery, with short bio
Arcadia Gallery

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art
Russ Manning

November 1, 2006

You might look at the comic page above and think “Oh, someone’s doing a take-off of Star Wars.”, except that you’d be wrong by almost 40 years. It’s a page from Magnus, Robot Fighter 4000 AD, a character created and drawn by comics artist Russ Manning in the early 1960’s.

Magnus, Robot Fighter depicted a semi-utopian world of the year 4000, in which great-looking men and women living in cities of sleek skyscrapers and flying cars had abdicated many of their personal responsibilities to domestic and official robots, with less than ideal consequences. The strip was drawn in a beautiful style with elegant linework and superb draftsmanship. His futuristic designs still look advanced, where most science fiction illustration and comic art from the time looks impossibly dated.

Ironically, Manning did later work on Star Wars comics, writing and drawing the Star Wars newspaper strip in the late 1970’s, toward the end of his career. He also worked on the newspaper strip Tarzan as well as the Tarzan comic book other comics for Dell and Gold Key. He also created Tarzan graphic albums that were aimed at the European market (and are now being reprinted by Dark Horse).

Manning was influenced by comics greats like Alex Raymond and Al Williamson, and in turn has been a great influence on many contemporary comics artists, among them William Stout and Dave Stevens, who worked as his assistants at one time, and in particular Steve Rude, who shows a dramatic influence from Manning’s solid draftsmanship and beautifully controlled line.

There an extensive, if somewhat awkward to navigate, Russ Manning Tribute on the online Edgar Rice Burroughs magazine ERBZine. Look for images outlined in blue, which connect to enlarged images or additional pages. Most of the images are not large, but you can get a feeling for the quality of his work and the extent of his career. The Magnus, Robot Fighter sequence from which the above page comes is on this page.

The beautiful Magnus , Robot Fighter 4000 AD stories are being collected by Dark Horse and released as hardback collections, Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3. There are also collections of the European-aimed Tarzan albums, Tarzan the Untamed, Tarzan: Jewels of Opar and Tarzan: The Land that Time Forgot.

ERBZine Russ manning Tribute
Illustrated bio on Lambiek.net Comiclopedia
Russ Manning on Dark Horse Comics – Magnus titles have previews

Categories:
Comics
Malcolm McNeill

October 31, 2006

Malcolm McNeill is an illustrator, concept artist and comics artist based in New York. His work has appeared in publications like The New York Times, National Lampoon and titles for Marvel Comics.

McNeill was collaborating with William S. Burroughs, before his death, on an “word/image novel” called Ah Pook is Here (image above, top), based, I believe, on a short story by the same name (which was also the inspiration for an animated short by Philip Hunt). McNeill worked on the project with Burroughs intermittently for seven years. Unfortunately the project was eventually abandoned because of insufficient funding. The glimpse of the work is tantalizing. It looks like McNeill is playing with the comics narrative form in some interesting and novel ways.

McNeill is at work on his own graphic novel, 0º, and a non-fiction graphic narrative called 1%, in which he also seems to be playing with narrative conventions. It’s too bad that the images on the site are relatively small.

He wrote and illustrated a science fiction comic series called Tetra (above, two images at bottom, right) that ran in Gallery magazine for two years.

He has also done concept design for TV, including concept, design and art direction for the Saturday Night Live opening sequence in which the cast appeared as giants among the buildings of New York, as well as a number of commercial spots.

There are some nicely done illustrations for a dinosaur-themed project in the Kids section (above, image at bottom, left), for which he lists contributions of character design and script development but doesn’t indicate the name of the project.

Addendum: Malcolm has let me know that he in now in LA, not NY, he’s just completed a book about the collaboration with Burroughs, which took place in the 70’s, and the book will include the artwork in various stages of completion. The dinosaur images are for a book/film called “Pterrence with a P”, which he storyboarded, but has left to work on 0º. He also notes that anyone interested in contacting him for professional inquiries can simply ask for larger versions of the images.

Note: Site contains NSFW images.

Addendum 2 (9/11/07): McNeill has posted a sited devoted specifically to the Burroughs project, which is now spelled Ah Puch is Here. There is now a fairly extensive interview with malcom McNeill posted on RealityStudio.org, and another on George Laughead’s Beats in Kansas, in which he talks about collaborating with Burroughs.

www.malcolmmcneillart.com/

Categories:
Comics, Concept & Visual Dev., Illustration
Chris Appelhans

October 30, 2006

I chanced on Chris Appelhans from a two-month old link from John Nevarez’s blog, did a little digging and found that he is being widely mentioned at the moment. Good thing because his own site has some yummy art but very little actual biographical or background info.

Chris Appelhans is a visual development artist who, among other projects, worked extensively on the new movie Monster House. His previsualization art for that movie is particularly striking (images above), and there are a number of images from the project on his site.

There are also images from an upcoming project that is an adaptation of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland which apparently takes place in a modern urban/sci-fi setting called Underworld. Art from these and other projects can be accessed from Appelhans’ Portfolio page, along with landscape sketches, doodles and an animated Superman short.

There is also a link there to the archive of his series of short webcomics, frank and frank.

Appelhans is featured in the Art of Monster House book and is a contributor to the Flight 1 and Flight 2 comics anthologies.

There is a nice post on Stainless Steel Droppings which indicates that Appelhans is a Pixar employee and goes into more detail on his current and upcoming projects. Appelhans is also an instructor for the Gnomon School of Visual Effects.

Link via John Nevarez

www.froghatstudios.com/
Portfolio mirror with additional sections
Stainless Steel Droppings post
Drawn! post
Prints from Gallery Nucleus

Categories:
Comics, Concept & Visual Dev., Webcomics
Ivan Bilibin

October 29, 2006

Every once in a while I stumble across something by accident that turns out to be a great find.

I was in the Met in New York last weekend and they have a wonderful practice (fortunately in common with many major museums lately) of rotating works into view from their collection of drawings, prints and photographs that ordinarily can’t be on permanent display because of sensitivity to light. One of the many upsides to this is that works come to light that might not make it to the curator’s list for major displays and wouldn’t be seen under other circumstances.

I was walking by a case in which some lushly illustrated books were on display and noticed that they were open to wonderful, brightly colored illustrations by an illustrator I was not familiar with. I took some photos (image above) and noted the artist’s name: Ivan Bilibin. On looking him up, I was pleased to find that there were a number of resources on the web, and I’ve listed what I could find for you in the links below.

Bilibin was a Russian illustrator working, more or less, during the peak times for great illustration around the turn of the 20th Century, but he seems to have been outside of the mainstream and took most of his influences from Russian folk art, Medieval and Renaissance art, Art Nouveau, and the open line and filled color style of Japanese prints. (See my posts on Hokusai, Yoshida and Hasui.)

Bilibin is most famous for his illustrations of Russian fairy tales which he illustrated with a colorful clear line style that incorporates decorative elements both within the images and at times surrounding them.

Bilibin eventually moved into stage and costume design for operas and ballets and also ventured into murals and straightforward landscape painting.

I was also delighted to find that there are books available with his illustrations, including Russian Fairy Tales, although I haven’t see them first hand yet.

Bio and illustrations on Wikipedia (16 illos)
FantasyGallery
Illustrations and bio on Matt McArdle site
Illustrated bio on Bud Plant Illustrated Books
SurLalane Fairy Tales
Auburn University (many costumes and stage sets)
Artcyclopedia (links)

Categories:
Illustration
Laurelines (Laura Frankstone)

October 28, 2006

All artists go through periods of difficulty, where the act of creation becomes more of a chore than a joy, or ideas dry up, or we reach those plateaus where progress seems to cease, or we are pressed with doubt or even fear about our abilities (or lack thereof).

When this happens, the logical thing to do is to look around for some way to change things, shake things up, wake up our muse (or have a fling with another) and get going again. Few of us though, will approach it so thoroughly as to draw up and dedicate ourselves to a systematic plan.

Laura Frankstone is an artist who has been posting her watercolors, drawings and sketches to her blog Laurelines since early 2005 (if not longer).

On January 1 of 2006, she embarked on a year-long plan of “self-apprenticeship” to revitalize her art life. She set aside each month of the year as a particular topic, January: interiors, February, food and dining, March: trees, etc. and devoted herself to doing a drawing a day through that period. (I mentioned that painter Jon Conkey os doing something similar with his Themeworks project in my last post on Painting a Day blogs.)

In addition she is taking classes in digital art, endeavoring to change mediums, even working in mediums she’s not comfortable with and trying to extend her reach in many directions.

She has managed to crown this program with a highlight that would be the envy of many artists, myself included, taking the month of October in Paris and dedicating her time there to travel sketches. The site also inclludes older travel sketches from other parts of Europe and the US.

I enjoy travel sketches to begin with, and particularly ones of Paris. Frankstone’s recent posts are filled with her direct, unfussy pencil and watercolor impressions of scenes around Paris and often in the Luxemborg Gardens.

You can view them in a gallery mode, but if you view them in place in the blog, you get the benefit of her description of the time and place and her approach to the sketch, which gives you even more of a feeling for being there.

It’s worth noting that even in the midst of the wonders of Paris, Frankstone finds worthwhile subjects in seedpods from trees and other simple objects.

One of the other ways to break out of an artistic slump is to ride along with another artist for a while, watching over their shoulder for inspiration, even if it’s just enough inspiration to say, “Yes, I should pick up my sketchbook and draw today”.

laurelines.typepad.com/
Paris in October sketches
Travel Sketches

Categories:
Painting a Day, Sketching, Watercolor and Gouache