ILLUSTRATION ART
1,032 FOLLOWERS
Celebrating great art in humble places, the glorious talents of the artists who illustrate stories, advertisements and comics.
ILLUSTRATION ART
2d ago
This drawing by James Montgomery Flagg is as confident and brash as Flagg himself.
The drawing is large-- nearly 30 inches (76 cm) and appears to have been drawn mostly from the elbow.
Like Franklin Booth, Flagg created values with numerous parallel lines:
However, unlike Booth, Flagg used bold lines, aggressively combining pen and brush. Booth carefully planned his drawings, but you can see from Flagg's pencil lines how loose and fluid his preparations were.
This is not digital drawing. You don't see much like it these days.
  ..read more
ILLUSTRATION ART
1w ago
Franklin Booth (1874-1948) learned to draw by studying wood engravings in magazines while he was growing up on a farm in Indiana. He mistakenly thought the engravings had been created with pen and ink, and so developed his highly unusual drawing style simulating engraving lines.
I usually prefer drawings with a more direct and expressive line, as opposed to clusters of lines used to create values. There always seems to be more painstaking effort than necessary in Booth's drawings. Still, when you look at extreme closeups of what Booth accomplished, you have to respect ..read more
ILLUSTRATION ART
2w ago
The popular arts were never exactly subtle about the roles of men and women:
Flash Gordon by Alex Raymond
Prince Valiant by John Cullen Murphy
Prince Valiant by Hal Foster
But words are only one small part of an illustration. The non-verbal part-- the lines and colors-- can have a gender orientation as well. In the 1950s, illustrator Albert Dorne was commissioned to illustrate a story for Cosmopolitan magazine. The story involved a barn that burns down at night, a cow, and a boy and girl being confronted by crooks. Dorne turned ..read more
ILLUSTRATION ART
1M ago
There's a long tradition of wars with-- and about-- ink:
(The Ink Battle by Utagawa Kuniyoshi 1843)
Ink has left a trail of rivalry, braggadocio, hostility and sometimes just general commotion.
Ink as a weapon can be flung, spattered and scrubbed; it can be a tool for slapstick and a tool for marking rivals with an indelible stain.
(Toshikage, 7 Gods Fighting with Ink, 1888)
(The Ink War)
There's no denying the yang in ink. Even when it's not literally ammunition, it frequently serves as metaphorical ammunition. It settles scores. It inflic ..read more
ILLUSTRATION ART
1M ago
There's a long tradition of wars with-- and about-- ink:
(The Ink Battle by Utagawa Kuniyoshi 1843)
Ink has left a trail of rivalry, braggadocio, hostility and sometimes just general commotion.
Ink as a weapon can be flung, spattered and scrubbed; it can be a tool for slapstick and a tool for marking rivals with an indelible stain.
(Toshikage, 7 Gods Fighting with Ink, 1888)
(The Ink War)
There's no denying the yang in ink. Even when it's not literally ammunition, it frequently serves as metaphorical ammunition. It settles scores. It infli ..read more
ILLUSTRATION ART
1M ago
"To live is to war with trolls." -- Ibsen
Anthropologists tell us that primitive cultures believed art had supernatural properties. Prehistoric tribes thought that striking a drawing of an animal on a cave wall would give them luck in the hunt.
Diorama from the Field Museum in Chicago
Apotropaic images were believed to contain protective magic. Ancient Egyptians believed that images had the power to connect them with the gods, and that carvings in tombs would come alive in the afterlife.
They also believed that a person would be destroyed if his cartouche ..read more
ILLUSTRATION ART
1M ago
I like Tomi Ungerer's drawing about the nature of men and women:
The lines may appear light and slapdash, but the ideas have genuine weight. It's an excellent example of conceptual or “idea” art, which transformed the field of illustration in the latter part of the 20th century. This type of art abandoned the traditional, literal approach to picture making in favor of visualizing ideas using metaphors, symbols, visual puns and word play.
The great Saul Steinberg said, "drawing is a way of reasoning on paper."
Steinberg explains, "The vulnerable ..read more
ILLUSTRATION ART
2M ago
"To live is to war with trolls." -- Ibsen
The United Nations Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space strictly forbids "harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies." It explicitly prohibits placing weapons of mass destruction in outer space.
Despite this prohibition, sculptures by marketing con artist Jeff Koons landed on the moon yesterday in the NASA-funded moon lander Odysseus. Koons now crows that he created "the first authorized artwork on the moon."
As if this act of extraterrestrial vandalism wasn ..read more
ILLUSTRATION ART
2M ago
When I first saw the ceilings of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, I was gobsmacked by their ornamentation -- nearly a hundred galleries dense with weird figures, mysterious symbols, grotesque creatures, bizarre landscapes and mythological tableaus, stretching as far as the eye could see. (Virtual tour courtesy of Google Maps available here ).
The ceilings on the Uffizi corridors were painted by teams of artists starting in 1579 and took hundreds of years to complete. But the ornate style originated in the ancient palace of the Roman emperor Nero, the ins ..read more
ILLUSTRATION ART
3M ago
In my recent post admiring a painting of a tree, someone commented that artists have been drawing trees for 30,000 years, and suggested that there could not be much new to say. But as William Irwin said, "the question is permanent; answers are temporary."
Trees may not have changed much in 30,000 years but nevertheless here are some innovative pictures of trees that I think are absolutely marvelous:
The brilliant draftsman Robert Fawcett draws tropical trees outside a hut:
Note how he drags a drybrush along their winding forms, then rounds them with shadows of leaves:
The brill ..read more