Anthony Zierhut

Here are four blogs I’m finding myself visiting every day now:

ILLUSTRATION ART — a wonderfully written blog on illustration, past and present, with terrific visual examples. The analyses and human story angles are wonderful, and spot-on, in my opinion.

Today’s Inspiration — a daily upload of illustrations from the 1940s through the 1970s (for the most part); an interesting time for illustration, when academic training was mixed with abstraction and experimentation. The author also has a wonderful knack for finding information about near-forgotten illustrators of the era and their lives and work habits.

Charlie Allen’s Blog and

Harry Borgman Art Blog — both of these men are now in their eighties: the former retired and uploading absolutely stunning illustrations from his past; the latter still going strong and sharing great works from past and present. They both write well and have great stories concerning the art they show. Mr. Borgman has an amazing range of work, from fine art, experimental, pure abstraction, to grounded-in-reality paintings and intricate line drawings. His textbook on line drawing, published in the late 1970s was something I, as a teenager crazy about pen and ink, checked out so often from our public library in Richardson Texas that it was dog-eared by the time I left for California.

All of these are a pleasure to see and read about, so I’m sharing them with you.

I just picked up a copy of a local magazine — the Verdugo Monthly — that has a great article about fashion and film illustrator Gregory Weir-Quiton. The print version has many examples of his beautiful pencil and watercolor life sketches. The on-line version of the article has reproduced one of them at the top of the page. Check it out here.

As of this writing his official web site is still mostly under construction, but the flash intro page has a few more examples of his drawings. Really inspiring.

Once again I’ve been looking at Mort Drucker’s work for inspiration, and once again I get that combination of excitement, admiration and ego-flattening humility in the presence of his genius. Check out this blog post of some of his originals (you can see his pencil lines and washes really well on close inspection). Truly awe-inspiring.

Here’s a wonderful collection of 20th century American illustrators — every name is worth clicking on. It’s wonderful to see how much advertising used to be illustrated by hand, in oils, watercolor, pencil, pen and ink, as opposed to the absolute totalitarian hegemony of photography in advertising these days.

Here’s a wonderful collection of story illustrations done for Reader’s Digest about 50 years ago. Most are beautifully rendered and composed without being overworked.

Lastly, a friend sent me a link to I’m Learning To Share — a blog about music, illustration and culture that’s a lot of fun to nose around in.

My friend, and fellow storyboarder, Dan Sweetman has co-created some animated craziness on YouTube. Check out Cotton Candy Autopsy. Great drawings, goofy slapstick humor 🙂

Dan’s illustration work is fabulous. His official site for Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children has a lot more to look at.