Category: Pen & Ink
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Steve Canyon original art
Most art done specifically for reproduction, whether it’s illustration, cartoons or comics, is drawn or painted at a different size than the printed piece, usually a bit larger. In the case of American comic books, it’s ordinarily about 1 1/2 times the printed size, but for newspaper strips it’s often 2 x the printed size…
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Franklin Booth
Franklin Booth owed his amazing style of pen and ink drawing to ignorance. Booth was one of the greatest American illustrators and one of the absolute masters of pen and ink drawing. His style was the result of an isolated childhood on an Indiana farm and an innocent ignorance of the printing technology of his…
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Milton Caniff
It’s hard to imagine these days, but newspaper comics were once a place where adventure reigned. Alongside genuinely funny humor strips (also hard to imagine in this day of watered-down, milquetoast comics pages where blandness seems a requirement), there were wonderful adventure comics, like Prince Valiant, Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Rip Kirby, Wash Tubbs, Buzz Sawyer,…
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Al Hirschfeld
I promised you something lighthearted today, so how about the wonderful drawings of Al Hirschfeld? OK, so maybe you’re familiar with Hirschfeld. Maybe you’re seen the documentary on his life and work, The Line King on PBS. Maybe you’ve seen his work in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum…
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Mark Summers
Mark Summers is a Canadian illustrator who works in the time-honored, but infrequently used, medium of scratchboard. (See my posts on Virgil Finlay and Elizabeth Traynor.) There is just something about the balance between black and white and the characteristics of the scratched lines that gives well-done scratchboard drawings a particular appeal. Summers is one…
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BibliOdyssey
Well, it happened again. I was trying once again to bring you this post and I got lost. You see, I fell down a rabbit hole, found myself among the very large and the very small, and as everything became curiouser and curiouser, lost myself wandering in wide eyed fascination through a seemingly endless wonderland…