Check this out:
I don't know who put that together, but I thank them on behalf of the internet. Also, bear in mind that the technology we use in films nowadays is a relatively recent development. Given that computing power doubles every year, I see no reason we can't climb out of the Uncanny Valley within the next three or four years. (Then the tech will keep growing until we have CGI characters who look more real than you.)
This is my new favorite thing. It's a video of previously recorded interviews with Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator who is going on the ever-expanding "My Heroes" list. Enjoy. (Watch it full-screen and high quality, if possible. You'll thank me.)
Oh, I almost forgot this; a link to "Walking", Larkin's 1968 Oscar-nominated short.
While testing the effects of LSD in the 1950s, the US government ended up dosing a man before giving him a box full of pencils and crayons, instructing him to sketch the medical officer in the room with him. Observe and enjoy.
20 minutes after first dose:
An attending doctor observes - Patient chooses to start drawing with charcoal.
The subject of the experiment reports - "Condition normal... no effect from the drug yet."
____________________________________________________________________
85 minutes after first dose:
The patient seems euphoric.
"I can see you clearly, so clearly. This... you... it's all ... I'm having a little trouble controlling this pencil. It seems to want to keep going."
____________________________________________________________________
2 hours and thirty minutes after first dose:
Patient appears very focus on the business of drawing.
"Outlines seem normal, but very vivid - everything is changing colour. My hand must follow the bold sweep of the lines. I feel as if my consciousness is situated in the part of my body that's now active - my hand, my elbow... my tongue."
____________________________________________________________________
2 hours and thirty-two minutes after first dose:
Patient seems gripped by his pad of paper.
"I'm trying another drawing. The outlines of the model are normal, but now those of my drawing are not. The outline of my hand is going weird too. It's not a very good drawing is it? I give up - I'll try again..."
____________________________________________________________________
2 hours and thirty-five minutes after first dose:
Patient follows quickly with another drawing.
"I'll do a drawing in one flourish... without stopping... one line, no break!"
Upon completing the drawing the patient starts laughing, then becomes startled by something on the floor.
____________________________________________________________________
2 hours and forty-five minutes after first dose:
Patient tries to climb into activity box (with the crayons and pencils), and is generally agitated - responds slowly to the suggestion he might like to draw some more. He has become largely non-verbal.
"I am... everything is... changed... they're calling... your face... interwoven... who is..." Patient mumbles inaudibly to a tune (sounds like "Thanks For The Memory"). He changes medium to Tempera.
____________________________________________________________________
4 hours and twenty-five minutes after first dose:
Patient retreated to the bunk, spending approximately 2 hours lying, waving his hands in the air. His return to the activity box is sudden and deliberate, changing media to pen and water colour.
"This will be the best drawing, Like the first one, only better. If I'm not careful I'll lose control of my movements, but I won't, because I know. I know" - (this saying is then repeated many times).
Patient makes the last half-a-dozen strokes of the drawing while running back and forth across the room.
____________________________________________________________________
5 hours and forty-five minutes after first dose:
Patient continues to move about the room, intersecting the space in complex variations. It's an hour and a half before he settles down to draw again - he appears over the effects of the drug.
"I can feel my knees again, I think it's starting to wear off. This is a pretty good drawing - this pencil is mighty hard to hold" - (he is holding a crayon).
____________________________________________________________________
8 hours after first dose:
Patient sits on bunk bed. He reports the intoxication has worn off except for the occasional distorting of our faces. We ask for a final drawing which he performs with little enthusiasm.
"I have nothing to say about this last drawing, it is bad and uninteresting, I want to go home now."
Source. Directed by the wonderful Drawing On Drugs, a blog with user-submitted pictures drawn under the influence.
First things first. If any of you see someone wearing this Sargon Ivy cap, I am telling you that it's alright to hit them as hard as you can. Here's a photo of it.
Just to be clear, that's an ivy cap with an embroidered dagger on it. The dagger is intricate and fancy, and lies broken amongst the lilies. It is meant as a tribute to Sargon, a Mesopotamian king who seems kind of sick and twisted and cruel. I mean, this is a guy who "marched to Kazallu and turned Kazallu into a ruin heap, so that there was not even a perch for a bird left." I get angry at places with stupid gimmicky town names as well, but I don't flip out and torch the place. And if I did, I wouldn't want to be memorialized on a hat whose target demographic would be purchasing them for "irony".
ANYWAY! Kutiman is a DJ, musician, producer, composer, animator, and, what the hell, artist. He's been the recipient of some fairly high praise of late, with the release of "ThruYou", an album composed entirely of remixed YouTube videos. This has garnered some minor nerdy applause, but has also revealed this Israeli musician's oeuvre to US audiences.
That's the first track off of the album, "The Mother Of All Funk Chords". If you liked it (you should have), you can watch the rest on the album's website here. Enjoy.
After more than 30 years of civil war in Cambodia, a British artist teamed up with a small arms specialist to help deal with the thousands of weapons that were to be destroyed. The project they came up with, The Peace Art Project Cambodia, has been running since 2003 and focuses on turning the weapons into sculptures and furniture. Check out the pics here.
Alright, so I found this delightful little place where this one guy, Martin Waugh, takes photos of something that you probably see couple times a day and never take note of, though the magic of high-speed photography. Enjoy.
I've remarked on the top-notch National Geographic photos before, but I found a neat little feature they've been doing that deserves its own mention. The Life In Color series illustrates the chromatic diversity of the world. Here we go.
Woo! If you want to see the full range of awesomeness on these photos, here you go: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, and Brown.
In other news, what's up with those tricky-as-hell-to-open plastic packages that expensive electronic things come in? You know the kind I'm talking about. You need some seriously sharp scissors to open them, and all it takes is one slip of the hand to accidentally cut a vital wire (I almost learned this the hard way about ten minutes ago). It does not seem like an efficient packaging standard. And here's the kicker: scissors come in these things. What if you don't have any secondary scissors? It's a total Catch-22. The company that packages stuff and the scissor companies are TOTALLY in cahoots. It just makes me SO IRRATIONALLY MAD. Also, Fall Break! Woo!
I've long been a fan of comics, mostly because it's like watching a movie, but you're reading. So it's good for you. Or something. And I'm willing to accept that every single panel of every single page may not be stunning art-wise. But after a period of time, I expect a basic level of competence in the way an entirely visual medium looks. I find this kind of important. Which is why it shocks me to discover that Rob Liefeld can still get work. This is the man who drew this:
Now admittedly, that is the one piece that everyone points to to illustrate how bad he is at what he's paid thousands to do, but surely most of his work... Ah, I guess not. Countdown of the forty worst Liefeld drawings can be found here, complete with witty commentary. He's apparently incapable of drawing hands or feet. Enjoy. And as long as you're enjoying that, enjoy this little number I found floating around. It's conclusion pits Captain America against... REPTOID RONALD REAGAN.
You'll have to take my word for it, that's the Gipper.
P.S.: In addition to being made of win and epic (are you HAPPY, internet?), this film will be freaking A-W-E-S-O-M-E.
It's not too rare that one can find legitimately free stuff online. It's easy to find free music for free from legal sources nowadays, and even television shows are just lying around for people to watch (especially older stuff. I've been watching Twin Peaks. WEEEEEIRD). With the growing amount of Gutenberg Project contributors, it's getting easier to find open source books or ones with expired copyrights. But for most of us nerds, the ultimate blend of literature and art remains the elusively expensive exception to the rule. There are, of course, webcomics, but look at them.
(I love you, XKCD)
But what about people who are looking for a smart, well illustrated comic-book quality graphic novel on the blogotubes? Well, I guess you could read Lackadaisy. But what if you wanted a name behind your comic? Like, say, the name of a man who wrote the superlative Transmetropolitan or the pretty good Preacher? Then look no further than FreakAngels, about twelve psychic post-adolescents growing up after the Apocalypse. It's got sex, violence and mayhem. Not to mention it's dangerously steampunk.
That's a steam-powered helicopter. She built it herself. Check it out here.
EDIT: JEEZ! Warren Ellis didn't write Preacher. That was Garth Ennis. Wow. I'm glad no one caught that but me. Ellis did write Hellblazer however, the comic that spawned the film Constantine.
I've spent a lot of time on the internet, and I would say that, oh, twenty, maybe thirty percent of that time has been waiting for things to load. The remaining seventy percent is split equally between reading Cracked articles, watching or listening to things that I should have paid for, telling myself to get up and go outside, writing things on here and watching Flash movies. In all that time, I've seen maybe ten Flash animations that are good enough to bookmark and watch over again. The twist is, most of them are made by the same guy. Adam Philips is a guy who is apparently too good to have an "About" page on his website, but if I may recall some information I could have possibly made up, he used to be a Disney animator and storyboard guy. This led him to the fast-paced and glamorous world of internet stardom, where he started with some awesome animation that I now look back on with disgust. Really. Compared to his newer stuff, It leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But honestly, what other Flash animator got the whistle-player from The Pogues to do a soundtrack for their movie? Honestly though, watch Waterlollies. It's easily the best animation I've ever seen (outside of things that cost money). At least watch the first running scene. If you need more proof than that:
See that? Those are prismatic water droplets. It's pretty good for a medium that usually brings you this.
Ooh, they're sticks.
EDIT: He DOES have an about page! He did work for Disney in the late 1990s, and has actually won a couple of awards for his work. Waterlollies was best movie of 2007 on Newgrounds. So, there's that. He's also apparently in talks for a Brackenwood feature-length film. I'd pay to see that. Thanks, Adam!
Alright, I finally have time to write something. Good for me. Today I bring you a new webcomic! And it's not just any webcomic, kiddies. This is nothing short of freaking art. And I don't say that a lot. Welcome to the world of the Lackadaisy Cats, a group of swinging felines anthropomorphically and anachronistically thrown into 1920's St. Louis. I haven't read much, but so far it seems like a really well written gangster story, except with cats. The very fact that well-written (novel-quality) storylines are available for free on this fortress of pornography and low-quality bootleg movies we call the internet is not too surprising, nor is the fact that art of this quality is being given away for free. What is surprising is that both can come together so harmoniously; and from one woman, too. Tracy Butler is nothing short of a artistic wunderkind. Observe:
Just go there. It's amazing. And also, check out the cat in the middle. MEOW.
The other day I heard one weird song; "A Nervous Tic Motion Of The Head To The Left" by one Andrew Bird. Take a listen. Weird, right? Anyway, check out these sand-based art pieces:
I think that last one is best summed up by username "JaBaBz13", when he says "its beutiful and i am filled with unexplanable emotions when i watch diz." Also, these three, which were ads for Animal Planet. The way he "morphs" each animal is pretty impressive.
And you know who I think would be a cool guy in real life? Mark Ruffalo.
If for no other reason than his name sounds like "Buffalo".
Did you know that walking around barefooted on mulch, while innocuous-seeming enough, is actually a stupid idea? Did you know that shards of wood can stab you clean through the bottom of the foot? I didn't. Learn from my mistakes.
In the early Nineties, when computers were still very much for the nerdy masses only, the phrase "open source content" was almost redundant. If a neat little program was in demand, someone just wrote it up and gave it out to the other nerds, who would modify it as their needs dictated. In our current social climate, this end-user culture (I coined that), people don't want to have to write programming. They want to pay an ambiguous third-party conglomerate and have everything they need at their fingertips. This is not by any means a bad thing; it is however, a little sad. The computer has ceased to be a magic box where only the eccentrically devoted need apply; it now frequents the most unlikely of places, even (ye gods) my grandmother's house. True, I think she only has dial-up, but still.
The moral of the story is Figlet. The program was written in 1991 by Glenn Chappell. Its first incarnation was 170 lines of C code, where you would input a phrase and an ASCII signature would pop out. That's what Figlet does, you see. It writes words better than you can. For instance, the first font ever written was "Standard".
Since then, the program has expanded to its current library of hundreds of fonts. Fonts like Bulbhead.
Or Broadway KB.
Everything from the uninspired Digital
to the oh-so-impressive Calligraphy.
You ca see all of the current fonts at this rather attractive front-end GUI. You can change everything from the color to the number of fonts displayed. It also has the more-professionally done AOL Macro fonts, ones that look like this.
Have fun.
While there are numerous websites dedicated to graffiti as an art form (Art Of The State is a favorite), there are precious few dedicated to the low-grade scribbling you'll find in your average bathroom stall. Actually, as far as I know, there's only one: Pictures Of Walls. Here are a few favorites from the first album.
Perhaps more importantly, I'm afraid I must bid you all à bientot. Not goodbye, you understand; it's just that the next few weeks will be intermittent, followed by a year's worth of weekly (rather than daily) posts. Ta-ta.
Were you aware that NatGeo had a Picture Of The Day? I was! Like the space photos, National Geographic photos are often one of the hundreds of photos that didn't make it to the final cut, but were still too good to pass up; like today's.
Those are wells from Zakouma National Park in Chad. For some reason, they orient themselves in a flower-formation, which looks pretty awesome. You also might want to check out the Wallpapers display. As an example, I present some chinstrap penguins on some of the coolest looking glaciers I've ever seen, and a buch of white lion cubs. Awwwww.
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