Mary GrandPré is another of those illustrators whose work you have undoubtedly seen, even if you don’t know her name.

GrandPré is best known as the illustrator for the U.S. editions of the Harry Potter books; which was just another assignment at first, as the books were not yet the phenomenon they would become; an assignment her contact with the publisher had to talk her into fitting into her schedule.

She has brought her love of pastels and her “soft geometry” to numerous other projects, both editorial and commercial, including clients like Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Random House, Berkely, Penguin, Dell and Mcgraw Hill. She also worked on the Dreamworks film Antz as an environment and scenery visual development artist.

She studied at Pamona College and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and has taught at the Ringling School of Art and Design wheer her husband is also a teacher. Her work has been recognized by the Society of Illustrators and featured in Communications Arts, Graphis, Print and Art Direction.

Her web site includes a short bio, as well as galleries of her work for picture books and for editorial and commercial clients. I can’t give you direct links because the site is in frames. I’ve taken the liberty of compositing two unrelated images together in the image sabove to reproduce them a little larger.

GrandPré infuses much of her work with a sort of warm cubism, breaking her whimsical forms into additional planes with edges of color and texture, playfully subdividing her compositions into both angular and curvilinear shapes.

She also uses strong value contrasts, with even her dark tones enriched by the strong, saturated colors often characteristic of pastel. Unfortunately the images on her site are a little small to get a feeling for the textural element of her work, but then, you probably have a book on your shelf with some of her illustrations.

Illustrator Boris Artzybasheff was born in the Ukraine, emigrated to the the U.S. and was active during the mid 20th Century.

“Unique” may be a mild word to describe Artzybasheff’s approach to illustration. maybe if I add adjectives like “idiosyncratic”, “eccentric”, “bizarre” and “off the wall”, I can get a little closer; oh yes, and throw in “wonderful”.

Artzybasheff is most noted for his graphic images in which he indulged in his fascination with anthropomorphized industrial machinery — glaring cauldrons pour bright molten metal into seeming surprised ingot molds, steel rollers feed the ingots through their “teeth” with conveyor belt hands, rods or wire ropes are extruded through the noses of forming machines, electro-mechanical calculators, heads full of vacuum tubes, use their intricately wired and gimbaled arms to perform calculations on themselves, and hydraulic presses, grommeted eyes bulging with exertion, slam down their plates with muscular arms (image above, left).

The always amazing ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive has posted another of their series on great illustrators with a feature on these images from the Machinalia section of Artzybasheff’s long out of print but newly reprinted book As I See: The Fantastic World of Boris Artzybasheff.

The above link is to the hardcover on Amazon, which lists a release date in October, but it looks as though you can order the softcover now through the site of publisher Ken Steacy. The Amazon link is worth exploring, though, because you can see some of the many other books he illustrated (and wrote) over the course of his career.

His most widely seen illustrations were for big magazines like Life, Fortune and Time, including over 200 covers for the latter. He also had a number of large commercial clients, including Parke-Davis, Parker Pens, Xerox, Pan Am, and Shell Oil, for whom he did some remarkably weird and wonderful illustrations (above, top right). You can see some of his advertising and commercial illustrations on the American Art Archives.

[AISFA article link via BoingBoing]