Waffle

Le site officiel de Laurel contient des dessins mignons, sexys et bien-faits. Ses BDs sont drôles aussi.
(Trouvé par Peter Breedveld)

(This is about all I have to show for the French I took for five years in secondary school. Sad how that gets rusty. But Laurel's drawings are quite lovely)

Pete linked to this convoluted website, and I took a look at it, as one does. Holy crap, it's got Szukalski art on it!

One of my studio mates once brought a book of Szukalski's art to the studio, and I was immediately fascinated by it. His sculpture looked like something from an undiscovered culture, but executed by the hand of a pre-modern master. A lot of it was destroyed or stolen in the upheavals in his native Poland during and after World War II. His drawings were an extention of that sculpture work: meticulous, skillful and strange.

Whether it was the loss of the work of the first half of his life, or some genetic disposition, or both, I can't tell, but one other thing was clear from reading the book: Szukalski was also absolutely insane. I know some of my readers hate terms like "fucking nuts" or "batshit insane", but he was both, and more. Szukalski devoted the second half of his long life, and his considerable artistic skills, to documenting a racial theory he had invented, called Zermatism, in which he argued that mankind had been polluted through contact with subhuman ape-men, yetis, or ahumans. His illustrations included many portraits of historical figures, purporting to demonstrate that history's worst villains, the Stalins and Hitlers (as well as anyone else Szukalski didn't like), were all ape-men, a contamination of the pure and good human race. The text of the book my studio-mate showed me was full of invective against anyone suspected of being an ape-man, the offspring of human beings raped by ape-men, or contaminated by the ideologies of ape-men. From reading it, those categories eventually came to include anyone who wasn't Szukalski.

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Another artist I liked on Deviantart has a Sketch Blog. I should gather my art blog links up some time and blogroll them, soon.

Like just about everyone else, I love Art Lad's web place. The six-year-old artist isn't just very talented, he thinks like artist, looking at his work and saying "It looked better in my head". His dad helps him with the reading and the writing, but the insight is all his. And he looks like he's having fun working on his art. (Via Drawn. BTW at the time of writing, the site appears to be broken. I don't know what's going on with that. Let's hope Dad will keep us posted.)
Also seen on Drawn, Funny Cute has lots of caricatures in development, including many of women. Many artists find female caricature very difficult, and I hope to find inspiration in this site in the near future.
Lauren Bergholm is an artist whose work I spotted on DeviantArt where she posted mostly penciled Harry Potter fan art. If that doesn't sound too appetising, I should add that her interpretations of the characters were all original, not based on the book jackets or the movies, and really fun to look at although few of them stood out individually. She does cute character portraits.

Quick Tutorial on drawing the male torso. Could come in handy.

I don't have time to post a full report from Denmark yet, so instead I'll leave you with this thought for the weekend: Is it just me or does the logo graphic for Blank Label Comics look like a feminine hygiene product? It's the first association that comes to my mind when I see it, anyway.
"Blank Label Comics - It's curved, just like you are." Except it isn't, really.

Ursula Vernon has a Deviant Art site with lots of cool stuff on it. Once you've rushed to that site to gaze on her imaginative, stylish art, come back here.

Back? Good. I wanted to point out one piece in particular, to wit, this one:

This image is proof that great minds think alike, although it also proves that some great minds are better at getting their ideas into concrete form than others. Those of you who are already familiar with the cast of The Stone of Contention, whether through reading it online in the mid-90s or through reading the print version from the same period, will notice that the Orcish Warrior Woman Ruby Elfgutter painted by Ursula is very similar in personality and appearance (well.... conceptually at least) to Ghrghuha the Gnomian Warrior Woman from "Contention". Ursula's creation has shades of Nanny Ogg in her, which I thoroughly approve of as well.

I wish I could draw like that. Heck, I wish I could afford to hire Ursula for a story or two.

There's plenty in that gallery that I haven't seen yet, so I'll spend some more of my idle time (of which there's been quite a lot this past week as I'm winding down my activities in preparation for a vacation) cyberstalking herperusing her works.

Are you, or do you know someone who is, the dirtiest child in the Netherlands? Can you walk out the door, freshly showered and in your best clothes, and get grime on you before you're past the garden fence? Does dirt like you? Then the parenting magazine J/M wants your story as part of their celebration of Annie M.G. Schmidt week, May 17-23. Annie M.G. Schmidt was the Netherlands' best-loved childrens' book writer, and this year's featured character is Floddertje, a little girl with a penchant for getting very very filthy indeed.

If you're not the dirtiest child in the Netherlands, you can still go to the Floddertje website to enjoy Fiep Westendorp's fantastic illustrations (see Voorpublicatie).

Through Drawn!:
Two great illustrators where mentionend on Drawn! recently. The first, Tadahiro Uesugi, is a Japanese master of illustration. He makes wonderful intuitive drawings, with great sense of texture and colour.
Pictures of his current exposition in Japan can be found here. His work has a retro feel to it, as well as the work of the second artist mentioned: Ronnie Del Carmen. He works at Pixar as a story artist, story supervisor, character designer, and illustrator. His illustrations also display a great feeling for colour, form and composition. Their work, especially Uesugi's, remind me a bit of that of the late great Dutch artist Fiep Westendorp. Unfortunately I can't seem to find a good gallery of her work, when I do, I'll update this.
Retro '50's, '60's and '70's style illustration really seems back with a bang, beautifully integrated in Pixars' "the Incredibles," especially if you know the Art of the Incredibles book.

A while ago, Adam suggested to me that I should have done Professor R?sdondr's testimoney in the style of Nineteenth-Century biologist Ernst Haeckel. At that time, I'd already finished the work on that section but in case I ever need a reference for that style again, here's a collection of Haeckel's drawings, mostly of marine invertebrates. Found on the ever-interesting Boing Boing.

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