A Study in Sherlock Holmes - (Various)

There are some really interesting examples of illustrations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. The first person to illustrate the character/stories was the artist Sidney Padget. I've heard various stories, such as at first Conan Doyle expected a different (less pretty) archetype for the character, and then decided that the Padget interpretation was fine. They also apparently mistook Sidney Padget for his brother, who was actually more famous at the time.

After Padget's illustrations, not many different stylistic archetypes have changed about the character, and you can definitely see his illustrations in the aesthetics many film adaptations of the stories. It's hard to say how much is due to the direction of the author's descriptions vs. the artist's interpretations though.

the first print illustrations of the story (I couln't find the artist information in the book I was looking at)

below are two Sidney Padget illustrations (along with some actors, etc.)

I found Wyndham Robinson's illustrations very interesting. He was mainly a cartoonist. 

these are all from "A Sherlock Holmes Scrapbook". 

you can find more of sidney padget's illustrations here: http://www.arthes.com/holmes/

and a whole bunch more: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Illustrations_from_books_of_Sherlock_Holmes

and more about wyndham robinson here: http://www.cartage.org.lb/en/themes/arts/drawings/Cartoonography/SatiricalArt/case2/case2.htm

Peter Sis

Peter Sis

As everybody should know, these are a couple children's book illustrations by Peter Sis. The reason why I wanted to share his illustrations particularly is because his use of style and application of visual components gave me a huge influence into the style of illustration that I am working on today. What I appreciate the most about his works are his method of mass space compared to the attention of detail; as you can see in the second illustration from The Conference of the Birds Peter creates this great mass of color and shape of the birds in his composition while taking careful note of each individual bird. Peter's great attention to meticulous detail creates a sense of depth and interest to the viewer from a far point of view as well as a close up view. 

** I don't know how many artists that I posted, but I just wanted to share a few more! :)

Taiyo Matsumoto

This is another of my favorite artists, a japanese illustrator/comickeer. He's most famous for writing and illustrating Tekkon Kinkreet  (Black & White), a comic about two rebellious street kids, which was eventually turned into a movie.

I'm still not sure if comic artists count, but I think his design and other senses are still really important to look at, even for non-comic narrative illustration. Everything from his covers, characters, storytelling, colors and line & drawings sense is really great. I'm sorry my scans are so bad!!

here's scans of his other book, no. 5:

Peter Mendelsund, Osamu Tezuka and Vertical Publishing

This is a bit of an "out of the box" topic, but I wanted to share two of my favorite artists/designers, Peter Mendelsund, a graphic designer known for his book covers (If you've heard of Vertical inc., he took the place of Chipp Kidd as essentially their in-house designers), and Osamu Tezuka, a comic/cartooning master from japan (Astro Boy, Black Jack, etc).

Vertical is a NYC based publishing firm who have been publishing various "alternative" and "old school" manga in the past several years. Pairing classic 60's-70's manga like Osamu Tezuka's work with such radical modern design sense as Chipp Kidd and Peter Mendelsund leads to some really amazing must-have books.

On hand, I have two of Osamu Tezuka's Black Jack comics to share, and then I've included some LQ images from the internet of some other work.

Osamu Tezuka is known for a lot of things ("the father of manga"), but he has a unique storytelling sensibility, character and narrative design, as well as a keen awareness of (sorry, unrelated to books) panel layout in his stories that make them very exciting, even after all these years.


Peter Mendelsund does a _lot_ of book covers, along with his Osamu Tezuka work, he's also done some other impressive work like the Steig Larsson "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" covers.  You can check out his work and his blog at ( http://bookcoverarchive.com/Peter_Mendelsund and http://jacketmechanical.blogspot.com/ )


Vertical is a really interesting publisher in terms of their design sense and also "what they like to publish" too, although it's really mainly english translations of japanese work. All their books are very "desirable" objects for me, not only because of content, but because their covers look gorgeous, on a shelf on in a hand. Here's a link to their website: http://www.vertical-inc.com/

Tove Jansson and Composition

Tove Jansson is the illustrator & writer of the Moomin series. I find her work very compelling! I think her composition is really one of the most interesting aspects (although her characters are really great too!)

There are many interesting websites on her work, and also the Moomin books (published by Drawn and Quarterly) are all at the MICA Library, so check 'em out!

Jules Feiffer's Characters

Another character post! 

Jules Feiffer is an american ilustrator, he's most known for his illustrations of the Phantom Tollbooth I think. He also does his own writing & illustration for some stories, and does some sassy cartoons.

He's got a really great sense of humor. Also he definitely really influenced me artistically and maybe mentally as a child, so I thought I should share some of his work, since it was important to me at that time.