Monday, May 28, 2012

Bernard Kornblum from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

For the second week I have decided to illustrate Bernard Kornblum for Alphabooks from a personal favorite, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The book is a fictional time piece retelling of the golden age of comics and the two men who helped forged it. In the earlier chapters Bernard Kornblum helps tutor Josef Kavalier in the ways of magic tricks and escape arts until Josef has to escape himself from Prague during it's Nazi occupancy. The character is intensely interesting and a great father like figure to Josef. He is also reminiscent of a much older and more bearded Harry Houdini.
Cool book, you should read it.

Monday, May 21, 2012

Starting Alphabooks with a little Cloud Atlas

So in the wake of Alphabeasts, Andrew Neal has started a new alphabetical illustration project called Alphabooks (http://alphabooks.tumblr.com/). It's the same concept as before, going through the alphabet and illustrating each letter to a theme, this time it happens to be characters from books and stories. Seeing as how Alphabeasts kept me on the ball for illustrating weekly, I was more than excited to jump on this project.
To start off I went with Adam Ewing, the first character of six from the novel "The Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell. They are all interlinked in a very interesting way and essentially Adam Ewing is the building block of the thread. He's an American Notary on a trip to the Chatham islands in the 1850's who befriends a sociopath by the name of Dr. Henry Goose. READ THE BOOK, IT'S THE BEST.