11 posts tagged “art”

The line between art and prank can sometimes be a really fine one, but when the outcome is as cool as this, who cares?

Nerdbots

'Skine Art, a blog that posts random drawing, sketches, and doodles from artists' Moleskine notebooks, is one of my favorite daily reads.

Recently, there have been several fun posts featuring the work of Mattias Adolfsson.  On his blog, Mattias describes himself as a freelance illustrator; his blog seems to function as his online resume for potential employers.

The image above comes from Adolfsson's Flickr account and I am re-posting it here under the terms provided by the Creative Commons license.

If you're interested in art, illustration, watercolor, or Moleskines, you may want to check out his work.

Last weekend, I made it down to Tokyo Big Site for Design Vesta Vol. 27.

The Festa (festival) is a twice annual art and design event where artists can set up booths to display, promote, or sell their art.  Painters, sculptors, musicians, and every other stripe of artist imaginable are all represented in the mess of several thousand exhibitors.

The quality varies, of course, and while there is a lot of talent evident, style choices seem to be a bit limited; many of the younger artists' work were indistinguishable from their neighboring artists' work.  Bright colors and abstract expressionism seemed to outweigh any sort of representational work by 10 to 1, and while that is not a bad thing, it did contribute to the feeling of everything looking like everything else.

However, there were a few artists that I noticed (read bought prints from):

Kaoru Kamui - Kamui works in digital art and has been at it for the three years or so since she graduated from university with a degree in graphic design.

Yoshida Suzuka - Yoshida does beautiful watercolor and acrylic paintings of small, quiet scenes.

Taishi Douchin - Douchin does small, fun illustrations with marker and pen on poster boards.  Unfortunately, he does not have much available yet, but he is hoping to get a book made soon.

Ko-Hey Harada - Ko-hey has two series of posters out, The Jokers, a group of rock and roll inspired images, and the Marshmallow Kings, a lighter, more romantic set of images.

U-suke - U-suke has created a fun character called Chonmage Kacho (Chonmage is the top knot that samurai warriors wore, and Kacho means president of a company.)  There is a book and DVD available collecting the best images featuring the character.

Hotanism - I'm not actually sure of the designer's name.  The person at the booth was very shy and would not speak to me.  But the website is up and has some interesting stuff on it.  I was most interested in Black Rabbit.

Kei Gallery - Again, I don't know who the designer is; the booth was unmanned when I found it.  But I love the Chess figures and should they ever market an affordable set, I will but it.

And that was the best I saw.  If you have a chance, and if you're a fan of new and independent art, I recommend you check out the Festa.

Show us your favorite artist.

Register - The Conversation

So, I came across this the other day:  Fabjectory - Virtual Objects in Real Life.

The idea is that these guys have gotten hold of a rapid proto-typing machine and will print (manufacture?) whatever the customer orders, including Second Life avatars, Mii characters, and Google Sketch-up files.  They also take custom orders via their website, which are then printed and shipped, the same as everything else.

At the moment, their prices are a bit high:  $50 USD for a three inch Mii figure, and $100 USD for a five inch, and I'm not sure of the quality.  The photos on the website make the finished products seem a little rough as they are printed out of colored plastics as opposed to painted plastics.  The same photos seem to indicate that the surfaces are somewhat textured, not smooth like modern toys usually are.

Still, I love the idea and I can't help wondering where this technology is going.

Let's start with the idea.  Personally, I like to draw and the idea that I could have any character I drew printed out and sent not just to me but to anyone, anywhere is very appealing.  Add to that the idea of one of a kind pieces by artists or limited editions of special figures and the collectible crowd will come running.  And how about producing blanks for the DIY crowd?  Easily done.

The immediate counter-point is that there are lots of vinyl or plastic art toys out there, blanks included, so how is this any different?  The answer is in the scale.  Most individual artists cannot afford to have their ideas turned into physical form without serious financial backing due to the numbers involved.  Typical production runs, even for limited editions often number in the thousands.  Even at the lowest cost available in East Asian factories, a large amount of money is required up front for a product that may or may not sell.

So this idea that an artist can post a design on a website and fans can choose which figures they'd like to purchase on a single unit scale is very appealing.  Especially if the software is in place to let designers limit the numbers on some designs, creating a quick-as-you-can market that may drive prices upwards and gain the individual some needed cash.

From there, let's look at the technology.  I have no idea how much these printers run but I know that computers used to fill entire rooms and the idea of a desktop computer was laughable.

If the manufacturing becomes as installed as a microwave, the design is the only part that would have value; if the design is on a computer, anybody will be able to get hold of it, one way or another, thus making it impossible to limit the number of copies printed, thus driving the cost back down.

Either way, the consumer gets what he or she wants without trouble and the artist is saved the cost of producing thousands of potentially unwanted pieces.

And, in any case, this is a technology and a company I'll be watching, just to see what they come up with.

What is (or would be) your DJ name?

DJ Polar

A brief list of things I like in artwork:  Bright colors, sharp lines, identifiable objects, juxtaposition, reciprocity, contrast, odd angles and perspectives, and a distorted reality.

My first realization that art could impact on one's psyche came from, of all things, a T-shirt.  I clearly remember being ten years old and in the shopping mall with my mother.  I remember pointing at a random stranger's T-shirt and telling my mom that I thought it was cool because it had melting clocks on it.  My mother told me it was a famous painting by Dali and that I should check the encyclopedia at school because she thought he had done several paintings like that.

Reading about Dali opened a door for me.  I began looking at books of famous paintings in the county library, wondering about the people who had made them and why I immediately liked some and thought of others as 'just ok'.  I realized quickly that I had little use for the realists or the bizarrely abstract.  I found myself drawn to Dali, Van Gogh, Register, Lichtenstein, and Lempicka.  Reading about them lead to other forms of art and other artists like Escher and Weston.

By the time I graduated from high school I was not thinking about art very much anymore.  I was content to take pictures and cited my influences as the photojournalists and candid street photographers from Life and National Geographic magazines.

It was not until I began painting, at almost thirty, that I really began questioning my assumptions about art and my own tastes in paintings that I started to look for influences - for artists whose work I could learn from or who had expressed something similar to what I wanted to say.

Thank God for the internet.

Searching for new things to like led me to Coop and to Kozyndan, Murakami and Frauenfelder, while reminding me of things I had liked once but forgotten: R Crumb and Dave McKean, not to mention the host of comic book artists I had loved in high school, like Dave Sim and Alex Ross.

And all of these are my influences.  They inform the colors I choose and the design of my paintings.  The diverse body of work represented by all the names listed above reminds me of what can be imagined can be painted; it frees me from every having to have a consistent, single style.

But my greatest inspiration comes from one single individual:  Charles Addams.

Addams was a cartoonist, best known for creating the Addams family, and though he did not often paint, he was capable of producing stunning watercolors when he chose to.  Addams felt that, in his cartoons, if he needed some kind of caption, or dialogue, he had somehow failed; he felt that his best cartoons are those that needed no explanation, no witty comment, but conveyed the entire story in the puzzled look on a little girls face when her string of paper dolls contained an extra leg or when a little boy was smiling triumphantly at the collection of warning signs decorating his bedroom.

Bright colors, clean lines, weird juxtapositions:  In any painting, cartoon, drawing, or doodle I do, this is the thought that stays with me - How do I tell this story?  This is my inspiration. 

Cliche
Originally uploaded by SunToad.

Sometimes quick and easy seems to be anything but. This painting, for example.

I had wanted to paint something my wife would like. Let me clarify: my wife likes my art. Especially when I draw little cartoons and make comics for her. She doesn't really care for my paintings though and I have never really managed to do one that she thought was more than just nice. And by nice, I mean, she might think it's good but just isn't her taste at all. And we have wildly different tastes in art: I like pop-art, with bright colors and odd angles and fragments of things. She likes soft, pretty art - landscapes and scenery and realistic visions.

This painting was an attempt to create something she would like without going outside the boundaries of what I enjoy painting. A compromise, if you will.

After all, isn't that how marriage works? Compromise?

Anyway. The painting started life as a photograph taken by someone whose photo was included in a backgrounds package I got with an old computer. I would credit it if I could, but it was a stock image without any accreditation built in; I had never painted a sunset, for all that they are one of the most visible and cliched images out there and decided that the time had come for me to try my hand at one.

Things started well. I laid down a thin line of each of the colors and then used a small brush to begin to blend them together, taking time and care to clean the brush between color sets so that red blended only to orange and orange blended only to yellow and so on. I gave the background a day or so to dry before laying on the black (actually all the leftover color blended together).

This particular canvas is on the small side, about five by seven inches and I was holding it in my left hand while I applied color with my right. I'm not sure what happened, or why, but I dropped it. Face down.

I was able to salvage most of the background but the palm tree had become unrecognizable. I wiped it and most of the surrounding background paint off and gave it a day or three to dry out.

Once dry, I used a small brush coated in paint thinned to loosen the dried background colors, and then another brush to drag the remaining colors to the left. When that was dry I applied a second layer of background color and eventually was able to replace the palm tree and city scape as well.

Unfortunately, the blending did not take as well the second time around, possibly because of the paint thinner I had had to use, possibly because I was too irritated to concentrate properly.

In the end, I do like the final image, and, more importantly, so does my wife. While I do think it is a cliched image, I learned a bit more about blending and layering, which, really, is the point behind all of this, so I'm calling it successful.

As for the next painting, I've already got an idea in mind, and I know, already, that my wife is going to hate it.

This entry is cross-posted to Painted Toad.