Illustrations

Barbara Remington, Whose Lord of the Rings Illustrations Were Beloved By Everyone Except Tolkien, Has Died

Before Peter Jackson’s movies, the visual identity of Lord of the Rings was the territory of artists and animators. And few created a vision so iconic, and so loosely related to the actual books, as Barbara Remington. Now, at the age of 90, the well-loved illustrator has passed away. As reported by the New York…

This Artist Drawing an Incredibly Detailed Mechanical Crab Is Like a Human Printer

Watching this timelapse footage of artist Steeven Salvat drawing a cutaway illustration of a mechanical crab, revealing its impossible inner workings on one side, will make you marvel at his patience and incredibly steady hand. If the art thing doesn’t work out, Salvat could easily find work as a surgeon. The illustration is one of…

A Beautiful Illustration of Something Quite Horrible

Up until a few months ago, we knew virtually nothing about the Zika virus—or what it even looked like. But a beautiful new illustration by David S. Goodsell reveals its hidden details, while also showing how the dreaded virus goes to work. Scientists have been hard at work trying to untangle the mystery that is…

The New Illustrated Harry Potter Books Have Glorious Character Portraits

The first fully-illustrated version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone will hit the shelves on October 6th, and now we’re getting a glimpse at how some of our favorite characters will look when that day comes. A few of the images done by artist Jim Kay have been released by Bloomsbury UK and Scholastic…

The Alphabet, As Taught By Marvel’s Greatest Heroes And Villains

What mad, mad mission could join Marvel’s bravest heroes and most infamously-evil villains under a single purpose? Teaching the alphabet, it turns out. In our show-and-tell thread today, where commenters share some of the amazing design, scientific, and art projects that have been occupying their time lately, commenter and illustrator Chris Cecot shared this adorable…

British illustrator John Holcroft takes a satirical view of modern-day technological issues through a series of illustrations—in the style of ads from the 1950s. You can check them all out on his website.

There’s a Horror Novel Lurking in These Ikea-Style Photos

For the DIY-challenged among us, Ikea catalogues are already terrifying enough in their own right. For everybody else, there’s Horrorstör—a traditional haunted house story dressed up in trendy, Scandinavian flat-pack furniture. The novel, written by Grady Hendrix, includes illustrations in the style of everyone’s favorite meatball/furniture catalog—and they are just as creepy as they are…

8 of the World’s Coolest Skyscrapers Rendered Like 1980s Futurist Art

An increasing number of skyscrapers that line our horizons these days resemble the future we were promised: twisting pillars of glass and steel that stretch up into the clouds. When you glaze those buildings with some 1980s-inspired French futurism, however, they look simply surreal Arcueil-based illustrator Romain Trystram is highlighting some of the world’s most…

What Book’s Artwork Added The Most To The Story?

Whether you want to talk up J.R.R. Tolkien’s cartography skills or you’re a fan of Maurice Sendak’s imaginary beasts, tell us what book had the visualizations that were most pivotal to your imagining of the story. Tell us in the comments which the book is your pick and what it was about the illustrations -—whether…

In This Art, Nature Battles the Artificial

From Daryl Toh Liem Zhan come these commissioned works of “depicting the destructive works of mankind against the forces of nature in a fight for balance on our fragile planet.” Really, it looks more like no one wins in this fight.

The Bizarre, Human-Animal Hybrids Imagined in the 1930s

Have you ever imagined yourself with a giraffe-like neck? Tentacles instead of arms? Maybe the lower torso of a preying mantis? If you have, great French space artist Lucian Rudaux beat you to it, creating bizarre illustrations of what humans might look like if “evolution had taken a different turn.” https://gizmodo.com/the-first-science-artist-to-draw-accurate-pictures-of-m-5876668 When I last wrote…

The Relative Screen Resolutions of Your Favorite Devices in One Chart

The display on your phone is relatively tiny. But in pixels, it’s friggin’ huge. That’s the beauty of high resolution. So how would that phone screen compare to your TV, or your tablet or your laptop if it was spread out to a similarly-sized screen? Doghouse Diaries made this graphic to show you, and it’s…

A guide to fallacious arguments, illustrated with funny animals

The Book of Bad Arguments is a great primer for anyone looking to understand logical fallacies and become a better debater. It helps that each logical fallacy is accompanied by a comic featuring funny animals. Writer and computer programmer Ali Almossawi teamed up with illustrator Alejandro Giraldo to create The Book of Bad Arguments, which…

Kazu Kibuishi’s Awesome Challenge: Creating New Harry Potter Covers

Eisner Award-nominated comic book artist and author Kazu Kibuishi admits that he was “surprised” when Scholastic approached him about designing brand-new covers for all seven “Harry Potter” books. He needn’t have worried: The founder of the stunning “Flight” comic book anthology series has brought a whole new dimension to J.K. Rowling’s enduring series. Although Mary…

These 19th-century diagrams were one man’s attempt to illustrate human consciousness

Could you represent the stages of human consciousness with a diagram? In the late 19th century, New Zealand psychologist Benjamin Betts tried to apply mathematics to the problem of visualizing human consciousness. What he produced were striking, almost floral designs that he believed represented the shape of out consciousness for a given activity. Maria Popova…

Face-melting illustrations of Poe’s terrifying tales from a 1969 Japanese pulp magazine

What do you get when you mix horror writer Edgar Allan Poe with a Japanese shōnen manga magazine from 1969? One issue of Weekly Shōnen Magazine featured a series of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of terror, pairing them with these rich and appropriately bizarre illustrations. Nerdcore has a larger collection of these images—along with the…

Peek inside the anatomies of Gremlins, Predators, and Martian Invaders

We’ve already fallen for Brad McGinty’s kaiju Santa cross-sections and xenomorph anatomy t-shirt. Fortunately, McGinty has continued to work with these fantastical physiologies, turning his x-ray vision on a range of movie monsters and aliens. https://gizmodo.com/kaiju-santa-claus-christmas-cards-are-the-most-insane-t-5862614 https://gizmodo.com/the-anatomical-guide-to-a-xenomorph-on-a-t-shirt-5908582 In addition to the images below, McGinty has a fully transformed gremlin anatomy print (not just the adorable…

Find the skull hidden in each of these illusory illustrations

At first glance, István Orosz’s illustrations look like ordinary, if vaguely cartoonish, scenes of medieval life. But contained in each scene is a picture of a human skull, if only you know how to look. Orosz frequently places with optical illusions in his work, and his Ship of Fools series, based on Albrecht Dürer’s engravings…

How Edward Gorey illustrated three classic fairytales

We’ve seen tons of interpretations and reinterpretations of classic fables and fairytales, often filtered through layers of Disney. Edward Gorey’s illustrations of Little Red Riding Hood, Jack the Giant Killer, and Rumpelstiltskin are wholly his own, adding his understated touch to those classic stories. Gorey provided the illustrations for the book Three Classic Children’s Stories,…

Gorgeous illustrations present Harry Potter as a mythological hero

Much of the Harry Potter we see gives the characters a soft touch, making them friendly and familiar. Angela Rizza’s intricate illustrations take a different tack, rendering our hero as a stern-faced figure of myth, a high wizard in a hooded sweatshirt. Rizza leans toward high fantasy illustrations, including some wonderfully detailed Lord of the…