Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Ladies and gentlemen, Jesus 2000.

I recently snagged Christian Northeast’s new book: Prayer Requested. It’s a delightful hodgepodge of drawings, collage, and hand lettering that illustrate random prayers he found on the Internet. It’s touching, funny, odd, and completely inspiring. You can see more of Christian’s work, and download some sample pages from the book, on his website.

Here’s a stretch of Aaron Costain’s surreal, profound and funny comic, Entropy along with this short interview with Aaron about his work.

You can read all of Entropy (as well as Aaron’s other comics) over on Aaron’s site.

I’m the graphic fiction editor for carte blanche, which is the online journal for the Quebec Writer’s Federation.

Also check out:
Calamity Coach: 13 Reasons not to Travel by Aaron Costain

Hogan’s Alley has posted a wonderful and in-depth interview with the late Johnny Hart. The discussion covers a lot of ground: both the writing and drawing process of cartooning, the structure of jokes, Johnny’s artistic influences, religion, and some biographical topics. I was particularly drawn to the discussion of the creative process. Some stand-out quotes from Hart include:

Yeah, a lot of times we draw more than we need to draw. It’s always really classy to let the reader in on it, let him do most of the work.

And on the subject of using a comic strip to spread a religious message:

It reaches a good audience, the kids. You have the gimmick that attracts an audience and you can either… you’re talking about going for broke, putting out that message in comic books? Yeah, this is one of those ideas that I’ve been entertaining . . . like a comic book or even maybe a children’s book.

Pixar artist, and author of Little India, Sanjay Patel was commissioned by the New York Times to create an editorial illustration about Diwali, India’s “festival of lights.” Unfotunately due to the recent bombings in Delhi, the editors thought the piece would seem trivial and decided not to run it. Today marks the third (and primary) day of Diwali’s 5-day celebration, and I’m happy to post Sanjay’s illustration here on Drawn! Click the image for full size, and be sure to visit Sanjay’s site.