Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Nuthin’ But Mech promises robots, and robots is what it delivers. The group blog features mech, robots, and automatica drawn by almost two dozen different artists, including Jake Parker, who work is shown here.

Alberto Mielgo is a Spanish illustrator living in London. He is a masterful painter who has an astonishing ability to create a kind of reductive literal realism that appears almost photographic. Here’s a small section…

… of a much larger illustration Mielgo created for an advertising client. On his blog he explains how he did six comprehensive roughs before this version of the image was settled on… and then, after execution, the project died!

Mielgo hints at his work on many major film and video game productions… but unfortunately, because of corporate secrecy, he is often unable to share much of that work with us. He had to take down an example of his contribution to Beatles Rockband, but was allowed to show a sketch from a Dorian Grey film project.

Alberto has also done some comics projects. This is a page from a story he drew for Image’s Popgun #3.

Illustration, concept art, comics… *whew!* … and somehow Mielgo finds the time to do fine art gallery painting as well!

Alberto Mielgo’s website.

Chris Appelhans has posted some lovely concept art for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. So great!

And if you missed it, check out my interview with Fantastic Mr. Fox storyboard artist Christian De Vita.

One of the most impressive illustrators working in film production today is Rodolfo Damaggio.

Damaggio worked as a comic book artist for DC in the 1990’s before moving on to do concept art and storyboards for such summer blockbusters as MI3, Lemony Snicket’s SoUE, Hidalgo, Indiana Jones 4, and Fantastic Four “Rise of the Silver Surfer”, among many others.  Pouring through Damaggio’s website will leave you feeling a little overwhelmed by his stunning sense of cinematic perspective – not to mention his rock-solid drawing and painting skills.  This guy is good.

Artist Jay Epperson has been posting lots of concept art that he created and art directed for the Nintendo DS game Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure. Check out his blog for background paintings, character designs, sketches, pixel art, and more.

Jake Parker has just finished posting the last installment of a series of posts featuring concept art he created for Blue Sky’s adaptation of Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who. Here’s the roundup:

• Props and transportation
• Jungle of Nool
• The speck
• A map of Whoville
• Whoville concepts I
• Whoville concepts II
• Whoville concepts III

Here’s a cool video for the concept artists and industrial designers in the crowd. ILoveSketch is a 3D sketching system being developed at the University of Toronto described as an “as-natural-as-possible sketching system for creating 3D curve models”.

Feast your eyes on the gorgeous work on display at the Concept Ships blog. The scene above was created by Dan Blomberg.

(via bbGadgets)

BoingBoing Gadgets has a nice informal chat with concept artist and designer, Syd Mead, whose work on Blade Runner may be the most convincing and enduring sci-fi art ever translated to film.

Of course, Mead is rather humble about the whole thing: “I wasn’t in the movie business and I didn’t particularly care, I was just doing a design job.”

Also of interest:
Joel Johnson interviews Syd Mead: part 1
Joel Johnson interviews Syd Mead: part 2
BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT on Amazon

Gorilla Artfare is a collective of illustrators, concept artists and designers. Their group blog, even in its nascent state, is already overflowing with a lot of very impressive work.