Ben Towle

Author's posts

Richard Scarry: an Appreciation

Richard Scarry is the “Kashmir” of children’s book illustrators; he’s so ubiquitous it can be easy to let rote familiarity blind you to how good the work itself is. Like any child who grew up in the 70s, I had a Richard Scarry book or two. My recent re-exposure to his work, though, is via …

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Portrait Night 2/15 (Tom Waits)

Continuing with my music-themed Tuesday Twitter #PortraitNight, here’s Tom Waits. This turned out OK, but not great. I have a history of mediocre attempts at drawings of Tom Waits. Here’s one I did at a convention for a Waits-themed sketchbook a while back. I like the diaper/”I don’t want to grow up” bit, but the …

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My “Cover” of Machine Man #2

Well, it’s been up over at the Covered blog for three or four days, so I guess I’m safe to go ahead and re-post it… If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the Covered project, it’s pretty simple: much as a one band might cover some other band’s song, on the Covered blog cartoonists and …

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How-To: Pre-Coloring Photoshop Actions

I was talking recently on Twitter about how much I love the convenience of custom Photoshop actions for performing routine tasks and I had a request to do a quick blog post about how I use Photoshop actions to get my pages set up for coloring. In reading about how various cartoonists color their work, …

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Portrait Night 2/07 (Nick Cave)

Well, I’m obviously slacking off on blog postings since the last thing I posted was also from my Twitter #PortraitNight.. but, here’s another one. This time, my subject is the young Nick Cave. I made a conscious decision last week not to choose a musician, but this week I’m back in music-land again: Here’s the …

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