December 14, 2017 permalink
Drawing Is a Form of Listening
Drawing is a form of listening.
Site navigation:
December 14, 2017 permalink
Drawing is a form of listening.
March 10, 2017 permalink
Chibi has its roots in kobun, or classical Japanese. The kobun noun tsubi 粒つび, which means “tiny, rounded thing,” eventually evolved into the verb tsubu 禿つぶ, which describes something becoming worn down or sharp edges getting rounded out.
A good example would be a calligraphy brush losing its hairs (because that’s what they used to write back in the days of classical Japanese).
The reading of tsubu eventually changed to chibiru 禿ちびる, and suddenly we’re not too far from chibi.
I had a brief curiosity about what chibi fully means and came across what may be my new favorite post on etymology. Thorough history, examples, usage issue notes and cautions, and even a drawing guide. More word explications should come with an adorable drawing guide.
July 25, 2012 permalink
What happens if you write software that generates random polygons and the software then feeds the results through facial recognition software, looping thousands of times until the generated image more and more resembles a face? Phil McCarthy’s Pareidoloop. Above, my results from running it for a few hours. Spooky.
(More about his project on GitHub, and more about pareidolia in case the name doesn’t ring a bell)
[8/5 Update: Hi folks coming in from BoingBoing and MetaFilter! Just want to reiterate that I didn’t write this software, the author is Phil McCarthy @phl !]
March 19, 2012 permalink
Comics give to the artist a very interesting field of exploration and research. Everything is possible. You can be very small or very big or very modest or very ambitious. You can stay in a regular style like everybody, or you can escape and be completely unusual and incredible. You can give more to the world, more to the drawing. Everything.
April 16, 2011 permalink
The principal factor in my success has been an absolute desire to draw constantly. I never decided to be an artist. Simply, I could not stop myself from drawing. I drew for my own pleasure. I never wanted to know whether or not someone liked my drawings. I drew on walls, the school blackboard, old bits of paper, the walls of barns. Today I’m still as fond of drawing as when I was a kid — and that’s a long time ago…
January 16, 2011 permalink
Awesome thing that I didn’t realize I had on my bookshelf: the Tom Lehrer sheet music songbook I’ve had since I was a kid was illustrated by cartoonist Ronald Searle. I must have been unfamiliar with Searle the last time I looked through this book — his scratchy style complements Lehrer’s acerbic wit nicely.
The whole book, “Too Many Songs By Tom Lehrer with not enough drawings by Ronald Searle”, is available for perusal on Scribd, in case you’re the sort that enjoys songs about masochism, the periodic table, bull fighting, nuclear annihilation, and Ivy League snobbery…
May 20, 2010 permalink
Digital Graffiti Wall + Stencils from Alex Beim on Vimeo.
Tangible Interaction’s Tangible Graffiti Wall. Rear projection drawing screens with IR “spraycan” interface. The cherry on top is the ability to use virtual stencils while painting – clever.
(Via Make)
March 28, 2010 permalink
Nifty HTML5 <canvas> procedural/generative drawing demo (similar to drawing in real time with Processing or The Scribbler)
February 21, 2010 permalink
Storyboard artist and animation historian Mark Kennedy on keeping a sketchbook:
I’ve seen artists on the Internet question the necessity for this, saying that you can’t really learn anything about drawing by carrying a sketchbook, and that the drawings you do in a sketchbook are always dashed off, careless and sloppy. […]
The real reason I carry a sketchbook is so that I can record and remember details that I observe. Drawing from real life is the best way to teach yourself how people look, act and move in a naturalistic way (and help you remember it later). Life drawing and studying the work of other artists and animators are great learning experiences, but those things aren’t the same as studying real life. A great life drawing is an amazing feat and you can learn a lot about drawing and anatomy by going to life drawing. But very few life drawings give you a lot of information about the model’s personality and what kind of human being they are. You’re never going to create an original story or character based on a life drawing model you saw.
January 28, 2010 permalink
A stylistically interesting medical drawing from the excellent Otis Historical Archives of the Walter Reed hospital: “Drawing. Life cycle of Balantidiasis”, part of a small set of other cartoons available on their Flickr stream. Gotta watch out for those protozoa.
January 23, 2010 permalink
Animators of note Bill Plympton and Patrick Smith have started a new blog where they can argue about animation, story telling, illustration, and whatever. An immediate add to my news reader!
November 29, 2009 permalink
A dog, a cyclops, and others kill some time with the help of wormholes and hobbyist self-modification. Made in 2008.
Pellet Gunn by Tim Beckhardt. Not 100% sure that I get the full story, but it’s great in a non sequitur, underground comix sort of way. His line work and hand-filled blacks are nicely composed, and the animation is fun. Extra points for the Philip Guston painting in the background.
August 29, 2009 permalink
“Harriot regularly corresponded with friends who were also trying out telescopes. One wrote to him saying that the full moon ‘appears like a tarte that my cooke made me the last week’.”
— A note from the “Cosmos and Culture: how astronomy has shaped our world” exhibit at London’s Science Museum, describing this first-ever drawing through a telescope, created circa 1610 by English mathematician Thomas Harriot.
Note to Austinites: the excellent Harry Ransom Center at UT will soon be opening their exhibit “Other Worlds: Rare Astronomical Works”, featuring some beautiful drawings by the likes of Cassini, Kepler, and Brahe. Can’t wait.
August 13, 2009 permalink
(video no longer available)
Rhonda. It’s a nifty 3D drawing/sketching app that’s been making the rounds for a few years, and now the video of its creator sketching with it has finally been posted on the web. Even better: it’s been ported to openFrameworks and is being actively maintained on a number of platforms.
May 5, 2009 permalink
Revolver, a brilliant series of short looping animations by Jonas Odell (codirected with Stig Bergkvist, Marti Ekstrand & Lars Olsson). I loved these when they ran serialized in the early days of Hotwired.com’s Renaissance 2.0 / Kino section, circa 1995, and hastily squirreled away all of the QuickTime .mov’s from the site for archiving. Benefit of having the .mov’s? You could have all of them open and playing simultaneously!