Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

BibliOdyssey shares with us E.H. Shepard’s wonderful illustrations to Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.

E.H. Shepard previously on Drawn!: Original Winnie the Pooh drawings.

Here’s a great resource for anyone looking for inspiration on anything Japanese: vintage pictures. The author of this site was one Michael, who was a pretty good photographer and writer in his own right. He also had/has a blog. There, you will see he passed away a year ago. My thanks to his family, who seem to have decided to let his stuff stay up online.

This collection of vintage Space Age illustrations not only makes one ask, “Where’s my flying car?” but also “Where’s my personal submarine?” and “Where’s my motorized water polo horse?”

Billy Mavreas has scanned in several American joke book cover illustrations from 1905, published by Wheman Bros. of NY. Says Billy:

I think they rock. The line work is reminiscent of 60s undergrounds. But i must warn all viewers, some are blatantly racist/offensive.

Gorgeous. This lovely calligraphy is from Studies in Pen Art, published by William E Dennis in 1914. Download the entire pamphlet as a free PDF from Luc Devroye’s typography links.

(via peacay’s Google Reader shared items)

Back in design school, one of our assignments was to create a travel brochure for a destination of our choice. Naturally, I chose the moon. That’s why I love this look at various vintage-looking science fiction travel and propaganda posters — including work from Wall•E and Futurama.

Shown here, one of several brilliant pieces from Steve Thomas.

Speaking of vintage comics, one of my very favorite blogs on the subject is Stripper’s Guide, overseen by Allan Holtz. He has a great line-up of regular features, including “Obscurity of the Day” and the revelatory “Herriman Saturday”.

I had no idea Herriman’s skills were so broad and that his subject matter could be so topical until I started reading the Stripper’s Guide. Holtz does a great job of providing context too, so there’s no need to wonder what’s going on in Herriman’s editorial illustrations (like the one above).

I’m surprised this treasure-trove of comics hasn’t been profiled here on Drawn previously, so it’s about time I shared one of the highlights of my rss feed.

The ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive has an excellent overview of one of my favorite vintage comic strips, Polly and Her Pals.

Shorpy is “a blog about old photos and what life a hundred years ago was like: How people looked and what they did for a living, back when not having a job usually meant not eating.” What a great collection of vintage photographs. Lots of inspiration to be found here.

Read about the site’s namesake here.

My brain nearly exploded checking out the almost endless stream of vintage and retro design/illustration, and what looks to be plenty of contemporary visuals inspired by the past: A Celebration of Vintage and Retro Design

Most of the images in the list branch off to their sources, plenty of which are Flickr feeds. This image comes from the exhaustive Mid-Century Illustrated pool.

(Thanks, Max!)