Wolfgang's Artist of the Week: Jinyoung Shin

Jinyoung Shin is a young woman from New York whose art I admire so strongly that I often sputter when asked about it. It is stylish, and not particularly digestible as something that you would see in comics or even character design, which isn't to say it isn't understandable or unapproachable, but rather is deeply artistic and, for me, inspiring. Ms. Shin's art is something I adore because it is so unique and solitary.

Obviously manga influenced and slightly gothic in tone, Jinyoung takes styles well beyond their normal borders and makes them completely her own: ethereal, bizarre, playful, extremely stylized and sort of frightening all at once. The utterly over-exaggerated, anorexic limbs, the surrealist and modern, geometric art of the various details and backgrounds are real hallmarks of her work. I really like the x-ray-like layering she does with clothes, limbs and positioning in many of the pictures. And while her images are busy — almost frenetic — they are never messy or cluttered, but precise and focused.
One thing I really come away with from this art (which may not have ever been intended by the artist) is a feeling of how important it is to experiment and push limits. Manga bishounen? Pfff. Manga bishounen on surrealist benders, with commentary intact on the absurdities of the genre, and it looks like art!

Orrin's Artist of the Week: Prometheus

Niklas Jansson, who seems to go by the name of Prometheus, mostly does pictures of old-school video game characters, robots, and monsters. Not that there's anything at all wrong with that. Though the monsters are, of course, my favorite part, I first encountered his work thanks to his redesigns of Megaman characters as cute anime girls. He has an interesting approach to digital coloring that lends all of his works a very appealing (and immediately recognizable) texture.

His most visible work out in the world is probably his work on the Dragonmech D20 setting. I've never actually read the books or used them to game, but the art is certainly nice. I think what ultimately won my heart, though, was the fact that he redesigned the characters and monsters from Fester's Quest, proving that he's the only person besides me who ever so much as played that game.

Wolfgang's Artist of the Week

For my half of the new feature's premiere, I'm going to focus on a fellow by the name of Mattias O Adolfsson. That links to his portfolio, but he has a sketch blog to look at with more current things, in process works and detail snippets of larger works.

I think this guy is amazing. A blend of Richard Scarry and everything that is awesome about robots, flying (or otherwise ambulatory) houses, cartoon animals and monsters that look like people (or caricatures of people). I love his use of watercolor and delicate ink, and the way everything he does has this consistent storybook tone. It really tickles me how he focuses on houses, buildings and transportation as having personality and motive, and I adore the tiniest details he puts into everything: faces in the window, expressions on clouds, and elephants in the street.

In short: awesome!

Orrin's Artist of the Week: Les McClaine

This is a new feature we're trying out. Every Wednesday, we'll each highlight a new artist that we really like. We're going to try to stick with smaller names that you might not know, and avoid folks like, say, Mike Mignola. This week, my contribution is Les McClaine. He's probably best known for his newstrip-style adventure comic Johnny Crossbones, although with there being a TV show of his comic The Minute Man coming out soon, that may change. I like him best, though, when he's riffing on classic horror tropes. Recently, he premiered this image on his website:
I love so many things about that picture. I love the way he draws the damsel-in-distress, I love the Jack Kirby dots, I love the butler-y attitude of the monster, I love the simian qualities of the mad doctor and his creations, I love the brain in the jar, I love the skylight roof, and I love the girl sneaking in through the window with a shovel. He's also got penciled and inked versions of the picture up, which show the process as well as any images I've seen.

For more of his great work on horror tropes, try his dullahan or his completely brilliant ghoul.