Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

In these videos, Gabe Swarr shows how he creates his webcomic Big Pants Mouse using, first, Photoshop for his roughs, and then Flash for his final artwork. Note how Gabe pulls parts of his characters, pre-drawn, from a library of stock parts, but also mentions how he does this only when appropriate, and still draws poses from scratch when stock pieces don’t exist.

(via Cartoon Brew)

Missile Mouse artist Jake Parker offers up a look at his process in a post titled Fixing It Old School.

Not only do we see his rough sketches, and editorial process, but he reveals how he fixes an inking mistake without (gasp!) using Photoshop.

Watch Chris Samnee ink Swamp Thing using a Pentel brush pen.

Stephen Silver offers us this glimpse at his latest efforts for the Schoolism online art classes. The Masters Series: In the Studio With… is an ongoing documentary/interview series conducted by Stephen in the home studios of some cartooning greats. The first episode features iconic MAD Magazine caricaturist and parody artist Mort Drucker.

Stephen is as passionate about teaching others to love drawing as he is about drawing itself, so this is sure to be a great collection.

This short clips only whets my appetite for the full video, which will set you back $40.

Clement & Co. has started We Are the New Standard, an “ongoing documentary series covering people who are taking themselves and their work to a new level.” The first artist featured is Eric Nyquist, who speaks here on process and creativity.

Brian Biggs is easily one of my favourite children’s illustrators and I’ve been eagerly following his forays into screen printing (snagging a swell robot print along the way), so his most recent blog post is a real treat.

Brian shares a bit of his process, and walks us through the steps it took for him to take this:

…and turn it into this:

Work In Progress is a blog that shows comics pages coming to life from initial sketches to finished piece, with various stages in between. The images are all in Flash, and we see them blend seamlessly into each other, which makes for an interesting effect. The blog is in Spanish, but you certainly don’t need to be able to read any of the words to appreciate the work here.

Shown here, the work of Enrique Fernández.

Cartoonist Charlie Gavin created a step-by-step look at how he uses Manga Studio (along with Photoshop) to create his webcomic, Silver Age.

I quite like Manga Studio. It’s a product quite unlike any other, offering cartoonists and comic artists a tool designed specifically for creating comics. It’s hindered a little by an unpolished user interface, imperfect screen rendering at certain zoom levels, and a product name that might scare away customers who think it’s only for Japanese-style manga.

Plus, Smith Micro isn’t quite sure how to market it. Confusingly, there are two versions of the software, EX and Debut. Neither version’s page links to the other one’s, and the differences between the $50 and $300 pricetags aren’t evident.

See our previous post about how Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons used it to create an illustration of Rorschach.

Gallery 1988 has shared a glimpse into their upcoming exhibition, Under The Influence: Masters of the Universe. This Battlecat painting by Robert Burden is, in their own words, absolutely epic. Clearly Robert haaaas the powerrrrrr.

You can’t quite grasp the size of the piece until you see the artist standing beside it.

They’ve also shared this video of the painting in process:

A quick Googling for Robert Burden also led me to this process video of Robert painting a similarly epic Voltron piece:

Edmonton illustrator Raymond Biesinger (previously) has crafted a new blog called The Daily Sentry which aims to illuminate his illustration work’s “economics, reasoning, context and process”.

And even though, in his first entry, he takes a stab at illustration link-blogs — certainly he means some other illustration link-blog? — who are we to ignore such a promising link to blog? Raymond’s work is undeniably thoughtful, restrained, and beautiful, and I look forward to reading about how his illustrations come to be.