The Tolkien Estate has built a new website dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien and it includes dozens of hard-drawn maps, illustrations, paintings, and calligraphic works done by the author in the course of writing his books. Tolkien was a talented artist and his maps and visual art were an integral part of his work. From Artnet:

Tolkien’s art and writings went hand and hand, with illustrations serving as an an integral part of his creative process. Sometimes the words would inspire the artwork, and sometimes drawing a scene would move the narrative in new directions.

The author meticulously mapped out the world of Middle Earth to ensure the accurate movements of his large cast of characters.

I was lucky enough to see some of these maps and drawings in person at this 2019 exhibition at the Morgan Library — great stuff. (via @tedgioia)

• books
• illustration
• J.R.R. Tolkien
• maps
• The Hobbit
• The Lord of the Rings

In 1893, English marine biologist William Saville-Kent published his 550-page book, The Great Barrier Reef of Australia: Its Products and Potentialities. Accompanying the text are more than a dozen full-color illustrations of the plants and animals of the reef, drawn from Saville-Kent’s watercolors painted on location. You can peruse the entire book at the Internet Archive or the Biodiversity Heritage Library or take a look at the illustrations at The Marginalian (where prints are also available).

• books
• illustration
• William Saville-Kent

Tomer Hanuka asked his third-year illustration students at SVA to “come up with a post-pandemic New Yorker magazine cover” and posted some of their wonderful & thoughtful work to Twitter. Here are a few that caught my eye:

The second cover down, by Katrina Catacutan, is probably my favorite (the body language of the woman answering the door is just perfect) but the last image by Amy Young hit me like a ton of bricks. The New Yorker should run all of these covers for an issue of the magazine in a few weeks — collect them all!

• Amy Young
• Covid-19
• design
• illustration
• Katrina Catacutan
• magazines
• NYC
• The New Yorker
• Tomer Hanuka

Illustrator Hazel Mead created a pair of pieces called You Don’t Know What’s Going On In People’s Lives: the original version and one featuring children. The images above are snippets from the larger images, both of which are available as prints in Mead’s shop. (via cup of jo)

Update: Several people sent me a link to this video from Cleveland Clinic that is very similar to Mead’s illustrations.

• art
• Hazel Mead
• illustration

That’s the cover for the April 5, 2021 issue of the New Yorker illustrated by R. Kikuo Johnson.

I began preparing for this project by revisiting news coverage of anti-Asian hate crimes committed during the pandemic. As I absorbed one account after another, they became increasingly difficult to read. So many mothers and grandmothers have been targeted. I imagined my own mom in that situation. I thought about my grandma and my aunt, who have been among my greatest sources of support. The mother in the drawing is made up of all these women.

So simple, so powerful. The way the shoes, eyes, and faces are positioned and angled. On Twitter, Jiayang Fan commented:

I can’t stop staring at this cover. I can’t stop wondering who would come to this mother-daughter pair’s aid if someone attacked them. I can’t stop thinking I was once the daughter and how helpless I still feel to protect my mother.

• illustration
• Jiayang Fan
• R. Kikuo Johnson
• racism
• The New Yorker

Over a period of a year and a half, Matt Kish created one illustration for each of the 552 pages in the Signet Classic paperback edition of Herman Melville’s novel, Moby-Dick. He then turned those illustrations into a book, Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page.

In retrospect, Kish says he feels as foolhardy as Ishmael, the novel’s narrator, and as obsessed as Captain Ahab in his quest for the great white whale. “I see now that the project was an attempt to fully understand this magnificent novel, to walk through every sun-drenched word, to lift up all the hatches and open all the barrels, to smell, taste, hear, and see every seabird, every shark, every sailor, every harpooner, and every whale,” he says. “It was a hard thing, a very painful thing, but the novel now lives inside me in a away it never could have before.”

All of the drawings are still available on Kish’s old Blogspot blog (first entry here) but the best way to see them is to get the book.

• books
• illustration
• Matt Kish
• Moby Dick
• remix

This guide to Covid-19 variants (SARS-CoV-2 viruses that have evolved changes to meaningfully alter their behavior) by Michaeleen Doucleff and Meredith Rizzo at NPR cleverly visualizes how mutations of the virus’s spike proteins help bind it more easily to ACE2 receptors on human cells. The key to the visualization is Meredith Miotke’s illustrations of the viruses using Lego pieces to represent the virus spikes and cell receptors. The usual SARS-CoV-2 has 1x1 Lego pieces that can bind with 1x2 pieces, like so:

But, as everyone who has ever worked with a Lego set knows, a 1x1 piece stuck to a 1x2 piece is not super stable. So when a version of the virus with a 1x2 piece shows up, it’s able to form a better connection to the 1x2 receptor:

The analogy breaks down if you look too hard at it¹ but for many people, it can be a quick way to get the gist of the mechanism at work here. (via @EricTopol)

1. This is a huge pet peeve of mine when people try to poke holes in analogies: by definition, all analogies break down if you examine them too deeply. An analogy is a comparison of two different things that are similar in significant respects. If they were the same in every respect, it’s not an analogy…you’d just be describing one thing.↩

• Covid-19
• illustration
• infoviz
• Lego
• medicine
• Meredith Miotke
• Meredith Rizzo
• Michaeleen Doucleff
• science

The rhetorical highlight of the Biden/Harris inauguration was Amanda Gorman reciting her poem, The Hill We Climb — I thought it was fantastic. It begins:

When day comes we ask ourselves,
where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry,
a sea we must wade
We’ve braved the belly of the beast
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace
And the norms and notions
of what just is
Isn’t always just-ice
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it
Somehow we do it
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished
We the successors of a country and a time
Where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one

Here’s a transcript courtesy of CNN. You can read about how Gorman composed the poem in the NY Times:

“I had this huge thing, probably one of the most important things I’ll ever do in my career,” she said in an interview. “It was like, if I try to climb this mountain all at once, I’m just going to pass out.”

Gorman managed to write a few lines a day and was about halfway through the poem on Jan. 6, when pro-Trump rioters stormed into the halls of Congress, some bearing weapons and Confederate flags. She stayed awake late into the night and finished the poem, adding verses about the apocalyptic scene that unfolded at the Capitol that day.

The Times also has a lesson for students about Gorman and her poem. And from NPR:

Gorman is no stranger to having to change her work midstream. Like Biden, who has spoken openly about having stuttered as a child, Gorman grew up with a childhood speech impediment of her own. She had difficulty saying certain letters of the alphabet — the letter R was especially tough — which caused her to have to constantly “self-edit and self-police.”

Her delivery was amazing — powerful and lyrical. Brava!

Update: I included a link to a transcript of the poem above. I also wanted to include this illustration by Samantha Dion Baker because art inspires art.

Update: A book version of Gorman’s inaugural poem will be out in April and is available for preorder.

• Amanda Gorman
• art
• illustration
• poetry
• Samantha Dion Baker
• video

Nicholas Rougeux has beautifully reproduced & remastered botanical illustrator Elizabeth Twining’s catalog of plants and flowers from 1868, Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants. Each of the 160 illustrations is accompanied by explanatory text from the original book and an interactive version of the image (click on the highlighted plant for more info).

Posters based on the illustrations are available and, get this, so are puzzles!

• art
• Elizabeth Twining
• illustration
• Nicholas Rougeux
• science

Author and illustrator Edward Carey has been making a drawing a day since the beginning of the pandemic. He recently completed his 250th drawing, with “no end in sight, alas”. He’s posting each day’s drawing to Instagram; here are a few of my recent favorites:

And the whole lot laid out on the floor:

That’s so many days. (via austin kleon)

• Edward Carey
• illustration

Just enjoying Jo Brown’s illustrations today. Using a Moleskine notebook, she sketches plants and wildlife near her home in Devon, England. A replica of that nature journal called Secrets of a Devon Wood has been recently published in the UK (US edition is out soon — Amazon is the only place I could find it). You can check out more of her artwork on Instagram. (via colossal)

• illustration
• Jo Brown

Study of the Creative Specimens is a collection of fantastical hybrid creatures created for Adobe’s 99U conference by Mark Brooks and illustration studio alademosca. Prints are available from Paper Chase Press. (via colossal)

• art
• design
• illustration
• Mark Brooks
• remix

In the 1930s and 40s, artist Eric Godal drew some anti-fascist political cartoons that urged people not to listen to right-wing authoritarians who want to destroy and pillage society for their own ends. Godal, a German Jew, had escaped the clutches of Nazi Germany in the 30s and labored to warn America and the world about the fate of the Jews in Europe.¹

Illustrator Chris Piascik has updated Godal’s drawings for 2020 to feature our own corrupt crackpot wannabe dictator. Calling Donald Trump a fascist is hardly controversial these days — he clearly is. What his supporters need to reckon with is: are they?

1. Godal’s mother was able to get out of Germany on a boat but was denied entry to the United States as a refugee by the Roosevelt administration. She was sent back and eventually murdered in a Nazi death camp.↩

• art
• Chris Piascik
• Donald Trump
• Eric Godal
• illustration
• Nazis
• politics
• remix

I love this zoomable interactive display of British & Exotic Mineralogy. To create it, Nicholas Rougeux collected 718 hand-drawn mineral illustrations by James Sowerby sourced from a pair of multi-volume books called British Mineralogy and Exotic Mineralogy, published between 1802 and 1817. Then he arranged them according to hue and brightness in a collage worthy of Knoll.

British Mineralogy and Exotic Mineralogy comprise 718 illustrations by James Sowerby in an effort to illustrate the topographical mineralogy of Great Britain and minerals not then known to it. Sowerby’s plates are some of the finest examples of hand-drawn mineral illustrations ever created. The detail and care with which these illustrations were created is incredible and worthy of close examination. See the samples below.

And, oh boy, he’s selling posters of it too.

• art
• geology
• illustration
• James Sowerby
• Nicholas Rougeux
• science

For the cover of this week’s New Yorker, Chris Ware drew several vignettes of NYC arranged in his trademark grid as a companion to this incredible piece about a single day of the Covid-19 crisis in the city. About the cover, Ware wrote:

Teeming with unpredictable people and unimaginable places and unforeseeable moments, life there is measured not in hours but in densely packed minutes that can fill up a day with a year’s worth of life. Lately, however, closed up in our homes against a worldwide terror, time everywhere has seemed to slur, to become almost Groundhog Day-ish, forced into a sort of present-perfect tense — or, as my fellow New Yorker contributor Masha Gessen more precisely put it, ‘loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself.’ But disaster can also have a recalibrating quality. It reminds us that the real things of life (breakfast, grass, spouse) can, in normal times, become clotted over by anxieties and nonsense. We’re at low tide, but, as my wife, a biology teacher, said to me this morning, “For a while, we get to just step back and look.” And really, when you do, it is pretty marvellous.

• art
• Chris Ware
• Covid-19
• illustration
• NYC

This is Chris Ware’s illustration for the cover of this week’s New Yorker, the magazine’s annual Health Issue. The pandemic had to be the topic for the cover, and Ware’s daughter suggested that the specific theme focus on the families of the healthcare workers on the front lines of the crisis.

“As a procrastination tactic, I sometimes ask my fifteen-year-old daughter what the comic strip or drawing I’m working on should be about — not only because it gets me away from my drawing table but because, like most kids of her generation, she pays attention to the world. So, while sketching the cover of this Health Issue, I asked her.

“‘Make sure it’s about how most doctors have children and families of their own,’ she said.

“Good idea. And a personal one: one of her friend’s parents are both doctors; that friend, now distilled into a rectangular puddle of light on my daughter’s nightstand, reported that her mom had temporarily stopped going to work, pending the results of a COVID-19 test.

• art
• Chris Ware
• Covid-19
• illustration
• medicine
• The New Yorker

Amber Share of Subpar Parks is producing illustrations of real one-star reviews of America’s National Parks from apparently dissatisfied park visitors. Zion National Park is a bit standoffish:

Newsflash: Sequoia National Park is outdoors and has insects:

From a bored Joshua Tree guest:

Follow along with the rest of these on Instagram — Share is doing one drawing for each National Park and she’s got many more still to go. Prints, postcards, stickers, and tshirts are available from her shop (or will be soon).

Update: See also beautiful photos paired with one-star reviews of the places in question and Snowbird’s creative ad campaign based on one-star reviews. (via @ebellm & @mattgist)

• Amber Share
• art
• illustration

The Valdivia Expedition, led by German marine biologist Carl Chun in 1898-1899, was the first time humans had explored the ocean depths below 500 fathoms. What they found changed our conception of the oceans. The results, in the form of 24 volumes of text and illustrations, took decades to be published. Among the volumes was The Cephalopoda, published in 1910 and filled with colorful hand-illustrated drawings of octopuses and squid, courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

I found this on Brain Pickings, which identifies the illustrator as Friedrich Wilhelm Winter, a credit I couldn’t find in the actual book itself. They’re also selling some of the illustrations as prints, like this one of the octopus featured above.

• biology
• books
• Carl Chun
• Friedrich Wilhelm Winter
• illustration
• science

Illustrator Jerry M. Wilson has drawn a series of constellations that explore the etymology of the constellations’ names and related words in several languages. So for example, “Taurus” is Latin for “bull”, which is “toro” in Spanish & Italian and “tyr” in Danish. And then you also have associated words like “toreador” (“bullfighter” in Spanish) and “teurastamo” (Finnish for “slaughterhouse”)…a constellation of words related to “Taurus”.

• astronomy
• illustration
• infoviz
• Jerry M. Wilson
• language
• maps

Here’s an enormous library of thousands of old book illustrations, with searchable name, artist, source, date, which book it was in, etc. There are also a number of collections to browse through, and each are tagged with multiple keywords so you can also get lost in there in that manner.

Though the team behind the site doesn’t specifically list the whole site as public domain, chances are a lot of the illustrations you’ll find are way out of copyright in most jurisdictions.

• art
• books
• illustration

For more than 11 years for a series he calls Everydays, Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple) has been making a daily picture. As you might expect from the breakneck pace, some of them aren’t that interesting (there’s a lot of juvenile stuff here tbh), but my favorite ones are the Black Mirror-ish with decayed or repurposed pop cultural references.

You can view more of Winkelmann’s work on Behance, Tumblr, and his website. (via dense discovery)

• design
• illustration
• Mike Winkelmann
• Pokemon
• Toy Story

I really like Owen Pomery’s illustrative style — his drawings are spare yet detailed, precise but a bit messy. You can see his work on his website, on Twitter, or on Instagram. He sells prints and books in his shop, including this field guide to modernist kiosk designs in a fictional country.

(via @dunstan)

• architecture
• art
• illustration
• Owen Pomery

One of the (several dozen) posts I started writing ages ago but never finished was a collection of the hundreds of bird illustrations pictured in John James Audubon’s seminal Birds of America. The images have been floating around on the web forever, in various sizes and collections, and I wanted to group (or at least link to) all of them in one place. But now I don’t have to because the Audubon Society has put them up on their website.

John James Audubon’s Birds of America is a portal into the natural world. Printed between 1827 and 1838, it contains 435 life-size watercolors of North American birds (Havell edition), all reproduced from hand-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration.

Thumbnails of all 435 illustrations are presented on a single page (sortable alphabetically or chronologically by their creation date) and then each illustration is given its own page with Audubon’s notes on the bird pictured, a link to the bird in Audubon’s Bird Guide (where you can see photos and hear bird calls, etc.), and a link to download a high resolution image (if you sign up for their mailing list). The barred owl image is 111-megapixels. What a resource!

You can also see online copies of Birds of America at the University of Pittsburgh and Meisei University.

And if you’ve never had a chance to see some of these illustrations in real life, you should keep your eyes peeled for the opportunity. They really are something. (via open culture, which has been particularly great lately)

• art
• birds
• Birds of America
• books
• illustration
• John James Audubon

Gorgeous work by a Polish illustrator working in Japan. Originally found him through this page about his Tokyo storefronts book, which features a number of super detailed watercolor illustrations. You can see even more on the series page and the Tokyo by night ones are also worth a long look. He also links to this very detailed review of the storefronts book, with a page by page description (sounds boring but the work is so beautiful, it goes by fast).

Urbanowicz also has a Youtube channel with lots of making-of videos, including a series about the book above.

(Via Darran Anderson)

• illustration
• Japan

Illustrator Andrew DeGraff makes what he calls Cinemaps, maps of movies and their plots in the style of the dotted-line wanderings of The Family Circus comic strip or Harry Potter’s Marauder’s Map. He’s done maps for Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Princess Bride.

My favorite DeGraff drawing is probably Back to the Future, with Hill Valley represented twice on the same page: 1955 in pink underneath 1985 in blue.

DeGraff collected these maps (and several more) into a book called Cinemaps. (via fairly interesting)

• Andrew DeGraff
• books
• Cinemaps
• illustration
• maps
• movies

The Downtown Collective is a project by illustrator Kelli Ercolano in which she is drawing & painting all of the NYC cafes, restaurants, and bars she’s fallen in love with. You can check out more of her work and process on Instagram.

• illustration
• Kelli Ercolano
• NYC

National Geographic sent illustrator Christoph Niemann to Cambodia and Vietnam and he returned with this series of drawings and observations. He talked about the trip in this behind-the-scenes video.

In a region with so much natural beauty, ancient architecture, and vibrant culture, travelers can easily get stuck behind their viewfinders — consumed with capturing the most vivid moments for their photo albums and Instagram feeds. But over the years, Niemann has developed a different method of documenting his trips.

“I always drew when I traveled … I draw just to calm down essentially, so I’m not constantly checking my phone,” he says.

Niemann believes that painting and drawing his experiences creates a dialogue between his mind and a place — this process ultimately allows him to turn the lens on himself. “Essentially the drawing is like a visual filter,” he explains. “You take the world — and you take it through the abstraction of your drawing — and you start seeing differently.”

Some my favorite posts I’ve written over the past few years have been about my travel: my western roadtrip, Berlin, Istanbul, the solar eclipse. Aside from the eclipse post (which gives me goosebumps every time I reread it), I hadn’t intended to start writing about travel. Ostensibly these trips are supposed to be vacations, my time off from constantly sifting through culture for observations. But Niemann is right…there’s something about applying the creative process to unfamiliar places that that makes the experience more worthwhile. For me, photographing and taking notes for a later post gives me a much better sense of a place, forces me to pay more attention & be more open, causes me to learn about myself, and produces a written document of my trip that I can go back to and experience again.

• Cambodia
• Christoph Niemann
• illustration
• travel
• Vietnam

I *love* these simple visualizations of how different kinds of relationships change over time by writer and cartoonist Olivia de Recat.

My pal Jesse James Garrett called them “Feynman diagrams of the heart” that depict “the vast entanglement of humanity”.

The illustration is available as a print but currently sold out. :( Hopefully it’ll be back in stock soon? In the meantime, you can take a look at some of her other cartoons (mostly for the New Yorker), peruse her shop, or follow her stuff on Insta.

• illustration
• infoviz
• Olivia de Recat

Abbie Paulhus is selling copies of this great illustrated poster she made featuring a Wes Anderson alphabet on her Etsy shop.

It features people, places, and objects from many of Anderson’s films (I didn’t see any Bottle Rocket references): B is for Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, N is for Ned Plimpton, and T is for Margot and Richie Tenenbaum.

• Abbie Paulhus
• art
• illustration
• movies
• Wes Anderson

The NY Times article about the Event Horizon Telescope that I wrote about here introduced me to Andy Gilmore’s geometric illustrations.

Really lovely stuff. More on his Instagram.

• Andy Gilmore
• illustration