Holiday Triptych

A recent commission - all the client wanted was a series of three illustrations, so it really was pretty open. I'm hopping she's not weirded-out. That middle one came out a little more homoerotic than I anticipated.

[Click to Enlarge]



update: Client was happy with these, -- sigh. You never know when the concept and subject matter is completely open. You cross your fingers its not way off the mark from what their expecting/hoping for.

1960's Pulp Novel Covers Come to Life

Look past the half naked females, and take note of the amazing feat of bringing mod-style pulpy paperback novel covers to live action. I love the typography, and tiny details added in recreating 1960's paperback cover art, even down to the tinny text callouts in the corners, pricing, and printing publisher. The first 1/4 of the video is all homage to James Bond silhouettes, (not that impressive) but stick it out, the latter half is the pulp-art-cover-illustration-style that impressed me. Be sure and view full screen (the arrows in bottom right of video player), This small size doesn't do it justice.



My wife wasn't impressed, I think the curvy female ruined it for her. So I realize this may not be for everyone

Ronald Kurniawan

Partake of the splendid goodness that is Ronald Kurniawan. Look beyond the first page; Use the paginated navigation in the top left to browse his full collection of work.

I'm surprised I haven't seen this guys work before now. I love how fun, and playful his content is. His style is reminiscent of Jillian Tamaki and James Jean to me.

Brandon Voges: Upside Down Portraits

See more shots from this series here.

Some of Brandon's other work.

80's Dating Videos

Some may not consider this art, but I consider it a MASTERPIECE.

Letters of Note

A friend recently brought this to my attention. It looks legitimate to me, and if they are real, its a gem of a blog to follow. Personal letters from an excited 20 year old David Bowie, or a prisoner of war letter by Kurt Vonnegut, J. D. Salinger, Robert Oppenheimer, Kurt Cobain, Andy Kauffman, Frank Sinatra, Edger Allen Poe, and numerous other fascinating figures. The letters weren't intended for numerous eyes, and some are so personal I feel kinda like a snoopy little sister reading them. Enjoy.

Letters of Note

via Jessie

Ran Hwang's - Cherry Blossoms

Using thousands of nails and Cherry Blossoms, Ran Hwang spends days working on these massive time consuming murals. See more of her impressive work HERE.

The paintings of Brian Despain

are so good.

Anne Hardy

Incredible sets made by Anne Hardy .

Grizzled Again - "Ready, Able"

This isn't the first time Grizzly Bear has been mentioned on here. This one is equally bizarre. Credits goes to Allison Schulnik as well as Grizzly Bear of course.




via: It's Nice That

Paul Hollingworth

Beautiful work.

Check out more of his projects on his Behance portfolio

Google-Maps Typography

Check out designer Rhett Dashwood's google maps alphabet. Now somebody just has to start finding inanimate objects, animals, and celebrities' faces in the topographic photos from google maps.



link via: The Art Dept

Massive Marionettes in Berlin

France's Royal de Luxe street theatre company performs these huge scale marionette performances with gigantic marionettes and a crew of hundreds of puppeteers. I've seen past videos and photos of these performances, but this particular performance through down town Berlin and these quality photos really capture it for me. It being Halloween season, I thought this appropriate to post cause these things are extremely creepy to me.

link

If you haven't added the Boston Globe's "The Big Picture" to your RSS feeds yet, you should. Its full of amazing stuff.

Autumn Cruiser of the future

I think the fact that it is entirely all white, makes it even more unique.

See more photos and video of this artwork in action here.

Welcome Autumn

Summer has come and gone. Fair well good friend. Until next year.

Alex Varanese

His Site

David Ellis & BLU

Makes me want to have a courtyard, just so I can paint it.

link via: drawn

Home Video

I really enjoyed this home video posted by Jarbas Agnelli which was shot by his dad in 1974.

Super 8 - 1974 from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Mark Gonzales

That Ed Templeton post made me want to post about Mark Gonzales. Mark's creativity is uncanny. Just watch him skate. He's talented in traditional painting, poetry and writing, but skating is his strongest art-form. His ability to react to his environments and create original impromptu tricks/performances has earned him international attention. In the late 90's a respected German museum contacted Mark to showcase some of his work, and in response he dressed up in what looks like fencing gear or a straight-jacket and skated the unique museum architecture in his distinct style. If I can find it online, I'll try and post a video of it below. He's been credited with co-pioneering street skating and making it what it is today. Its said he was the first to skate rails. You can find plenty of interesting videos and info on Gonz all over the internet. He's been around a while, and is still creatively contributing to society today.





sorry so many skate-related posts, Im done for awhile. Although I'm really itching to post something about Jim Phillips I'll hold off for now.

Ed Templeton

I've always been a fan of Ed Templeton, and I'm realizing I haven't really given him enough mention on here. Beyond being an incredible skater, he's extremely creative and produces original unique illustration that grace skate decks to high-end gallery walls. He also receives plenty of praise for his documentary style photography of skate culture and southern California, not to mention he runs his own thriving skate company Toy Machine. He's a huge inspiration to me.






His RVCA weblog
His photoblog

Jaime Martinez: Three Frames

I've seen these 3-frame beauties floating around the internet the past few weeks. Who would have thought that the old animated GIF would ever been creatively mentionable after 1995.

Mexico's Jamie Martinez has more captivating 3-frame shots here.

20+ Years Later

I love photography projects that deal with re-visiting the exact same content years later. Peter Feldstein took photos of every resident ( 676 ) of his small Iowa town of Oxford. Now 20+ years later he's taken a follow-up photograph and had them reflect on camera about the years between the two photos. Of the 676 residents, there are bound to be some real wacky characters, interesting interviews and photos. I'll have to try and track down the book. More

"Hundreds of Oxford residents come to life in these pages. Time leaps back and forth, instantly elapsing twenty years. Meet, among others, the donut baker who went from having to be weighed on a livestock scale to losing over 150 pounds with the encouragement of the entire town; the Pentecostal minister who gave up buck-skinning to found his own church and now awaits the rapture in 2028; the World War II veteran who survived the Battle of the Bulge, but still suffers terribly from post-traumatic stress disorder; his son, a recipient of the Purple Heart for his service in Vietnam, who shares his father's affliction." -the book

link via:cpluv

Brendan Lee: Juxtaposition

I realized we haven't put up many ceramic artists on here. I enjoyed the contrasting styles in Brendan Lee's "Manga Ormolu" collection.



link via: hi-fructose

Li Wei: Suspended

Pretty powerful photography with the help of a crane and some wires.

Link

link via: cpluv

GRACE ZENS: Fan Art

A couple days back I stumbled upon the CHICKEN NUGGET LEMON TOOTY blog. Its basically a blog where a dad has been posting up his 3 kids, Isaac, Grace, and Lily's drawings for the past few years. The Dad himself is an artist (Aaron Zenz) and has been encouraging and sharing his kids art. Recently they had open submissions for fan art. I loved seeing other artists trying to interpret or re-imagine the kid's creativity in their own style.

I've seen similar concepts where photographers try to re-create children's drawings, or artists illustrate them. Its a concept I really enjoy, and I think is mainly due the originality of the children's drawings to begin with. Children have a raw untainted creativity, which for some reason most people lose as they grow older.

When your playing with a little kid, and you say " lets draw a horse riding a horse", they do it no hesitation. They're probably excited to. But if you ask an adult to draw just a man, most of the time they get awkward, embarrassed and refuse. Or they'll just draw a stick figure. What changed, why won't they just draw? It doesn't have to look like so-and-so's, it doesn't have to be proportional or even accurate.

Just like handwriting everyone has their own unique drawing style, and it should be explored and enjoyed at any age. I apologize for the long winded post. Nobody reads these anyways, they just look at the pics. Speaking of, here's my fan art submission I did based on a drawing by Gracie Zenz (age 6).

Kalle Gustafsson

Over saturated, lots of tone mapping, and excellent compositions. His motion work also carries his style real well. This photo is from his advertising > atg series.

his portfolio

link via: Adobe

Frank Stockton

Saw his stuff on the recent cover of Communication Arts magazine. I specifically love his compositions. His style is reminiscent to Tomer Hanuka and sometimes simliar to Jillian Tamaki.

See more of his amazing work here.

Mathieu Beaulieu: Vector Perfect

He's a little more cartoony than we usually put on here, but his vector illustrations have so much personality I had to post him up. See more of his work on his blog.

Typogriffic!

It really is kinda strange to me that art centered around type is so interesting to me. You'd think that art centered around so many other actual objects, animals, humans, concepts, landscapes, etc would be so much cooler, but I'm so often drawn to interesting presentations of letters and type. Type taken as form and shape would seem to be one of the more boring subjects to base art around, but its surprisingly not so. I'm probably not making sense. Does anyone get what I'm trying to say...

Terri Timely: Directory of Peculiarity

He's diffidently got a distinct style, and his color and textures are real unique and memorable. Check out his site here. I recommend this video to taste his flavor. Looks like he's worked for some pretty well known clients, and done some big name music videos.

Vincent Fournier

terrible site navigation, but worth while images.

Nick Meek

Great use of color. link

Jeff Scher: Technology-less Animation

via: its nice that

lo-fi: Music Visualizer

via: my computerlove

Sweetheart: Cinema 4D Dynamics

See more motion work by Universal Everything

behind the scenes
links via: Inspire To Be More

Funny Spam Illustrations

You've all seen the funny spam emails. Elliott Burford takes those HOT one liners and makes an illustration from them.





This was posted on my friends blog, which you can check out here.
Original post with more illustrations are here.

Wes Anderson: A Peek at The Fox

Wes Anderson's next project is a stop-motion feature film based on Roald Dahl’s children's book "Fantastic Mr. Fox". It's got his usual big list of big names in the cast including: Owen Wilson, Bill Murray, George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Adrien Brody, Jason Schwartzman, Willem Dafoe and many others. The David Bowie-esk brit-popper Jarvis Cocker is doing the score. This image is the first to leak out from the film.


I'm not sure what I expected, but now that I see it, it kinda makes sense he would go with a 1970's style of puppets/animation. Kind of along the lines of the old Rudolph Christmas stop-motion stuff I guess.

This particular photo really reminds me a lot of an old "Little Red Riding Hood" children's book I had growing up. It was illustrated by T. Izawa and S. Hijikata, and it was all done using photographs of creepy puppets.


The trailer is said to be coming out soon, I'm really interested to see how it looks.

For more info visit imdb and or The Rushmore Academy

update - another recent photo. (this photo looks like a better representation than the first) Click for larger view

Visual Poetry: ...And a Glair of Hashish

Poem by: Alan Brunton
Poem Title: Transformed Urbs - The Days Of
Visuals by: Thomas Bredin-Grey

Disclaimer: The word "hump" is used along with the word "palliases" which just means a straw-filled mattress

Music video shot with CCTV cameras

The Get Out Clause decided to use all of the "big brother" cctv cameras throughout the U.K. to make a music video.

"The band set up their music equipment, from microphones to drum kit, in eighty different locations, including buses and what appear to be taxi cabs, and then requested all of the footage using the Data Protection Act, an English statute similar to the U.S.’s Freedom of Information Act that mandates any individual should have access to all information collected about them."

Brilliant!



via The Future of Media

I'm a sucker for color

Notte Sento

Great stop motion video done with over 4500 stills. Vespa, beautiful Italian girl and cameras. Can't get much better then that.

JeanYves Lemoignee: Pronounce that....

View the urban legends of JeanYves Lemoigne and say that name three times fast.

Disclaimer: Beware of wacky 3D pixilated nudity in the "Editorial" work section

Jonathan Bergeron: Sugar Skulls and then more Sugar Skulls

I stumbled upon the blog of Jonathan Bergeron recently, and I haven't found an official website full of his work yet, so you'll have to navigate his generic blaaaaugh to see his stuff. He really is a well rounded artist with the ability to depict a variety of stylized content. But from what I can see on his blog he's fascinated with painting sugar skulls in diverse context and a variety of situations. All in all, I'm into the style and playfulness of his paintings.

Uncooked Music Videos

This is kind of the follow-up/context to that last Fleet Foxes post. I think we need more music and performance art related posts on here.

"The Take away shows are la Blogotheque’s first video podcasts.
Every week, we invite an artist or a band to play in the streets, in a bar, a park, or even in a flat or in an elevator, and we film the whole session. Of course, what makes the beauty of it is all the little incidents, hesitations, and crazy stuff happening unexpectingly. Besides, we do not edit the videos so they look perfectly flawless, instead we keep the raw sound of the surroundings. Our goal is to try and capture instants, film the music just like it happens, without preparation, without tricks. Spontaneity is the keyword.

The Take away shows exist since April 2006. There was Chryde, who wanted to shake things up and find another way to share music, and there was Vincent Moon, who wanted to film music differently. Chryde offered Moon to go and film musicians in the city, Moon seized the idea and glorified it. Since then, other directors across the world joined this project, and we plan to extend it worldwide."

text via: La Blogotheque

Summer, please make yourself at home

In celebration of summer finally arriving here's some Fleet Foxes. I'm not sure why but they're music and their singer Robin Pecknold's voice makes me want to go camping in the mountains. This song doesn't really start until like 2:30 into this video.

Jeremy Geddes: Ground Control

All I want for Christmas is a Jeremy Geddes print. His astronaut series is so impressive to me! Even without the floating cosmonauts, the composition, colors, and moods of his environments alone are amazing! Be sure and browse his blog as well, to see his process, comps, sketches, and newest work.

Snik.

I ran across this on the Wooster Collective. Tried finding more work from them but this is all I could find. Great Stuff. If anyone has anymore info about them please let me know!


From Romanyg on Flickr.


From PaulGreen on Flickr.