Lines and Colors – Page 319

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

Michael Paul Smith

February 3, 2010

I don’t normally feature photography on Lines and Colors, not that I don’t think of photography as an art form; I just feel that it’s dealt with better on many other sites, and seems different enough to be in a separate category from the art forms I feature.

But the photographs of Michael Paul Smith just charmed my socks off, and there is more to them then excellent photography. In the images you see above, the houses, cars and streets are 1/24th scale (1/2 inch = 1 foot; 1 m = 4.16 cm).

The cars are die-cast models; the buildings are built by Smith, constructed out of Gator board, plastics such as styrene and Sintra, and found objects (and it looks like the old model makers standby of lichen for shrubs).

The outdoor scenes are set up on a table and photographed against real backgrounds. The interior ones, lit very simply but cleverly, are photographed in Smith’s garage.

There is no digital manipulation, no GCI, no Photoshop compositing; it’s all in the models and the original shot from the camera.

My father, among his other skills, was a museum model maker, so this has a particular resonance for me. He, my brother and I spent many happy hours working on train layouts and even helping him construct his museum models; but we never managed photographs of them that had this kind of emotional depth.

Smith says: “What started out as an exercise in model building and photography, ended up as a dream-like reconstruction of the town I grew up in. It’s not an exact recreation, but it does capture the mood of my memories.’

There is a two page Flickr set of his photographs, (and here), many of the compositions have been photographed in both color and black and white, the latter looking uncannily like actual photos from the era Smith is recreating.

Michael Paul Smith Flickr set, and here

Categories:
Sculpture & Dimensional
Martin Ansin

February 3, 2010

I know little about Martin Ansin, save that he is a free lance illustrator living and working in Montevideo, Uraguay. His web site and blog don’t contain a great deal of biographical information.

His portfolio includes posters for The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, and Taming Light, a group exhibition in Dublin inspired by the films of Stanley Kubrick.

His approach varies from a semi-rendered line and tone style, as in the Phanton of the Opera poster above, to a more fully rendered technique. His archives also include comics and comics themed illustration.

[Note: a couple of images on these sites may be considered mildly NSFW.]

www.martinansin.com
http://martinansin.com/journal

Categories:
Illustration
J. Bernard Koch

February 2, 2010

California artist Johathan Bernard Koch studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. Since then, he has apparently has had a successful career as an illustrator, with clients like The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune and Rodale Books, and has been honored by the Society of Illustrators New York; but I can’t find an online portfolio of his illustration work.

What is available online, however, is Koch’s painting blog, A Small Painting. Crediting Duane Keiser, Julian Merrow-Smith and Justin Clayton with inspiring him to start, Koch posts his small paintings (and sometimes larger ones) of still life subjects and landscapes, and offers them for sale.

Unlike most painter/bloggers, Koch does not sell his paintings through auction, or even list their price on the blog, asking instead that interested parties contact him for information.

There is a page of Available Work, but it is a small fraction of the posted images. There is also an Archive page in which you can browse thumbnails, but I recommend browsing leisurely through the posted works by clicking on the left arrow, or simply clicking on the images of the paintings, to view them full size as you go.

Much of the appeal of Koch’s work is in his deft handling of texture, contrasts of rough and smooth and delicate shimmers of restrained color.

He has a more rendered style than most painters who frequently post small paintings, and he obviously posts when a painting is ready and not on a pre-determined schedule (note the absence of a frequency in the name of his blog).

His still life paintings are composed against textural or dark backgrounds, and have a feeling of Dutch master still life. Koch has a wonderful command of soft and “lost and found” edges.

Despite the fact that he often renders more smoothly than many contemporary still life painters, much of Koch’s work consists of suggestion; he hints at where the curve of an onion or the edge of a glass jar might end against a dark background, and lets your eye fill in the rest.

His landscapes likewise have a feeling of soft edges, soft light, controlled color and gentle atmospherics, frequently evoking stillness and contemplation.

http://asmallpainting.com

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art
Bill Watterson Interview

February 2, 2010

Bill Watterson, the artist and writer of Calvin and Hobbes, to my mind the best late 20th Century comic strip after Pogo ceased publication in 1975, is almost as notable for the things he didn’t do as for his actual accomplishments.

He didn’t accept the idea of merchandising his popular characters to the hilt, and resisted his syndicate’s constant pressure to do so, allowing only the publication of book collections of the strip and calendars. No stuffed characters, no Hobbes dolls hung upside-down with suction cups to the inside of station wagon windows, no notebooks, sticker books, T-shirts, TV specials or Burger King soda cups. Just the strip, pure and simple.

And it was pure and simple, a classic humor strip, brilliantly written and wonderfully drawn. He didn’t overcomplicate it, try to make it too topical or stretch it beyond its natural limits. When he felt the strip had run its course, Watterson retired, and again resisted any desire on the part of the syndicate to keep it alive artificially and milk it into oblivion.

Watterson himself did not seek the spotlight, preferring to let his characters do the talking, and rarely gave interviews. There was a brief interview with Watterson published in yesterday’s Celveland Plain Dealer (which I believe is his hometown newspaper). The interview was conducted by email, and is very short and not particularly revealing, but worth noting just as an event.

You’ll see it marked as the first in 20 years, but that discounts the question and answer with fans that his book publisher, Andrews McMeel, conducted in 2005 to promote the release of The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.

The cleveland.com site has also posted a selection of rarely seen editorial cartoons by Watterson from his stint with Sun Newspapers in the 1980’s. Unfortunately, as in the images above, the reproductions in their slideshow have apparently been poorly resized and lost some of their original line quality.

At any rate, it’s a good excuse to stop, pick up a Calvin and Hobbes book you haven’t read in a while, and be reminded that “there’s treasure everywhere”.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Watterson interview from Celveland Plain Dealer
Watterson editorial cartoons from Sun Newspapers
2005 question and answer with fans
My Previous post on Bill Watterson, also here

Categories:
Cartoons, Comics
The Drawings of Bronzino

February 1, 2010

In the hands of 16th Century masters like Bronzino, drawings were rarely considered artworks in themselves, but studies in preparation of more finished works like paintings or frescoes. They were a means to an end, a step in the process. Yet, drawings from those times are valued now as highly beautiful works of art in themselves, and rightly so.

Agnolo Bronzino was born Agnolo di Cosimo di Mariano Tori, and known as Il Bronzino for reasons that are unclear but may have had to do with his complexion, or that of his subjects. He had the good fortune to become a pupil of another great Florentine artist, Jacopo Pontormo, who was only nine years older then his pupil. Their styles are similar in may ways; they maintained a collaborative relationship for most of their careers, and attributions of works sometimes flop back and forth.

Bronzino’s drawings show that similarity at times, and a similar level of command of draftsmanship, line and tone; which is to say, very high indeed. (I also see similarities to the chalk drawings of Raphael in his isolated figures.)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibit, the first ever devoted to Bronzino, The Drawings of Bronzino, that contains 60 drawings drawn from sources in the U.S. and Europe. There is a selection of drawings from the exhibit here.

There is a book accompanying the exhibit, also titled The Drawings of Bronzino. The exhibit runs until April 18. 2010.

The Drawings of Bronzino, Metropolitan Museum of Art to 4/18/10
Bronzino drawing on Heilbrun Timeline of Art History
Review of exhibit on Elon de l’Art par Alain Truong
Review on NYT
Art Daily
Bronzino on WGA, and here
Bio on Wikipedia
More resources on Artcyclopedia

Categories:
Drawing, Gallery and Museum Art
Rob Rey

February 1, 2010

llustrator and painter Rob Rey is originally from Chicago, studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, and now lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.

His illustrations have been recognized The Society of Illustrators Los Angeles, CMYK Magazine, Applied Arts and Arista.

His web site has a gallery of his illustration, which has a nice painterly feel with dramatically theatrical staging and use of lighting (images above, top).

What I found most appealing, though, were the “in-your-face” portraits in his “Painting” section, with their bold compositions, big textural brushstrokes and dramatic color. I also found many of those elements in his richly textured still life paintings engagingly lit cityscapes.

Rey also has a blog on which he posts additional paintings and nicely rendered cafe sketches.

www.robreyart.com
http://robreyart.blogspot.com (blog)

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Illustration, Sketching