A good morning sketch after a Bill Everett zombie.

My name as a Egyptian cartouche...

Niece's birthday card,

The Postman brought me these treasures yesterday, that are going great with my coffee this morning.
The Toon Treasury of Children's Comics is almost 350 pages of comics from the 30's to the early 60's that make me want to eat chocolate chip pancakes all day and lie on the floor ignoring my chores.




And a Marvel Masterworks that raises the gooseflesh. A collection of Menace!
I love these 50's horror comics and I'd love to see a lot more titles get the hardcover treatment.


Bill Everett brilliance.
Go Moon-Men!

Sketchbook stuff

sketchbook

Sketches

I was happy to find this book on Frank Hampson creator of Dan Dare. A nice biography with lots of
great images and photos.




Sir William Russell Flint

sketches

Some sketches from life drawing last week.

Went sketching at French comic master Regis Loisel's studio. Regis had a lot of cool artwork around
and was a great guy. I'll have to learn to speak French one day.

Managed to to a quick drive to Montreal to visit friends, sketch and see the large John Waterhouse exhibit. The paintings lay against and stood out against black walls surrounded by black velvet, black chairs and black roses. A fantastic show from one of my favourite British painters of the time.

And here we have Atomic Cow, created by my friend Rodney Dunn who sadly passed away a number of years ago.
Rod had already put out this issue before we became friends and I remember being impressed that he had self published something so young. Rod encouraged me to get my first job in animation
and introduced to me to some of my favorite artists and many times said a couple of words that
helped me with my work when I was frustrated. He had a lot of energy and was always fun to be around and we had a lot of late nights talking about cartoonists and illustrators and listening to rock'n roll. I still think about him a lot.
I'll post some mores stuff soon.







A spread from a Dunn illustrated story from Mr. X #14.

A spread from Walter de la Mare's Peackcock Pie illustrated by the great Edward Ardizzone.




And a spread from The Wizard of Oz illustrated by Tom Sinnickson.

As luck would have it, just when I thought our basement was all renovated and done a small problem
happened and I had to move some of my books out of a room for a quick fix this morning.
So, since I'll probably be puttting them back on the shelves slower than I took them out,
I thought I would scan a couple of images.

This is Anthony Van Dyck's self-portrait with a sunflower from the catalogue of the major retrospective of his work at the Royal Academy of Arts in London that I saw in 1999. I remember it being a beautiful show.

stickies

Ahhh the amazing Provenson's.
From Charge of the Light Brigade.

Unbalanced

The Illustration Gallery in Newport wouldn't allow pictures inside but they had a nice bookstore.
I picked up this facsimile edition of The Knave of Hearts. Its a beautifully illustrated Maxfield Parrish book from the mid twenties, the last book he illustrated and the original printing goes for a big chunk of change. There were a couple of originals in the gallery from this book and I have the images from it in other books but this was a very nice, oversized and nicely printed book I had to pick it up. And now I can read the story.

some of last nights life drawing