Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Brendan Wenzel has been posting some wonderful animal illustrations over at his blog.

Dig deeper, and you’ll find more fun watercolours, like these heads:

Designer and illustrator Ty Wilkins (founder of Type Theory) has a small (but hopefully growing) collection of animal illustrations made up of a nice mix of vector shapes and hand-painted textures.

One of my most prized books is the beautiful, and massive Charley Harper: An Illustrated Life. It’s a book filled with Harper’s brilliant modernist nature illustrations, and one that I think belongs in every illustrator’s collection. Two factors otherwise prohibit more people from adopting the book into their libraries: the book’s physical size (it’s so big, mine hides away in a drawer because no bookshelf can handle it, and it’s big enough to be its own coffee table) and its hefty $200 pricetag ($135 on Amazon).

As a book, it’s a work of art itself, and it’s truly inspiring to flip through and be fully enveloped by its pages, but I’ve always wished there was a more accessible showcase of his career for the more casual (and thrifty) fan. I suppose AMMO Books agrees; they have just released a popular edition of Charpey Harper: An Illustrated Life — the same book, but considerably smaller (and bookshelf friendly) and at an affordable $49.95 ($32.97 on Amazon).

So if you have been pining for this collection, but could never justify the price, now you have no excuse. And, of course, if money is no object, there’s always the limited editions from AMMO for $400 that are signed by Charley Harper and author Todd Oldham, and come with a fancy slipcase and one of Harper’s silkscreen prints. Yowza.

Previously: Charley Harper 1922-2007

Hold onto your hubcaps kids! Although it’s been said many times that one man’s trash is another man’s art supplies, it bears repeating. Case in point, UK artist Ptolemy Elrington’s fantastically accurate menagerie, created entirely of hubcaps and recycled materials:

“Hubcap creatures are made entirely from re-cycled materials. All the hubcaps are found, usually on the side of the road, and therefore bear the scars of their previous lives in the form of scratches and abrasions. I believe these marks add texture and history to the creatures they decorate, and so choose not to fill, overpaint or alter them in any way.”

If you’d like to adopt one of his wonderful wheel cover creatures, he has plenty of amazing creations to choose from. Also be sure to check out his other work, commissions and past creations for more previously discarded born-again beasties.

Jake sends in this link to scans of a card game set called Animal Families, which seems to be a varaition on the Happy Families games we blogged about back in August. More fun things like this set can be found at Things Magazine