The Adobe Design Center features an interesting profile of Dylan Roscover, creator of beautiful typographic illustrations called calligrams:
All of Roscover’s calligrams are driven by pure passion, and each takes 40 to 60 hours of painstaking craftsmanship to render. “These days, it is easy to make things quickly and get them out the door,” he says. “But with this type of work, every image is special and a labor of love.
Check out Adrià Navarro’s Processing-powered Inkscapes project. The Verge writes,
“Inkscapes” is a sprawling installation that turns tablet doodling into something more profound. Created by Adrià Navarro and DI Shin, the system streams live iPad drawings across a giant, 120-foot-long display, located inside New York’s InterActive Corps building. The result is a hypnotic, undulating mural that’s equal parts painting and performance.
[Previously: Collaborative drawing: Is there a “there” there?]
If Inkscapes is up your alley, see also Fluidic. Colossal writes,
The interactive light sculpture is made from 12,000 suspended spheres that act as three dimensional pixels, or voxels. Surrounded by 3D cameras the piece can sense viewer’s motions which are then translated into light patterns, but amazingly the light supplied to the individual voxels is fully external. An array of high-speed lasers project into the cloud to create the dynamic visuals in real-time.
You might already know LiveSurface, a stock-image library that featured preset grids optimized to work with Photoshop’s Vanishing Point feature. Now the crew behind it has announced the beta of LiveSurface Context, a unique 2.5D app with a built-in artwork store.
Founder Joshua Distler writes,
The app makes design exploration & visualization (for both designer and client) much faster and more fluid by acting as a kind of next-generation WYSIWYG tool. Designers can work naturally inside Illustrator and visualize their concepts rendered photographically with a click. With it you can:
- Work inside Illustrator and preview ideas rendered in photographic realism with just a click.
- Simulate a variety of inks and materials (such as foil, emboss, fluorescent) by simply choosing swatches in Illustrator.
- Download surfaces by drag and drop; surfaces are automatically re-rendered at hi-res when the download completes.
- Resize and/or rotate Plus Surfaces with a few clicks.
- Output very hi-res renderings in the background, without interruption to workflow.
The app drew a nice write-up in Fast Company. Here’s a quick demo of browsing for photographic templates, then applying artwork:
More info is in 9to5Mac’s write-up.
Kottke writes, “Here’s a video that shows how scientists believe the human face has changed over the past 7 million years:”
I don’t know who re-imagined modern movies using classic styles & actors, but I love it.
[Via Bill Hensler]
And if that’s up your alley:
In this fun, bizarre, and inevitably sad animation by Patrick Jean, “The map of an American city goes on a quest across the world to find oil in order to feed its body, made of streets, highways and freeways.”
Of his free new utility Drawscript, Adobe developer Tom Krcha writes, “It closes the gap between designer and developer in Creative Cloud (e.g. Illustrator -> Edge Code+PhoneGap) and adds value to Illustrator. Typical use cases are UI skinning on iOS, vector assets creation for games and apps, teaching/learning of vector graphics programming.”
Update: Renaun Erickson has posted a quick demo:
Folks seemed to really enjoy the video I posted a couple of weeks ago about master illustrator David Smith creating an album cover for John Mayer. Now David has posted a gallery of illustrations & photos from the project on his site.
Another cool-as-hell plug-in from Astute Graphics, this time geared towards significantly one-upping Illustrator’s venerable Smart Guides feature:
Fast Company has a great gallery & write-up covering Nicholas Felton’s 2012 Feltron Annual Report. It’s an interesting history of the project & how he’s now using an app to capture life status.
Tangential: The Layer Tennis match between Nicholas & Khoi Vinh that I narrated.
Chris Carlson is a madman.
[Via]
More than 5,000 artists have already registered for the Adobe-Red Bull Collective Art project, and more than 60% of the time slots have already been reserved. As the site explains,
It is an evolution of the concept of “Cadavre Exquis” in which each collaborator adds to the Collective Art through being allowed to see the end of what the previous artist contributed. Participants are free to choose if they want to paint, draw or scribble their work or just to create it digitally with design software.
As the Adobe site says,
Sign up here to create an original piece of art to contribute as part of a global collective art installation. Then join Adobe® Creative Cloud™ to download Adobe creative tools you’ll need, such as Adobe Photoshop® and Illustrator®, to create your masterpiece.
Here’s footage of the event happening in Greece:
You are most welcome. 🙂
[Via Margot Nack]
This one time, at math camp…
[Via Marc Pawliger]
Theoretically related: “a fully-articulated, 3D-printed gown with nearly 3,000 joints” that “follows the Fibonacci Sequence in the way it curves around a woman’s body, in order to maximize its theoretical beauty.”
[Via]
Check out Danny Cooke’s portrait of master sign maker David A. Smith exquisitely crafting an album cover & related artwork. And—gasp—does this mean I don’t hate John Mayer?
Check out Matteo Civaschi’s set of clever pictogram movie posters that encapsulate this year’s nominees in pictogram form. For example, there’s the Life of Pi:
Constraint can be a beautiful thing, and I like being reminded of how expressive the interplay of simple geometries can be. Behold the work of painter/mograph artist Carlo Vega:
[Via]
You go, Annette Jung:
One hopes MJ fell in love with a girl—perhaps one named Billie Jean. [Via]
Oh dear lord—someone actually did this. Timothius Martin actually did this.
[Via]
Adobe writer (and, tangentially, Survivor survivor) Lex van den Berghe interviews street artist INSA, talking about the crazy dedication needed to turn buildings into “GIF-iti.” Check it out.
Say “what” again, CrazyTalk app.
[Via Troy Church]
I find Evan Roth‘s work endlessly intriguing:
Evan Roth’s Angry Birds All Levels uses black ink on tracing paper to show the gestures required to complete each level of the popular bird-flinging game. Roth placed the paper over his iPhone to capture each swipe and tap, and the result is a work that aims to “contrast the excitement that happens in the gaming environment with the monotony that actually takes places in the physical world.”
[Via Mark Coleran]
A rough transcript of me watching this demo: “Uh-huh… sure, sure… Whoa!”
Using pressure to essentially “paint on” width, plus the Width Gradient tool? Very cool indeed.
WidthScribe comes from the same Astute Graphics folks who make the powerful VectorScribe for Illustrator.
I love the 365 Supers project from Pixar animator Everett Downing. According to a well illustrated interview in Wired,
“I got into a rut, I wasn’t drawing enough and a friend told me I was over-thinking things,” says Downing. “I just needed to do something I was really into that wouldn’t require too much thinking. I started thinking about designing superheroes and the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do it. I threw the gauntlet down and decided to draw a super every day.”
Everett does more than draw, too, dreaming up backstories for the characters. I’m partial to the teams like married couple “Ball & Chain.”
Another unlikely favorite is “Dober-Man and Pincer,” a silly looking duo with a hilarious history “Altruistic exotic veterinarian Voss Brown was bitten by a genetically altered rabid doberman and given its approximate powers. He can run as fast as a pinscher and wields a dog-like fury! Together with his pet, Pincher (the now toothless dog that gave him his abilities) they pursue crime with a dogged determination!”
[Via NPR]
Photoshop.com profiles comics illustrator & storyteller Brian Haberlin, talking about his mix of digital & traditional media:
It’s really Faustian, meaning I will do anything it takes to get me to the final image. For example, I use both analog and digital techniques and go back and forth. I may print out my work, spray it with water, throw paint on it, scan it back in, or collage it with the original digital painting. I use anything from painting on a wet printout to using coffee as a paint source – whatever it takes to get there at the end of the day.
Brian shows his work & talks about key Photoshop features (Puppet Tool, Warp), favorite CS6 features (Background Save, Oil Paint), and more. (Note that a good chunk of the interview is inexplicably buried under a “More” link.)
[Via Daniel Presedo]
Longtime Adobe veteran Chris Parrish and the crew at Aged & Distilled have created Napkin, “the ultimate tool for concise visual communication,” designed to “painlessly annotate images or create diagrams and share the results quickly.” It looks rather slick:
Check out more details from Rene Ritchie.
[Via]
It is, Edson Oda writes, “the story of Fabiano, a young Mercenary who is hired to kill Death. This short film combines Origami, Kirigami, Time lapse, nankin illustration, Comic Books and Western Cinema.”
In first grade or so, I was blown away to see green contour lines on a black Apple II screen (not unlike this). Seeing this work from Matthew DiVito (maker of some great animated GIFs) would have melted my face clean off:
[Via]
If Roger Black (or maybe Jack White) designed a game in After Effects, it might look a lot like Hundreds:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM0Vo7neVpw&w=425&h=239]
Don’t miss the lovely, spare design work & clever HTML/CSS effects on the game’s site.
Bizarre intricacy:
Boston-based animator Jake Fried just released his latest psychedelic animation, The Deep End, which was drawn entirely with ink, coffee, and white-out. The animation is continually layered on top of itself as forms morph, bend and transform across the screen.
[Via]
I loved being caught totally off guard by this ad, appearing as it did during a college football game amidst a bunch of predictable school self-promos.
Filmmaker Andrew Telling followed street artist Conor Harrington around Vardo, “a half-abandoned fishing village” off the coast of Norway, “one of the most Northerly and isolated parts of Europe.” I dig the minimal, meditative results.
[Via]
Remember when Adobe was a hardware company, making software only to sell printers & peripherals? Okay, that imagined future never came to be (despite being the founders’ original business plan), but the company was, for its first five years, all about PostScript. Illustrator marked a big departure—into the creation of application software (crazy talk!).
To celebrate Illustrator’s 25th (!) birthday, Adobe’s Ton Frederiks & his brother Hans have put together a free iPad app that tells the story of AI’s early years. They write,
Adobe Illustrator shipped on March 19, 1987. It was Adobe’s first software application based on Adobe PostScript, the technology that changed the entire publishing industry. Illustrator not only altered Adobe’s course dramatically, it changed drawing and line art forever.
For a lot of the current users of Illustrator it’s hard to imagine the impact that Illustrator made in a world where designs and illustrations were done manually.
With the app ‘Adobe Illustrator, the early years’ we want to give some insight into the early years of Illustrator and celebrate the creative freedom that Illustrator brought to designers and illustrators.
Related: Here’s the video demonstration that co-founder/CEO John Warnock shot & included on VHS with every copy of the product.
“Doll houses are space hogs, dust magnets and insanely expensive to boot,” writes Katherine Belsey. “That is why I designed this pop-up paper house. Knock it down and fold it up for storage or travel, and if you’re willing to put in a little sweat equity it can be yours for under $15.”
[Via]
Artist INSA “creates elaborately painted walls that are photographed in sequence to create amazing, psychedelic animated GIFs.” Check out the gallery.
[Via]
Digital painting pioneer is offering a new way to lay down “Virtual Thick Paint” in Photoshop CS5/6:
John’s Impasto! for Adobe Photoshop CS5 & CS6 is a set of expressive brushes and layer styles providing an interactive three-dimensional surface appearance to your brush strokes. John’s Impasto! provides both paint and clear varnish styles.
John’s Impasto! tool presets are divided into depth-applying brushes and depth-removing erasers. Using one of the erasers on an Impasto! layer is like inscribing into wet gesso. A wide variety of surface appearances can be created using a combination of additive and subtractive strokes. And, any Photoshop brush can be used on an Impasto! layer.
The package comes with a set of 12 Impasto and 12 Varnish Layer Styles. Create art from scratch or apply virtual varnish to existing art. Each set has 4 surface styles: Matte, Satin, Gloss, and Smooth and is further sub-divided into Light, Medium, and Heavy. Impasto! layers can be interactively changed with a single mouse-click.
Here’s a video demo. Impasto is $20 from John’s site.
This app looks incredibly charming:
[Via Mark Kawano]
As I noted last month, Adobe’s vector-based drawing app for iPhone & iPad recently added speed-sensitive line thickness, a paint bucket, layer merging/flipping/duplications, and an eyedropper tool. Here PM Takashi Morifusa shows off the new tools:
“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” And if so, by whom? It’s hard not to relate to some of this short, rather charming video.
[Via]
“I thought myself too lazy to decorate the house this year,” writes Corey Barker of NAPP, “so I just did it in Photoshop.” Enjoy.
Ready for your brain to hurt? PetaPixel writes,
YouTube illusion and science channel Brusspup recently did an anamorphic illusion project in which he photographed a few random objects resting on a piece of paper (e.g. a Rubik’s cube, a roll of tape, and a shoe), skewed them, printed them out as high-resolution prints, and then photographed them at an angle to make the prints look just like the original objects.
Enjoy it now, before the copyright cops kill the joy!
[Via Bruce Bullis]
I like the straightforward charm of these animated illustrations. This kind of thing wins my heart over the disposably trendy every time.
Remember AJ Brockman, the Photoshop artist who got to meet President Obama after painting a portrait of the First Family using just a couple of fingers? Now he & his production company, No White Flags, would like to make a documentary about his life and work, and they’re asking for support via Indiegogo. I’ve contributed mine:
Courage & enthusiasm are contagious, and I’m honored to say that AJ & team have asked me to sit on the board of No White Flags. I’m really looking forward to helping them tell interesting, inspiring stories about creators & their art.
First up is Malcolm Sutherland‘s Umbra, drawn using paper, pastels, and Toon Boom Studio, then assembled in After Effects. Lovely, perplexing, mind-bending?
[Via]
And then there’s one (or more) to grown on. Behold, the ever so winsome Dumb Ways To Die:
[Via Christine Kerby Fitts]
I can’t claim to quite grok the story Jordan Bruner is telling, but it’s full of lovely visuals:
“Tornado seeds! Giant magnets! Dynamite! Rocket-powered roller skates!” writes illustrator Rob Loukotka. “I spent over 100 hours illustrating, designing, and researching this one poster.”
The fictional ACME Corporation appeared in nearly all 43 Coyote & Road Runner cartoons from 1949-1994. They make any product you can imagine. I’ve loved The ACME Corporation since I was a kid because they’re a true dream factory.
How amazing would it be if The ACME Corporation were real? That’s why I made this poster; to make our world a little crazier.
With version 2.5 Adobe’s vector-based drawing app for iPad & iPhone has just taken some big steps forward. The points below understate the impact, but in early reviews customers seem to be really enjoying the changes.
- Three new drawing tools with unique stroke characteristics.
- Ability to quickly fill areas with color.
- Duplicate, merge and flip layers horizontally or vertically.
- Enhanced eyedropper tool lets you easily compare and match colors in different parts of your artwork.
“Drawing a perfect curly, swirly Stroke with varying widths,” points out Jeff Witchel, “used to be a tedious task requiring a steady hand and a tremendous amount of ability using the the Pen tool.” In this tutorial he shows off how variable-width strokes in Illustrator make tricky looks much easier to pull off.
