Blog
Tag: Illustration
Michael Cho at Type Books May 23rd
by Dan
Art & Photography + Events + Graphica / May 10, 2012
Toronto-based illustrator and hometown hero Michael Cho will be signing copies of his new book Back Alleys and Urban Landscapes 6pm–8pm on May 23rd at Type Books on Queen Street West near Trinity Bellwoods Park. TYPE will also be featuring a gallery show of selected work from the book.
Michael began creating drawings of the back alleys near his Toronto home in 2008. Collected together in this book, the work speaks to the beauty of the urban landscape: sometimes gritty and citified, sometimes unexpectedly pastoral, but always beautifully rendered. Michael is a brilliant draftsman, and Back Alleys shines with loving attention to detail – from expletive-filled graffiti splayed across backyard fences to the graceful twists of power lines over a bend in the road.
Last weekend, Michael joined a host of other super-talented cartoonists – including Kate Beaton, Guy Delisle and Tom Gauld to name a few – signing books at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival at the Toronto Reference Library. Unsurprisingly (in retrospect!) Backalleys was in big demand and we sold out of the book in no time at all, so make sure you come by early on the 23rd if you are want to get your hands on a copy!
Michael Cho
Back Alleys and Urban Landscapes
Book signing featuring a gallery show of selected work
@ TYPE Books
883 Queen Street West, Toronto
May 23rd, 6pm - 8pm
Typebooks.ca
Anders Nilsen Big Questions
by Dan
Graphica / August 16, 2011
Big Questions is cartoonist Anders Nilsen's newest book. But it is also his oldest, collecting together the mini-comic he first started in 1999 into a single volume.
The mini-comics took 10 years to complete, but as Ander's recently told Comic Book Resources, that was just the beginning a long process to bring them together for the book:
I finished the last issue somewhere around September-October and then after that, there was a good six months that was just editing. I think out of all of those pages, probably ninety percent or more have some changes, even if it was just moving a word balloon over or adding a word there. It turned into this giant editing process. I didn't redraw much. I added a few pages. I added one scene in the body of the book and then extended the material from the last two issues. I think I added ten or so pages to the end of the book. There were some deadlines which I did not quite make. I think the book was originally supposed to come out in May for TCAF, which did not happen. That process was just crazy labor intensive and it wasn't the fun part of coming up with the story and doing the drawings. When I was finally done with that, I was definitely exhausted and just slept for a couple days.
After all that, Big Questions, finally done, is over 600 pages long and a stunningly beautiful book. It is also now available from bookstores and Anders is touring to promote it. You can read a PDF preview at Drawn & Quarterly's website, but here are a couple of the pages from book to whet your appetite:
In The Wilds
by Dan
Art & Photography / May 09, 2011
I just cannot stop talking about the beautiful In The Wilds, recently published by Princeton Architectural Press!It's a collection of obsessively detailed hand-drawn observations of rural life by Irish artist and illustrator Nigel Peake. It's just a small hardcover (6" x 8" and 144 pages), but just so lovely!
If you haven't seen Nigel's work before (he has worked with the likes of Ninja Tune and Dwell Magazine), here are some illustrations from the book:
Bicycle Travel Journal also featuring Nigel's illustrations will be published by Laurence King later this year.
The journal will be designed by Roger Fawcett-Tang of Struktur Design and will include 20 illustrations, blank pages to write on and 16 envelopes to store mementoes of your journeys.
You can pre-order copies from your favourite independent bookstore, or online at Amazon.
In The Wilds is available now.
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art illustration ireland nigel peake
Kate Bingaman-Burt on Design Matters
by Dan
Art & Photography + Design & Typography / December 06, 2010
Don't miss Kate Bingamen-Burt talking about her awesome book Obsessive Consumption: What Did You Buy Today?, "being in debt, drawing, being hired by Target, feeling useful, craft, 'zines and making something new everyday" with Debbie Millman for the Design Matters Podcast.
Classic Canadian Literature and Modern Canadian Trees
by Siobhan
Art & Photography + Design & Typography / November 01, 2010
The New York Times Sunday Book Review ran a great feature on The Native Trees of Canada this weekend.
Leanne Shapton was inspired to create the book after discovering a copy of “Native Trees of Canada, Bulletin No. 61, Fifth Edition,” originally published in 1917 by the Forestry Branch of the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources.
In its flat, monochrome survey photographs I saw a simplified version of the Canadian landscape, like the one I understood as a child. Seeing the pictures reminded me of our capacity to colorize memories, some not even our own. I made a series of paintings from the book, and afterward, whenever I read a story, any mention of a tree stood out like an old friend.
Check out the New York Times Sunday Book Review feature to read how Leanne matches up passages from classic Canadian literature with her modern trees.
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canada canadian illustration painting trees
The Exquisite Book blog tour is in full swing!
by Siobhan
Art & Photography + Craft / October 27, 2010
The Exquisite Book blog tour is in full swing!
Visit these blogs to read more about the book, see some sneak peeks, read interviews with artists from the book, and reviews. The line-up of creative blogs is fantastic — you're bound to be inspired along the way.
October 18 - Design for Mankind - Featuring an interview with Julia Rothman!
October 19 - My Love for You is a Stampede of Horses
October 20 - Creature Comforts
October 21 - Oh Joy!
October 22 - Pikaland
October 25 - Print and Pattern - Lots of great photos of the interiors, if you haven't seen the book yet.
October 26 - ReadyMade magazine
October 28 - The Post Family
October 29 - Décor 8
November 1 - Uppercase Journal
November 2 - Mint
November 3 - Grain Edit
November 5 - 7×7 Magazine
And, of course, check out ExquisiteBook.com!
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design illustration
Masters of Fashion Illustration Sneak Peek
by Siobhan
Art & Photography + Fashion & Textiles / October 18, 2010
Attention fashionistas, fashion designers, fashion daydreamers and doodlers... You must go have a look at the slideshow of gorgeous images from Masters of Fashion Illustration posted on New York Magazine's Fashion blog. Le sigh.
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fashion illustration
The Exquisite Book is… Exquisite!
by Siobhan
Art & Photography + Design & Typography / September 17, 2010
Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words...
Check out this awesome video preview of The Exquisite Book.
The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game is truly a one-of-a-kind project. As the title and subtitle imply, it's based on the Exquisite Corpse drawing game... but goes way beyond, including 100 artists and 10 accordian pull-out pages.
The list of contributors is amazing -- the foreword is written by Dave Egger and art by James Jean, David Shrigley, Camilla Engman, Ray Fenwick, Mike Perry, Julie Morstad, Julia Rothman, Jill Bliss, Jen Corace and 91 other fantastic artists.
Visit ExquisiteBook.com for more info and sneak peeks.
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design illustration
Q & A with Jason Munn at GrainEdit
by Dan
Design & Typography / July 27, 2010
Graphic artist Jason Munn of one-man studio The Small Stakes talks about his beautiful book of music posters, published by our friends at Chronicle Books, with GrainEdit:
When Chronicle and I first started to talk about the book, there was a lot of different ideas on how the posters should be presented, the format of the book and so on. We agreed on presenting the posters very simply, one per page, chronologically by year. I definitely wanted to keep the book simple in design, and I think Chronicle did a wonderful job on the design, layout, and production of the book. The end result is a simple catalog of many of my posters with some added features that lend itself well to the design, like the use of metallic inks throughout the book. One of my favorite parts of the book is the back cover, which may sound kind of weird, but I love the large field of silver with just the radio/barcode at the bottom.
Read the full Q & A and see more images from the book here.
Seth Redesigns Canadian Notes & Queries
by Dan
Graphica / July 13, 2010
Canadian cartoonist Seth (George Sprott, Wimbledon Green) has found time between drawing comics for D+Q and illustrations for The Walrus et al, to redesign the thrice-yearly Canadian Notes & Queries magazine in his trademark style. In an email to The National Post about the new design, he said:
“It’s a lot of work to redesign a magazine and I was pretty busy. But it was really something that sounded like a challenge. And it couldn’t have been more ‘up my alley.’ I love Canadiana of all sorts and I particularly loved the absolutely stiffness and dullness of the magazine’s title – I mean, you just couldn’t have a more quintessentially Canadian masthead title than Canadian Notes and Queries. If you made it up, no one would believe it. In a way, the name of the magazine hides the fact that it is a very smart and entertaining read – not stuffy at all. I figured I could do something amusing but elegant with the magazine to draw attention to that fact – perhaps poke some fun at it’s purcieved stuffiness while at the same time pointing out what a marvelous magazine of criticism it is by giving the interior a look of class and austerity, but still showing off some charm and sense of humour about the whole thing."
Read the full story at The National Post's The Afterword blog.