Please show me your first sketchbook, mighty artist!

May 7, 2010 9:15 AM

Are there good online resources for examples of the early work of a modern illustrator or comic artist?

I love fantasy art, comic art, or almost any animation in that vein. I'm also really curious about how these talents got their start, and what that start looked like. Have any artists put up real timelines of their early start, from when the started to take things seriously but weren't yet great, and onward through some of the clumsy periods when they were still learning?

The best example I've found is heading back to comic #1 for online webcomic artists. That's interesting, but is a very specific niche. In many cases, these artists were already awesome when they started, so you don't even get that much information. How did these artists progress through art on paper, learn Photoshop (or other digital tool), and develop their creativity?

You're awesome now, artists, but surely you were simply mediocre at some point! Mind sharing? :)

posted by swrittenb to Media & Arts (3 answers total)

Michael Sporn has a great blog about early animators. He's got so much great content, interviews, letters, dissects things like walk cycles and painstakingly transfers NTSC DVDs (which have 29.97 fps, and animations frequently was 12, though others existed before standardization of big production houses like Disney) to show frame by frame, and which frames were done by the primary animator and which were done by the assistants. I love to see where assistants messed up the tweens.

You'll probably be best served by looking into art history materials, like you said, artists don't often share early work. Art historians will dig it up though.

When you say "modern" do you mean contemporary or modernist?
posted by fontophilic at 9:46 AM on May 7, 2010

John Byrne - Images from JB's Early Days
posted by martinrebas at 10:26 AM on May 7, 2010

Penny Arcade was really horrendously drawn in the beginning.
posted by Scoo at 11:15 AM on May 7, 2010