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Channel: Graphic Tales - D.B. Dowd / Graphic Nonfiction
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Evening Lectures, February-March 2016

Advertising illustration by Coles Phillips for the Overland Roadster, 1915. My teaching schedule has been affected by sabbatical. I'm teaching a studio course this spring to seniors, instead of the...

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Of Billikens and Plaid-Patterned Elephants

A while back I got a note from William Powell at St. Louis Magazine, asking me for comment on the new redrawn Saint Louis University Billiken, its oddball mascot. I'd editorialized on mascots for the...

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Thickets, Screens, Scrims

Proposition: things are located in places, but places are not made of things.To students working onsite, it is often useful to think a little less about looking at things than trying to see through...

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Figurative Abstraction and Description: Art Deco

I am working with seniors in illustration as they craft senior projects. Typically I work with them in the fall, in a course focused on visual development. During that time, I confess, I am often...

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Welcome to the Neighborhood: Race, Rockwell, and New Hampshire

I am reposting this entry today, March 1, 2016, just over eight years after it first ran on Graphic Tales. I'm doing so on Super Tuesday, as Donald Trump looks poised to sweep most of the South in this...

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Harry and Alfred Make Pictures of People

I have written often about the final project in Word and Image 1, which is a Figure, Story and Staging problem. The first order of business involves choosing a set of characters and setting them loose...

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Jaleen Grove Post-Doctoral Fellow at MGHL / Washington University

This will be going up on the Washington University site early next week, but to beat the weekend rush, here's some exciting news: The University Libraries are pleased to announce the appointment of...

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ICON Talk: Bibliography for Liberal Arts + Illustration

I am speaking at the ICON conference in Austin. My initial proposal read thusly:This session will present a “liberal arts” agenda for educating illustrators in the tradition of the narrative arts....

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Godspeed, Father (A Colonel in Clover Update)

I wrote this post, about the first of the David Dudley Dowds, twenty-two months ago. Our father was the fourth David D. Dowd. Today I add to it, in a spirit of mournful celebration. Our father has died...

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Owls, Devils, Wagons: Adventures in Picture Lotto

This is a re-edited post from a number of years ago, with updated examples and discussion. In some respects I am speaking directly to students, as this blog has transitioned to being, above all, a...

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The Visual Correspondent

I reflect upon/write criticism about/curate exhibitions concerning the culture of illustration, and the illustrated periodical, broadly speaking. But my own practice has moved over the past decade to a...

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Display That! (Examples + Commentary)

(Re-edited; originally posted March 1, 2014.) When I started this blog in 2007, I identified several subjects of interest: graphic connoisseurship, broadly speaking; the relationship between cartooning...

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Lively Pictures of "Boring" Things

Lorraine Fox (uncredited), Power Tools, section divider illustration, Better Homes & Gardens Handyman's Book, Meredith Corporation, 1957.  April 2017––I'm updating this post to report that these...

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Lehigh Valley Animation

Over the last decade, I have done relatively little commercial work. Mostly that has had to do with the increased role that writing has played in my overall production, such that a lot of the...

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Animated Filmmaker R.O. Blechman’s Ink Tank Archive Comes to STL

R.B. Blechman, animated Alka-Seltzer commercial, 1967. A man and his stomach go to therapy together. The stomach is voiced by Gene Wilder at his neurotic best. Blechman's animation is delightful....

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Graphic Tales Reconsidered

I launched this blog in a time of personal uncertainty, ten years ago last week.During the prior ten years I had written and drawn a newspaper serial that became an online animation property in the era...

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Yes, I Did Say 100

Ah, October. There are many reasons to appreciate the month, but for me one of them includes the developmental bombshell of the 100 figures assignment in my senior illustration course. It's a big job,...

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Words of Wisdom From Abroad, re: 100 Figures

Commentary rolls in...

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Blade Runner 2049: Are All Hobbesian Worlds Also Misogynistic Ones?

I saw Blade Runner 2049 last night, with my wife and son Danny, visiting from Dayton. As expected, a somewhat more spectacular dystopia than Ridley Scott’s film, owing (of course) to the intervening...

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Let's Make a Zine!

It’s possible that zine is a word headed for obsolescence, perhaps in a future where paper has been outlawed. Internet distribution has made screen consumption the default mode for looking at images....

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