In Praise of Chris Ware

Just saw this great animation by illustrator Chris Ware. It's the story of Quimby the Mouse, make sure you keep watching until the very end:

I don't really know much about his stuff, but I'm looking forward to seeing more. The music is by Andrew Bird, for those who are interested.

Enjoy!

In Praise Of Marc Johns

Lately I've been seeing a fair bit of the work of Marc Johns around some of the design and visual arts blogs. Marc's work reminds me of some of the stuff done by the guys in the Royal Art Lodge collective. Marc has this really cool skill of merging naive imagery and style, with a pretty oddball sense of humour, which is great.


Marc is definitely my kind of illustrator, by which I mean he keeps things simple, while maintaining a skewed view of the world. It also helps that his stuff is tinged with this melancholy humour that is a really nice touch.


If you like Marc's stuff, you can check out his website, see more of his work on Flickr (if it's not blocked in your country), follow him on Twitter, or buy his book, which definitely looks like something I'm going to pick up next time I'm at Kinokuniya (if they have it).



I could seriously look at Marc's work all day. In fact, I think I might do that

Bloggers in Iran

Someone linked to this great little animation on Twitter the other day. I had no idea that half of Iran's population were under the age of 25, and that Iran was the third largest country in terms of bloggers.

Anyone visit this site from Iran? If you do, does this video accurately represent what's going on over there? Or have the guys and girls over at the Vancouver Film School got it wrong? Let me know what you think..

In praise of Devin McGrath

I stumbled onto these illustrations from NY-based illustrator Devin McGrath over on Josh Spear's site. This guy has a real knack for creating surreal and creepy worlds involving mutant animals and mildly threatening 10 year olds. I can imagine McGrath would be a good choice to illustrate a children's version of an HP Lovecraft compendium, if they make such a thing. He's got a pretty twisted sense of humour (see the Unicorn piece below), but I really love the guy's use of colour; he's got a talent for making the bright and shiny seem somehow corrupt and sickly.


They've also featured Devin's work over on Juxtapoz and Lost At E Minor, so the guy is getting some good exposure. Hopefully we'll see more from him in the near future.


Also, if you head to his site, check out the guy's bio, it's pretty funny stuff..

New Simpsons Intro

So what do we all think of this?

I'm a bit disappointed, but then again, I think The Simpsons has gone downhill in recent years. There's a blog called Eye On Springfield that celebrates the times when The Simpsons was great, by taking frames and quotes from memorable episodes, such as:


"Freshen ya drink, Govenah?" I still say that to my friends from time to time.

Any thoughts on the new Simpsons intro? Leave them in the comments if you want..

Great Wave versions

In my image dump last week I posted this re-interpretation of Hokusai's Great Wave Off Kanagawa (click for a larger version):


Here's the original:


A reader called Ben emailed me this version of the artwork:


This next one was done by the ridiculously-talented pair Kozyndan, and keeps up the great work they've been doing that incorporates rabbits:


And this last one was done on a much larger scale, in a Japanese rice paddy field:


That this amazing image has inspired so many re-interpretations and re-imaginings is really quite incredible. The image itself is quite small in real life apparently, but the effect it has had on illustration and art is immeasurable.

Anyone else know of some other cool versions of the Great Wave? Leave a comment if you do...

UPDATE: Found some more:



I'll probably keep posting more versions as I find them, so keep checking back...

Background information

One of my favourite blogs is Bobby Solomon's Kitsune Noir. Once a week, Bobby posts a new desktop wallpaper that has been sent in by an independent designer, illustrator, or artist. This Desktop Wallpaper Project has kept my desktop looking ace for like the past 6-8 months.

There are different resolutions for different desktop sizes, and the style of the design changes dramatically each week, and with work from guys like Tavis Coburn, Josh Cochran, and Rey Ortega, the work is top-notch. Check out a few examples below, and definitely have a look at the site for the full range of wallpapers:

In praise of Mitch Ansara

Just saw these awesome illustrations over on Veer. Illustrator Mitch Ansara has taken a bunch of movies, some old, some new, and created images that show what they would look like as 60's era paperbacks. They're slightly similar to my earlier post about Olly Moss' work I guess, in that they're both using retro designs to simply illustrate the general plot of a film. Either way, Mitch's work is simply great, and I really encourage you to head over here, to check out some more (like 16 or 17 more) work like this:





The illustration series is called "I Can Read Movies", by the way..

More great movie posters

Another young designer/illustrator who is doing great work with movies posters is a guy by the name of Tyler Stout. I've just finished watching Larry Bishop's Hell Ride, and apart from Michael Madsen's performance, the whole film was forgettable. If only the movie was as good as the cover art on the DVD case:


Tyler Stout has such an individual style that as soon as you see some of his work, you know immediately who it belongs to. He has put his hand to several other movie posters, and they're uniformly great:


It also helps that he's got great taste in the movies that he re-interprets, so his designs really jump of the page.

But seriously, that Hell Ride movie was really bad. The dialogue was actually laughable in places, and not even a lazy cameo from Dennis Hopper could save this one. I'm watching Body of Lies at the moment, waiting for the scenes they shot in Dubai. It's pretty interesting so far..

Pop will eat itself

Ok, so back to product design. I recently saw this awesome Flickr set (the set's name is 'autophagy', clearly someone went to Biology class) that is collecting examples of anthropomorphic characters that are essentially showing how delicious a product is, by eating it themselves. The weird thing is, that the product in this case, is themselves. Here are some examples:




Ok so the Bugs Bunny one at the end isn't technically eating himself, but it's majorly creepy nonetheless. Does a smiley-faced chip-box character make you want to eat what appears to be a box full of brains? Maybe. It's just kind of creepy that these characters are so happily offering themselves up to be eaten..

Another strange phenomenon that people often find on some food packages is what is now called the Droste Effect. It's essentially a picture on the pack, which features the package itself.
Here's the original example, and another one that I found after a brief search:



It's kind of like an infinite regress, but with baking powder.

Speaking in tongues

Saw this nice piece of work by Peter Fuss, over on the Wooster Collective's site:


It got me thinking about an article I read in the paper on the weekend, which said that expats in Dubai are less likely to learn Arabic while they're living here than expats in Beijing are likely to learn Mandarin. I know so many expats whose grasp of Arabic starts and finishes with "Habibi". Call me naive, but I think this whole Dubai thing would work a lot better if some of the expats gave Arabic classes a shot.

Speaking of nice pieces of work, this little sign that David Shrigley gets two thumbs up:


Remember yesterday when I said that Ryan North was a genius? Well Dave Shrigley fits squarely into that category as well. In fact, maybe I'll start a list on the side of this site that lists all the people I think are geniuses (genii?) Check out his site, I got stuck on there for like 2 hours once.

Lastly, here are two little character studies, the first from the guys (and girls, I'm sure) at The Royal Art Lodge, and the second from this site, which I found through FFFFound. Enjoy: