This is a cool idea: Michael Paulus has a gallery which takes a look at the skeletal systems of cartoon characters. The distortions are interesting. For example, Betty Boop has no lower jaw!
(Via Drawn!)
Updated links 2015
illustration
Colour-in Canberra: The Suburban Duck
At the moment I am painting two traffic control boxes in the Urban Services project ‘Colour-in Canberra’. The first one, The Suburban Duck, is on the corner of Yamba Drive and Kitchener St in Garran, just across the road from the Canberra Hospital. It tells a story from my back garden: about how foxes are an ever present danger to ducks in the suburbs, while crows have the place staked out and steal their eggs given half a chance. Its been really enjoyable painting out in the sun on and off the last few weeks.
A Meander towards a Fourth Dimension
I like the old stonework and bluest of blues in Oxford Blue, a photo by Robert Silverwood. And it reminds me of my Cyber Hall drawing which was to be a virtual Union building site map for the Indiana Uninversity Alumnii Association. It was my friend Amy’s initiative, and we worked closely together on it, as we did at Pemberley.
A while ago, Amy was musing about Kosso’s question, are you a createc?
‘I’m not as programmery but can find my way around under the hood. I
have less graphics savvy, and lean a little more to the verbal side.
Maybe there should be a scale with those three dimensions or aspects to
measure one’s createc quotient (C.Q.).’
I think there is maybe a fourth dimension as well, which Amy has in spades. Its an openess to the fluidity and feedback loops in the non-linear creative process: the ability to share and trigger creativity in others, and be open to and build on ideas coming back.
Flying Spaghetti Monster
From south eastern Australia, possible evidence that the Flying Spaghetti Monster was known to ancient peoples:
Artist Trading Cards
I’ve been making a few artist trading cards: an edition of just three. One of them is in exchange for Mimi‘s night baby.
Close-ups below.
I find the concept of artist trading cards quite seductive. It must be the idea of miniature art, like stamps and other mailart. But I am also wary of getting into it, on time grounds alone.
For a long time I wanted to make an installation – sometimes I still do! – with the little images I did for The Republic of Pemberley years ago. (Some of them were money and stamps invented for that imaginary world, featuring Colin Firth’s Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, but those particular ones are not online at the moment). The idea was to print and frame the pictures at the scale they were made – 200 x 150 pixels – and then exhibit them in a purpose-built miniature gallery. The way you would view them would be through peep holes, or being able to pop you head up into the individual gallery rooms from underneath. The idea connects into ideas I have long played around with, to do with how cyberspace impacts on our understandings of public and private space.
Little Golden Books: Tibor Gergely
The following illustration is by Tibor Gergely from the Little Golden Book ‘Houses’ by Elsa Jane Werner. I’m posting it as a comparison to the one by Richard Scarry in another Little Golden Book, ‘Cars and Trucks’, over at Wee Wonderfuls. There is an interesting discussion there about how in updates of the book that particular illustration has been changed to accommodate a more feminist attitude to gender roles. This one obviously belongs firmly in the earlier era, and I wonder if it was changed in a similar way later on?
I don’t have an exact date for this book – its one of a set of four books that together make up a ‘Little Golden Book Library’ that I bought in about 1983, and the dates given collectively are 1948 through 1969.
I was interested to see in an online bio of Tibor Gergely that as a young man he worked for two years in a Vienna marionette theatre as a puppet designer and stage decorator :-).
Japanese Design Motifs
Meggiecat is a constant source of interesting art-craft-image-related notes. Her link to Japanese Free Clip Art the other day provided this lovely swallowtail butterfly image, for instance.
The designs reminded me of a book called ‘Snow, Wave, Pine:Traditional patterns in Japanese Design’ by Motoji Niwa and Sadao Hibi, which I sometimes page through in the bookshop. Its a beautiful collection of photographs of classic decorative patterns on a wide variety of objects (for example robes, laquerware, swords and ceramics), and many drawings of family crests and stylized motifs.
The Medieval Bestiary
This green parrot is one of the many lovely animal illustrations catalogued on The Medieval Bestiary: Animals in the Middle Ages. Its a nicely organized site, with alphabetical ordering and cross-referencing, and information about the beasts from manuscripts. For each beast there is usually a gallery of different images from different sources.
Did you know, for example, that a dragon’s strength is found in its tail, not in its teeth? And that ‘it is the enemy of the elephant, and hides near paths where elephants walk so that it can catch them with its tail and kill them by suffocation’? Or that ‘it is because of the threat of the dragon that elephants give birth in the water’?
Jonathon Oxlade
For me Jonathon Oxlade was the stand-out performance of the One Van puppetry festival in late January. His short performance during the Saturday night cabaret was exciting, bizarre, gross, and hilarious. Jonathon works as a freelance theatre designer, illustrator and puppeteer.
According to his bio, among many other things, he created The Red Tree installation — ‘an interactive experience full of little surprises for the eyes, ears,heart and mind’ — that accompanied the QPAC’s Out of the Box production of ShaunTan’s beautiful picture book ‘The Red Tree’ in 2004.
This year he is designing ‘Creche and Burn’ (on stage in April) and ‘The Dance of Jeramiah’ (in Oct-Nov) for LaBoite Theatre, and a production of the Dicken’s classic ‘A Christmas Carol’ for the Queensland Theatre Company late in the year. He is currently working on a picture book, too.
