Cool! I've been listening a lot to the Draftsmen podcast lately and one thing that they keep mentioning is "studying the (old) Masters". I'm not sure if these qualify as "Masterworks" per their definition but it's from the same era, i.e., when drawings/engravings/art had to be planned and executed carefully because a mistake is not as cheap as a CTRL + Z.
Another thing Draftsmen made me realize is the actual art (or at least craftsmanship) of comics. They may be mass entertainment (i.e., we're talking mainstream here, not your charming indie series) but even in their early incarnations comic art was still grounded in solid art principles. A lot of the works here exhibit that thesis:
- Like Vess, Frazetta might be too easy an example but I fancy he took his technique of theatrical lighting and exaggerated dynamic ranges from old black and white engravings.
So I think the one thing that will resonate with the HN crowd is the fact that Stan Prokopenko, one of the hosts, is also some sort of small-time tech entrepreneur. This comes up throughout the episodes but two that really focus on his efforts are:
If you take programming/hacking as an art and hold fierce ideals over it, some of their other episodes might also benefit you, either personally or professionally:
I just want to say, whatever your feelings about programming as an art there are still definitely differences between the two industries. I might just be biased because if I didn't love my paycheck too much, I'd probably be making indie comics.
A while back, I fell in love with James Mahoney's illustrations of many Dickens' classics. That's when I realized there were no high quality digital copies of this Victorian master's ink drawings.
You can find the version of Oliver Twist I created here:
I've also been working on typesetting Little Dorrit. Unfortunately, the text of both books have a lot of typographical errors that I'd like to correct at some point. Perhaps some future advance in machine learning will help me automate the process because I don't have the patience to do it all manually.
Assuming it's legal to do so, what's the best way to get some of these printed, for wall art or whatnot? Is this something a Fedex Kinkos would specialize in?
[0]: https://github.com/jemmybutton/fiziko