Sunday, December 08, 2013

Traditional Illustration For All It's Worth!

Traditional illustration is coming back in a big way, saturated in a world of instagram filters and digitally altered reproductions, an original organic image seems so much more worthwhile of our time.

My go to reference artist for traditional illustration is Andrew Loomis. Not only has he written books about the genre during the most popular era for illustration artists, he has helped define the genre. He created beautiful works of art that rival all the great illustrators and pin up artists such as Gil Elvgren, Al Buel, Earl Moran, Alberto Vargas, and artists like Alphonse Mucha, Aubrey Beardsley and Gustav klimt.

Drawing The head and Hands


His books are a delight to read, and all have recently been re published by Titan Books and so are easy to get hold of in new print, or first edition copies are available through collectors book shops.

Creative Illustration


I have two Andrew Loomis books, One is Creative Illustration and the other, Figure Drawing for All it's Worth. Creative Illustration has more colour plates and talks more about the profession in terms of advertising. The other, Figure Drawing For All Its Worth has lot's of art tutorials, though both are similar in this respect, the latter has tutorials which concentrate more heavily on the ability to draw as the tools of the trade and give you the exercises and skills necessary to achieve such status, that was necessary for illustrators in advertising.

Creative Illustration



For many artist Illustration was their way or making their living, their bread and butter. It was their income, for those good enough and as such these books offer a wealth of knowledge.


Figure drawing for All It's Worth




Neck Action
Tilting The Head and Perspective in Drawing The Head
You Get Something The Camera can't Give You
Drawing The Head
Hanging Figures On The Horizon

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Laura Knight Wartime Artist

Corporal Elspeth Henderson and Sergeant Helen Turner, 1941 by Laura Knight. Photograph: The Royal United Services Institute

Laura Knight Nuremberg Burns

Laura Knight: 
The Nuremberg Trial 1946
At the age of 68, Knight persuaded the War Artists Advisory Committee to send her to Nuremburg to record the trials of Nazi war criminals, sketching Goering and the others from the press box. 'But when the time came to turn all this to paint,' says Cooke, 'she gave the courtroom only one visible wall, framing the dock instead with what she called “a mirage” of the ruined city – a fire even now burning among its rubble, the better, perhaps, to symbolise the impossibility of reparation.'


Wednesday, July 03, 2013

Double Exposure using the application Vignette for Android



This double exposure was made through looking up through the trees and taking the fist shot and then  a portrait for the second. It is a portrait of my girlfriend Vicky using the application Vignette for Android. 

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Alice In Wonderland Beautifuly Ilustrated In Colour



Alice In Wonderland Beautifuly Ilustrated In Colour by A.A. Nash
Produced By Juvenile Productions Ltd. LONDON. Designed and printed in England.

We found this in a charity shop. what a beautifully illustrated find! We were so happy to find this and I have include the scanned images at high enough resolution for all Alice and traditional illustration fans to enjoy.  


Saturday, March 23, 2013

Vicky, a sketch for modern times



This quick sketch shows Vicky my girlfriend  in a contemporary pose dated by the fact she is using a mac book pro. A drawing tells a thousand different stories to a photo, the bare lines reducing things down to the most basic elements, in this sense, the use of the mac book, dates the sketch in another the tell tale story of time as a drawing records objects over time.

Saturday, March 02, 2013

Exploring Women's Bodies: How do women artists depict women?

How do women artists depict women?

Pretty much all of the paintings we've looked at so far on this historical tour of paintings of women have been done by men.  It's been tough for women artists to get noticed, actually.  There's a very good article on Wikipedia which cronicles women artists' efforts through history.  Apparently there weren't many women artists over the centuries partially because they weren't allowed into the academies because of the nude male models.  Finally there were some women artists whose fathers or husbands were artists - perhaps they were allowed to work with their family members without scandal. There's a movie called Artemesia which is about one of the first well-known female painters - apparently it's too fictionalized for many people to like, but it gives some sense of her.  She was raped by one of her teachers then was put on trial for the rape - that's how women were treated in those days.  She was tortured to see if she would confess that her accusation was false.  Here's the picture she did a year after the trial in 1612:  It's called Judith Beheading Holofernes.
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Exploring Women's Bodies: How do women artists depict women?