This is beautiful. I found it on artless, which is a site that’s not updated very often, but when they do it’s always worth the wait. Thing is, I wish they’d explain their stuff a little more. What is this, what’s it about? I feel stymied by my lack of knowledge of Japanese.

I just came across this article on Japanese rubber stamps on Ping Mag. Go read.

I got to James Jean’s site via Computerlove (a site I very much recommend) and was immediately impressed by the quality of the illustration. Some of them remind me of the frontispiece for a set of encyclopaedias I have, dating from the 1930s: great tableaux of activities, incredible detail and fantastic technique and artistry. I’ll scan the frontispiece in soon… meanwhile, pay a visit to his site, and maybe commission him or something: James Jean.

Another one found while researching the Japanese advertising poster article, I came across this poster for Japan in the results. The result itself came from Riding Sun, which links to the wonderful collection of travel posters on the Los Angeles Public Library’s site. Some of my particular favourites:

This is another post from the big pile of images I have. Now, I remember finding this, and being disappointed there were no detailed versions of the illustration, which from what I can see should bear closer inspection. Unfortunately yet again I’ve lost the reference to where I found it. No, no I haven’t. I found it through an image search for Japanese Advertising Art while researching this article and I just realised the Google Image Result page is still in my history. W00t.

So here we have it. It’s a page from Canadian Art Magazine about Nicholas Di Genova. Using Google I find lots of pages about him, including a decent quality version of the image used in the article, along with a couple more. Looking at them I realise I’ve seen his work plenty of times in books and magazines. Interestingly I had an entirely different image in my mind when I saw the original page from Canadian Art. I thought it would be a stylised but otherwise accurate drawing of a stag or moose, but it turns out to be some kind of moose-fish hybrid. Ho hum. Still, the inspiration holds. One day I’ll get around to doing my comic book of doom.