An awesome animated short about owls that a 5th grade teacher made for his students. If teachers did this sort of thing for every subject they were passionate about, the world would be a lot smarter.
Source: Drawn!
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Leda by ’skine.art member szazz
What? You enjoy sketching AND you have a moleskine? Who would’ve thought the two could ever cross paths? (I kid.) Most artists, with the right amount of office supply enthusiasm, know that a moleskine = awesome art. Why? Because moleskine sketchbooks are crafted simply and made to last. I have not yet made the plunge into moleskine-ism, where as you can imagine in Japan is all the rage in stationery stores. Also the books a tad expensive, although I found the small sketch notebook
Anyway, there is a great art blog featuring artwork from various contributors of moleskine art. A lot of the stuff is simply amazing and provides a window into a wide range of how artists plan out their thoughts (the most interesting to me are the comic and animation sketches.) Check out ’skine.art if you want some inspiration on how to get better use out of your moleskine, or simply want to get a peak into what people are sketching these days.
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Constellation
I envy those who live in or around Culver City, CA, where this exhibition for Korin Faught is taking plac at the Corey Helford Gallery! The exhibition, entitled “Twenty Two,” features a series of paintings of twins and other people lying around. The poses are natural and the faces haunting–I especially love the way some subjects are looking directly at the audience. Probably the most interesting part of the exhibition is the use of twins, or rather, the same person shown twice in the same painting, in similar poses with subtle changes.
Those who can’t attend the exhibition, which runs until April 19, can view more of her work here.
Other links:
- Corey Helford Gallery
- Korin Faught’s artnet entry
- Korin Faught official site
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Stich all dressed up for Halloween–photo taken with my cellphone last October
I am not such a huge fan of Disney as I was when I was kid–for one thing, the movies have progressively gotten worse and the storylines seem very desperate. Japan, however, has continued to fully embrace Disney, possibly even moreso than average Americans. One character that immediately jumps to mind is Stich from Lilo & Stitch, the little destructive blue alien with a love for Elvis.
In Japan, Stitch has taken on many incarnations, even being adopted into the Japanese culture by wearing seasonal Japanese clothing. I am kind of excited to hear Disney teaming up with Madhouse to create a Japanese Stitch TV show (cleverly entitled Stitch!). I’m excited because Madhouse is a famous animation studio that has created many amazing animated works, including numerous CLAMP animated series, and most recently Yazawa Ai’s huge hit Nana and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika. I’ve always admired the work Madhouse puts into their productions, and am even more intrigued that the show will take place in Okinawa.
Disney is also in cahoots with Jinni’s Animation to produce another series called Fireball, which will take advantage of Jinni’s repitoure of extensive 3-D animation works. Jinni’s Animation produces a lot of music videos and commercials, and most recently had a hand in the opening credits for Takeshi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western (which contained a cameo by Quentin Tarantino).
I can’t say for sure whether this move will gain my respect back for Disney–Disney in America is certainly different than Disney in Japan–but it’s nice to see that they are branching out and actually thinking about their international audiences for once.
Source: Disney to work with two local animators - The Japan Times
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If you’re a member of DeviantArt, the popular art community, chances are you’ve come across a lot of work that could only be made by people who enjoy what they do. This clever flash animation by Alan Becker breaks the fifth wall in animation with his Flash-animated short Animator vs. Animation. Simple but cute, it’s rare these days to see artists just muck around and have fun with their work.
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“Aquarium” from Lori Nix’s The City collection
What you are looking at is a photograph of a detailed miniature disaster. Lori Nix is an artist who recreates disasters in a miniature scale and photographs them as a scene, drawing influence from old disaster movies and her home state of Kansas. A lot of the pictures show the aftermath of a natural disaster, and the scenes are always abandoned. I find them a little eerie despite knowing they are basically cleverly arranged tiny toys. The mood of these pictures is kind of quiet, despite that there’s a lot going on–not unlike the aftermath of a real disaster. Regarding Kansas, Nix’s site introduction tells us there’s a lot more going on than hurricanes and Dorthy:
The state of Kansas is located in the middle of the United States geographically, and also represents the moral middle of the road as a state of mind where conventional family values and good citizenship go hand in hand. By linking disasters with moral imperatives Nix allows herself to question conventional codes of society at the same time as she explores the unsettling memories of her youth.
Such attention to detail and history behind these scenes can only be described as painstaking.
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Don’t know why I’m on such an art kick lately, but in any case check out these interesting (disturbing?) street installations by Mark Jenkins. Most of them involve human figures doing things you would wish to never see real people doing, but here and there you will see a cheeky little bird poopin’ out rainbows. A lot of it seems to do deal with pollution and the environment, but it might just be that putting a statue constructed out of tape will stand out better sticking out of some garbage than not. Check out his official site for more 3D art that will make you do a double-take.
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There is an interesting interview on New York Times with graphics editor Steve Duenes. A lot of people might take advantage of diagrams and images that appear in media, but for artists and designers, those are the things we notice first. And to be able to read some of our questions answered by a graphics editor for a well-established news source is something us art-lovers shouldn’t pass over!
In one of Duenes’s answers, he mentions a basic principle that I was taught in high school drawing class: draw what you see and not what you know. In other words, when drawing from a reference, don’t assume features are there when they’re not. A common mistake in drawing is that people want to draw everything they know is there. A hand has five fingers, a head two ears. But at angle, an ear disappears, or a hand is less three fingers. This is why the best artists constantly look at their reference over and over obsessively in order to prevent any mistakes.
Duenes mentions this principle when referring to diagrams that artists draw for media outlets:
Related Posts:When we create diagrams, we keep a couple of things in mind. We want to be clear, and we don’t want to invent anything. Maybe it’s obvious what I mean when I say we want to be clear, but I’ll elaborate a little. It means we want to eliminate superfluous detail, and we want to establish a clear visual hierarchy. So, if the story is about someone firing a gun in City Hall, we want readers to look at our diagram and quickly understand where the event occurred in the building, and where the important players were when it happened. We have some extraordinary 3-D illustrators on the staff like Mika Gröndahl, Frank O’ Connell and Graham Roberts, and they’re more than capable of rendering every last detail of the ornate balcony in an old building like City Hall, but that’s usually not the point. More often than not, a simple line drawing is the best solution.
Now, when I say that we don’t want to invent anything, I mean we don’t want to guess that a building was five stories tall. We don’t want to assume that the staircase turned left, and we don’t want to speculate about the color of the drapes. We have software that lets us create photo-realistic renderings, but it can be a problem if we don’t know how everything was configured or what it looked like. This may seem like an obvious point, but back in 2003, when Saddam Hussein was captured, just about every news outlet did a diagram of his small hiding place, and not everyone got it right. It happens all the time.
This is an visually stunning site featuring a gallery exhibition at MoMa entitled Design and the Elastic Mind:
Design and the Elastic Mind explores the reciprocal relationship between science and design in the contemporary world by bringing together design objects and concepts that marry the most advanced scientific research with attentive consideration of human limitations, habits, and aspirations. The exhibition highlights designers’ ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and history—changes that demand or reflect major adjustments in human behavior—and translate them into objects that people can actually understand and use.
You can easily spend hours here, as I’m sure you could at the actual Museum of Modern Art in New York. But since I’m oceans away, I have to live vicariously through their website and behold the genuis of these designers in the form of a flash interface. (I recommend watching the mesmerizing Electric Sheep video–I’d like the see Windows come up with a screen saver so moving.)
If you’re lucky enough to be in the area, be sure to check out the exhibition, which runs until May 12, 2008. (And tell me about it!!)
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It’s supposed to say “Paper Fox,” but…
Don’t you wish there was a site that was simple, beautiful, interactive, and a great way to procrastinate? Enter jacksonpollock.org, named after the famous abstract expressionist painter.
To make your own creation, simply hover your mouse any any ol’ direction to get started. The paintbrush seems to randomly generate splatters. Click your mouse to change colors, and press the space bar to erase the canvas.
It’s obviously not a great way to get into the mindset of the great painter, who took painting to a new level by turning into something that required the whole body, but if you ever feel like your brain is going to explode from information overload, this site might be a great way to unwind and just mess around with something that isn’t supposed to be orderly.
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