Useful sites for illustrators

Inspiration / General tutorial sites

Christoph Niemann talk
A Quicktime talk and slideshow by Christoph Niemann all about his editorial illustration and how he works. Great stuff.

Chris Wormell's world of animals
On the Guardian website - ten pictures plus process.

Gurney Journey
Blog of James Gurney, of Dinotopia fame. Fantastic entries of practical nuts and bolts type stuff (colour theory, composition, etc), fun, interesting posts and... dinosaurs!

Dani Draws
Friendly blog by illustrator Dani Jones where I first came across useful photoshop tips, such as Texture: How to Make Better Art with Jelly Beans, and Create a Watercolor Painting in Photoshop.

Empty Easel
Good for practical tutorials, but I wouldn't mind a complete site index.

Color + Design Blog
Apart from themed posts on colour (vintage cars, etc), there's also stuff like Color Basics: Dos and Dont's.

Golden Age Comic Book Stories
...and classic children's book illustrations, and pen and ink.

BibliOdyssey
Stunning illustrations from obscure out-of-print books, lots of good pen and ink.

BookScans
Vintage American paperback covers 1939 > 1959. Also check out the colophons.

Comic Tools
Tutorial site, I came across it because of this post on making your own stay-wet palette for water colour and gouache.

Convince me you are not a flake
A guide to being an illustrator, mostly about mistakes made.

5min.com
Instructional videos on painting.

Art Babble
A collection of art and illustration related videos from all kinds of sources. This looks like it would be great, but loads way to slowly for me to see anything. Worth checking back on though...

What printer to buy to make archival prints you can sell on ETSY?
According to this post on Drawn.ca, it's the Epson R1900.

Drawing for classical animation
Good for cartoon-style illustration too.

Artist Daily
From the publishers of the American Artist series of magazines.

Water Colour Tutorials

Description of process for a children's book illustration
by Robert Mackenzie of Blue Sky Studios (Ice Age, Robots).

Handprint.com
A comprehensive technical guide to watercolours, comparisons of different brands of brushes, paints and paper, as well as techniques and colour theory.

How to scan watercolours
Watercolours are a pain to scan, for ages mine came out either bleached or saturated, and never looked a patch on the original. This method seems to work a treat though: For a start, the Vuescan software seems to work a lot better than the Canoscan program that came with my machine (Canoscan 8400F). Once you've scanned the image, play about with the Curves in Photoshop; for RGB go below the diagonal, for CMYK go above (you still may need to play about with levels and vibrancy as with any scan). Thanks loads for telling me about this Clare, you're a lifesaver.

Fonts

MyFonts is a huge site selling fonts, and has a great feature where you can identify fonts from an image. I had to order Adobe Sabon font for work, and fought with the clunky Adobe site ("your membership country dosen't match the country of the store you are visiting", etc) for far too long before giving up and trying Fonts.com. From finding the font, to payment, to having installed the fonts on my computer took just minutes. Hallelujah.

MainType - Windows Font Manager
The best font manager I've found, free to try US$49 to buy. Just a quick note - you'll probably want to check all the "Copy xxx to Windows font folder" options under Tools>Options>/Fonts>Install Fonts, otherwise next time you turn on the computer you'll have to re-load all the fonts you installed last session.

Picture Reference

Morgue File
Photo reference site aimed specifically at "creatives."

Science and Society Picture Library
50,000 images from the British Science Museum, National Media Museum and National Railway Museum.

Online illustration tools

Kuler
Adobe's colour theme website where you can create and share palettes. I use this for vector work or images with a very limited colour range. You can download their free Switchboard program from here, this lets you export the Kuler palettes straight into Photoshop or Illustrator.

Google Sketchup
I love this, it's saved a lot of headaches. It's a free, very simple 3D image program. Great for planning images, you can create complex 3D shapes (a restaurant, a city scape, etc), then change your viewpoint until you're happy with the composition, save the image in 2D jpeg and use it as a drawing guide.

Sending Files
If files are too large to send by email, or there's a problem with zipped files etc, there are sites like dropbox (you need to download a client) and sendspace (which you can use without downloading anything). Otherwise, if you have a website, just set up a folder and dump the files in there, then send the recipient a direct link (www.mysite/client/picture.jpg).

Spoonflower
Turn your images into textile designs, and print your own fabric.

Zamzar
Free online file conversion (dwg > jpg etc). Doesn't do Corel Draw files (.cdr) though, unfortunately.

seeklogo
Vector files of company logos.

Free online portfolio sites

Here's a list of the one's I've come across so far...

Absolute Arts
Warmtoast Cafe
Voodoo Chilli
My Art Space
PutItOn
Coroflot
Jacketflap (Children's book illustration - you can put images in your profile.)

The one site I've got the most out of is Illustration Friday. It's not a portfolio site - you submit an illustration for the theme of the week - but it's a good place to show off your work. I don't have much time to take part now, but when I did and posted to my old website, there were always a lot of friendly comments. If you're going to bother with any of them, IF is the way forward I reckon...

Print on demand sites

You upload your images, people pick the ones they like and print out cards etc.

ImageKind (I've actually sold stuff on this one)
Nuzart
Redbubble

Online art dealer sites

These sell actual paintings. They are free to sign up to, but take a commission. Zatista's isn't much, if I remember right, but ArtQuiver is 45%, just like a real gallery.

Web host

Blackfoot.co.uk
These are the people who host this site and a couple others I've had, and while I assume most webhosts are pretty interchangeable, their tech support is very impressive. Whenever I've contacted them about a problem (usually something annoying in wordpress) they've fixed it within 24 hours.

Listen while you work

BBC Radio 4

BBC Radio 6 (before they kill it)

This American Life

New Yorker short story readings

Audio content from The Economist magazine

Listening to Words
A collection of lectures from online sources.

Guardian audio
A daily news broadcast, alongside film, music, books.

Escape from Illustrator Island

Time wasting

Kate Beaton's History Comics
Canada's finest.

Savage Chickens
Comics about chickens, drawn on Post-it notes.

Boing Boing
You probably know this one.

Tor
Site by Tor Books on anything sci-fi and fantasty, but mostly books.

DailyLit
Debateable whether this is actually time wasting - you pick a book from the website, and they send you a few paragraphs to your email a few times a week. All books are free.