Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

A fun little advert/video that Saatchi Moscow created to turn more Russians on to Gmail.

I’m embarrassed to say I never realized the little red envelope in the Gmail logo was an ‘M’ before this. (An aside: why can’t Gmail’s amazing spam filter figure out that Cyrillic messages in North America are usually spam?)

Also check out this fun video by Commoncraft about how Twitter works. It’s a great video - Commoncraft doesn’t say it’s an ad - but at times it sure feels like an ad.

via Art Threat

Also of interest:
Follow Drawn! on Twitter
More illustrators on Twitter

This awesome new game brings your drawings to life. Draw a ball and watch it fall, draw an incline and watch the ball roll down. A demo version is available for download on the official site.

Looks like it’s based on this MIT software (watch the demo here) which everyone was blogging about last year.

It also looks like the game requires a tablet. Could be another fun way to use the Wacom Cintiq.

via kottke.org

I love the Dezeen design magazine website. Every day, you get glimpses into some stunning architectural and design ideas for the future. Many of them seem like something out of science fiction, while some are in production right now. Above:

San Francisco architects IwamotoScott (it’s an all-flash site, but worth it) have won a competition to propose a futuristic vision of their city, organised by the History Channel. Hydro-Net proposes a new, underground network of tunnels for hydrogen-powered, hovering vehicles plus a forest of new towers sprouting from lowland areas inundated by rising sea levels.

Check out the full set of images on IwamotoScott’s Flickr page.

[via Dezeen]

Photographer Stuart Nafey and artist Lori Stotko create Light Doodles with custom-made LED pens. In addition to their website, they have work on Flickr, and what’s really cool — they’ve uploaded a step-by-step tutorial to Instructables on how to make your own LED pens.

CBC just published an article on a research team that is figuring out a way to make updateable holographs. Of course, they’re marketing it at the medical industry. But all I could think was, update those suckers at 12 frames a second and make them full colour! CBC does eventually make a reference to gaming further down the page.

The image above I swiped from the website of Joseph Perry, a professor working on the project. He describes the research in techno-speak, and lists the scholarly articles about it, for those of you ejjikated enuff to understand them.

Say THAT ten times fast. Rolls right off the tongue. Anyhoo…

You spoiled rich kids who’ve already upgraded to Leopard can give your Mac’s seemingly-useless Color Picker a little extra zazz with Mondrianum, a plugin that pumps Adobe’s Kuler into CP:

Lithoglyph’s Mondrianum is a powerful plug-in that enables Mac applications to leverage the resources of the kuler community. Once installed, Mondrianum acts like a built-in, system-wide color picker, available in any Mac application that supports this feature of Mac OS X. Apple’s own iWork™ and iLife® suites, Google Sketchup™, and renowned applications like Coda, CSSEdit, and many more, all work well with Mondrianum.

And, no, it doesn’t work in 10.4. I tried. Wahh!

Don’t have a scanner? Here’s a creative workaround: using the Mac’s built-in iSight and PhotoBooth. Any webcam would work, of course, and for something a little higher-res (though not as immediate) you can surely use your digital camera.

This is the first in a series of screencasts by illustrator Garth Bruner demonstrating the differences between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe’s acquired-and-now-discontinued Freehand. It’s a plea for Adobe to migrate and incorporate some of Freehand’s more intuitive features into Illustrator. Can’t wait to see more.

EDIT: Garth informs me that the videos will do more than just compare Illustrator to Freehand. He’ll be using several other applications as reference points in order to pinpoint some of Illustrator’s shortcomings.

via Garth’s Twitter

In this wonderfully geeky/surreal art project called “the bubbles of radio,” Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas illustrates different types of radio waves, (Bluetooth, DMB, GSM, RFID (shown above), Wifi and Zigbee) as if they were animals in a biology text book:

“Using inspiration from richly illustrated books on botany, zoology and natural history, Ingeborg arrived at the concept of an encyclopaedia of radio waves that contains a selection of fictional radio ‘species’.”

Link from Hugh!

Gizmodo has a four-minute video review (unboxing and everything) of the new Wacom Cintiq 12WX Pen Tablet with display. “Verdict: Simply Amazing.”

I also notice the tablets are now available in North America.

Also of interest:
Wacom Cintiq 21″ tablet

Artist rep Anna Goodson shares some insight into Facebook’s terms of service, and tells illustrators to “be-a-ware”.

She highlights the site’s terms regarding uploaded user content, particularly the clause that reads:

“By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.”

Read the full article.

See Leonardo da Vinci’s fresco in super-duper-up-close-zoom-in detail here. (Thanks, Bully)

The technology described in this video will probably amaze you.

Mmm… now I want a Wacom Cintiq even more. The Turntablet is a rotating mount for the Cintiq that allows an artist to rotate their digital canvas ergonomically and intuitively like a piece of paper. On his blog, artist Dan Goldman shows how he installed the Turntablet to his drawing table.

Our own Luc Latulippe has put together this informative and handy look at the various small business accounting solutions available to us freelancers — both stand-alone software applications and web-based services. When I needed a new invoicing system, Luc was the first person I went to, and his advice was invaluable. If you’re struggling with your own bookkeeping, it’s definitely worth a read.

Tagtool is an open-source instrument for live-performance drawing and animation. Used for guerilla projections, with musicians and dancers, with kids, graffiti artists, etc… This is a kind of performance art I can get behind. How fun would it be to have a doodle-filled street party? Awesome.

If you’ve got more time on your hands than money and you really want a Cintiq, here’s a step-by-step demonstration of how Drew Northcott hacked together a homebrew version using a spare Wacom tablet, a laptop, and a monitor.

Here’s a video of the thing in action.

(Thanks, Charlene!)

This series of “illustrated essays” by David Gillette is something I’m surprised I don’t see more of. We’re living in the golden age of personal expression/broadcasting/publishing thanks to the Internet, and something like this seems, to me, to be a natural four-way lovechild of blogging, podcasting, webcomics, and online video sharing.

Oh my god! Our sun is going super-nova! Ha ha! Relax, I kid because I love. This 40-Earths long Solar Prominence is totally normal, and wouldn’t hurt a fly. Unless it were, y’know, floating around really close to the sun or something.

Yes, these are mostly photos and not illustrations, but being the visual types I know you are, I hope you’ll appreciate this anyway. My fellow artists/science nerds out there have been in-the-know about the Astronomy Picture of the Day site for years (I remember initially finding it as a “feed” plugin for Apple’s now defunct Sherlock app) but, despite the fact it’s been online for over 12 years now, I bet most of you have never heard of it. Think of it as Drawn! for astronomers. (An RSS feed is available here)

And they don’t just post jaw-droppingly (I just made that word up) spectacular satellite photos either, but also artists’ renditions such as this digital illustration of Eris, our newest planet, by artist Thierry Lombry.

They also occasionally post clever optical illusions like the one seen as today’s APotD. Here’s the illusion: Squares “A” and “B” are the exactly same colour. Yes they are. Yes they are! Don’t believe me? Click here to reveal the truth. Or drag it into Photoshop and see for yourself.

PS: More for you nerds: Astronomy Cast podcast.

I wouldn’t normally post a link to something so corporately hyped, but I do think that new imaging technology needs to be grabbed creatively and critically as soon as possible in order to keep it democratic. Especially when said tech is depending on accessing and using everybody’s personal photos, apparently no matter where they are posted on the web. So, since Photosynth is new enough to still only (afaik) exist in Corporateland, I apologize for sending you to a bunch of Microsoft spin-o-matic vids, but Go Forth and Make It Your Own.

Specifically, this stuff is geared to ruling the universe of photography, but as we draughts-people types showed Flickr, we can appropriate tech according to our illustratorly whims. According to a spokesbot, “… we take the the world’s photos and organize them in 3d…” and “the ultimate dream is that we merge the real world and the virtual world until it is ultimately seamless…”. OK, so now imagine doing that with our drawings. Also, this goes some way to providing a solution to the lack-of-detail-available-in-web-images issue I complained about recently. Here’s the MS site, but the link above is of a live presentation and much more watchable.

Yesterday I attended a free, day long Adobe seminar/sales pitch. They are a really efficient way to get up to speed on the new software, get tips,get tech support, bitch directly at the reps about bugs and features, and maybe win something. I missed CS2 while I was in school, so I have some major catching up to do. Actually, everyone has some major catching up to do, with CS3. You’ve probably already heard all the buzz about it being the biggest upgrade ever, bla bla bla. Well, this time the buzz is true. Now that they’ve added in Dreamweaver and Flash and a billion other things, and made Photoshop the grand central station of them all, the world just ain’t the same. I predict our industry (I mean anything graphically creative) is about to undergo a huge jump in look, feel, efficiency, and impact because of this. I’m not here to plug Adobe, so that’s all I’m going to say, not that opinions matter since we have few alternatives to Adobe any more. Personally, I was just pleased to see Illustrator pen tool capability in Flash.

I will mention though that I get a little big-picture worried about the digital divide, now that the software is getting so expensive and complicated that only full-time users will be able to keep up.

Now for some fun: Adobe began this colour-swatch exchange thing a while ago, called Kuler. For those who love mixing paint and choosing colours, it’s addictive. You can dynamically download colour schemes from the site from within CS and apply them to your work in progress. I only wish they had made the site background colour a neutral grey, to see the colours more accurately.

While I was in Hawaii working on my tan and buying coconut purses, previously-blogged Aaron Leighton was in Cannes accepting an International Interactive Emmy (a new branch of the awards to recognize interactive projects from around the world that utilize both television and the Internet) on behalf of the team behind the Zimmer Twins (Leighton is the Creative Director). And from this story on his blog, a local train strike almost prevented him from getting to the ceremonis on time. It was like Run, Lola, Run, but without any killing. And less running. But an award at the end!

Actually, due to a tie, Leighton shared this award with another Canadian company, Xenophile Media, for their project called Re-Genesis. You can watch both teams accept the award here. Congratulations to everyone!

How very uncannily convenient to have a web 2.0 article just posted below. I was just going to post a little thing about what gets left off the web, a thought provoked in part by Serendipity, a conference for children’s book industry insiders that I attended the last two days.

Stephen Biesty was one of the illustrator presenters, along with Ian Wallace, Janet Stevens, Bill Slavin, and Cornelia Funke, although she is more of a writer these days (Dragon Rider, Inkheart).

Now what I will draw your attention to is that Stephen Biesty does not have a personal website, although I imagine the majority of people reading this will recognize his work above. Nor does Bill Slavin. These guys are in the lucky position of being so well-known they can get by without one - for now. But consider that neither of them would have made it into Drawn! here except for my deciding to write this - because, well, we art people on the web don’t generally post what we can’t link to. Non-personal sites have to be pretty spectacular for some other reason for me to use it to yak about an artist, because there usually just isn’t enough depth on second-sources to really profile someone. So some people with amazing careers and work are going to be overlooked online if there is no way it can be featured.

Ah, but you point out that one can always go get one of their books! Well, yes. I should hope so. BUT, and this is the problem Stephen himself mentioned in his talk, in his case his market is disappearing, because of the web. Stephen makes what the book people refer to as “informational books.” And they’ve been dwindling down to the skinniest of shelves in bookstores over the last 15 years in direct correlation to the popularity of the web, because - as Stephen told us - there is a perception that the internet is the best place to find out all about stuff. So, if I wanted to find something on, say, amazing illustrators - well… ok you see the problem. Not everything is or ever will be online.

So, couldn’t Stephen just get a darned site and solve at least his own lack of presence online? Well, sure. But here is another little thing. That picture of his up there? — we can’t make out the detail. Stephen is a miracle worker of detail, but he works for the press, not the monitor. In fact, he apparently doesn’t even use a ruler, he is so low-tech. He does it all freehand, ink on paper with watercolour. Old - no, Ancient - School. And without putting up huge pdf’s of each piece (something most artists are reluctant to do for fear of copyright abuse), his work does not translate for the computer and web - as they are currently configured.

Tech can undoubtedly come round to accomodate the artists and art who are missing in action. But what I am seeing instead is a move to art that reads well online. It is my hope that the Stephen Biestys of the world don’t find their talents neglected as everyone gets caught up in digital media and forgets there’s that other, ancient way of looking at pictures: intimately, with the original or a good facsimile in our lap, getting lost in the world of a complex image that takes more than 15 seconds to absorb.

So I’m checking out classic Sesame Street videos on YouTube with the kiddos when I stumble upon this video by Michael Wesch, PhD, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. He heads up Digital Ethnography, a “working group of students and faculty dedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital ethnography.”

I know I’m a little late in mentioning about this, since an earlier version of the video was posted back in February (and has since tallied over 2 million views), but Dr. Wesch has since posted an updated version, with some fixed typos and other additions. It’s a fascinating video about the progression of text, internet and Web 2.0, told with some excellent graphics, pacing and editing. Man, I wish some of my professors were this cool. To read more about Wesch, there’s an interview with the guy.