Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Chhuy-Ing IA is a character designer, illustrator and animator. She lives and works in Paris. Here’s a page of her personal work from her website.

Chhuy-Ing IA also has a fantastic blog, Ciia… what’s up? with tons of fun art and delightful little animations – and she recently published a sketchbook.

In this video artist Tommy Kane combines video diary with travel sketchbook as we follow him through the streets of Beirut, Lebanon to watch him draw.

Check out Leigh Walton’s Tintin sketchbook Flickr set. Lots of great Tintins. And Haddocks. And Snowys.

Spanish cartoonist Juan Berrio (previously on Drawn!) has started a sketchbook for overheard snippets of conversations. He’s sharing the images via a blog called cuaderno de frases encontradas, which I clumsily computer-translated as notebook of found phrases.

I don’t speak Spanish, so I can’t fully appreciate the actual context of the sketchbook, but I think you’ll agree that drawings and bold, confident inking like this is universal:

Here’s a fun video of Juan making a sort of diorama of an apartment building out of a Moleskine notebook:

Gadgeteers, sci fi fans, and sketchbook lovers alert!

There’s a huge database of the drawings and notebooks of Karl Hans Janke. The text is in German, but thanks to the always wonderful blog BiblioOdyssey, we have information in English too. Apparently Janke was considered schizophrenic and so spent his life in a hospital, and he occupied himself with inventing stuff. Janke wanted his work to be shared. He wrote,

I ask you to keep the images and albums with the numerous drawings and models that I created for you humans.

How have I not posted Jamie Sutton (aka: Hobo Divine) here yet? You’ll love his many sketchbook posts and his animation.

I’ve always admired folks who take their pads, pencils, brushes and paint outdoors and document the world around them. I keep meaning to do this, but I love the comfort of my studio too much, and I’m very self-concsious when it comes to strangers watching me try and sketch from real life (one of the benefits of drawing goofy cartoons is that I don’t often hear comments like, “Hey! That doesn’t look like a midget pirate!”, ‘cuz like, just what is a midget pirate supposed to look like?)

Lately I’ve been enjoying the outdoor illustration work of artist Wilfred Wong, who bravely takes his drawing utensils out into the city of Toronto, and creates beautiful scenes from all over the city – the St. Lawrence Market, Baldwin Street, Old City Hall, Harbourfront, the Dufferin Mall, and well, basically any place that strikes his fancy.

Loving the peek into the sketchbooks of Aurélie Neyret over at her blog. Keeping digging back into past blog posts to see some of her comic work, and lots of digital painting process work as well.

Oh man, how did I not know that Italian cartoonist Gipi has a blog? Granted, it’s in Italian (natch) so I can’t read it, but it’s worth skimming through the various pages for the nice big scans of his comics, sketchbook pages, and bee-yoo-teeful watercolours.

Gipi’s comics, including Garage Band and Notes for a War Story (both translated into English), are among my favourites. His work gifts the reader with a sense of place and atmosphere unlike any other cartoonist’s work.

Zach Worton, whose graphic novel The Klondike will be published by Drawn & Quarterly later this year has finally joined the Online Revolution and joined Flickr.

You can also see his sketches on his blog, Ballad of a Cross-Hatch Junky and his journal comics at Flash Citrus. And you can follow his cranky tweets on Twitter.