“Don’t know really. Started out as something, ended up many other things. I’ve been eating a lot of figs recently. They’re good and ripe right now.”

In other words, this is a Flickr set of scans of someone’s wonderfully odd sketchbook.

“Celebrating great art in humble places: the glorious talents of the artists who illustrated stories, advertisements and comics in the 20th century.”

Includes:

• SwirlyCurls 4 Vector Pack
• 33 Speech Bubbles Vectors - Adobe Illustrator
• Rainbow Brush Kit - Adobe Illustrator
• The Hairbrush Kit - Adobe Illustrator
• Swirls 3 Vector Symbols - Adobe Illustrator
• Swirly Curls 2 - Adobe Illustrator
• Angela’s Butterflies - Adobe Illustrator Symbols
• 18 Swirly Curls - Adobe Illustrator Symbols
• 36 Trees 2 - Adobe Illustrator Symbols
• 36 Trees 1- Adobe Illustrator Symbols

“A while back we had a roundabout discussion about the term illustration and its limitations. Bob Flynn and Jaleen Grove both pushed back a little against my impatience with the term, and the supposed tyranny of the word which I decried… Frustrated by the lack of a larger narrative in which to locate genres, careers, and achievements, I have been working on visualizations of the development of commerical images. This week I have blundered into print with one such attempt: Commercial Images: An Evolutionary Scheme, a two-page infographic that occupies a central spread in the new Modern Graphic History Library catalogue, out this week. It posits two basic strands in commercial image history: illustration and cartooning, increasingly intermingled but distinct.”

“This site converts bitmap images to vector art — it’s an online auto-tracer. Just upload your image and we will vectorize it for you. Vector art is useful because it allows you to scale an image without making it blurry or pixelated. Vectorization (aka tracing) is the process of converting a raster image to a vector image. Raster images are pixel-based, whereas vector images are represented by geometric shapes such as lines, circles and curves.”

“‘Napkin Sketches 101′ written by Don Moyer in last months’ 360 e-zine, registered as our most popular article to date (as noted by number of pdf downloads). Moyer writes, ‘the leading edge of every wave of innovation is flecked with little drawings scrawled on cocktail napkins, envelope backs, scratch paper and whiteboards. Napkin sketches can help you see what you think about a topic and make it easier to communicate your ideas to others.’

His piece is interesting, well written and extremely practical. So much in fact, this 90-second article will re-cap some of Don’s napkin sketch tips.”

“Before you can draw a human figure with clothing, muscles, shading, etc., it is necessary to understand the basic proportions of the human figure. Proportions on a figure are simply how long the major anatomical parts of the body are, in relation to each other.

Let’s examine the proportions of a healthy male human figure. Proportions change based on body type, age, sex and activity level. Our example healthy male figure will be seven heads tall. As a foundation, let’s start with these lengths that are all the same. Each of them are two heads long…”

“The IAN symbol libraries contain over 1500 custom made vector symbols (in 32 categories) designed specifically for enhancing science communication skills. The libraries are designed primarily for use with Adobe Illustrator (requires version 10 or better), however we also offer eps and svg versions for non-Illustrator users. The symbols allow diagrammatic representations of complex processes to be developed easily with minimal graphical skills.”

“Need to know the capital of Vanuatu? Interested to find out the major export of Madagascar? Itching to find out about the (homo)sexual tension on Columbus’ trips to The New World? Then we have just the book for you!

Atlas, Schmatlas is a 128 page hardback book chock-a-block with essential information (fact and fiction), maps, and illustrations about every country in the world.” (Thanks Chris Glass!)

“It is my privilege and pleasure to announce that a book based on the this humble website is now in release and available for purchase by the general public…

As you might expect, the book features eclectic and rare book illustrations derived from many digital repositories, accompanied by some background commentary. It is not simply a regurgitation of what is here in the archives, although about two thirds of the images have appeared on the site previously.”

“The other day I got an e-mail from Carson Van Osten, a famous Disney artist who did many Disney Comic Books and created the famous “Comic Strip Artist’s Kit”. It was created to help beginning comic artists deal with perspective problems and other drawing difficulties. I scanned my old xeroxes a while ago. It’s probably the best thing I’ve ever seen about practical staging and drawing for storyboards or comic books.

Anyway Carson saw it on my blog and read what nice things people had said about it and it really meant a lot to him. And he offered to send me an original copy of the handout, which is 11 x 17. I’ll scan it big so you can really see it well and print it out on 11 x 17 paper if you want to. He was even nice enough to inscribe it to me and if you print it out big you can read it.

Here’s the history of the handout, in Carson’s own words…”

“I put together this list of my favorite figure drawing, sketching and anatomy books for fellow artists and student friends. You can download any and all of these books for free. I hope you’ll find them useful.”

“DrawIt is not your typical image-editor. It does not fill up your window with lots of pallets you don’t use but instead presents with just one simple and clean window. Nevertheless, DrawIt packs an impressive feature-list into this single window. DrawIt is layer-based, has a powerful vector-drawing tool, incredible support for masks and much, much more. Check the feature-list below to discover why DrawIt might be the tool you need.”

“The below image looks like a simple gradient with my website’s name on it. But it’s more than that. There’s a picture hidden in that gradient. Can you find it?”

“…if you are working on an engraving, you will probably find there are a lot of grey areas where the lines were close together. Assuming you used at least 1200dpi for the scan, and preferably 1600 or 2400, there should be at least four or five pixels between the lines, which should be at least two or three pixels wide…”