Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

This trailer for the Bothers McLeod’s The Moon Bird is intriguing. I’m digging the black-and-white chalk drawing look; it’s nice and spooky, but without losing their trademark sense of fun.

Indian artist Rohit Iyer has been posting these fun little black-and-white doodles on his blog. He calls them Stretchmarks.

David Prosser uses black and white to great effect in his illustrations and animations. His website’s a bit clunky to navigate; click on the little house to find the menu. You can also visit his blog.

This film just played in Montreal at the Fantasia Film Festival. I couldn’t make the screening, but everyone’s buzzing about how good it was.

It’s a collection of creepy, black & white animated shorts by prominent comic book artists and animators (including Charles Burns).

Frames Per Second has a good write-up of the film here.

Dread Central also has a very positive review here.

Out on DVD later this year.

I’m not often a fan of “bad” drawing – sometimes it just seems like it’s trying too hard to be cool – but here’s a book where I think it really works well: I Can’t Wait by Serge Bloch, the mighty fine French designer-illustrator, and Davide Cali. What makes this work is the minimalist design of the book and the appropriateness of the introspective little drawings to a bare-bones and sentimental but universal story of life.

The lifeline is metaphorically told with a red thread laid on top of the drawings, that acts as a visual counterpoint to them. It’s such a seductive combination: black, white, red. In fact, here’s that combination successfully used again in an animation by Brad Mossman and Aaron Blecha, for a music piece just released this week by The Figurines.

Kellie Strøm is another one of those artists who’s so talented it almost makes me sick. Save some talent for the rest of us! His black-and-white line art, like the illustration shown here, is simply stunning, but his full-colour pieces are equally skillful.

Kenny Penman has interviewed Kellie for Forbidden Planet. The interview covers Kellie’s career from his earliest work through to his latest illustrated book, Sadie the Air Mail Pilot.

I love these high-contrast illustrations by Edmonton illustrator Raymond Biesinger. His method involves a motley combination of pencil, ink, computer, photography, collage, stamps, photocopiers, Letraset, and other low-tech techniques.

Author of End Times: Tiempos Finales and ink-and-brush genius, Sam Hiti has a new sketch blog.

(It’ll be interesting to see if he can actually keep up his ‘Rambo of the Week’ feature).

Bookmarked!