Ben Towle

Author's posts

U is for Uther Pendragon

“U” was a tough one for sure. There aren’t a ton of literary characters whose names begin with “U,” and even fewer of those are from books I’ve actually read. But, here’s what I settled on: U is for Uther Pendragon – from The Story of King Arthur and His Knights by Howard Pyle Uther …

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The Formal Inventiveness of Kids’ Picture Books

Last week I got involved in Twitter back-and-forth with a few folks (Alan Haverholm, Eric Orchard, and whomever operates the Hooded Utilitarian’s Twitter account–Noah Berlatsky, maybe?) about the differences–or lack thereof, argues Noah–between cartooning and illustration and it got me thinking about children’s books. I don’t have some big, overall point here vis-a-vis the formal …

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Illustration: Medeski Martin & Wood

I try to keep my music-related ramblings to a minimum on this blog, but if you follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I’m a bit of a music-obsessive. I subscribe to a lot of music blogs, but one of my absolute favorites is Aquarium Drunkard, which you can find here. One of the …

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T is for the Time Traveler

My only other contender for “T” was Tom Bombadil–and I guess I could have done him since I could technically have claimed that my earlier drawing of Gimli was from The Lord of the Rings and Bombadil was from The Adventures of Tom Bombadil… but that’s kinda cheating. So instead, I did this guy: T …

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Iron Man MK1 Armor

Here’s a quick pinup I did of the first version of Iron Man’s armor. There’s something really appealing about this clunky, gray “bullet head” version of Iron Man, I think. It has a visual sense of weight and menace that the later versions lack. As you can see I’m still experimenting with trying spotting blacks. …

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