An Abundance of Ideas: Art Post with Inspiration

I’ve been absent for a few weeks, and they’ve been a bit busy.  The good news, though, is that I’ve been doing a lot of sketching.  That means that this is going to be largely a post consisting of iPhone pictures of those sketches, a bit of commentary, and a few bits of inspiration and what ifs.

I’ve been looking through my copy of Brian Froud’s Goblin Companion – a book that I’ve had for years and years now, but never really browsed through.  Some of the sketches below are inspired by Froud’s work from the Goblin book, or else they are copied from the book to try to improve my technique.  I’d like to think that I’m learning bits and bobs of technique from the books I’ve been looking over recently.

Several of the sketches are faces and costumes that I’ve done from memory, and yet others are inspired by the works of Justin Gerard(whom I mentioned in an earlier post).

Another great artist that I’ve just discovered is Paul Bonner, who does fantasy illustration of the best sort.  He just did a very long guest post on the Muddy Colors blog, describing his process on a wonderful painting that features dwarves and a great big upright beastie based loosely on a musk ox.

Direct link to the blog post here:  http://muddycolors.blogspot.com/2011/09/guest-blogger-paul-bonner.html

And now the big bunch of sketches:

…uploading images to WordPress is a pain in the butt.  Anyone have a faster way to do it?  I hope everyone enjoys the art post… I’ll try to be back sooner next time, so that I don’t have to go through such a lengthy image-inserting process again.  Whew!

Gorey and Kenn; Line Art Inspires and Terrifies.

I have mentioned both Don Kenn and Edward Gorey on this blog before.  In today’s post, I thought I would share a few images from both artists that show the details that go into their art.  In my attempts to illustrate images inspired by these two artists, I’ve found that the intricately detailed line art is actually harder than it appears at first.  Your lines must have a consistency that fits with each other line on the page, while at the same time creating dimension, shadow, distance.  In short, the entire image is dependent on lines, instead of more conventional means of composition.

Gorey illustrated a number of children’s books that he authored himself; most are incredibly short and have been gathered into several collections, the best-known of which are probably Amphigorey and Amphigorey 2.  He passed away in 2000, and was, among other things, known for his fondness of cats and the New York Ballet; at one point in his life he attended every single performance of the ballet for several years.  He often wore heavy rings and fur coats, and was a bit eccentric.  The following images will hopefully showcase his art well.

 

Don Kenn is a Scandinavian artist who does most of his work on Post-it notes.  The illustrations largely represent hidden or not-so-hidden terrors near oblivious people.