Dec 04 2010
I’m really bad at caricatures, but I do them anyway. That’s how you get better, right? (In theory, anyway..) This is an odd subject, but it was the only thing I found interesting leafing through the most recent TIME magazine recently: author/inventor/futurist Ray Kurzweil. Here’s the drawing (with some sloppy Photoshop color) and a picture of the subject:
Dec 03 2010
Yeah, that’s right: a shamelessly self-promotional holiday sale! Enter HOLIDAY2010 at checkout for 20% off everything in my store. In addition to an assortment of original pages from Midnight Sun and Amelia Earhart: This Broad Ocean, there’re:
Dec 01 2010
I admit, there’s not much point to this post other than, “These things look cool,” but hey, they do look pretty cool.
I’m lucky enough be be the recipient of a slow trickle of old family books, mostly from the part of my family that originates in the Lancaster, PA area. I did a post a while back about the fantastic full set of My Bookhouse volumes I received, but since then I’ve gotten my hands on two other items.
The first is a workbook from something called “The Normal Union System of Industrial Drawing.” A Google search for this turns up a big nothing. It appears though, to be a workbook for students of basic mechanical drafting (entities since replaced by CAD software). It’s filled with areas for students to construct mechanical shapes via elliptical curves, angles, etc. Looking at the beautiful cover of this thing, fans of Chris Ware’s work (and I’m one of them) will immediately recognize the aesthetic kinship between his work and this era of commercial illustration.
The other book, as you can see, is a workbook for a penmanship course. If the word “penmanship” seems archaic, it’s because it is; handwriting and handwriting instruction have been on the decline in this keyboard-centric age. The less-cluttered Art Nouveau-ish cover design of this workbook is really beautiful I think. The typefaces and typesetting alone are worth noting. I love how the “E”s are not consistent. The X-height of the “E” in “vertical” is different from the X-height of the one in “penmanship.” All the kerning here looks like it was eyeballed–albeit expertly eyeballed–and gives the lettering a non-computery, organic look.
Here’s a sample of some of the writing inside, done when my great great aunt Anna Herr was learning handwriting in 1898:
There’s something really beautiful and captivating about seeing those lines and lines of type repeated like that. (And it of course reminds me of the opening sequence of The Simpsons.) I remember as recently (?) as the mid-90s a friend of mine taking a class in typesetting that involved learning how to hand-draw basic serif and sans serif fonts. I also remember seeing in my mom’s college art portfolio a piece she did for a typesetting class where she’d hand-drawn the lyrics to The Doors’ Crystal Ship in big four or five-inch serif lettering. (Now that I think about it, I’d love to have that framed in my house.) I know that no one actually has to do this kind of stuff anymore, but it’s something I’d love to be able to do and I think I’d learn a lot about typefaces and typesetting in the process–both things I don’t know much about.
Anyway, end rambling post. Hope you enjoy these dusty old books.
Nov 30 2010
I’ve had monsters on the brain lately. I think it’s because a few weeks ago I posted some art from Drew Weing’s great bestiary, 33 Beasties and at about that same time I placed my own Moleskine bestiary for sale in my store. Whatever the case, I decided it’d be fun to draw some monsters. I began just doodling in my sketchbook, but in a rare moment of forward-thinking, I grabbed a piece of bristol board and did the drawing on that, which allowed me to ink the drawing with dip pen (which would have shredded a sketchbook page). I switched from brush to pens relatively recently and although I still don’t think I’ve got the hang of it completely, doing a drawing like this is only going to help me improve.
The original art for this is for sale here.
Nov 29 2010
I’m sure I’ve posted some or all of these childhood drawings of mine before, but with the recent death of Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner, I thought it’d be appropriate to drag them out again. While there may be one or two folks out there who’d debate Empire‘s status as the best of the Star Wars films, there’s no doubt that it’s the one that most profoundly affected me. It came out in 1980, when I was ten and starting to really get into drawing. These drawings were likely done from The Empire Strikes Back Storybook, although I remember when I was a bit older getting a copy of The Art of The Empire Strikes Back and devoting myself to memorizing exactly how to draw AT-ATs, Hoth gun turrets, etc.
Recent Comments