Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

A group of London artists is creating illustrations based on every song from the Magnetic Fields’ 3-disc 69 Love Songs: How Fucking Romantic.

Avery Hologram’s 365 Draweteria is a collaborative daily drawing project between Dan James of Ghostshrimp and his wife-to-be Sarah Locke of FOUND Magazine. Dan draws a picture every day, and Sarah colours it.

When a couple’s partnership extends into the artistic realm, their collaborations always seem to be something special. Such is the case with Kurt Huggins and Zelda Devon’s Teetering Bulb.

Sketchtravel is an international challenge bringing together more than 50 artists (famous or not). The challenge is to share ideas, concepts, moods, and styles of very different talented artists from all over the globe.

The skethbook will travel from one artist to another during one year — the book cannot be mailed; it must be delivered by hand, in person. When completed it will be exhibited at the Arludik Gallery in Paris and eventually sold at auction for charity.

It’s certainly not the first of its kind, but I love the idea that the book must be handed off in person from artist to artist. The book started with Pierre Alary in Paris, and the roster of contributing artists includes Peter de Sève (previously) and Vincent Di Nguyen (previously).

Penelope Dullaghan is fast becoming the official queen of collaborative illustration projects online. As offshoots of her wildly successful Illustration Friday, she occasionally curates similar mini-projects such as this Halloween’s Black & Orange, in which the only guideline was to create an illustration using those colours. The gallery is a trick treat to look through, although I wish that that the individual entries were properly credited. There is indeed a list of participants, but as far as I can tell no easy way to tell which piece belongs to which illustrator.

Credit edit: The cat shown here belongs to illustrator John Coulter. Visit his blog where a few more Halloween goodies await you.

After our post on BlueSky’s collaborative art challenge blog, reader Aaron Zenz wrote in to share some other sites with similar themed drawing activities:

This Princess Leia was created by Dave McClellan and was found at the Avalanche Software Art Blog, which has also just started its Halloween theme, Ghoulsmire Castle.

Drawer Geeks already has dozens of completed themes, many of which ask the artists for their take on specific characters. The most recent is the Grim Reaper, and the results are fantastic. This Nosferatu by Michael Moore was from last Halloween’s Movie Monsters challenge.

Finally, Toon Club doesn’t seem as active as the other two, but it still lots of fun. This wonderfully-skilled cartoon gator is courtesy of user Yendorb.

The always-awesome Jake Parker writes in to let us know about the BlueSky Studios Challenge, a collaborative blog that the creative folks at BlueSky Studios are taking part in:

Every week we set a topic and then everyone does their take on it. It’s open to the whole studio so sometimes you get designers, and other times you get production assistants contributing. For the most part it’s animators, story artists and designers who do stuff. I only share this with you becuase I thought it might be something other readers of DRAWN! would enjoy. This week we’re doing Classic Movie Monsters as we gear up for Halloween.

The results are fantastic. Some of the other themes they’ve already covered include animal hybrids, dinosaurs, the Muppets, and cartoons from the 80s. Just check out this superb Smurf by Jake himself.

Back in November we wrote about the 700 Hoboes project in which illustrators took it upon themselves to create illustrations of every one of John Hodgman’s 700 hobo names. The participants have finally fulfilled their promise and all 700 hoboes are accounted for over at E-Hobo.com.

Did you miss your chance to participate? No worries — there are already multiple versions of several hoboes, so pick your favourite name and make your own. Plus, the paperback edition of Hodgman’s The Areas of My Expertise promises 100 new bonus hobo names to add to the mix (and check out that hilariously hideous cover!)

Worthy of note are the too-numerous-to-mention contributions by Adam Koford, aka ApeLad, who apparently is an android and never sleeps.

Blank is a travelling, collaborative sketchbook journal akin to the 1000 Journals project and Look at Book. What I like about Blank is you can download full-size PDF versions of the books, and it’s all on a very simple, yet very well-designed site. They’re accepting participants for the next book, too, if you’re interested.

Our friends at Start a Story have just announced that the project called 5×5 is finally finished. In 5×5, twenty-five illustrators each designed one square in a 5×5 quilt of images. The first square illustrated was the central one and the rest were allocated from the centre outwards, each one interacting in some way with its bordering squares. Awesome!