Old & Young Rotoscoping

Fleischer's animation excited me when I was young. At seven or so I'd often dare myself to stay up and watch Betty Boop (and The Twilight Zone) and fall asleep later in a state of frightened intoxication.

Decades later it carries on:

FLAIRS - BETTER THAN PRINCE from 3rd Side Records on Vimeo.

ps If you liked Flairs, clear your mind and watch this. (NSFW)

Some more from the book

Genesis

Untitled Drawing 3 (2002) from Malcolm Sutherland on Vimeo.

I'd love a high-definition version.

Malcom Suthlerand also made this video below, which struck me as similar to two music-as-symbol videos from an earlier post. I love the song, though I'm mystified by the content:

Salt Peanuts Jam (2002) from Malcolm Sutherland on Vimeo.

It was awesome how you just did that

[ Note: this post references an interview between Jon Stewart and David Plouffe, and the accompanying video (link now defunct) featured events as described. ]

About halfway through the interview, Jon Stewart mocks David Plouffe's flowery description of Obama with the counter, "So he's a Jedi master." The moment earns Stewart audible support from the crowd and presumably the at-home audience (though both are, more or less, always in his corner). Plouffe seemed somewhat shaken by the event - Stewart effectively accused him of drivelous hyperbole, the voodoo of the right - but near the end, Plouffe brought Star Wars back by saying (of Obama's political skills), "He knows when to turn the lightsaber on."

Stewart says, "Can I tell you something? If I may, it was awesome how you just did that. He took something that I said, which was kind of snarky, and turned it into a bumper sticker."

Clever, but some have already wandered that path.



Skywalker '12 from Ironic Sans.

Cats and monkeys; monkeys and cats; all human life is there.

-Henry James

A keen friend pointed out this commonality: the work of You Si:



The work of schizophrenic cat-lover Louis Wain:

"The creature was a party of boys, marching..."

Good luck obtaining a copy of this new illustrated Lord of the Flies without being in the Folio Society. It's beautiful and probably well worth it. Art by Sam Weber.






To compare, Pentagram's original 1954 cover:

Approaching Order

Some chaotic images, investigating order, in no deliberate sequence:











Note: no credit is presently given to each artist, for I collected these images quite some time ago. Back homework in progress: each deserve & will have their due.

A Hitherto Untrod Rock

The future to come, from 1886, in no chronology:








Note: no credit is presently given to each artist, for I collected these images quite some time ago. Back homework in progress: each deserve & will have their due.

The Serpent

Jeremy Narby's The Cosmic Serpent is an investigation of the link between DNA and knowledge. Mysticism is central to many of his discoveries, including the recurrent image of a serpent (often an entwined twin pair, or a single serpent with two heads or tails) seen during trance-like hallucinatory visions. He compares the indigenous beliefs surrounding these serpents to the structure and nature of DNA, visualized on the book's cover:



After finishing the chapter about serpents and mythology, I began to walk home from the coffeeshop and reflected on serpent stories I heard throughout childhood. I remembered Smaug from The Hobbit, Pete's Dragon, The Reluctant Dragon, the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the classic Chinese Dragon (which bears visible resemblance to Falkor from The Neverending Story and Haku from Spirited Away), and others. On the way home, this was for sale:



Page 38 - the first I came to - depicts two dragons in flight, intertwined, forever in conflict.  Perhaps two must be in conflict to exist separately, or independently, otherwise to exist as one.

Thanks Courtney.

Music, Charted

Flightpattern from Gwen Vanhee on Vimeo.

Which is reminiscent of an animation to the Beatles 'Tomorrow Never Knows', drawn by my friend Tess, below:

Bogus

Some From The Comic Book

Excerpts from Don't Forget Where The Sun Sets, the new album - and accompanying comic book they were kind enough to commission from me - from Das Vibenbass. Listen to the music and see the art at DasVibenbass.com.

FORGOTTEN BUT NOT LOST

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Last week my bike was stolen by an imaginary thief. Like something out of Memento, I 'forgot' which particular rack I had latched my bike to and somberly took the bus home, no doubt in my mind that it was gone. Forever.

But the bike hadn't moved at all. In my mind, it had traveled to a distant, shadowy Seattle neighborhood and was promptly sold on Craigslist (for which $50 would be pushing it ~ really pushing it). In my mind, it was already in another state. I grieved and moved on.

When, weeks later, a friend called me to say she had seen my bike locked outside a bookstore I frequent, I still wasn't ready for the truth: my first thought was that the thief happened to visit the same used bookstore I did. Then, after a moment, things came into rapid focus.

Certainty is simply certainty and has no innate bearing on the actual state of affairs. A mind fixated victim to certainty will have its bike stolen by imaginary thieves, its ailments caused by imaginary spirits, and its life inhibited by imaginary barriers. Skepticism is not, like many say, a door that locks out beauty; it's more of a net that captures foolishness and holds it accountable.

Some From The Book

Recent sketches:



Yesterday the neighbors were clearly, although beyond the grasp of reason, smashing in a window with a large knife, and for those peeking over the fence the scene looked and sounded more or less like this.

YES / NO

The health care debate is madness. Joe Wilson's (R-S.C.) outburst at last night's joint session is indicative of the fever-dream this debate is for many of reform's opponents. Wilson's shout, 'You lie!' was irrational and wholly reactionary, a posture assumed from ten consecutive months of consumed feartalk.

With fear replacing reason, just about every visible curve transforms to a sharp, threatening edge. Skepticism transforms into paranoia. And those so riled, like Wilson, feel a desperate sense of duty in the face of their terror. One can imagine that his colleagues + news providers passively set him up for this moment ~ that Obama is lying, he cannot be trusted, he is vexing the public with charisma, that it is terrible, that it spells doom, and every word he utters into a microphone brings national collapse ~ Obama's ultimate agenda ~ closer and closer to hand.

I hesitate to call this imagination. But one could easily compare Wilson's fears about health reform to Orwell's fears about the all-powerful State. I'm biased here, though. I would describe Orwell's dream, though it could be called paranoid, as much more rational than Wilson's terror ~ I imagine he came to many of his severe conclusions independently, from calm observation, whereas Wilson was stirred into a frenzy that seemed to him the only option outside surrender.

Which isn't really an option.

Just try to click it.

[ Note: Yes is also unclickable. }

DUSK LATTITUDES

Thinking about Swamp Thing.

W.H.Y.S.

Thinking about tattoos.

EYES, PT.2

From Luke Dixon's portfolio.

Says Luke: "I leave the eyes to clear to take away some personality from the image - opens it up for more interpretation..."

Hmm. Confession: most of my cartoons feature eyeless characters. I began drawing this way after becoming frustrated with poorly drawn eyes on otherwise well-drawn characters. And internally, the initial reaction was positive ~ the characters no longer looked so clearly amateur (although they did take on a zombie-esque quality) and I saved good time + energy overall. However, while it theoretically helped my cartoons, it did nothing for my ability to draw eyes.

While I do sympathize with Dixon's defense, it's not satisfying. 'Opening up' something for 'interpretation' is too often euphemism for laziness on the part of the artist, who is well aware that the eyes carry much of a character's emotion and an awkwardly drawn gaze can and will drag a cartoon into purgatorial mediocrity. Leave eyes blank, however, and the reader will approximately place the eyes where they ought to be. The drawing meanwhile gains a quasi-intellectual, haunting quality ~ albeit cheaply earned ~ and the artist takes credit for what many might call edginess.

It seems like guilty artists should ditch the practice, and all admiration for those who employ it. But, not so fast...like a musician seeking to become a one-man band, where it might be beneficial to use a drum machine while mastering the guitar, an artist mastering other elements could justify empty eyes. Not to say I've mastered every area but eyes (legs come to mind) or that eyelessness isn't a glaring shortcut, but at the moment I truly do not mind, and like how it looks on my cartoons and the comics of others. Though certainly I do imagine that as I become a stronger artist that eye detail will evolve into and within all my artwork, for the time being I enjoy Luke Dixon and the Empty Gaze.

MATHLINGS

From this guy's Flickr via this wealth of bizarre wonder.

Some of these renderings resemble organic life so much it hurts. The fact that it comes from AT&T research just lends more absurdity ~ it's images like this that make me think Project Natal and fractal/matrices mathematics are approaching the same stupendous truth.

[ Edit: compare + contrast ]

WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH PAPYRUS?

From xkcd, via B.

There was no intention to include the font in other applications other than those designed for children when I designed Comic Sans.
-Vincent Connare

So why did he do it? When Connare was still a font designer for Microsoft way-back-when, he designed Comic Sans for a program called Microsoft Bob. From the still of MS Bob on Connare's website, the program looks like some kind of creepy tour-de-stuff led by a dog presumably named Bob (the character calls to mind the dog that offered, without solicitation, help formatting your greetings in MS Word). The scorn held toward Comic Sans by the design community is matched only by the adoration held by the bake-sale community - and the latter, unfortunately, has more say in whether or not the font will persist in our visual culture. That is, unless programmers step in and remove it as an option from MS Word, Publisher, Movie Maker, etc, the idea of which being very exciting for two reasons: first, Comic Sans would be gone for good, and secondly, it would be fascinating to watch how the community of its users would handle the absence. What font would they find to take its place? Papyrus does come to mind (though its most frequent home is the covers of New Age literature). Probably not Connare's other big-name font, Trebuchet, which is certainly not whimsical and built-for-children enough to advertise Bunko night. On the other side, if they began using, say, Helvetica or Univers or Bodoni ~ any sacred typeface ~ the design community would simply have a new focus of impotent outrage. There doesn't seem to be a way through, and certainly not around this, ahem, comical dilemma.

The poetic part of all this is that the admirers of Comic Sans blissfully have no idea about the vast, lonely, Sisyphean world of designers that hold them in so much contempt. Point: admirers. But in the meantime, feel free to join the cause...

...OUT

It's a good and interesting experience, drawing eyes...the business of it is implicitly emotional because of everything we associate with eyes ~ ie, the window to the soul, the first thing many of us notice about someone, the struggle to open the mind's eye, etc. Well-drawn eyes seem, more than any other feature, to bring life to whatever creature they belong to. Likewise, the absence of eyes is one of the more discomforting concepts to most folk, associated with ghosts, monsters, machines and creatures generally unwelcome. I still find them difficult to draw from imagination. But practice makes better, and better and better still.

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO CREATE A CHILD, AND HOW MUCH WILL IT COST TO MEET HIM?

Death to the demoness Allegra Gellar! Death to Lionhead Studios!

Before railing into this 'thing', it ought to be noted that, yesh, the technology is rather incredible, and several genuinely positive usages could be distilled from this software (most that come to mind involve use as companions for those with mental struggles). That said, not only is this unnecessary in the general way that all entertainment is unnecessary, but it's also unnecessary because there are actual twelve-year-old boys, some of them even named Milo, that will gladly look at our drawings of fish if only we hand it to them.

Why do real people need to be replaced with these...these carefully crafted creations? Well, I guess real people aren't as "fascinated" by our lives as they could be. But Milo is the true captive audience. That long anecdote from your 2002 family vacation to Colorado - the one that everyone else drifts off during and starts texting? Milo will probably listen wide-eyed to the whole thing and then ask to hear it again. Skynet becoming self-aware is really just humans becoming immersed in tech-dependence.

Anyways, science fiction certainly has thought of this stuff, and it's rarely been happy about it. I mean, 'Natal' is to 'Natal' as 'Existenz' is to 'Existence'...

DRAG ME TO GASWORKS

On Wednesday, it was beer outdoors at the park at sunset. Really a classic setpiece.


Thanksamil to B for the pose and Big John for the swell photo.