After retiring from teaching drawing and commercial art at a local high school over a year ago the drawing bug has struck me again and I'm cranking out a prodigious amount of work.
As any serious artist will tell you drawing, or art, takes a lot of sweat and research. Images do not flow like magic from and artist's fingertips-it take a lot of hard work.
Over the last few weeks I've began to accumulate a lot of reference books on many different subjects.
Transportation, architecture, figures, portraits, costumes and other books are being added almost daily to my reference library.
Ask any artist (at least in my case) and they'll say one of the hardest things to draw is trees. Sounds silly right? Not really.
Trees are especially complex subject to draw and to make them look natural.
Shading, line quality, proper placement in their respective environments, natural settings, complementing man-made structures and more are difficult techniques to draw correctly.
Frank M. Rines 'How To Draw Trees' is an invaluable resource for any artist wishing to tackle one of nature's most complex creations.
Whether solitary or in forests or smaller clusters each type of tree is covered in great detail with beautifully illustrated examples of trees of every variety. I plan on following each and every word of the author's advice as I populate my drawings with trees.
Anyone who knows me knows that I love comic book and comic strip artwork. I have my favorite gallery of artists, but now and again an artist of outstanding talent slips by me.
One such artist is Sam Glanzman whose graphic novel creation 'ATTU" has grabbed my attention.
Up until this point I was unaware of his work but I must say after reading through and looking at his work I've become a big fan.
Rendered in black and white the ATTU The Collected Volumes really showcase his work that reminds me of Joe Kubert's and Tim Truman's art (Tim provides an introduction).
Jeff Lemire writes the foreword and one-time Swampthing artist Stephen R. Bissette provides the afterword.
Looking through ATTU you can watch as the artist's work matures and takes on new challenges. As an artist myself I appreciate the amount of hard work and exhaustive reference gleaning it took to produce such a collection.