Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Congratulations to our John Martz, for getting nominated March 12 for “Best Emerging Talent” in the annual Doug Wright Awards! His short “It’s Snowing Outside, We Should Go For A Walk” is the reason. Got a link to it, John?

Edit: Here’s the link — It’s Snowing Outside. We Should Go For a Walk.

Mike Lynch shares some real gems from his cartooning classes in a recent blog post:

How do you get to be a better cartoonist?

There is the old piece of advice: take a stack of paper the same height that you are. Draw on every one. When you get to the bottom, you’ve gotten a lot of the bad drawings out of your system and you’re a better artist.

Mike had his class of ten students draw 160 images in about 5 minutes. He prepared ten sheets of paper, each comprising a pre-labelled 4×4 grid. The students took turns passing the paper around and filling in a square of their choice.

A brilliant exercise. The results are fun and, though obviously childlike, say a lot about visual thinking and how little detail is truly needed to get an idea across.

In Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, a fifteen-week classroom in a book, his first week assignments include just such activities:

…Spend 3-4 minutes drawing a car. Then, start over and draw it in 2 minutes. Then 1 minute. Then 30 seconds. Then 15 seconds. And then 5 seconds. Draw faster at each step, that is, draw the entire car within the time limit. Repeat this same process for four other subjects: a cat, a castle, a telephone, and a self-portrait.

In the spirit of our recent post about Harmony – the beautiful html5 drawing tool – comes flame. Another online drawing toy that lets you draw with a brush of flames. You pick the colour and brush size.

Australian cartoonist Andrew Fulton would really like an iPad. And he wants you to pay for it.

Okay, not really. But, as a way to fund his technolust he’s selling custom tablet-themed drawings and comic strips: I’d really like to get an iPad, guys.

All that aside, Andrew’s comics are definitely worth your time, if you aren’t familiar with them. Since I last linked to him here a few years ago, Andrew’s comics have evolved into lovely, poetic things. His simple style has allowed him to play with panels, moods, and time in very interesting ways. His comics are among my favourite things on the Internet.

Some examples:

Harmony is an interesting online drawing tool made in HTML5 (Not Flash, I was surprised to learn). The samples here (and the link itself) are from Anthony “Nedroid” Clark on Twitter.

Here’s a video of the app being demoed:

Asaf Hanuka has been serializing his weekly comic, The Realist, about his family’s search for a new home. Originally serialized in an Israeli newspaper, Asaf presents the web version in both English and Hebrew.

(via Meathaus)

In honour of MAR10 Day, here’s a link to some wonderful Nintendo-inspired comics by Corey Godbey: Bit and Run.

Be sure to also check out Cory’s Nintendo-themed desktop wallpapers:

I know I’m preaching to the converted here, but this is a funny take on what freelance illustrators (and freelance everythings) go through on a daily basis.

via Francis Vallejo, (Art Contests: Unethical?)

I was browsing the Rabid Children Flickr group for artwork inspired by the music of They Might Be Giants, which introduced me to the work of Vancouver artist Hine Mizushima, whose little felted characters blew me away with pure cute (more at her Flickr stream).

I was then immediately reminded that she was responsible for the stop motion video for TMBG’s Why Does the Sun Shine? from their wonderful Here Comes Science:

You may be aware of Nathan Fowkes’ painting blog (Adam mentioned it back here), but have you seen his sketch blog? Years worth of gouache and watercolour landscape sketches and a few tutorials, like the one (partially) shown here.