And Kent's dramatic, meticulously rendered illustration from "Moby-Dick," with oars and oarsmen tumbling into the drink, seems to live in a more epic, perhaps biblical universe.
Alongside this miniscule photo was a badly rendered illustration wherein the great T.R. - dressed like a plantation owner with white suit and walking stick - personally supervised the digging of, what appeared to be, a mid-sized trench.
His accurately rendered illustrations of beetles, maps of the sewer system in Washington, D.C., and the changing coastline of the United States draw the attention of the Smithsonian Institution, which, mistaking him for an adult, offers him a prestigious award.
The brothers played in old Nazi blockhouses on the beach, and spent hours reading "Tintin" books — savoring tales of the roving boy reporter and poring over Hergé's minutely rendered illustrations of Shanghai, Cairo, the Andes.
In his book "Cartoon Fundamentals," Ross shows this stylistic evolution, from the carefully rendered illustrations of the thirties to the looser ones of the forties and fifties, using brush, India ink, and wash, which morphed into the even freer pen-line and wash technique of the sixties, before being reduced to pure extemporaneous line itself as the preferred medium of expression.
Magdalena's journey to America to find her sister forms the arc of a fairy-tale quest, perhaps that of Snow White and Rose Red, in a German storybook the girls' mother had once given them: "Magdalena could still remember the vividly rendered illustrations, so different from the washed-out colors of the country's socialist presses".
They weave rugs with crudely rendered illustrations of tanks and the twin towers and other hieroglyphs depicting invasions and withdrawals; they put Soviet fighter jets high up on stilts like big tin gargoyles to ornament their airports.
True, the writer notes, Coca Cola certainly became famous for its lush, beautifully rendered illustrations of Santa Claus enjoying cool, refreshing bottles of the soda.
The precisely rendered matte illustrations work well with the bleached terrain and the snowmen's bodies but give the human faces an oddly impassive quality (and maybe it's a bug in the paintbrush, or the flattened style, but the snowball hitting the bear looks more like a floating ice cream scoop).
Some have striking illustrations, often in a format that's beautifully designed or rendered via an illustration process that's a feat of artistic skill or technological innovation — or both.
In the high moment of digital photography, fashion illustration, rendered largely with pen, ink and paper, appears to be having a small renaissance.
