Illustrators #12

 

The latest issue of Illustrators has landed – with its always satisfying thunk! – on my doormat and it's a very welcome arrival. Editor Peter Richardson always packs a lot into its 96 pages and this issue is no different, with four lengthy articles, all illustrated to stunning effect.

Android Jones and Denis Zilber were names unfamiliar to me, but their work is fascinating. Both have lengthy appreciations which put their artwork in context. Jones' career spans George Lucas's Industrial Light & Magic and Nintendo before he founded Massive Black, to bring together talented creators, and ConceptArt.org, widely used by the film and gaming industries to find artists. Nowadays he can be found performing live with a variety of collaborators. You can see the creation of a number of his paintings at Vimeo.

Burning Embrace video at Vimeo

Denis Zilber also works with digital art but has a rather more zany outlook, working in cartoons, book illustration, advertising and animation design. Zilber, via interviewer Diego Cordoba, talks readers through his colourful, madcap imagination.

I'm more at home with Howard Chaykin, having followed his work during my Comic World days... in fact, I'm pretty sure I interviewed him around the time of Power and Glory. He's better known for American Flagg! and Black Kiss (more notorious than popular, as author Thomas Kintner notes), although I think I first got into Chaykin through either his Shadow or Blackhawk mini-series in the 1980s. The article covers a whole heap of other Chaykin goodies.

 

An appreciation of the illustrations of Sidney Sime by Cleaver Patterson sheds light on this forgotten artist whose pen and ink artwork graced many magazines in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, although Sime hoped that his success would come from painting. For a while he was editor (and owner) of The Idler.

Much of Sime's work was fantastic or macabre and it was here that he excelled, working with the likes of Lord Dunsany to create beautiful, grotesque images. After the Great War, Sime, now over fifty, began to find commissions less regular and his interests more abstract.

A brief interview with Ron Murphy rounds out the issue.

For more information about Illustrators and back issues, visit the Book Palace website where you can also find details of their online editions. Issue 13 should include features on Mitch O'Connell, Jeff Miracola, Brooke Boynton Hughes and Sep Scott.