Chris Sanders

Chris Sanders may be instantly recognizable to those of you who have seen movies like Lilo and Stitch or How to Train your Dragon, he is the director of both and of these films and was responsible for art direction and character design for them.

His style is just that, stylish and comical, full of exaggeration and rich with detail but all the while managing to keep the lines simple and flowing. Sanders works mostly in traditional media, having been an illustrator for several years now and been educated in an era before digital proliferation, a lot of it still involves cutting paper and resizing using copies and tape.

His art is stylish and whimsical and perfectly suited for the animated industry, he opts to accentuate curvature and proportions, particularly in his female form and he tends to do a lot of fantastic creatures and animals, his images are always lively and convey an impressive amount of movement and spirit, and always manage to bring a smile to my face.

If youre interested in checking out more of his work he can be found at http://alohalilo.deviantart.com/ where he also has a couple of tutorials and images of his drafting process.

Yehrin Tong

I really like this piece because it really draws me in, almost as if its a puzzle and a piece of art at the same time. I think the preciseness of the patterns is amazing. Every line is impeccably placed and completely even. I love how the snakes are so tangled and spiraled at the same time. This artist does some work with typography so I suppose its no surprise that everything is so precise. Designing typography requires incredible attention to detail and very precise measurements so it seems logical that this artist would cross over into both facets of design. This artist does some album designing too and I feel like that kind of work would influence a piece like this. Album art is geared both to be interesting to look at and also to see music so its important that the art draws the viewer in and intrigues them. I feel like that is exactly what this piece does. Additionally, I think the black and white was a good route to take with this piece. The lines and patterns are so intricate that the absence of color allows for an element of simplicity in a piece that is not simple at all.

Winnie Truong

"Bride of Dede"

Winnie Truong is an artist from Canada. Her works are large-scale compositions of colored pencil and pastel crayons on paper. Truong's style is meant to question the nature of hair, skin, and beauty as a whole. It is also a comment on portraiture. In the work, "Bride of Dede," the skin and hair are handled with the same long, exact, strokes with multitudes of underlying colors. The small bubble-like cysts almost cover the body in beautifully lain groups, and treated in the same way that "beautiful" objects like beads, berries, or grapes might be. I believe this is a comment on the illusion of beauty and our perception of "imperfection." Using what would be a horrific skin disorder, Truong weaves together a portrait using the beautiful and the grotesque, until a work is created in which we have trouble telling the two apart.

Her Website:

http://www.winnietruong.com/

Tom Preston

Tom Preston is a traditional art illustrator. Even though it is a comic, it has no lines between the panels and no borders. This piece is cool because only the creative ideas and emotions are colored and everything else is black and white. I also like the use of hatching and cross-hatching for the shadows. Tom likes to draw things and emotions that he has experiences and try to make it repeatable to others. In this piece he takes the idea of an artists' creative ideas that he wants to put on a canvas from his head. The ideas are bright colors and cute fun things. However, it doesn't come out the way he wants it and becomes depressed. That is why he is crouched down at the end and a depressing blue gloom is over him.

Ryan Mauskopf

The artist I chose for this week is another I stumbled upon using google images. I did some research and browsed his site and his online portfolio. His name is Ryan Mauskopf and he is an illustrator, graphic designer, and musician from New York City. His favorite gallery of mine is his illustration section. What first caught my eye is the diversity of his portfolio. He has several different styles that are each very strong. But as I looked closer, I discovered one thing all of his pieces had in common (well except the b&w ones), excellent execution of color and shading, in particular his mastery of reflective light/color. In the piece “Why Wizards Shouldn’t Cook” (the first image) Ryan uses reflective color of the smoke against the wizard. His reflective color gives excellent luminosity to his images and provides fantastic depth. Take note, that as the color of the smoke changes, the reflected light it cast on the wizard changes too. Although Ryan doesn’t list where these images have been used, my assumption would be for online articles or magazines. His “Gaga Bo Peep” and “Cronus and the Delicious Baby” are satirical images towards pop society and the upper class. I very well see these accompanying articles in today’s media. Last but not least, “Medusa and the Optometrist” is another fine example that his work is often humorous. I’ve given his website at the bottom; it’s really worth checking out!

http://www.ryanmauskopf.com/

Rodolforever

Rodolforever (couldn't find his real name) creates this amazing art deco style of different movie posters/characters in his art piece. I'm a crazy fan, in terms of simplicity, in any art work. To my left shows exactly that. What really caught my eye of this piece is its simplistic gesture of the form of superman. It seems like the artist really dissected superman's figure to its simplest form to the last limit of recognition. The other point i like to add to its clarity is that you can quickly grasp the figures identity, not including the help of superman's iconic logo. The color palate he used in the illustration gives this light and elegant feel to it to give the sense superman is flying far far away, i thought it was a great choice of color that kind of compliment the superman's color clothes. The text he used enhances that deco style feel to the whole piece.

Floyd O.L.J. Butler here. Today we are looking at Batman #577 penciled by Scott Mc Daniel. It is illustrated in a western cartoon style. the period it takes place in is the present sewers or swamps. The technique is comic book style with outlined in black lines that outline the character and his foe. This is for a comic book audience, meant to grab a buyers eye with Batman crouching over while the alligator lurks behind him. Scott Mc Daniel was commissioned by DC Comics to do this art piece This was the cover for May 2000 of Batman, was meant to bring a consumer in to buy the comic. I think it is a very successful piece, with Batman in dangerous waters with an alligator lurking behind him, it really jumps off the page. Makes me want to read it just to see if Batman gets out alive. It also looks kind of sinister, like Batman seems to not know the alligator is there. If you like Scott Mc Daniel art work check out Nightwing and Batman back issues.