2008

Congratulations to the very creative Spanish ad company DoubleYou (link to a non-site), who have various nice projects,among them the ingenious DoupleYou Loop.

ONE LOVELY DRAWING, part 15

I can't think of a better way to end 2007 than with this lovely drawing by our old friend Rembrandt.

This little drawing makes me wonder why Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell thought it was necessary to invent abstract expressionism.  

What an astonishing drawing and what a wonderful world we live in!

Happy new year to all of you!

Inspiration Typography

A type face that isnpired me for one typographic project of mine. Soon I'll post it to get some feedback. Tramyad font free for personal use from protofonts Download
download link fixed

Free Vectors

I found a great website for free vectors, you can also submit your own work and recieve feedback from other vector artists. "Vecteezy is an index of Free Vector Graphics available for download by some of the best artists around the world."

Jonas Dahlberg - the melancholy of illusion

There is a dark corridor, with just one passage through some light coming from the half-open door to a production room. The corridor is not long, so before I know it, I'm in a black room. There is apparently no light, except for three large, very, very dimly lit images. Actually, they seem more like windows, as what we see on them are interiors - at first glance it is hard to tell whether those are three rooms, or the same one. The rooms have a sensual, soft light, and everything about them seems dream-like.

That is a very comfortable place to be, delightfully melancholy, hidden in the middle, looking out into the private zone, the excessively private zone of what might have been a perfectly regular set of spaces, were they not so hypnotically absent.

If there is something at once appealing and haunting in this triple view, I am reminded that there was a TV set in the entrance. I go back, and the curator Katarzyna Krysiak tells me that although the video is an hour-long loop, it will start again soon and is worth watching at least the first minutes.
So I put myself comfortable. And the same room I saw on one (two?) of the pictures appears. And then, it starts melting. First, the back of the chair thins to nothing, and it falls apart. Then, progressively, the lamp gives way, the bookshelf (how could I have not noticed it before?), the table, the bed... The whole wax model (as it turns out) vanishes bit by bit.
According to the curator, this is the artists reaction to a friend's depression. It is inspired by how a physical space changes in such circumstances.
Johan Dahlberg is a master of disguise. But his masquerades are not about people. Rather, Dahlberg masks space. In his work (check out his site for several other interesting examples), illusion is the basis for questioning our relation with the space we see and feel. It comes as no surprise that among his favorite tools are models of rooms (their doppelgängers) and surveillance equipment. But contrary to many commentators, I have some doubts whether we can define Dahlberg's work through the prism of the "Big Brother" universe. There is so much more in his observing of our observing of an object! Be it with cameras and screens, be it through the nomenclature of surveillance and false spaces. But see, for example, this work from 2000, (Untitled) Billboard,presented in the Swedish town of Uddevalla:



The wonderful quality I find in these works is their capacity to confuse our sense of space, and question the order we assume as self-comprehensive. How mine is this space? Where am I in relation to it? And how sure can I be of it, of what it is?

The exhibition I visited at the Foksal Gallery (on until January 11) is part of an entire cycle called Quiet Home. What is the degree of irony in such a title? That depends on where you find yourself in relation to it, doesn't it?

The pictures from the exhibition courtesy of the Foksal Gallery.
Photos of Untitled (Billboard): copyright Jonas Dahlberg.

Vector Convert (Suggestion)

Most of the brushes for Adobe Photoshop can be easily converted to vector objects with the help of Illustrators, the Live Trace feature .

Photoshop Brushes are actually information about grayscale shapes, all you have to is to use them once in a blank document, export them as a jpeg, gif or png file , and then load it with Illustrator (File > Place).

The final step is to select the loaded file and go Object>Live Trace.

Note: The Live Trace Feature is avalable in Adobe Illustrator CS2 and CS3. You can also take a quick look at "Producing creative drawings with Live Trace and Live Paint"

Urban Scrawl Brush set for Photoshop

Here is a good proposal if you would like to apply grungy/sketchy style to your digital artwork.

This Photoshop brush set contains 29 different hand-drawn shapes. Feel free to experiment with different colors and layer transparency.

Author - InvisibleSnow Download from here

A HOLIDAY QUEST FOR MITIGATION

In an exchange with readers after my last posting I wrote,

if you go online and look at the 2,284 drawings in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you will be stunned by the amount of unmitigated crap in their collection....the ratio of money to talent at the MOMA cathedral is downright asphyxiating.

Some of you scolded me for exaggerating. After all, would such a distinguished museum really purchase "unmitigated crap"? In the spirit of this holiday season, I thought I would post some of the offending artwork to see whether my more open hearted readers can point out the mitigating features I am missing. Here are some of the masterpieces currently enshrined in the collection of MOMA:













As I browsed through dozens of crummy drawings like these, I noticed that whenever I was tempted to give a drawing the benefit of a doubt I ended up deducting points for pretentiousness. For example, MOMA does not appear to own a single Disney drawing, yet it proudly features many lame drawings of Disney subjects by inferior artists:









Why should MOMA display such drawings while it turns up its nose at the Disney originals? Perhaps the answer can be found in a press release issued earlier this year, wherein MOMA praised "a psychological collage made by slicing and reconfiguring the pages of Walt Disney coloring books." The drawings in MOMA's collection are not lowbrow Disney entertainment, buster, they are psychological collages.

MOMA also has many exquisite pieces. But someone at MOMA obviously believes that no matter how poorly a picture is drawn, it can be redeemed by an intellectual purpose. Regrettably, these drawings and their intellectual purpose both strike me as unmitigated crap. However, I am confident that my network of art lovers out there can explain what I am missing.

Merry Christmas

Have A Wonderful
Christmas Season


Thank you all,  For the support!

2007

Adobe Illustrator Tutorial Create Vector Metal Icons Buttons

Create these nice little metal buttons that can also be used as icons. Everything we make in this video is 100% vector so it can be used virtually anywhere! Check out www.tutvid.com for more great video tutorials!

THE SMOKE FROM KRAZY KAT'S CHIMNEY

We have chatted in the past about artists who delight in drawing subjects such as hair or folds or water, that allow them to take liberties with abstract design.

The great George Herriman rarely passed up an opportunity to draw smoke coming from a chimney. He seemed to place smoke in a picture the way a hat designer would place a feather in a lady's chapeau.



For art's sake, every fireplace in Coconino County must have been roaring all summer long.



Each example is different-- fluid, intuitive and beautiful.



You can look at each of these little abstract designs as a miniature rorschach test:











For comparison, here is a drawing by famed artist Ellsworth Kelly from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York :

I think the smoke from Krazy Kat's chimney is far superior as abstract art.

Pattern Tutorial For Adobe Illustrator

Wednesday 19 Dec 2007

Patterns are everywhere. Look around and you’ll probably see one right now. It might be a pattern on a tie, a shirt, pants, a paper cup, bathroom tiles, an umbrella, on a bag, a sofa, wrapping paper… the list goes on and on. Patterns add decoration and beauty to many consumer products. If you look closely at a true repeating pattern you can see the ‘repeat square’, the area of the image that repeats along vertical and horizontal seams where one section flows into the next.In this tutorial we will use vector elements to create a four-way repeating pattern swatch in Adobe Illustrator and then mask the pattern into several mock products. So, let’s get started! Fulltutorial

Holiday Decoration Brushes for Photoshop

Browsing www.brushes.obsidiandawn.com I found great proposal for holiday design projects. A set of 32 brushes made up of various vector designs and shapes. Most designs come in a basic shape of that brush, then another with one shape inside another - somewhat offset, another with dots or smaller versions of that same shape within it, and all kinds of variations of that. Great for making patterned paper or patterns, or for single embellishments to a design.

Includes: circles, squares, stars, hearts, triangles, swirls, flowers, brackets Download

La la la

Fragment of Amelia, a film by Edouard Lock and La la la Human Steps.

Another chapter of the film is here.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BEETHOVEN

Well, he's not exactly an illustrator, but I simply can't let the great man's birthday go by without tipping my hat in respect.

The illustrator Robert Fawcett studied Beethoven's notebooks and found their thematic notations surprisingly similar to an artist's conceptual sketches: they are both "notations of plastic linear ideas."



Fawcett said that abstract drawing "is probably as close to music as drawing can come." Enjoy these handwritten manuscripts as abstract art.

The unaccepted body

Three pictures by Anoush Abrar. The first is in co-authroship with Aimée Hoving, and was a co-authorship, a Christmas Cover (!) for Das Magazin. The second comes from a series that answers the theme ""attractive and repulsive images". The second is from the Realdolls series portraying silicone dolls made in California.

Our human selves, as bodies, are shape, are skin, body hair... Manipulating the elements of the definition brings about strange creatures, disgusting and fascinating in their unworldliness. It isn't about the simulacrum, about the virtual dominion over our idea of reality. Rather, it is the exploration of our unrealness, the impossible shape that is human. What are we to do with it? How are we to deal with the body that is never quite what we feel it to be? So the question is not Who am I?, but What am I? How dare I include this and that, and for God's sake where is my perfection?! I deserve it. I deserve corresponding to what I believe in, to what I live as.
But doesn't the language of merit (of deserving) hide our incapacity to cope with the neutrality of what is, or to differentiate between what is and what our concepts allow us to believe?

Vector Elements Brush Set For Photoshop

Here is another vecotr set of of oval element brushes from adcor. Compatible with Adobe Photoshop CS + . Download link , Enjoy !!!

How small is history?

In a comment in the Portuguese daily newspaper Público, my colleague Tiago Bartolomeu Costa commented on a controversial artistic residency at the Gulbenkian Foundation, which ended in October with a presentation of the works. A number of young visual and performance artists were invited for a 2-month residency in the very space where the Foundation’s collection of contemporary Portuguese art is usually presented. The place was completely transformed into 30 large cubicles or divisions. Visitors to the museum could eavesdrop and discover how each artist develops his work, as the space opened for the general public during several hours in the afternoon. Theoretically, one could accompany the entire process day-by-day (I wonder if anyone tried).
The entire (impressive and extensive) program which incorporated this daring initiative is called The State of the World, and this very title makes me feel somewhat uneasy. But first, let's hear Tiago:

Generally speaking, the protagonists of the arts of the body that were present [during the day of presentation] seem to have wasted an opportunity to reflect about what it means to create today. (...) the propositions (...) had in common what the artist Christian Boltanski called "the small memory" (...), but which to many of the creators became a runaway solution [in Portuguese: escape]: an apology of the idea that a selection of immediate and generational references can substitute, without any loss, History's evolutive processes.

There are several very important statements implied in this short fragment.
1) That there is a History. And not many histories, stories, lines. Indeed, in this perspective it is clear that the artists Tiago speaks of missed the point completely. However, "History" remains to be proven. And although History's end has been suspended, this still does not mean we have but the choice of either facing it or questioning it. But the very fact that the word appears here, in all its capital-letter majesty, is not benign. It has to do with the very opinion that artists should work on something called "The State of the World". What World? What State? What are we to do of the the legacy of the last 40 years of thought (and Boltanski is in the midst of it), with its “shift from history to discourse, from a third- to a second-person address” (Craig Owen, quoted from a famous essay called The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism )?
2) That there is an evolution, and that it can be ceased. This does make sense if we see any change as evolution. And makes a very interesting point: how do we feel evolution today? Beyond terrorism and cell phones, how does our (my) world pulsate? What leaks? What swallows? What itches? What feels good? I quite agree with Tiago that there is a tension that remains to be read, deciphered, discovered. However,
3) Shouldn't we accept this sort of intimate storytelling as an acceptance of one's own limits, an artistic modesty that is praiseworthy? It might go further than the postmodernist paradigm described through Craig Owens’ words. There is a telling slip of the tongue in the comment. If we read it literally, it suggests that the "selection of references" cannot "substitute History". This, however, implies that the artists put the generational references as an ontological substitute for History's processes. Which they don't (nobody declares or implies that the processes are susbsitututed). The problem might be precisely this: in the case of some of the young performers, the artistic discourse doesn't seem to come near the question of histories vs. History. The modesty seems almost unconscious, more like a limitation than a choice or perspective.
So Tiago does raise an important issue: how can art deal with the world and its new type of globality? We are more conscious today of what the world is than ever before. Might that be why we are more reluctant to generalize, or even try and define its processes? But can we just turn away and ignore them? Of course we can. So why would we participate in an event called State of the World? On one hand, this "small talk" of the "small memory" could be saying a lot about the State of the World, seen from here and now. On the other, its difficulty with approaching these Capital-Lettered-Concepts could be a hint that maybe its time to start off without the caps.

Here is a poem by Wislawa Szymborska, the Polish Nobel-Prize-Winner:

No Title Required

It has come to this: I’m sitting under a tree
beside a river
on a sunny morning.
It’s an insignificant event
and won’t go down in history.
It’s not battles and pacts,
where motives are scrutinized,
or noteworthy tyrannicides.

And yet I’m sitting by this river, that’s a fact.
And since I’m here
I must have come from somewhere,
and before that
I must have turned up in many other places,
exactly like the conquerors of nations
before setting sail.

Even a passing moment has its fertile past,
its Friday before Saturday,
its May before June.
Its horizons are no less real
than those that a marshal’s field glasses might scan.

This tree is a poplar that’s been rooted here for years.
The river is the Raba; it didn’t spring up yesterday.
The path leading through the bushes
wasn’t beaten last week.
The wind had to blow the clouds here
before it could blow them away.

And though nothing much is going on nearby,
the world is no poorer in details for that.
It’s just as grounded, just as definite
as when migrating races held it captive.

Conspiracies aren’t the only things shrouded in silence.
Retinues of reasons don’t trail coronations alone.
Anniversaries of revolutions may roll around,
but so do oval pebbles encircling the bay.

The tapestry of circumstance is intricate and dense.
Ants stitching in the grass.
The grass sewn into the ground.
The pattern of a wave being needled by a twig.

So it happens that I am and look.
Above me a white butterfly is fluttering through the air
on wings that are its alone,
and a shadow skims through my hands
that is none other than itself, no one else’s but its own.

When I see such things, I’m no longer sure
that what’s important
is more important than what’s not.

I know, Tiago - the big question remains: is this, can this small memory be enough? Can we spend time watching little branches and the butterflies' wings, and claim to any sort of authority in regards to the State of the World, or the states of the worlds, for that matter?
It's a beautiful poem. One of the things I like most about it, though, is that Szymborska is not sure. There is a hesitation here. While us, poor contemporary creative bastards, often take it for granted. We just move on, as if this was it.

How many capital letters can we keep? How many should we? Is it a question of the times that are a-changin? The closest I ever came to a war was when the tanks appeared on the streets in Poland in 1981. I was 3. My memory of it is fairly clear. But do I need to have this memory to have my sense of what is important? Can’t we define the world as superficially as we feel allowed to? But shouldn’t a good artist be able to overcome the obstacle of taking all the caps off, and find a capital letter after all, say in the “l” that looks so much like a “1”? But then again, should she? Or is she better off in the small narratives?
Does the “I” only stand for “1”?

= =

NB: Notice that Tiago is a performing arts critic. Would he write something of the sort if he were a fine arts critic? It seems unlikely. The modernist paradigm of an artistic soul that needs not the sullied, exterior world to create, is still quite omnipresent in the fine arts. The performing arts, particularly theater, have quite a different point of view, with a tendency to see the work through the prism of its engagement with the public, its dialog with “society”. I feel more affinity with the latter position. But doesn’t it sometimes limit our appreciation of the generous universe of art?

(photo by Juan Rayos)

STEGANOGRAPHY

Artists and spies know there are two ways to convey a message:

The first is to write your message in secret code. This is called cryptography.

The second is to plant your message within a larger, non-secret communication. This is called steganography: hiding a message within an image, right out in the open.

Illustration is essentially a steganographic art. Rather than using the words of a writer, illustrators convey a message by folding it into an image. They use a variety of symbols, brush strokes, colors, facial expressions, body language and other techniques to communicate meaning that writers convey verbally.

Here are some dandy examples by Kyle Baker:



This picture has a text which you can certainly read, but the marvelous frowns on the young "orphans" add a whole non-verbal layer of humor and intelligence to the message.



In the next picture, Baker cleverly distorts the figure to heighten the text he is illustrating:

Try conveying this level of frustration with mere words!

Next is a joke which only works because Baker knows how to draw shadows and weak chins and thinks visually, so he understands that this person's pajama pants should be too short;

Finally, here is a neat example of the illustrator's art of staging and body language. The stooped posture of the interviewer, the wild gesticulations of Cowboy Wally, the arc of beer tracking the movement of his gesture; this all requires thought and planning.



These pictures by Baker are beautifully designed but they are also highly intelligent in a non-verbal way. This is different from the writer's form of intelligence, but it is just as rare and deserves just as much respect.

In recent postings about words and pictures, I have commented on the current rash of artistic geniuses who can't draw (or who, in the words of one commenter, are simply "writers who draw.") These artists don't communicate with steganography, they use cryptography. Their message may be concealed in the metaphor or allegory or symbolism of their written text, but it is rarely found ingrained in their drawings.

Whenever I write on this subject, I receive fatwahs and death threats from fans of Maus, Persepolis, Jimmy Corrigan, Fun Home and other fashionable works. They would like to dismiss skill or talent in art as merely "slick," but the roots of quality in art are too ancient to be so easily dismissed. Perhaps such critics sell pictures short because they can't read the steganography in art.

.

Fade In and Out Action Script Tutorial

Here is a very basic but useful tutorial for Adobe Flash Action Script. Fading in and out alpha... but no timeline. A small introduction of onEnterFrame event function and its usages. You can see a preview at the final result here. Download tutorial (.fla file)

Gift idea

Meantime.

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