What do you think?
Rate this book
Tiny Pencil #4
Tiny Pencil IV: The Death & Resurrection Issue
Issue IV of the all-graphite art, illustration and comics anthology artzine created and edited by Amber Hsu. Artists Pablo Auladell - Rachel M.Bray - Gareth Brookes - Laura Cochon - Joanna Concejo - Alexis Deacon - Shohn DeSoto - Andy Van Dinh - Joe Fenton - Joshua Goymer - Celine Guichard - S.J. Harris - Cen Jun - John D. Kilburn - Céli Lee - Jeonghee Lee - Robert MacKenzie - Milou Maass - Isabella Mazzanti - Bart Nijstad - Claudia Piras - Josephin Ritschel - Lara Robinson - Bene Rohlmann - Nick Sheehy - Allison Sommers - Yoko Tanaka - Page Tsou - Ho Sin Tung. Designed & Directed by Amber Hsu. Production & additional editing by John D. Kilburn, Nick Sheehy & Ysabelle Cheung.
72 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2014
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
May 13, 2016
This review applies to Tiny Pencil 3 AND 4, since I read them at the same time. Also: laziness.
Pencil + paper. That's a simple formula, but by adding some truly astounding talent and fun themes like 'Monsters, Machines & Unnatural Things' or 'Death and Resurrection', Amber Hsu and company have concocted a perfect-bound, 72-page anthology that feels like something precious. It's fucking beautiful, an objet l'art, and -- while I say it often, I always mean it, truly and violently -- brilliant.
Renee French, from Tiny Pencil 3:
Allison Sommers, from TP3:
Except for the recent Walk the Line: The Art of Drawing, from Lawrence King Publishing, there is a distinct paucity of graphite in the art world, something 'Tiny Pencil' is quietly attempting to rectify. The names that immediately caught my eye, and convinced me to take a chance on the relatively expensive 3rd and 4th issues, were Renee French -- a cartoonist and legimate Neo-Surrealist who ranks very highly on my long list of favorites -- and Allison Sommers -- a young artist whose paintings left some lovely scars on my brain when they were featured in Hi-Fructose and Juxtapoz. For evidence, see the artwork hanging over this paragraph like two wonderful nightmares trapped in rectangular thought-bubbles. Their contributions are just as compelling and affecting as I expected them to be, but what's truly exciting about Tiny Pencil are the names I didn't know (or didn't recognize, since a few were contributors in Walk the Line, or made appearances in magazines such as Elephant). For instance...
Joe Fenton, from www.tinypencil.com and TP3:
Rupert Smissen, from TP3:
Nick Sheehy, from TP4:
and from Tiny Pencil 1:
Robert Mackenzie, another master scribbler whose work had already gotten it's teeth into my neck before reading TP4:
Lee Misenheimer, from TP3:
What really sets it apart from the bulk of art and comic anthologies is the consistent quality of the contributions. Most titles have a fair percentage of 'filler' work, for any number of reasons: 'A'-list artists doing grade D work; an editor who can't stand the thought of hurting someone's feelings with a rejection; a story included as filler to even up the page-count... et cetera. There's not a mediocre page in Tiny Pencil. Either Hsu doesn't mind pissing off the talent, or she's very selective about who she's inviting to the Tiny Table. I'm guessing it's both.
The last instalment of Kramer's Ergot was disappointing, perhaps because Sammy Harkham blew his artistic wad on the mighty citadel of art-comics that was Kramer's Ergot 7. Monte Beauchamp's resurrected Blabworld is fine stuff, but hasn't featured anything as visionary as the work that appeared in the Blab! of the late 90's and early 00's: Al Columbia's 'The Trumpets They Played', or Archer Prewitt's 'Sof' Boy'. And Mome is gone. I'm therefore naming Tiny Pencil as 'The Most Vital and Fucking Awesome of Art-Comic Anthologies'.
Malojo, from www.tinypencil.com:
Pete Murgatroyd (a damn cool surname), from TP3:
and the colored version...
Vania Barbato, from the two-sided poster included with TP3:
Amber Hsu's curatorial aesthetic is impeccable, and the gathering of young, carbon-scrawling masters she's put together is deserving of better things than made-up titles. Unlike the other anthologies I've mentioned, the focus is more on the art than the comics; one of the things I love to see is high-level craftsmanship and draughtsmanship, heavily stylized but meticulously rendered. The backlash against what's referred to as 'try-hard drawing' has always annoyed me. If you draw loose, go be that artist -- C.F. and Brian Chippendale rock; but if you draw tight, stay tight, don't get talked out of your natural style. Tiny Pencil is refreshingly pretention-free... just artists scribbling on paper until something takes a soft-black form and breathes.
As demonstrated above, the art of Nick Sheehy, Robert McKenzie and Allison Sommers spoke to me in monochromatic whispers of their genius, but they've also screamed at me in a glorious chromatic cacophony; here's some of their colored and painted work, from outside the borders of Tiny Town:
Nick Sheehy
Robert Mackenzie
Allison Sommers
Here's the next item on my list -- Tiny Pencil 2.0; breaking the format trend of 1, 3, and 4, it's a viciously adorable box-set that includes pencils and posters and an invitation to play with your own Tiny Pencil -- innuendo intendo -- as well as the book itself, diminished in size, but not in beauty. Cover by Kristyna Baczinski:
More Art-book Reviews
More Comic-book Reviews
More Novel Reviews
Pencil + paper. That's a simple formula, but by adding some truly astounding talent and fun themes like 'Monsters, Machines & Unnatural Things' or 'Death and Resurrection', Amber Hsu and company have concocted a perfect-bound, 72-page anthology that feels like something precious. It's fucking beautiful, an objet l'art, and -- while I say it often, I always mean it, truly and violently -- brilliant.
Renee French, from Tiny Pencil 3:
Allison Sommers, from TP3:
Except for the recent Walk the Line: The Art of Drawing, from Lawrence King Publishing, there is a distinct paucity of graphite in the art world, something 'Tiny Pencil' is quietly attempting to rectify. The names that immediately caught my eye, and convinced me to take a chance on the relatively expensive 3rd and 4th issues, were Renee French -- a cartoonist and legimate Neo-Surrealist who ranks very highly on my long list of favorites -- and Allison Sommers -- a young artist whose paintings left some lovely scars on my brain when they were featured in Hi-Fructose and Juxtapoz. For evidence, see the artwork hanging over this paragraph like two wonderful nightmares trapped in rectangular thought-bubbles. Their contributions are just as compelling and affecting as I expected them to be, but what's truly exciting about Tiny Pencil are the names I didn't know (or didn't recognize, since a few were contributors in Walk the Line, or made appearances in magazines such as Elephant). For instance...
Joe Fenton, from www.tinypencil.com and TP3:
Rupert Smissen, from TP3:
Nick Sheehy, from TP4:
and from Tiny Pencil 1:
Robert Mackenzie, another master scribbler whose work had already gotten it's teeth into my neck before reading TP4:
Lee Misenheimer, from TP3:
What really sets it apart from the bulk of art and comic anthologies is the consistent quality of the contributions. Most titles have a fair percentage of 'filler' work, for any number of reasons: 'A'-list artists doing grade D work; an editor who can't stand the thought of hurting someone's feelings with a rejection; a story included as filler to even up the page-count... et cetera. There's not a mediocre page in Tiny Pencil. Either Hsu doesn't mind pissing off the talent, or she's very selective about who she's inviting to the Tiny Table. I'm guessing it's both.
The last instalment of Kramer's Ergot was disappointing, perhaps because Sammy Harkham blew his artistic wad on the mighty citadel of art-comics that was Kramer's Ergot 7. Monte Beauchamp's resurrected Blabworld is fine stuff, but hasn't featured anything as visionary as the work that appeared in the Blab! of the late 90's and early 00's: Al Columbia's 'The Trumpets They Played', or Archer Prewitt's 'Sof' Boy'. And Mome is gone. I'm therefore naming Tiny Pencil as 'The Most Vital and Fucking Awesome of Art-Comic Anthologies'.
Malojo, from www.tinypencil.com:
Pete Murgatroyd (a damn cool surname), from TP3:
and the colored version...
Vania Barbato, from the two-sided poster included with TP3:
Amber Hsu's curatorial aesthetic is impeccable, and the gathering of young, carbon-scrawling masters she's put together is deserving of better things than made-up titles. Unlike the other anthologies I've mentioned, the focus is more on the art than the comics; one of the things I love to see is high-level craftsmanship and draughtsmanship, heavily stylized but meticulously rendered. The backlash against what's referred to as 'try-hard drawing' has always annoyed me. If you draw loose, go be that artist -- C.F. and Brian Chippendale rock; but if you draw tight, stay tight, don't get talked out of your natural style. Tiny Pencil is refreshingly pretention-free... just artists scribbling on paper until something takes a soft-black form and breathes.
As demonstrated above, the art of Nick Sheehy, Robert McKenzie and Allison Sommers spoke to me in monochromatic whispers of their genius, but they've also screamed at me in a glorious chromatic cacophony; here's some of their colored and painted work, from outside the borders of Tiny Town:
Nick Sheehy
Robert Mackenzie
Allison Sommers
Here's the next item on my list -- Tiny Pencil 2.0; breaking the format trend of 1, 3, and 4, it's a viciously adorable box-set that includes pencils and posters and an invitation to play with your own Tiny Pencil -- innuendo intendo -- as well as the book itself, diminished in size, but not in beauty. Cover by Kristyna Baczinski:
More Art-book Reviews
More Comic-book Reviews
More Novel Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review