Ragged Claws Network

ComiCrazys Archive for the Famous Artists Cartoon Course Category — 18 free lessons and counting; available in both PDF and JPEG formats.

Comic Tools: Tutorials — learn about basic anatomy, balloon shapes, Kirby energy dots, perfect white-out consistency, ruling pens, cutting techniques, art corrections, scanning, and lots more.

Download Here: “Constructive Anatomy” by George B. Bridgman

Ken Hultgren on Cartooning

Lessons from the Easel – The Basics by Charles Sovek

Rey’s Anatomy by Rey Bustos – a display of images that use Flash technology to interactively cross fade from photos of real and sculpted human figures to drawings of those same figures with the skin removed to display the underlying musculature.

Save Loomis! — download PDFs of Fun with a Pencil, Figure Drawing for All It’s Worth, Drawing the Head & Hands, Successful Drawing, Creative Illustration, and Eye of the Painter, all for free.

Scott Burdick: Demonstrations – nine in oil, one in watercolour. Even if the subject matter is not to your taste, you can learn something here about the traditional alla prima method of working out a painting in oil from the initial block in to the final strokes of detail.

Tom Richmond’s MAD Blog Cartooning/Caricature Tutorials — noses, hands, crowd scenes, cross hatching, and more.

The Tools Artists Use — find out what tools your fellow artists keep in their toolboxes that you might add to yours.

BONUS LINKS:

Agent 44: Fixing It Old School — learn how cartoonists make art corrections in the real world.

Build Your Own Easel! – Free Easel Plans by Benjamin Grosser.

Felipe’s Art Tutorials — Felipe’s detailed explanation of Burton Silverman‘s watercolour technique alone makes this site a keeper.

From Idea Sketch to Final Painting: Kent Williams, Mother and Daughter (2009), oil on linen, 42 x 50 in. — not art instruction per se, but much can be gleaned from step-by-step process photos, and the finished work is a knockout!

Making a Canvas Board! by Larry Seiler

At Adweek.com, I read “Profile: Ralph Steadman – Gonzo art through the Decades” by Eleftheria Parpis:

“There’s a saying: ‘In art there is no such thing as a mistake — a mistake is an excuse to do something else,’” says the 72-year-old artist. “That’s how I feel about drawing and writing. I couldn’t draw very well. I kept blotting things by accident, so I decided to make mistakes part of my work.” Which is how, he adds, his work evolved from the cleaner lines of illustrated books such as I, Leonardo and Sigmund Freud to the messier, frenetic style that later defined his most iconic creations, such as the drawings for Thompson’s novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

I caught up with Moving Pictures by Kathryn and Stuart Immonen:

I briefly browsed through the posts at GFXworld.org.

I admired the scans of Virgil Finlay’s H.P. Lovecraft illustrations, posted by Mr. Door Tree over at the blog, Golden Age Comic Book Stories: part one, part two and part three. Here’s a tiny taste (the images on Mr. Door Tree’s site are much larger):

I browsed through the latest images from the Phoenix Mars Mission. There are many more available today than there were yesterday.

I read/skimmed a few articles about the Democratic nomination campaign in the U.S., including this oddly uplifting profile of Barack Obama’s “body man” (an unusual term — or at least, one I’ve never heard before — that appears to be derived from “bodyguard”).

I went back to take another look at a small gallery of gorgeous cartoons by Ethel Hays. Love those sinuous ink lines! Love those flappers!

And I checked out Read Yourself Raw to see if the August preview list is up yet. It’s not.

To be continued…