Dios mío, it’s the Nicolas Cage Art Party.

We will be featuring many wonderful* works of art by a local and international lineup of artists depicting the various incarnations of one of history’s most magical actors and public figures.

Always good when “wonderful” requires an asterisk.

Croft promises a range of musical acts, including one that comes with an interpretive dancer named “Beany.” Beany, it should be added, is a bearded man who weighs 300 pounds.

Check out more images if you dare/hate your eyeballs.

Besides a great name, Zsolt Ekho Farkas is blessed with great patience & an even more patient wife: She’s the one who challenged him to recreate a 19th-century painting, Budavár Visszavétele, through CGI. The results (behind the scenes of which you can look via his Behance page) are pretty incredible:

[Vimeo] [Via]

Graphic designer Sergio Toporek is Kickstarting Beware of Images, a “fully animated, feature-length film about the history, technology, regulation and social effects of media.” I found his story & that of the project interesting:

The control over symbols and their dissemination channels represent power. Religious institutions, governments and corporations understand this power and have exploited it to advance their interests. Unfortunately, these practices are at the root of many of our social, ecological and financial concerns. […]

No medium is inherently good or evil, and all have the potential to be beneficial and constructive cultural agents. Whether such potential is fulfilled or not, depends greatly on our understanding of the markets, industries and regulations under which they operate. Education is the only way we will be able to shift the present power balance, from corporate interests towards the public good.

“Not the guy from Duck Dynasty”—heh.

Turn on your speakers, click the box below, and then press letters on your keyboard:

The Fox Is Black writes,

The project is a collaboration between Jono Brandel, who has a knack for combining design with computer wizardry, and Lullatone, a musical duo based out of Nagoya, Japan. Together they’ve made abeautiful fusion of technology, design, art, and music that I’ve rarely seen achieved.

• Wowie wow wow—Velvet portraits of wrestling greats are “a veritable chocolate and peanut butter of low culture combos!” (You’re welcome, children of the 80’s.)
• “Game of Brands” interprets The Game of Thrones Houses as Modern Corporations. (You’re welcome, children who should absolutely not be watching Game of Thrones!)

Years ago, I told a certain Photoshop engineer that when it came to girls, “Man, you’re so transparent, I can see a little checkerboard right through you!”

Riffing on that same visual idiom, this project by Guus Ter Beek & Tayfun Sarier is brilliantly simple. Designboom writes, “[T]he giant playful labels illustrate the familiar grey and white checkerboard pattern, visible when using the eraser tool in photoshop. Eliminating graffitti from traffic signs, color from mailboxes and portions of billboards, the intervention seemingly reveals a concealed world beneath our own.”

[Via Joe Ault]

In Federico Babina’s Archist series, “All the buildings in this illustrated city are inspired by famous works of art.” This homage to sculptor Tony Smith reminds me of the Adobe logo/Adobe gang sign.

[Via]

Illustrator Mickey Duzyj & friends tell the entirely charming story of an extremely rare thing—a perfect game of putt-putt:

From Grantland:

On April 9, 2011, at a tournament in Richmond, Virginia, an IT manager named Rick Baird notched 18 straight hole-in-one shots to record a perfect putt-putt score. In more than 50 years of sanctioned competition, it was just the third time that anyone had achieved the feat.

Putt-putt is different from miniature golf. It’s played only on official courses; there are no pirate ships, no windmills, and no holes that cannot be conquered with one stroke — if you execute the perfect shot. On that day in 2011, Baird executed the perfect shot 18 times in a row.

[YouTube]

Perhaps I should show this charming, beautifully illustrated piece to my hosts in Germany this week. 🙂

[YouTube][Via]

Cinemagraphics is Pier Paolo’s charming little love letter to the history of film:

Motionographer writes,

Pay close attention to the music, as it pays homage to the soundtracks of each film by subtly weaving their overtures into the electronic tapestry of the short’s audio.

Along similar lines, here’s a rather brilliant set of 8-bit movie GIFs: 

I love the Total Recall & Pulp Fiction ones especially!

[Vimeo] [Via Christian Cantrell]

Knowing my love of both Photoshop & storytelling, I hope you’ll forgive a third (!) Google-related posting today (“Unsubscribe!!”). It’s a cool one, though: check out today’s Google Doodle to see & hear an interactive set of micro stories created in partnership with Ira Glass & This American Life. Here’s how it all came to be:

The Nest team has been visiting Google HQ this week, and I found this quick video interesting both for the animation/visual storytelling and for the tech it covers. (Don’t worry, I’m not going to become some kind of corporate shill/spokesweasel. I would’ve blogged this at Adobe, too.)

We couldn’t be happier with our Nest thermostat & smoke detectors. Now if I ever get some time, the Micronaxx & I are going to reenact the Office Space printer scene, this time staring our bag of heinous & deposed former smoke detectors. Stay tuned.

Many thanks to Dave Werner for helping me evolve & migrate my old blog’s visual identity (it’s an ocelot, not that you ever wondered), replacing the bone-stock WordPress header. Little did I know when I blogged the portfolio of terrific young designer in 2006 that he’d pop out of the woodwork six and a half years later, taking a job on my team at Adobe. (That’s not unlike how we met Camera Raw brainiac Eric Chan.) Every so often this whole time-to-make-the-donuts thing pays off just a bit. 🙂

Check out the clever trompe-l’œil in this ad from Honda:

Here’s a look behind the scenes:

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via Russell Williams]

Super cute, super dark, but for a good cause, it’s Dumb Ways To Die:

[Via Christine Kerby Fitts]

Umbra, from Malcolm Sutherland, is more meditative. He drew it using paper, pastels, and Toon Boom Studio, then assembled it in After Effects.

[Via]

Rino Stefano Tagliafierro & team have done an amazing job animating classical paintings. “It’s as though these images which the history of art has consigned to us as frozen movement can today come back to life thanks to the fire of digital invention.”

[Vimeo] [Via]

“Dubious Photoshop has never sounded so good,” writes the Verge of musician Boggie performing “Nouveau Parfum,” a commentary on how far we’ll go to change our appearances—maybe even who we are. It’s well worth a look:

I just wish we got a peek at the actual app & process used to make this imaginary one. Here are the Google-translated lyrics. [Vimeo]

Amberlight is a Mac & Windows app helps you create beautiful abstract artwork by manipulating particle fields:

Meanwhile Deco Sketch promises “Mobile artistry for the geometrically obsessed”:

[Via John Stevenson]

[YouTube] [Vimeo]

Charming work from Christoph Niemann:

[Via] [YouTube]

Festive & fun:

But what’s really interesting is the ‘making of’ piece:

Elliot and Yves took the two most traditional and time-honored animation processes – stop-motion and traditional hand-drawn 2D animation – and combined them to create something innovative and unique. Their aim was to do almost everything in camera, using real lighting, lens and film craft to build a world where the audience can see and feel the painstaking work behind it. The 2D animation’s physical interaction with the set and the human imperfections inherent in the process create a hand-crafted piece full of heart and integrity.

The animation process involved constant shifts between 2D and 3D worlds. In order to achieve this complicated combination the whole film was first created in Blinkink Studios as a 3D previsualisation animatic with all the sets and characters built to scale. This allowed everything to be developed and planned alongside the modelmakers and animators, thus integrating the different disciplines and processes before the set was built or the characters were printed.

Aaron Blaise (Brother Bear, The Lion King, Mulan) and his team of veteran Disney animators at Premise Entertainment in Orlando, Florida, designed and animated the characters. The 2D-animation frames were printed onto mounted paper and cut with a laser. Each frame (nearly 4,000 in total) was then individually hand-labelled before going on set. Feature-film stop-frame animators then spent 6 weeks bringing the world to life.

[Vimeo 1, 2] [Via Steve Guilhamet]

Whether or not you agree with their politics, it’s hard not to be impressed by the nine years’ worth of work that went into Beehive Collective’s story-graphic, Mesoamérica Resiste:

Over the past thirteen years we’ve researched, drawn, and re-drawn the story of corporate-driven globalization in the Americas… Our intensive grassroots research and collaborative design process continued for several years. After the pencil work was complete, inking the final drawings took several more years, with rotating teams of illustrators and studios in multiple locations.

[Via]

Scott Adams shows how he draws in PS using the new Cintiq Companion tablet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFqYokJNzHg&feature=youtu.be
[YouTube] [Via Jerry Harris]

Charming stop-motion work from Tu Uthaisri, even if it did get a little Cthulhu-y there for a sec:

[YouTube] [Via Jamie Gjerde]

What are they feeding these kids—besides the Pucker & Bloat tools?

Belgian photographer Kurt Stallaert has created this photo series, entitled Bodybuilder’s World, in which he digitally altered people’s bodies to explore what it would be like if everyone was serious about working out, including children.

There’s no way I should get Ollie Munden‘s Tattoo Coloring Book for my young lads—but some part of me (the part that grew up collecting Jim Phillips & Powell-Peralta skate art) still wants to.

[Vimeo]

Design Taxi writes,

Parking attendant Rafael Veyisov makes good use of his time while on the job by “painting” scenes on dusty cars. […]

Soon, word about Veyisov’s impressive works of art spread, with many drivers dropping off their cars with him, waiting to see what he will come up with next.

[Update: Dang—the video has gone away. (This is what I get for queueing up posts over the weekend. You can check out more photos on Design Taxi.]

[YouTube]

Check out Orlando Arocena’s beautiful, Metropolis-style vector renderings of Iron Man characters. (“No gradient meshes, no plug-ins, no custom brushes, no tracing,” he notes.)

[Via]

I love Christian Robinson’s animated take on how kids understand music:

Reminds me the Super Bowl halftime show where Madonna performed, prompting me to explain to our 3-year-old that “she’s kind of an old Lady Gaga.”

[Vimeo] [Via]

I’ve long admired the highly graphical work of James White (e.g. his poster for No Country for Old Men), and now he’s featured in a new piece from Lynda.com:

https://vimeo.com/80101893

Designer James White spent a decade working for other agencies before he founded Signalnoise, a one-man design studio in Nova Scotia. He was determined to explore his own aesthetic: “Fascination, wonder, and imagination made visual.”

The move was creatively productive and financially lucrative. But when he decided to dedicate a year to his passion project—taking his own bright, pop approach to iconic movie posters like Jaws and Indiana Jones—he ran into licensing roadblocks.

In this Creative Spark, James explains how he dealt with the setbacks and found new opportunities for Signalnoise.

[Vimeo]

• Bill Clave applies classic race car liveries (paint/sponsor schemes) to classic aircraft (e.g. a Messerschmidt in Gulf Porsche blue/orange; a Fiat wearing Ferrari red).
• Football as Football “is a design exploration of American football logos redesigned as European football (soccer) badges.” [Via Kottke]

Erik kinda makes me sick—with jealousy. He’s that exceedingly rare combination of a great artist & great technologist. His work has inspired me for more than a decade (I still keep a folder of his ancient SWF “toys”), and I’m so happy he’s now creating some groundbreaking touch tools at Adobe.

https://vimeo.com/77185119 

“What if?” Erik Natzke, generative artist and principle designer at Adobe, uses this question to constantly test what is possible at the intersection of art and technology.

In this lynda.com Creative Spark, Erik explains his quest to build tools that improve people’s ability to be creative—and to make them forget they’re using a tool to begin with.

By combining interactivity, remote collaboration, touch input, and gestures with the real-world behavior of paper, ink, and brushes, he hopes to build applications that lead to a more organic, playful, and inspiring creative experience.

[Vimeo]

It’s an anthropomorphic party in your guts!

I have no idea how my young boys will respond to this (enlightened? terrified?). One way to find out…
[Via]

My colleague Rick Borstein asked,

One thing I like about Photoshop is that I can create a new document at the dimensions of the item on the clipboard.

It would be great to have this feature in Illustrator. I am often extracting logos and want to create a new AI file with an artboard of the same dimensions as the clipboard item.

It turns out you can paste an image into Illustrator, then double-click the pasted image using the Artboard Tool. That’ll automatically create the art board at that size. Alternately, you can make an action: Select All > Object menu > Artboards > Fit to Selected Art

[Thanks to Rufus Deuchler & Ton Frederiks]

I was tempted to say that this Electrolux ad sucks, when in reality it blows:

The ad, conceived by Saatchi & Saatchi Thailand, features the artist packing a compounded mound of dust into the cleaner, which he then releases onto the floor as powdered dust. Using the vacuum cleaner’s various settings, he meticulously creates an intricate mandala from the colored dust. 

[YouTube]

So vain that being seen in a normal luxury car makes you itch? Why not have your car lovingly draw & redraw your face in front of you as you drive? Check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8cqJptwNVI

The IS 300h hybrid vehicle has a screen that uses special software developed for the Art is Motion project that measures the driver’s driving style, such as the ratio of hybrid and fuel use, and speed and acceleration styles, and converts that data into digital brush strokes to generate portraits. 

Maybe soon the car will self-drive you to a restaurant where they’ve got glass tables so you can watch yourself while you are eating.

[YouTube]

How do you turn the worst-performing ship with the lowest morale in the US Navy into a truly great crew? I really enjoyed Captain David Marquet’s talk on greatness & think it’s well worth 9 minutes of your time:

[YouTube] [Via]

Can’t unsee!!

[YouTube][Via Christa Mrgan]

Look what Olivia Huynh did using the AnimDessin extension for Photoshop:

[Vimeo] For more on the panel, check out this demo from its creator, Adobe’s Stéphane Baril.

This brings to mind Three Legged Legs’ similarly amazing “We’re All In This Together”:

[Vimeo] Go behind the scenes here.