An amazing thing happened over at Drawger , a website where illustrators post and discuss their work. Yesterday, artist Tim O’Brien posted the above portrait  he drew of Neda Agha-Soltan, the woman whose death has become a symbol of the opposition movement after the contested election in Iran. As usual, other illustrators responded in the comments section. But through the magic of the internet, citizens in Iran also found it, and flooded the post with their own heart wrenching and inspiring comments . According to the artist, what is missing from the site are the hundreds of e-mails he received from people less comfortable posting in public. It makes you ponder the power of visuals, and how one image that strikes a chord can inspire a movement.

(Thanks, Edel Rodriguez .)

Image courtesy of Tim O’Brien

I feel like I should hold my breath around Vasco Mourao’s illustrations. His teetering, lopsided buildings look as though they’d be toppled by the slightest breeze. To say they’re shaky, though, doesn’t mean they’re messy: Mourao realizes his labyrinthine structures meticulously, with an almost obsessive attention to detail. It’s partially this tension—between the precariousness of the subjects and the sureness of his hand—that makes the drawings so compelling. Check out more of his work here.

 (Thanks, Lost at E Minor.)    

In a clever example of life imitating art, one Flickr group gathers images in which people photographically re-create "The Far Side" cartoons. The results are often accurate, detailed, and humorous.

(Thanks, Quipsologies)

Image courtesy of Kevin Steinhardt, licensed under Creative Commons.

Normally, art reaches us as a finished product. We see nothing of an artist’s process, of the tentative first steps, the mistakes, the experiments and abandoned ideas. I found two blogs that make me think we’re missing out:

Jonathan Burton documents the evolution of his drawings, from their scribbled seeds to final drafts, in The Unreachable Itch. He keeps pretty tight-lipped, providing little comment on his process, but he includes enough drafts to let you register his shifts in thought yourself.

In Salamunic Illustration, Tin Salamunic posts pages out of his sketchbooks, many of which never develop into polished, full-fledged pieces. But these images possess an immediacy that’s even more compelling than his finished work. He layers doodles with more meticulous studies and snippets of text, creating unfiltered peeks into his day-to-day musings.

(Thanks, Drawn.)

(Thanks, Lost at E Minor.)

There once was a Texas prisoner named Frank Jones (1900-1969), who “as a child . . . was told that he was born with a veil over his left eye, and that this veil would enable him to see spirits,” reports Lynne Adele in the outsider art magazine Raw Vision, winner of a 2006 Utne Independent Press Award (article not available online).

Once incarcerated, Jones scavenged blue- and red-colored pencils from prison bookkeepers and embarked upon drawing “devil houses”—loose representations of the Huntsville Prison where he served a life sentence. The devil houses feature thorny compartments populated by wicked spirits that Jones called haints.

Adele writes, “Although Jones’s haints appear to be friendly and playful, their benign expressions disguise their true objectives. Jones indicated that they smile because ‘they’re happy, waiting for your soul’ . . . [they] smile ‘to get you to come closer . . . to drag you down and make you do bad things. They laugh when they do that.’”

—Jason Ericson

In the world of editorial illustration, Steve Brodner is a giant. Many magazine readers will recognize his work from the New Yorker, the Progressive, Mother Jones, the Village Voice, Esquire, and others. Brodner is best known for his political art, in particular his fantastic caricatures. What distinguishes him from the countless other caricature artists out there is his deep understanding of the American political landscape and his passion for the subject. He recently teamed up with the New Yorker online for the Naked Campaign. Go there and watch Brodner while he talks about and draws the 2008 presidential candidates. Then check out his Person of the Day blog, where Brodner shows that images can express concepts in ways that words simply cannot (but don’t tell my editors).

—Stephanie Glaros