I’ll post more tomorrow including the winner…

Two weeks left till we roll out to the summer hours and I can’t wait. As much as I enjoy being in school I am soooooo looking forward to this summer and not being on as much of a grind.

I’m posting my second pass at the large pastel drawing I have going on in Life Drawing and a quicker, one session drawing from life drawing with Sidney Goodman this morning. I was much happier with this quicker study done in pastel on Ingres paper.

It seems this semester I had a lot more male models than any previous semester which was a different challenge in some aspects.i think the male models were less graceful that the females and this makes doing an interesting drawing a bit more of a challenge at times. I’d want more dynamic poses than dudes standing or sitting.

I plan on working more from private models this summer and trying some more interesting poses.

Dallas Poague of Monkey in a Dryer and Pally Pal paper toys has recently put his love of the great 1930s where his internet is! Although the site is currently under construction, his tribute to Ub Iwerks is chock fulla interesting facts, comical cartoons and a 90-minute biography of the man behind the man who swiped The Mouse right out from under him (citation needed)! So go pop some corn, grab a sarsaparilla and while away the day watching cartoons in living blackened white – just the way your grandparents like ‘em!

Posted by Stephan Britt on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog |
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Tags: 1930s, Animation, cartoons, Flip the Frog, Monkey in a Dryer, Pally Pal, Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney

Craig Yoe’s latest book celebrating cartoon history, The Complete Milt Gross Comic Books and Life Story is not so much a book as it is a small museum. All cartoonists should be so lucky to get such a lovingly assembled retrospective.

The book is not a complete collection of Gross’s work, but does represent a complete collection of the artists’s hard-to-find comic book work. What’s more is the sheet amount of extras, photos, sketches, original art, and other rare pieces of Milt Gross ephemera that you’ll find in its pages.

The meat of the book is the comics, though. Milt Gross’s cartooning is loose and wild, and is quite unlike anything that came before or after. Although I’ve been marginally aware of Milt Gross’s work with the help of books like Dan Nadel’s Art Out of Time and the National Cartoonist Society’s Milt Gross Fund (now the NCS Foundation), this book offered me my first substantial introduction to his work.

It’s a manic, colourful world where anything goes. Gross’s floppy-armed grotesque characters that zoom from one antic to the next remind me of The Muppet Show if they remind me of anything, and that’s most certainly a good thing.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog |
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Tags: Books, Comics, Milt Gross

Have a peek into the sketchbooks of Jorge González.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog |
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Tags: Drawing, Jorge González

Here’s a fun activity if you’re looking for a little comicking inspiration. Jason Turner has started what he calls The Page 100 Project.

Take one of your favourite books, turn to page 100, and adapt it into a comic.

Here’s another from Emily Carroll, adapting page 100 from Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone:

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog |
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Tags: Books, Comics, Emily Carroll, Illustration, Jason Turner

Joy Ang sent me the comics anthology she edited with Nick Thornborrow called The Anthology Project. It’s a gorgeous package, with one of Joy’s lush illustrations on the cover, and an irresistible gold foil type treatment.

Fans of the Flight series of anthologies may want to check this one out. It features a similar makeup of short fantasy-driven head-in-the-clouds comic stories. I found several of them to have more style than substance, but overall, it’s a neat little package.

I’m mostly happy that the book gave me a chance to rediscover Joy’s work. Her comic is one of the strongest in the book, and it looks like candy:

You can see previews of the stories at The Anthology Project website and more of Joy’s work at JoyAng.ca.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog |
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Tags: Comics, Joy Ang, Nick Thornborrow

Did this some time ago for Penthouse magazine’s erotic fiction article. This is the fullpage illustration, and it was accompanied by a spot. You can see both illustrations on my website: fullpage and spot.

Daniel Clowes’s new graphic novel Wilson comes out next week. I’ve read it, and loved it.

The antihero Wilson is a not unfamiliar Clowes character. He’s a cynical loner type reflecting on a life of failed relationships, both familial and romantic.

But where it gets interesting for me is in the cartooning itself.

The story is made up of individual standalone one-page gags, each reminiscent of a large Sunday comic strip, but telling a larger story when stitched together. This sense of reading the Sunday funnies is compounded by Clowes’s decision to draw these pages in a wide range of cartoon styles, each different from the next. So the reading experience is both entirely familiar, and unlike anything else I’ve read.

The variety of form makes it a book that highlights how comics are used to tell stories, as much as it tells one itself. And perhaps, too, it reflects how moments in our lives take on different forms in our memories. Then again, as someone who often finds it difficult to sustain or commit to a style for too long, I probably would have found the process of switching it up to be quite freeing. But as Tom Spurgeon says in his review, it’s “the hook for comics book club meetings, Internet chats and convention dinners for months if not years to come.” It’s an effect that gives Wilson a unique way with which to engage the reader. Each page is an encapsulated micro story, one which you can stop to study further, or quickly move past to get to the next.

I’m looking forward to seeing Clowes at TCAF in a few weeks. He kicks off the Toronto event with a presentation of the book.

Posted by John Martz on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog |
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Tags: Books, Comics, Daniel Clowes