Since 2009: more than six hundred stories, and the pictures we still think about.
Most pictures you look at once. A few you keep going back to, and after a while you notice they have changed how you look at everything else.
Since 2009 we have been collecting that second kind here: a tent glowing in a backyard long after midnight, houses stacked on top of each other with no regard for gravity, a whole zoo drawn without lifting the pen, a hundred years of posters, and paint that got bored of the canvas and wandered off. Think of this as a map of the painters and illustrators who stopped us mid-scroll. We will keep adding to it.
617
painting and illustration stories and counting
4,300+
art stories across every medium
03 / 08
worlds in the Moss & Fog atlas
01 · Painters of the Quiet Hour
Not much happens in these paintings, which is the point. Nicholas Moegly works the hours after the neighbors have gone to bed. Anton Van Hertbruggen paints the backyard in February. Maciej Sidorowicz can make a boat on trailer stands look like somewhere you would want to spend the afternoon, and Jim Darling paints the one view every traveler has seen and nobody photographs well.
02 · Worlds That Fold
Cinta Vidal builds houses where the floor is also the wall, depending on which figure you follow. David Ambarzumjan drags one loaded brush across a city street and a savanna shows up underneath it. Rafael Silveira and Sascha Braunig both paint faces you cannot quite hold still. Look as long as you like. They will not resolve.
03 · One Line, No Lifting
Draw an animal without lifting the pen. It sounds like a party trick until you try it. Jonathan Calugi fills entire scenes this way, Loooop has worked through most of the animal kingdom, and ShouXin’s cats are not strictly one line, but they are so few lines that the cat seems to keep moving while you look at it.
Leaves, cups, and fruit are simple things to draw when practising a single continuous line.
From the Shop
Things we would keep for ourselves
04 · Illustration With Something to Say
Editorial illustrators have a hard job: say what the article says, in one image, before anyone has read a word of it. Myriam Wares and Will Cordell are as good at this as anyone working right now.
Tania Yakunova has been on this site since 2022 and keeps getting better. And the lantern scenes in our India collection are the kind of pictures that make you homesick for somewhere you have never lived.
05 · The Natural World, Drawn
Before cameras, if you wanted to know what a stag beetle looked like, somebody had to paint one. Joris Hoefnagel did it in the 1500s and his beetle still holds up next to anything made since.
The habit never went away. Tiffany Bozic paints on wood panels so the grain shows through as water, Alfred Basha grows a deer out of bare branches, and Martin Wittfooth’s bear is on fire and in bloom at the same time.
06 · Futures Past
The future used to look better. Robert McCall painted it for NASA with monorails, domes and total confidence. Albert Robida drew Paris in the year 2000 while living in the 1880s and got a surprising amount of it right. Japanese magazines of the 1960s filled their pages with robot fire brigades. We went deep on all of this in our guide to retrofuturism. This is the short version.
07 · The Poster as Art
A poster has to work from across the street. Eric Rohman made them for Swedish cinemas a century ago and they still do. Achille Mauzan sold liqueur with pure Art Deco nerve. Drew Struzan painted so many of the movies you grew up with that you probably know his work without knowing his name. Ugo Gattoni’s poster for the Paris 2024 Olympics is the most crowded one here. Get close to it.
08 · Paint That Left the Canvas
At some point the canvas stops being enough. Pawel Nolbert’s brushstrokes lift off the surface and cast shadows. Alexa Meade paints on actual people, then photographs them, and the photograph reads as a painting. Joshua Vides did the same thing to a car museum.
For the walls and the desk
Prints and objects chosen the same way we choose the art we feature.
Saype paints on hillsides at a scale you need a drone to take in, and Helena Minginowicz paints portraits on paper towels, which should not work and does.
09 · The Masters, Revisited
And then there are the ones everyone knows, still turning up surprises. A Rembrandt that had gone missing comes back into the light. A grasshopper turns out to have been stuck in a Van Gogh since the 1880s. Hilma af Klint, who was painting abstractly before Kandinsky and asked that her work stay hidden for twenty years after her death, finally gets the crowds. O’Keeffe, Amy Sherald and Maria Prymachenko round it out, and none of them need our introduction.
Keep Exploring
That is the surface. There are 617 painting and illustration stories on the site and we keep adding to them. If a term here tripped you up, gouache, plein air, that sort of thing, The Glossary of Visual Culture & Design has it.
The guides Extraordinary Buildings · Natural Wonders · Animal Defense Mechanisms · Breathtaking Photography · Beautiful Places on Earth · Retrofuturism · Sustainable Design · All guides
New on Moss & Fog The Dreamlike Carousels of Luca Battaglia · Rinat Khabirov’s Fine Art Illustrations
And when you want to keep going, the other guides are The World’s Most Extraordinary Buildings, The Most Breathtaking Photography in the World, The World’s Most Astonishing Natural Wonders, and The Most Beautiful Places on Earth.
Colophon Set in Montserrat and Instrument Serif. Every photograph here carries a written description for readers using screen readers. Highlight any line and it turns the ultramarine that painters once prized above gold. Put together in Portland, Oregon.
All images © Copyrighted via the artists.
