Last year I took my then-11yo son Henry (aka my astromech droid) on a 2000-mile “Miodyssey” down Route 66 in my dad’s vintage Miata. It was a great way to see the country (see more pics & posts than you might ever want), and despite the tight quarters we managed not to kill one another—or to get slain by Anton Chigurh in an especially murdery Texas town (but that’s another story!).

In any event, we were especially charmed to see the Goog celebrate the Mother Road in this doodle:

Heh—I love this kind of silly mashup. (And now I want to see what kind of things DALL•E would dream up for prompts like “medieval grotesque Burger King logo.”)

“Lost your keys? Lost your job?” asks illustrator Don Moyer. “Look at the bright side. At least you’re not plagued by pterodactyls, pursued by giant robots, or pestered by zombie poodles. Life is good!”

I find this project (Kickstarting now) pretty charming:

[Via]

Heh:

Adam Buxton recorded a conversation with his 5-year-old daughter discussing her thoughts on Princess Leia’s famous slave outfit. She is hilarious by herself but when he got The Brothers McLeod to animate her words, it all turned into pure comedic gold.

[YouTube]

Illustrator David Plunkert made a chilling distillation of history’s echoes for the cover of the New Yorker:

“Look at it this way,” my son noted, “At least the tracks suggest that it’s retreating.” God, let it be so.

Elsewhere, I don’t know the origin of this image, but it’s hard to think of a case where a simple Desaturate command was so powerful.

Love this. Per Colossal,

Forty months in the making, “Pass the Ball” is a delightful and eccentric example of the creative possibilities of collaboration […] Each scenario was created by one of 40 animators around the world, who, as the title suggests, “pass the ball” to the next person, resulting in a varied display of styles and techniques from stop-motion to digital.

Man, I’d have so loved having features like this in my Flash days:

This looks gripping:

Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner FLEE tells the story of Amin Nawabi as he grapples with a painful secret he has kept hidden for 20 years, one that threatens to derail the life he has built for himself and his soon to be husband. Recounted mostly through animation to director Jonas Poher Rasmussen, he tells for the first time the story of his extraordinary journey as a child refugee from Afghanistan.

Let’s start Monday with some moments of Zen. 😌

Perhaps a bit shockingly, I’ve somehow been only glancingly familiar with the artist’s career, and I really enjoyed this segment—including a quick visual tour spanning his first daily creation through the 2-minute piece he made before going to the hospital for the birth of his child (!), to the work he sold on Tuesday for nearly $30 million (!!).

Sure, face swapping and pose manipulation on humans is cool and all, but our industry’s next challenge must be beak swapping and wing manipulation. 😅🐦

[Via]

Let’s say you dig AR but want to, y’know, actually create instead of just painting by numbers (just yielding whatever some filter maker deigns to provide). In that case, my friend, you’ll want to check out this guidance from animator/designer/musician/Renaissance man Dave Werner.

0:00 Intro
1:27 Character Animator Setup
7:38 After Effects Motion Tracking
14:14 After Effects Color Matching
17:35 Outro (w/ surprise cameo)

Literally! I love this kind of minimal yet visually rich work.

Okay, I still don’t understand the math here—but I feel closer now! Freya Holmér has done a beautiful job of visualizing the core workings of what’s a core ingredient in myriad creative applications:

The New York Public Library has shared some astronomical drawings by E.L. Trouvelot done in the 1870s, comparing them to contemporary NASA images. They write,

Trouvelot was a French immigrant to the US in the 1800s, and his job was to create sketches of astronomical observations at Harvard College’s observatory. Building off of this sketch work, Trouvelot decided to do large pastel drawings of “the celestial phenomena as they appear…through the great modern telescopes.”

[Via]

Going back seven years or so, when we were working on a Halloween face painting feature for Google Photos (sort of ur-AR), I’ve been occasionally updating a Pinterest board full of interesting augmentations done to human faces. I’ve particularly admired the work of Yulia Brodskaya, a master of paper quilling. Here’s a quick look into her world:

Heh—my Adobe video eng teammate Eric Sanders passed along this fun poster (artist unknown):

It reminds me of a silly thing I made years ago when our then-little kids had a weird fixation on light fixtures. Oddly enough, this remains the one & presumably only piece of art I’ll ever get to show Matt Groening, as I got to meet him at dinner with Lynda Weinman back then. (Forgive the name drop; I have so few!)

I’m a huge & longtime fan of Chop Shop’s beautiful space-tech illustrations, so I’m excited to see them kicking off a new Kickstarter campaign:

Right at the start of my career, I had the chance to draw some simple Peanuts animations for MetLife banner ads. The cool thing is that back then, Charles Schulz himself had to approve each use of his characters—and I’m happy to say he approved mine. 😌 (For the record, as I recall it feature Linus’s hair flying up as he was surprised.)

In any event, here’s a fun tutorial commissioned by Apple:

As Kottke notes, “They’ve even included a PDF of drawing references to make it easier.” Fortunately you don’t have to do the whole thing in 35 seconds, a la Schulz himself:

[Via]

I love these posters from Concepcion Studios (also viewable on Instagram and available for purchase on Etsy). [Via]

This is the super chill content I needed right now. 😌

Colossal writes,

“Viewfinder” is a charming animation about exploring the outdoors from the Seoul-based studio VCRWORKS. The second episode in the recently launched Rhythmens series, the peaceful short follows a central character on a hike in a springtime forest and frames their whimsically rendered finds through the lens of a camera.

You can find another installment on their Vimeo page.

Extremely old, never-say-die (but good-natured) sibling rivalry: “Hey, 2008 called, and its wants its Photoshop feature back!” 🙃 I kid, though, and I’m happy to see illustrators getting this nice, smoothly rendering feature. Here’s a 1-minute tour:

What an incredible labor of love this must have been to stitch & animate:

Our most ridiculously labor-intensive animation ever! The traditional Passover folk song rendered in embroidermation by Nina Paley and Theodore Gray. These very same embroidered matzoh covers are available for purchase here.

[Via Christa Mrgan]

As I noted last year,

I’ve always been part of that weird little slice of the Adobe user population that gets really hyped about offbeat painting tools—from stretching vectors along splines & spraying out fish in Illustrator (yes, they’re both in your copy right now; no, you’ve never used them).

In that vein, I dig what Erik Natzke & co. have explored:

This one’s even trippier:

Here’s a quick tutorial on how to make your own brush via Adobe Capture:

And here are the multicolor brushes added to Adobe Fresco last year:

There are lots of fun details here, from the evolution of the “potato-chip lip,” to how lines & shapes evolved to let characters rotate more easily in space, to hundreds of pages of documentation on exactly how hair & eyes should work, and more.