Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

My new favourite webcomic? Justin Winslow’s adorable and hilarious Mythfits starring a robot and a unicorn in love.

(via @JoeBluhm.)

Matthew Cruickshank presents Philip & The Stove, a wordless comic/illustrated story told with some beautiful digital illustrations. See also: Matthew’s blog.

It’s March, so you know what that means. It’s time for March MODOK Madness. All month various artists are submitting their interpretations of the classic and ridiculous Jack Kirby and Stan Lee creation.

Here’s my favourite so far — a MODOK version of Poncho from my pal Paul Gilligan’s comic strip Pooch Cafe.

Maria Stuart has a blog of daily drawings that, with the captions added, are like sublime little cartoons: Mrs. Stuart’s Dailys.

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.

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:

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:

Christophe Marchetti is a Belgian comics creator and ten year veteran of video game character design and background painting.
Christophe has been sharing his beautiful artwork on Flickr. Go! Be inspired!

Bizarro creator and comic artist Dan Piraro announces today his new…

…a Bizarro iPhone app! Boy, am I excited about it! I’ve been working for months with some very cool app designers here in NYC and we’ve come up with a new innovation in the comics-for-phones field!

Previously, with other comics apps, you could only buy a given number of cartoons and cram them into your phone and when you’d seen them all, that was that. Could take you ten minutes, could take you ten years.

With the Bizarro app, a NEW COMIC is added EVERY DAY! (The same comic that appears in newspapers.) PLUS, at any given time there is a YEAR’S ARCHIVE of comics that can be accessed super easy and fast from a handy-dandy calendar page.