Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Canadian illustrator Gary Taxali has a nice printmaking-meets-subversive style to his work, incorporating an odd assortment of disjointed cartoon characters with words and letterforms. He even uses the inside covers of old books as his canvas, further connecting the print world with the art world. I dig the gritty, handcrafted method to his style of work. A nice change from the digital aesthetic.

Check out this fantastic little gallery of Little Golden Books. It appears to be put together by an MSN group devoted to vintage children’s illustrators. I distinctly remember owning a copy of that Old Mother Hubbard book…

I got an e-mail from my webhost yesterday that says I’ve been using “more than my fair share” of system resources, and that Drawn! has been moved to an “evaluation server” to handle the load while I find ways to reduce stress on the machines running the site. I’ve reduced the amount of entries on the front page by half, and the amount of entries in the RSS feed to the 5 most recent in the hopes that the pages will load quicker and, in the case of the RSS feed, less frequently. I can’t afford to move the site to a dedicated server, and I’d hate to disable the RSS feed just to keep the site alive, so hopefully reducing the amount of visible articles will do the trick.

In the meantime, you can support the site by buying some cool t-shirts from Veer (that little orange box underneath the Google ad to your right). Thanks for making Drawn! so popular that within two months alarms started going off at my webhost!

Autumn Whitehurst’s work is a beautiful combination of vector lines and digital airbrush. More of her work at Altpick, and some interviews to boot.

Every time I see an illustration by Edwin Fotheringham I gush at his linework. His drawings look like they may have jumped from the pages of Punch, but with a slight touch of saturday morning cartoons — the bastard love child of Ronald Searle and Hanna-Barbera.

You must visit the website of Chris Harding now and revel in the dry wit and lovely visuals that consumes his work. Revel in it, I say! Superb Flash animation (this is the way it should be done, folks) offset by fantastic painterly backgrounds and great character design make up the short, Learn Self Defense. The best retro-50’s animated industrial I’ve seen this side of 1957 (again, animated in Flash!) constitutes Make Mine Shoebox — the short was actually produced for Shoebox to screen at various corporate gatherings and events.

Chris’s style and talent seems to be unmatched in the way he approaches his animated films. And he’s got quite a sense of humor, too. Must visit and must see his work. Revel now!

Nick Anderson, who takes home 2005’s Pullitzer Prize for editorial cartooning, is interviewed by NPR. Anderson, unlike many these days, doesn’t pull his punches in his work. The interview is worth listening to, especially to hear Anderson telling Terry Gross about the ins and outs of Corel Painter.

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John Romita Sr. was one of my favorite comic book artists as a kid. His clean, crisp style, coming from the romance comic tradition, made Marvel superheroes look ‘real’ to me. Romitaman has loads of his artwork (mostly Spiderman) for sale and viewing pleasure, alongside comic book art from dozens of other top notch artists. Lots to look at. And speaking of Spidey… if, like me, you love the psychedelic look of the original ’60’s cartoon show, RetroCRUSH has a nifty article with lots of nice screen shots in their archives. They also have some other cool stuff, so you might want to dig through here, too.

Mary and Kimberly say, “We combined our fondness for vintage sewing patterns with our need to be bitchy and mean and cruel,” when they came up with Threadbared, a blog in which they post images of kitschy sewing pattern illustrations along with snarky commentary and narration.

The Crockett Johnson Homepage is a nice smallish tribute to the man who created the comic strip Barnaby (the forerunner to Calvin & Hobbes) and wrote such celebrated childrens’ books as Harold and the Purple Crayon.