Designers who blog, Catherine (cat) Morley’s terrific blog about just that, featured another post about lines and colors today (permalink here), with a focus on my post about “Painting a day” blogs.

I’ve written about Morley’s great selection of designers’ blogs before, as well as her Cat’s Fancy column for Creative Latitude in which she goes into more depth by conducting email interviews with the blog creators.

Her blog consistently showcases top notch designers, illustrators and photographers. I’ve been amazed with the number of talented and skilled designers she has found.

There’s really no excuse for bad graphic design out there, art directors could simply use Designers who blog as a Rolodex.

Like any artists, illustrators must choose where their work will “live” on the spectrum of styles and genres. Toni DiTerlizzi lives somewhere between adventure fantasy and children’s book whimsey, where dragons and fairies meet spiders and flies and giant pink rabbit-eared creatures appear in kids’ bedrooms. His work shows the influence of some of the classic children’s book illustrators like Arthur Rackham and perhaps John Bauer.

Toni DiTerlizzi has worked for TSR, doing illustrations for Dungeons and Dragons and has created illustrations for a number of other games, including the Magic the Gathering card based game, in which the fantasy illustrations are a major appeal of the game.

After working in gaming and fantasy for a number of years, DiTerlizzi moved into children’s books, writing and drawing his own titles, Jimmy Zangwow’s Out-of-this-World Moon Pie Adventure and Ted, as well as illustrating the work of other authors including the Alien and Possum series by Tony Johnson and the Ribbiting Tales collection.

In 2003 he co-created with Holly Black The Spiderwick Chronicles, revisited in 2005 with Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You.

DiTerlizzi’s site got a major makeover several months ago, reappearing as a spiffed-up Flash version with gallery drawers, video clips, animated hearers and a nice looking interface. Personally, I preferred the older, less polished version because I thought it was easier to see his artwork.

The new site still has plenty of DiTerlizzi’s charming artwork, however, both in galleries and as downloadable wallpaper. He works in watercolor, pastel and, by my guess, gouache and other mixed media as well. Some of the gallery selections include preliminary sketches and pencil drawings of his illustrations.

When I was about 8 years old my parents made the mistake of giving me a wonderful book.

It looked like an innocent enough childrens’ book. It had a brown cover and a drawing of a young boy, who, I would soon learn, was “Harold”, and he had a large purple crayon with which he was apparently drawing large purple lines all over the cover of the book on which he resided.

The book was, in fact, called Harold and the Purple Crayon and it was indeed a dangerous thing to give to a child prone to flights of fantasy and a strong tendency to want to use his crayons “outside the lines”.

Harold, you see, has a large purple crayon with which he creates and modifies his world. The book doesn’t outline this in such fancy words, of course, it just starts out with Harold deciding, “after thinking it over for some time”, to go for a walk in the moonlight.

Inconveniently, there is no moon, so Harold draws one. He needs a path for his walk, so Harold draws one; and whatever Harold draws with his wonderful, magical purple crayon becomes the reality in which Harold lives and moves.

He draws, apparently on some kind of wall behind him, a forest (consisting of one apple tree), a dragon (to guard the apples), an ocean, a boat, a mountain and an entire city; and they all become magically real (although it all seems quite normal to Harold), and he can walk through them at will — drawing and creating his world as he goes.

Wow.

That giving a book with this radical and mind-altering concept to his impressionable young son was indeed a mistake, only dawned on my father when heard me making odd scraping noises behind the couch and, pulling the couch away from the wall, discovered that I had drawn and scribbled, with my own magical crayons, my beautiful, multi-colored crayons, my waxy, incredibly-hard-to-wash-off, paint-resistant, indelible, cling-to-your-wall-forever, hours-of-elbow-grease-to-remove crayons,… on a considerable area of the wall behind the couch.

My parents didn’t scold me though, bless their hearts forever. The were never likely to discourage me from drawing or creating in any way, but it was… strongly suggested that I use my crayons on other surfaces; and I was kept in supply with lots of coloring books (which I wasn’t all that interested in) and big sheets of inexpensive paper (much more to my liking) from which I would eventually learn to coax the magic of creating a world of my own liking by drawing what I wanted.