Lines and Colors art blog
  • Clay Bennett

    Clay Bennett
    Newspaper staff artists are the unsung heroes of illustration, usually in the shadows until they move to another position. Clay Bennett was a staff artist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Fayetteville (NC) Times before moving to The St. Petersburgh Times as an editorial cartoonist.

    He was fired from The St. Petersburgh Times (I always have an interest in cartoonists who can piss off their papers enough to be fired) and now does Pulitzer Prize winning work for The Christian Science Monitor. His polished color renderings often convey complex ideas in elegantly simple images.

    Bennett is married to portrait artist Cindy Procious.



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  • Marshall Hopkins

    Marshall HopkinsMarshall Hopkins’ Lightning Studios is primarily a sketch blog in which the Brooklyn artist posts works in charcoal, pen, wash, graphite, watercolor and oil. Most of the pieces are for sale. Hopkins also does cartoons for The New Yorker.

    His website includes a selection of his cartoons and illustrations.



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  • Craig Mullins

    Craig Mullins
    Craig Mullins does concept art for hollywood movies and high-end games. He works digitally in a loose, painterly style that can be very powerful. This site has a large selection of his concept art images as well as sketches and some work in traditional media.



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  • Steve Mumford


    Steven Mumford is a New York artist who has made several trips to Iraq during the war and recorded his observations in a series of remarkable pen, inkwash and watercolor drawings. The images range from intimate portraits of soldiers to battlefield scenes to pictures of the local citizens who were much less reluctant to pose for an artist’s pen than they might have been for a reporter’s camera.

    This posting of his Baghdad Journal is part of the Artnet online magazine. The drawings are beautiful, scary, immediate and revealing in a way photographs couldn’t be. The work has now been collected in a book published by Drawn and Quarterly.



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  • Alex Ross


    Ask comics fans about Alex Ross and you’ll get mixed but strong opinions. Many think his highly rendered watercolor and gouache comic illustrations “inappropriate” for comics storytelling, others find his work exciting and beautiful. I fall into the latter camp and have a tremendous respect for his water media technique. I also have no problem with his extensive use of photographic models. I feel that practice falls squarely in the tradition of great comic illustrators like Hal Foster, Alex Raymond and Al Williamson. Much of the most interesting art is to be found in the Ross Report newsletter section of the site.



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  • Practical Painting

    Practical Painting
    This is an unpretentious little how-to artists magazine created by an individual artist (identified only as “Denise”). The site features compact, informative articles on art technique and tool basics such as choosing canvas, colors and brushes. Her “What Paint Colors do I Need” article, for example, is a quick introduction to choosing a split-primary color palette. The site also includes interviews with working artists and articles about Art Nouveau and the Pre-Raphaelites. There is also a good list of online museums.



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Vasari Handcraftes artist's oil colors

Charley’s Picks
Bookshop.org

(Bookshop.org affilliate links; sales benefit independent bookshop owners; I get a small percentage to help support my work on Lines and Colors)

John Singer Sargent: Watercolors
John Singer Sargent: Watercolors

Sorolla the masterworks
Sorolla: the masterworks

The Art Spirit
The Art Spirit

Rendering in Pen and Ink
Rendering in Pen and Ink

Urban Sketching: Understanding Perspective
Urban Sketching: Understanding Perspective

World of Urban Sketching
World of Urban Sketching

Daily Painting
Daily Painting

Drawing on the right side of the brain
Drawing on the right side of the brain

Understanding Comics
Understanding Comics

Charley’s Picks
Amazon

(Amazon.com affiliate links; sales go to a larger yacht for Jeff Bezos; but I get a small percentage to help support my work on Lines and Colors)

John Singer Sargent: Watercolors
John Singer Sargent: Watercolors

Sorolla the masterworks
Sorolla: the masterworks

The Art Spirit
The Art Spirit

Rendering in Pen and Ink
Rendering in Pen and Ink

Urban Sketching: Understanding Perspective
Urban Sketching: Understanding Perspective

World of Urban Sketching
World of Urban Sketching

Daily Painting
Daily Painting

Drawing on the right side of the brain
Drawing on the right side of the brain

Understanding Comics
Understanding Comics