illustration

“The birds developed out of gag strips and short experiments I had started with. They began to develop personalities….But I didn’t really know how to draw comics. To a great extent, the story of this book is the story of me trying to figure out what I’m doing exactly. For as long as I can remember, I’ve spent a lot of time drawing pictures, and probably for that reason it was something I had become reasonably good at. Making comics, however, is about more than just being able to draw well. It involves rhythm and timing, directing the reader’s focus, making objects and faces recognizable from one panel to the next. Things as subtle as a character’s posture and the way a panel is framed convey information, whether intentionally or not. Part of the pleasure of drawing for me has always been to watch an image take shape in front of me, and to adapt and respond as it unfolds. There’s a way that drawing can be very improvisational. But in comics, if it isn’t consistent, you risk confusing your reader. If that happens more than once or twice, she will take her attention elsewhere.”

-Author and artist Anders Nilsen on his magnum opus, Big Questions, recently published by Drawn and Quarterly

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Just a couple of years after his then-ubiquitous and not-yet controversial poster of President Obama made the cover, Shepard Fairey is back at it again for Time‘s Person of the Year edition. The artist has designed the cover for the annual issue, wherein this time they picked “The Protestor”, once again skipping an individual person and instead focus more of a concept. If you’re familiar with Fairey’s work, you’ll of course recognize it immediately, with his familiar propaganda-esque illustration and coloring. Christopher Knight at the LA Times thinks the match between Fairey and Time is a perfect fit, though not at all in a good way, calling the Fairey a “designer dissident” and the only artist who “is really suitable for the job of creating the publication’s inevitably ironic cover.” Knight gets more critical from there. Here’s a bit:

The style oozes cozy, collectible nostalgia. On the cover of Time, the schmaltzy result trivializes the portentous power — and authentic potential — of the “Arab spring,” Occupy Wall Street and whatever might-or-might-not be breaking now in Russia. Questioning authority never looked more corporate and conventional.

Criticism aside, let’s just hope Fairey made sure to get the photo rights behind the illustration more squared away this time around.

In The Seven Crystal Balls, Tintin’s ride was a golden Lincoln Zephyr.

We’re slightly nervous about the Spielberg-directed The Adventures of Tintin, an animated 3-D extravaganza that brings Hergé‘s spunky gumshoe reporter to life (the title character is played by Jamie Bell, despite our entreaties that the role be given to Burberry’s Christopher Bailey). On the bright side, the film’s imminent American debut has occasioned some swell Tintin coverage. In the Wall Street Journal, Meghan Cox Gurdon did a fine job of elucidating the enduring appeal of the brave yet fallible young Belgian, whose dramatic adventures remain at human scale. “And he is always gorgeously drawn in the distinctive clean lines of his creator, Georges Remi (whose initials reversed and pronounced in French produced the nom de plume Hergé),” she writes. “Hergé’s style is so perfectly suited to the two-dimensional medium of comics that any digital version was bound to produce howls of outrage.” Meanwhile, Fred Bierman of The New York Times calls attention to Tintin’s excellent and wide-ranging taste in cars, from a 1921 Ford Model T to a 1971 Land Rover 109. And how’s this for a kicker?

The automobile is even responsible for Tintin’s most identifiable trait: the upturned tuft of his orange hair. In the first book, Tintin’s hair was combed flat, but it was a fast ride in an open-top 1925 Mercedes that gave rise to his now-famous hairstyle. It has stayed that way ever since.

Since Werner Herzog’s 3D film Cave of Forgotten Dreams was such a big hit earlier this year, should we now expect a follow up, wherein the adventurous director travels to the wilds of central London and dares enter a small apartment? If you’re a certain professor of archeology at the University of York, you apparently might consider it. The Telegraph reports that a handful of cartoons drawn by John Lydon (or Johnny Rotten) of the Sex Pistols have been discovered behind a cupboard in what are now offices. The archeologist in question is Dr. John Schofield who has compared the find with the cave paintings at Lascaux in France, or at the very least, perhaps even more important than the “lost early Beatles recordings” the BBC found in the mid-90s. In that case, Schofield is careful to remind that a producer at the time of that finding said the discovery was “like finding Tutankhamen’s tomb,” so his comparison to ancient cave paintings shouldn’t sound so absurd. That said, the Guardian‘s Johnathan Jones isn’t buying any of it. Writing that “archeologists should know better” and that anyone from that field who agrees with the importance of the find is merely doing so “to provoke their own profession” without really understanding that modern culture constantly “glorifies the immediate.” In a general sense, his argument seems to boil down to: why stoop to pop culture’s level when there’s legitimate, albeit less sexy, work to be done? Our personal addendum is that, while we genuinely like Lydon’s drawings, and realize their importance to the comparatively very recent history of music, isn’t it a bit premature to label something a major archeological find when the guy who drew them is still alive, and could likely redraw the same cartoons today?

It’s no secret that Chip Kidd is a big Batman fan. In fact, just a couple of years back, we were talking about exactly that, when we wrote about the famous design keeping tabs in his journal of all things Batman-related at that year’s Comic-Con. Now it seems that Kidd is making that love official, with the news coming last month that DC Comics had brought aboard Kidd to pen a full-length graphic novel and artist Dave Taylor to visually bring it to life. Though the news about Batman: Death By Design, which is set to be released sometime next year, has been circulating since mid-October, there have been a number of great interviews with both Kidd and Taylor out there, with new illustrations popping up from the book here and there. We point you first to Newsarama, who recently interviewed Kidd, learning that one of the story’s main villains is a new creation made by the designer himself. Named Exacto, Kidd describes him as “an architectural critic as a Batman villain.” Comic Book Resources also has a great talk with the designer from right after the NYCC event, wherein he talks a bit more about the artistic direction the book will be taking. Here’s a bit about coming up with the name and where it all goes from there:

I actually came up with the title first. I thought, “If it’s me and you know who I am and what I do, then I’m going to come at this whole thing from a design standpoint.” I’ve said for many years that Batman himself and especially the way he’s evolved is brilliant design. It’s problem solving. And we get into that in the story. Beyond that, it became about me going “What if?” What do I want that I haven’t seen? And really, the overall Art Direction for the book is “What if Fritz Lang made a Batman movie in the late 1930s and had a huge budget? Go!” There’s the visual platform.

Rule #82: Cook

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Michael Pollan elaborated on this omnivorous mantra in his 2009 book, Food Rules, which offered 64 “simple rules for eating healthily and happily.” Having spawned reader-created t-shirts, market bags, posters, and plenty of reader-submitted maxims, the book has been reborn in a glorious illustrated edition. The enhanced hardcover version of Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual (Penguin) goes on sale today and is awash in colorful, witty paintings by Maira Kalman. Elegantly designed by Claire Naylon Vaccaro, the book includes a new introduction and 19 additional food principles, such as “Love your spices” and “Place a bouquet of flowers on the table and everything will taste twice as good” (Kalman opts for a green fluted vase of hot pink poppies). And while there are plenty of fresh veggies and farm scenes to admire, Kalman’s signature way with pastry is featured in such rules as “Treat treats as treats” and “Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself,” which is matched with a Hostess cupcake. “When Michael asked if I would like to illustrate this book, I said two things. First, Yes. Absolutely Yes. Second, that Cheezdoodles had a beloved place in our family history,” explains Kalman in her handwritten introduction. “He did not hold that against me. This is a great country. Vast. Complicated,” she notes, pausing for a painting of a plump sausage floating on a pink ground. “With plenty of room for extremes.”

Get out your fancy pens and draw an elaborate box around November 4-13. That’s Illustration Week, an event bonanza featuring exhibitions, talks, panel discussions, and parties that will draw out a crowd of people who don’t blink when faced with questions such as “Prismacolors or Copics?” The fun begins next Friday, November 4, as Parsons the New School for Design plays hosts to the third annual Pictoplasma Conference, which invites designers, illustrators, fimmakers and producers, artists, and character connoisseurs to discourse freely about the world of character-driven art and design. The two-day event features lectures by global superstars such as Siggi Eggertsson, Wooster Collective, Jon Burgerman (whose work is pictured above), and French-Swiss Technicolor enfants terribles Ben & Julia. The Society of Illustrators follows up that character-building bunch with a presentation on the history of illustration by Murray Tinkelman, an Illustrators Sketch Night featuring the musical stylings of the Half-Tones (illustrators Barry Blitt, Joe Ciardiello, and Michael Sloan, joined by guest guitarist Kenny Wessel), and an evening with children’s book icons and illustrators including Ted and Betsy Lewin and Jerry Pinkney. Check out the full schedule of events here.

Has veteran artist Bruce McCall swiped, unintentionally or otherwise, the idea for his latest New Yorker cover? The October 3rd issue of the magazine features McCall’s illustration of Times Square, with a portion of the sidewalk cordoned off for tourists and another two sections dedicated as a “No Tourist” zone. Per usual for the magazine, it’s a clever, fun image. However, it’s also remarkably close to artist Jeff Greenspan‘s 2010 collaboration with Improv Everywhere. Entitled “The Tourist Lane,” Greenspan spray painted sections of New York sidewalks, labeling one side “Tourists” and the other, “New Yorkers.” On one hand, McCall certainly could have come up with the idea himself, explaining on the New Yorker‘s site how he came up with the concept after getting out of a cab in Times Square and being overwhelmed by the out-of-towners. On the other hand, Greenspan’s stunt garnered international press, with copycats painting variations in cities across the world, and the Improv Everywhere video receiving more than a million hits. So we suppose it isn’t inconceivable that McCall could have been aware of it and had it land somewhere in his subconscious. We’ll leave it up to you to decide. Whatever the case: interesting.

When was the last time you can remember that Wacom‘s site was so overloaded with traffic that it was difficult to get it to load? We don’t visit the pen tablet for designers’ site often enough to be able to give that a definite answer, but we’re guessing it’s not all that frequent. However, such was the case yesterday (for us anyway) as word spread quickly about the company’s new product, the Inkling, an ink pen-based device that records your drawings as you sketch them out, again in ink, on a physical piece of paper. Even if you aren’t a regular sketcher, or have always used a tablet just fine, or are from the exact opposite direction and get by just fine with a mouse and don’t plan on ever changing your ways, even you will find this cool. And if sites like Gizmodo, which said about the Inkling that it “may become [their] favorite gadget of all time” are any judge, every designer is either going to be buying one or putting it on their wish list immediately when it’s released in the middle of next month. Here’s the promo video:

From left, a mixed-media collage painting by Fred Otnes and the cover of Jerry Pinkney’s The Lion and The Mouse, a wordless adaptation of one of Aesop’s fables.

The Society of Illustrators has elected five artists to its illustrious Hall of Fame: Fred Otnes, Jerry Pinkney, Kenneth Paul Block, Alan E. Cober, and Robert Heindel (the latter three will be honored posthumously). Past presidents of the Society selected the artists based on their body of work and the impact it has made on the field of illustration. This year’s Hall of Fame inductees will be honored at a dinner and ceremony on June 24. Pinkney, 71, is fresh from his 2010 Caldecott Medal win for The Lion and the Mouse, one of the more than 100 children’s books he has illustrated since 1964. “My most favorite is always the work in progress on the drawing board, because my strongest feelings about a particular book are tied to the experience of creating it,” notes the illustrator on his website. “I love the act of making marks on paper, and seeing those marks develop into a picture. My intent and hope is to lead the viewer into a world that only exists because of that picture.”