With regards to the shameless plagiarism case mentioned in the post below, I’m pretty disgusted with the marginalization of visual art in general. As if our work isn’t worthy of the respect other creators and researchers get. As it happens, I just wrote a letter of protest to the president of Stony Brook University, where I am a student, complaining of her unilateral removal of art from a campus wide arts festival.
Perhaps this is why I am so appreciative of Natalie Kocsis’ scrappy drawings – they perfectly express how I feel right now. Off with their heads!! Natalie says in her bio she is working on a book called Lucy Goes to Coney Island… I look forward to seeing it.
I love, love, love these cartoonish studies of “the costumes of the Portuguese” from an album of sketches dating back to 1836. I spotted these over at the mighty BibliOdyssey. The high-res versions can be found at the National Library of Portugal.
Artist Mark Penxa has created a series of 100 portraits of old ball players with the mouthful of a title Stealing Signs: Dead-Ball Era Baseball – Memories from My Last Life; 1927
There are so many wonderful illustrations by James Gulliver Hancock, it was hard to pick just one to show here. If that wasn’t enough, he does animation too:
Artists Dave Rau and Josh Bertrand created this digital collage piece, and are experimenting in a philosophy of open remixes, by offering all the original, high-res source photography available for download on their website for you to download, deconstruct, and create with. Pretty cool.
If the illustration world has any rock stars, James Jean is certainly one of them. We’ve only briefly had a peek at James Jean’s work for Prada here, but for a more in-depth peek at this cultural mash-up of fashion and comics, look to no other than comics-blogger and Beguiling manager Chris Butcher. Chris gives the fashion line the attention it deserves, with a look at the pieces themselves, and some sharp commentary on the seeming lack of attention given to James Jean’s contribution:
While industry sites had made notice of Jean’s mural and film, no one (myself included) seemed to have noticed that James Jean’s palette, visual style, and even his actual illustration, is present across almost the entire line, and to be found in the pages of virtually every fashion magazine around the world.
Fantagraphics has posted the winning entry for their open call for submissions to their second BEASTS! book. The lucky beasties are these nymphs by Jennifer Tong.
See a few more of editor Jacob Covey’s favourite non-winning entries over at the BEASTS! Blog, and dozens more in a Flickr group where you can post your own entry, if you participated.
Artist Mark Penxa has created a series of 
Nathan Mazur has just finished a series of 50 eensy paintings named 
