Lines and Colors – Page 667

Lines and Colors is a blog about painting, drawing, sketching, illustration, comics, cartoons, webcomics, art history, concept art, gallery art, digital art, artist tools and techniques, motion graphics, animation, sci-fi and fantasy illustration, paleo art, storyboards, matte painting, 3d graphics and anything else I find visually interesting. If it has lines and/or colors, it’s fair game.

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Promoting some friends and some clients of my website design business

Thugs on Film

April 26, 2008

Thugs on Film is one of my favorites of the crop of independent Flash animation short series that have come and gone over the past few years.

Distributed by Mondo Mini Shows, Thugs on Film is lamentably no longer being produced. Mondo’s awkward an inelegant distribution and promotion model always confused me, and evidently, other potential viewers as well. They now seem intent on putting most of their efforts into Happy Tree Friends, a series whose appeal is lost on me.

No so with Thugs on Film, a wonderfully snarky setup in which a couple of British ~~thieves~~, er, independent small businessmen, sit around in a warehouse full of ~~loot~~ merchandise and review movies, awarding the reviewed feature a rating at the end based on the number of ~~pilfered~~ recently acquired Rolexes up their sleeves. Thugs on Film is just up my alley, irreverent, funny and drawn with a style that has a nice springy feeling of rough line work and is designed with the requirements of inexpensive limited animation for Flash in mind.

The designers and animators take advantage of color and simple shapes to create mood and settings, and the limited animation is used to best advantage to compliment the writing. The characters, Stubby and Cecil, are well designed, both visually and conceptually, and play well off of each other.

For a while, you couldn’t even find these animations. Mondo’s misguided attempts to keep them monetized instead kept them out of reach, and confused even devoted fans trying to search out the episodes.

Some of them (though certainly not all) are now available again on the Thugs on Film section of the Mondo Mini Shows site, even if it’s in a less than wonderful interface. Wait for a short eSurance spot and the episode plays. You can choose more from the scrolling menu below the main screen.

The older ones ended with an interactive quiz, with a different short snippet shown in response to your answer, but these seem to be short circuited now into ads for Happy Tree Friends and eSurance.

Some of the older episodes are also better and more elaborate, they apparently got a little tired of the formula after a while.

You can also look through the other Mondo cartoons, though except for an occasional episode of Like, News, none of them has particularly grabbed my attention.

Created by Dan Todd, Thugs on Film was a group effort. I’m not sure how consistent the team was throughout its run, but here are some of the credits from a middle period episode (in which they reviewed The Mummy Returns): Directed by W Kamu Bell, Design by Rhode Montijo, Storyboards by David Donar, Backgrounds by Jenny Hansen and animation by John Cimino, Mark Giambruno and Mark West.

I give Thugs on Film five Rolexes.

Thugs on Film

Categories:
Animation, Motion Graphics & Flash
Stanhope Forbes

April 24, 2008

Stanhope Alexander Forbes was an Irish painter who was considered to be the leader of the Newlyn School of painters. This was more of a loose artists’ colony than a concerted school of painting style.

Forbes studied under John Sparkes, and then enrolled in the Royal Academy School, where he briefly studied with Frederick Lord Leighton and Alma Tadema.

He continued his studies in France, where he came into contact with some of the French painters who were beginning to paint “en plein air”. He would eventually devote himself to the demanding practice of plein air figure painting, composing large scale canvasses, often with multiple models, that sometimes took months to complete.

He moved back across the channel and, looking for a place that afforded good light, abundant scenery and village life to paint, settled in Newlyn, which was convenient to Penzance, Cornwall. The new railway station there allowed easy travel to London and its galleries.

Other artists were attracted to the area for the same reasons, similar to the way plein air artists of the time were in France attracted to Barbizon, near Paris, in the US to New Hope, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia and various places in California that were also accessible by rail.

In Newlyn, Forbes painted outdoor scenes of working fishermen and village life, and when the weather was inclement, painted indoor scenes. He usually had at least two paintings in progress at any time, one outdoors and one indoors.

Forbes is often credited as the father of the Newlyn school, and was the most renowned of the painters working there at the time. His style never became “impressionistic” but his brushwork loosened as time went on, and he was devoted to the qualities inherent in plein air painting, saying it afforded “…that quality of freshness, most difficult of attainment by any other means and which one is apt to lose when the work is brought into the studio for completion”.

ARC (15 images)
Birmingham Museums and Gallery (1 image)
Brighton & Hove Museums (1 image)
Tate Collection (1 image)
National Gallery of Art, Australia (1 image)
Rhagor (1 image)
Walker Art Gallery (1 image)
Outdoor Painting (bio and 3 small images)
Penlee House, Cornwall (2 small images and bio)
Gallery of Art (4 images)
Irish Art Archives (1 image)
Ciudad de la pintura (1 image) (ES)
Jordan & Chard (bio and 1 image)
Artcyclopedia (links)

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art
Philip Burke

April 23, 2008

Philip Burke is another of those artists whose images are more commonly known than his name. Whether you’ve heard of Burke or not, you’ve probably seen his his wildly exaggerated portraits of rock stars, splashed with lurid colors and jumping out at you from the pages of popular magazines with expressionistic abandon.

His work has been on the covers and interior pages of publications like Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Vogue, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, TV Guide, Fortune and, of course, Rolling Stone, where he was the featured artist for several years. You’ll find a major section devoted to his work in the collection Rolling Stone: The Illustrated Portraits.

He has received awards and notice from the Society of Illustrators, the Society of Publication Design and the Society of Newspaper Design.

Burke’s portraits cover a range of public figures from entertainment, sports and politics, but his real love seems to be those in the music culture, from James Brown to the Beatles to David Byrne to Miles Davis to Carlos Santana (above).

If you go to www.philipburke.com, it resolves to the “official” site of L.B. Madison Fine Art, presumably his rep. There is a broad cross-section of Burke’s work here, arranged in various ways, along with a bio and other information. Unfortunately the images are watermarked; though most of them are not defaced to the point where you can’t at least get a feeling for the original image.

There is also an unofficial gallery on A Feast of Crumbs on which you can see the images without the intrusion of watermarking.

Burke does more than take the usual caricaturist’s license with the shape and placement of his subject’s features. Though his portraits can sometimes be less exaggerated, they are often wildly sculpted into outrageous forms, giving a real push to the psychological implications that you can read into some of them.

His colors are also “pushed”; brilliant contrasting hues seem to fight amongst themselves for dominance in their attempts to define the forms, each pulling their own way but somehow working together in the final image to snap into the clear focus of of the portrait. Remarkable.

Addendum: Thanks to Dale Stephanos for a link to this post from Stephen Kroninger’s blog in which he posts a wealth of early work from Philip Burke.

www.philipburke.com
Gallery on A Feast of Crumbs

Categories:
Illustration
Dafen, China – Where All the Paintings Come From

April 21, 2008

I’m not certain how the statistic was arrived at, but the figure being bandied about is that 60% of the world’s paintings come from a single village in China.

Dafen (Dafen shequ) is actually more of a suburb than a village, lying outside Shenzhen, a city of 10 million northeast of Hong Kong. In the early 1990’s a group of 20 or so artists moved to the area at the urging and under the guidance of artist/businessman Huang Jiang, and began turning out quantities of replicas of famous paintings by artists like Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Dali, Rembrandt, the French Impressionists and others.

The enterprise became wildly successful and more artists were recruited, a number now believed to be in the thousands. The paintings are sold through a number of outlets, both brick-and-mortar and online (do a Google search for Dafen paintings), while some of them are original in design (think ads for “starving artist sales” and cheap “sofa sized paintings”), most are copies of famous paintings and are clearly promoted as replicas.

While there are replica painting enterprises with similar processes in other countries (notably Russia), nothing approaches the scale of the output from Dafen.

The area has become a gated community, with a large sculpture of a hand with paintbrush outside its gates, and indulges in its identity as an art center, even to the point of facsimile painting “matches”, in which a hundred or more painters compete in creating replicas of the same painting in a timed event (image at left – AP).

The site and journal for REGIONAL, a design and research network whose founders are currently working in Shenzhen, commissioned some of the Dafen painters (many of whom studied at art academies) to turn their painting skills from painting replicas to painting self-portraits. A few of them are posted along with the article Self-Portraiture and emerging artistic consciousness in Dafen â€˜Oil Paintingâ€™ Village, accompanied by a photo of the artist and one of their representative facsimile works.

The images at top, taken from the article, are of painter Xu ZanPeng, who specializes in Russian Baroque painters, including a detail of one of her replica paintings of Kramskoy’s Unknown Woman (see my recent post on Ivan Kramskoy).

I doubt there is any town in the world into which oil paint, brushes and canvas are trucked in, and paintings trucked out, in such quantities. According to the Chicago Tribune, Dafen shipped over $120 million in paintings last year, which is a lot when you consider that the prices are usually quite low.

I guess it’s good that there’s a large worldwide market for oil paintings, even if it’s not exactly the kind of market for which we might have hoped.

[Link to REGIONAL article via BoingBoing]

Self-Portraiture and emerging artistic consciousness in Dafen â€˜Oil Paintingâ€™ Village from REGIONAL
China’s Art Factories: Van Gogh From the Sweatshop from Spiegel Online
Chinese village paints by incredible numbers from Chicago Tribune
60% of World’s Paintings come from Dafen Village of China from AsianOffBeat
Rather odd promotional(?) video about Dafen

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Painting
Build Your Own Easel (Ben Grosser)

April 20, 2008

Ben Grosser is an artist and composer who also directs the Imaging Technology Group at the Beckman Institute. As a painter, Grosser paints large scale non-represenational works. After being frustrated early in his painting career by the cost of large easels that would accommodate his desire to paint large canvasses, he decided to build his own.

Impressed by the helpfulness of the free information of various kinds on the web at the time (1998), Grosser decided to contribute his plans to those interested and posted them on his website.

He has continued that practice and the plans, which are detailed, accompanied by a materials list and photographs, are available freely on his web site today.

With them, he states that even a novice, with borrowed tools and no woodworking experience, can build their own large easel for under $100, handling paintings as well as some large easels costing many times that much.

There is also a gallery of photos from people who have built their own easels using Grosser’s plans (images above, bottom row), as well as emails with anecdotes, descriptions of customizations and clever enhancements, and even stories of easels built from scrap materials for under $20, some of them looking wonderfully rough hewn and rustic.

Grosser was offering easily downloadable PDF versions of his plans, but his generosity was repaid by scavengers ripping off his free plans, stripping out his credits and selling them on eBay as if they had created them; so he has had to discontinue the PDFs. The web based plans, however, remain available.

If you decide to build an easel, be sure to send him photos and comments about your experience.

[Link via Ujwala Prabhu]

http://bengrosser.com/easel/

Categories:
Painting, Tools and Techniques
David Lloyd

April 19, 2008

David Lloyd is self-taught as an artist. Born in Virginia and raised in Houston, he studied Drama, English Literature and Philosophy at the University of Houston.

Lloyd has developed a style that wavers between painterly realism and a graphic feeling that recalls the modernist influenced styles of mid-20th century illustrators like Al Parker.

Lloyd works in acrylic at a relatively small size (at least in those paintings for which I can find sizes), frequently 8×10″ (20x25cm).

Lloyd’s subjects range from mountainous landscapes to intimate still lifes to portraits and figurative works to illuminated night streets mirrored in rain. My favorites are his quiet interiors, their subtle darks in sharp contrast to brightly illuminated windows.

There is often a sketch-like feeling to the drawing component of his paintings, in which verticals are left casually askew and forms are briefly suggested.

At other times the works can feel more finished, as in the image above; there is always a feeling, though, that he has stopped at the moment when there was “enough” to the image, never pushing into the dangerous territory of potentially overworking the painting.

Lloyd maintains both an Artblog, where he posts recent paintings, and a Sketchblog, in which he posts his sketches which are frequently done in pen and ink on toned paper, occasionally accented with wash.

Lloyd is represented by the Jean Bragg Gallery and the Canal Street Gallery in Houston, as well as making his work directly available through his web site.

www.davidlloydgallery.com
David Lloyd Artblog
David Lloyd Sketchblog

Categories:
Gallery and Museum Art, Sketching