Today the Independent ran a story listing the best illustrators in Britain, and two of my favorite artists, Stanley Donwood and Tom Gauld, were right at the top. Funny enough, I don’t really consider either of them illustrators…

Stanley Donwood

More of a fine artist than illustrator, Stanley Donwood, 38, created the artwork for Radiohead’s album sleeves. The man himself is not one naturally drawn to the limelight. For years, the only way to contact him was to fax his local pub in Bath, from whence any communication would be forwarded to him. Much of Donwood’s work delights in rediscovering antiquated processes. A recent series of images, London Views, created a panorama of the capital out of 14 pieces of hand-cut linoleum, printed on a Victorian printing press. His latest work, If You Lived Here You’d Be Home By Now (recently shown at the Lazarides Gallery in London’s Soho), comprises a series of darkly compelling etchings that used the century-old photogravure technique.

Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld is a 30-year-old illustrator and comic book artist who lives and works in London. With Simone Lia, whom he met while studying at the Royal College of Art, Gauld publishes a series of delightful, poignant comics under the imprint Cabanon Press. His subject matter is a long way from the superhero deeds that many associate with the genre, retaining a very British reserve that grounds the extraordinary in the everyday. Just check out his treatment for the cover of a special Penguin edition of Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers (pictured above). His commissioned illustrations have appeared in The Guardian, Time Out, New Scientist and Prospect.

My sketchbooks ebb and flow. Whenever I’m working non-stop on a project, my sketchbook suffers. Whenever I’m meandering, reading a lot, wondering what to do next, my sketchbook flourishes. Is there a correlation to my mental health? Almost certainly. Were food and shelter provided for me, I could be content to spend the rest of my days reading and doodling in a sketchbook, finished product be damned.

This afternoon I read Ivan Brunetti‘s interview in Todd Hignite’s IN THE STUDIO. He was talking a lot about grids, and how if you put objects into a grid, they read as a system, or “pleasing geometry,” and viewers automatically start to structure them and find relationships between them. He pointed to this Kandinsky print as an inspiration:

He also related this “putting things into boxes” as part of his definition of cartooning:

The nature of cartooning seems inherently playful, having its roots in a playful kind of drawing, but because you’re putting things into boxes and organizing pages into panels and shapes of rectangles and circles, it automatically has an architectural quality, too.

I was talking to Dan Chaon a while back and he told me he uses an exercise with his students where he has them divide a piece of notebook paper into six “panels” and then instructs them to write scenes in each box. I really like this idea of looking at writing as merely a filling of black space. Lately, I’ve been playing with grids in my sketchbook pages:

(I’ve also been copying people’s work: the last five panels are ripped from the amazing Tom Gauld.)

I find that gridding gives way to lots of spontaneous doodling and gaglines…

I’ve also been trying to rip off Lynda Barry and treat my writing as calligraphically as possible–varying text sizes and styles within the same space. Brunetti had a great point in the interview when he said that cartooning wasn’t necessarily drawing, it was more like calligraphy or writing…writing with pictures, as Saul Steinberg would say.

Speaking of putting things into boxes, I can’t really keep a sketchbook at my desk at work, but we have all kinds of post-it notes around, so if there’s a bit of downtime and a flash of inspiration, I’ve been using the post-it as a panel, and doing a quick doodle. Jessica Hagy’s wonderful index cards have already captured the cartoon-on-mundane-office-supply market…but Meg thought these were pretty funny:

“You look just like…”

I’ve heard Robert Downey Jr. and Donnie Darko, but now it’s “that guy who got shot last night on CSI.”

What do you say to this stuff?

I get this brand of couch potato free-associating day in and day out at the reference desk. And it’s always from someone in sweatpants. Never someone you’d actually want a compliment from.

“Thank you, I’m glad I remind you of a celebrity, even a minor one. My sense of self-worth has sky-rocketed.”

Okay, enough griping.

They have nothing to do with this post, but I like pretty much everything that Tom Gauld, Anders Nilsen, John Porcellino, and Kevin Huizenga put out.

It seems like just about everybody has the plague these days, and over at our place it’s no different. I spent the weekend recovering from the crud, watching the Star Wars trilogy on DVD, reading comic books and Elmore Leonard, and eating like a hog. (Starve a fever, feed a cold.)

The best thing about the trilogy box set is a 2 1/2 hour long documentary called Empire of Dreams. It mostly focuses on the first movie, but it does a pretty amazing job at putting Star Wars — which seems like it came out of nowhere — into a context.

What interested me the most was the huge role played by Ralph McQuarrie, a conceptual design artist who Lucas hired to make paintings of several scenes (including C-3P0, R2-D2, a lightsaber battle, stormtroopers, and Darth Vader) so that Lucas could take them to the studio and say, “This is what it’s going to look like.” Essentially, McQuarrie’s drawings sold the movie, and got the thing made, but not only that, he created the look of the films. He took what was in Lucas’s head, and made it come to life.

Pictures trumped words.

You can see a bunch of these things at McQuarrie’s website.

Other inspiration from the weekend? Check out Tom Gauld’s Guardians of the Kingdom:

I love pretty much everything that I’ve seen from him.

And I can’t say it enough: if you haven’t read Elmore Leonard before, you are in for a real treat. Killshot is about to come out as a movie.
Ok, that’s all I can think of. Between wedding plans, GRE, and grad school apps, there’s not much time for anything else, but maybe I’ll put something pretty up this week.