Anthony Zierhut

I found this little collection of great quotes about drawing and sketching. A couple of my favorites:

“Do not fail, as you go on, to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is, it will be well worthwhile, and it will do you a world of good.” ~ Cennini.

and

“From the age of six I had a mania for drawing the shapes of things. When I was fifty I had published a universe of designs. but all I have done before the the age of seventy is not worth bothering with. At seventy five I’ll have learned something of the pattern of nature, of animals, of plants, of trees, birds, fish and insects. When I am eighty you will see real progress. At ninety I shall have cut my way deeply into the mystery of life itself. At a hundred I shall be a marvelous artist. At a hundred and ten everything I create; a dot, a line, will jump to life as never before. To all of you who are going to live as long as I do, I promise to keep my word. I am writing this in my old age. I used to call myself Hokosai, but today I sign my self ‘The Old Man Mad About Drawing.’ ” ~ Hokusai, The Drawings of Hokosai.

I love Hokusai.

This morning the light had a strange movie-like quality to it due to the recent fires. The smell of smoke is everywhere and there was ash on my car, even though I live 20 miles from the nearest fire. Seventeen thousand acres is a big area and a lot of incinerated trees. Living in L.A. is always a strange mix of extremes: near-perfect non-weather 95% of the time, punctuated by fires, earthquakes, mudslides and the once-a-century deluge. It’s like Mother Nature sings you a lullaby, kisses you goodnight – then jabs you with a hat pin.

UPDATE: It looks like there’s a fire in Burbank as well, only two miles from my home, and that’s the culprit. Hopefully they put these things out in a hurry.

My friend Dave just emailed me this link to an astounding number of art-related web sites. Highly bookmarkable:
http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/lessons/middle/arted.htm

I have several friends who are artists and can perform miracles with a pencil or markers, but who are completely dismayed when it comes to creating a web site to show their work. This is natural. Most of us can use Photoshop and compose email but writing HTML or using web authoring software, or getting web space can be an utterly alien and daunting proposal. After messing around with Blogger.com for about a year it occurred to me that a fairly simple artist / illustrator / storyboard artist web site could be created fairly easily using blogging tools without having to go through the painful computer nerd stuff.

So, late last night in a fit of inspiration I spent two hours creating a simple web site – for free – that displays an artist’s gallery, a resume’, contact information – and a page showing how I did it, hopefully simple enough that anyone else can do it.

I needed material to show, so I chose to create a site for the great Rennaissance master painter Titian, as if he were still alive and looking for work. Here’s the result:
www.titianArt.blogspot.com

And here’s the tutorial page that shows how I, and presumably you, if you want to, can do it too. I don’t know if will help anybody, but maybe it will be a small step towards getting someone’s work up on the web – which might lead to a job for crying out loud.

Rodolfo Damaggio is a brilliant illustrator and storyboard artist. Check out his storyboard page here. It’s some of the cleanest, most elegantly and succinctly drawn storyboards I have ever seen. Really inspiring stuff.

More links:
His Imdb page
His web site’s main portfolio page

Check out this on-line one-man show of the late Mentor Huebner. He was a fantastic motion picture production illustrator and storyboard artist. The paintings are beautiful and the commentary by his widow, Louise Huebner, is equally wonderful and inspiring.

Also, for a bit more background, check out his Imdb listing, which includes North By Northwest, Blade Runner, Forbidden Planet, Ben Hur, The Time Machine (the 1960 original) and many other classics.

A friend and fellow storyboard artist once showed me some photocopies of storyboards Mr. Huebner had done for Beethoven 2, that’s right the dog movie, that were utterly fantastic and seemingly effortlessly executed.

And of course here is the Huebner’s official site: www.mentorhuebnerart.com

I try to keep things on topic in my little corner of the blog world here, but the stuff happening out in the Gulf is overwhelming and provocative of some kind of action. I just made an on-line donation to the Feed The Children organization for sending food out to the New Orleans hurricane victims. If you can afford it, please give to the charity of your choice. Here’s a good list. We can watch the world at a distance or try to be some kind of force for good, even if in small or relatively nominal ways. It’s a choice we all make.

As a teen-ager I had a poster of this painting thumbtacked to the wall above my bed (I wonder what my parents thought). Frank Frazetta, the artist who created that picture, was one of the reasons I even entertained the idea of becoming some kind of professional illustrator someday. Just this evening at the weekly get-together after work the costume designer mentioned he had a documentary about Mr. Frazetta. He popped it into the DVD player and I watched about half of it. It brought back all the feelings I had as a kid about Frazetta’s work – the savage energy, the beautiful women, the crazy drama, the seemingly effortless draftsmanship – and a bit of the story behind it all, which I hadn’t known. For instance, he painted most of his pictures in over the course of eight to ten hours each, usually the night before they were due. Another tidbit is that he never worked from reference; it was all in his head. That alone is mind-blowing. His official gallery has a ton of biographical information, and this unofficial site has a ton of fairly high-res scans of his paintings and pen-and-ink drawings. As I was checking out his site I happened upon this page showing sketches he made as a kid in a single night from an anatomy book in an effort to “learn anatomy”. They appear to be from George Bridgeman, only – forgive me for saying it – but more polished than Mr. Bridgeman’s drawings, in my opinion anyway.

I envy the student who happens upon Frank Frazetta for the first time.

Our family will be off to Big Sur for a week-long camping trip! I’m planning on doing lots of sketching during that time, hopefully inspired by the beautiful surroundings. If I draw anything worth posting I’ll put it up here for sure…