Eric Tan

For those who are not in Richards Monday night studio class we are currently working on a WPA style poster. While browsing the Internet for examples of WPA posters I stumbled upon Eric Tan. Eric is a designer from San Diego that creates interesting retro inspired posters and also dabbles in designer toy making. The majority of his work on his website is his fun and unique movie poster remakes from Disney Pixar. His design style can be explained as a modern interruption of art deco. I personally believe that his artwork is so enjoyable because of its simplicity. The objects being illustrated are very bare boned WPA style with very little detail. Tan’s color schemes are very strong because of his choice in fundamentally proven primary, monochromatic, and analogous colors. I could not actually find if he had the permission from the companies/copy right holders to recreate and sell his posters. I find myself wishing to see his posters printed by using screen printing and removing it from the digital realm. So my question to all of you is what is your opinion about and if you think it is right to use copyrighted/ trademarked objects in your artwork with out the permission of the company/artist? And if his posters were done by hand using retro printing processes instead of digital would it still be successful as his digital originals?

check out his blog at: http://erictanart.blogspot.com/

Typophile Film Festival

This week I wanted to cross into two foggy areas of illustration at the same time: typography and motion. There are many instances of incredible motion graphic work, which use type to dynamically illustrate a given idea. Often, these are wonderful examples of the many uses of Adobe After Effects, but not so here. This entire piece was created without any digital effects of any kind.

Created for the 5th annual Typophile Film Festival as part of the opening ceremony, this incredible work was created by BYU design students and faculty. View the full credits here. It was well recieved and has gained a lot of attention outside of its original screening from many design and typography publications.

The entire piece is meant to illustrate each of the five senses in dynamic and powerful ways. It utterly succeeds at this goal, with each section utilizing interesting materials and movement to create a visceral effect. They used a large variety of materials including, plexiglass, wood, aluminum, ham, squash, potatoes, jell-o, clay, and incense (around 150 cones).

Though some might lump this into a separate category like design, I can see the places where this piece overlaps disciplines. Each frame could easily be used as a spot illustration for an article on something related to the senses, and as a whole I have never seen a more dynamic representation of the given themes. In fact, because this piece utilizes the best of design principles, available technology, and particular attention to aesthetics, I think that this piece communicates to a greater extent than any drawn single illustration could accomplish.

The Font Feed has a wonderful write up about everything which went into this project, along with additional stills here.

Ruby Blue

Ruby Blue album art

I’ve been on a bit of a Róisín Murphy kick lately, and it only recently dawned on me that the album art for Ruby Blue is, in fact, a painting. Ramalama (Bang Bang) is inspiring me this week in more ways than one.

According to Wiki, Murphy met Simon Henwood at a bar. He thought she’d make a good subject for painting, so they had sequin-themed photo shoots with Murphy’s own wardrobe. Murphy took on abstract stances, and viola, dynamic paintings happened over the course of a year. Henwood described Murphy’s character as a “disco electro pop diva with a 1940’s look”. The paintings were on display at The Hospital in London and have since been purchased by Murphy (ostensibly so her children can someday see what she used to look like).

Simon Henwood is known for his simplified paintings of teens. They end up looking posterized and vivid, but he still leaves plenty of texture and expression within planes. His style is quite evident in the portraits of Murphy. I don’t know what their first conversations would have sounded like, but I’d guess that once she knew what Henwood’s work looked like, Murphy commissioned the portraits specifically for her album art because she felt it would fit with the sounds she was putting forth on Ruby Blue. Because it was seemingly commissioned expressly for album art, I’d consider this illustration, rather than only fine art.

I rather enjoy how dynamic and eye-catching this painting is, especially in terms of Murphy’s pose and the way her expression seems to be beckoning towards the camera/audience. There’s just something phenomenal going on with the lighting and color as well. Redheads <3 Her outfit was probably the first thing that grabbed my attention. It’s kind of interesting how the only way you can tell it’s not a photo is from her skin, and even then it could’ve been manipulated. Nope. It’s gouache on paper, according to Henwood’s site.

Lisa Frank- Hunter

My terrible secret- this is the artist who basically inspired me to draw when I was a kid. I can't even tell you how many stickers, stationary sets, stuffed animals, and all kinds of random crap I owned from this artist. This here is a sticker sheet of Hunter, one of her characters. It's inside a journal that is also a pop-up book, and like all of her products it's marketed for preteen girls. Lisa Frank really marketed her art well to kids- it's extremely vibrant, cartoonish, and she puts an emphasis on making characters, not just always pretty pictures. There's no cartoon show or anything to go along with the merchandise, but kids still got a sense for who these characters were just by a little blurb on the back of the packaging, or like in this image you see many different poses to describe the way the character might move if it were animated, giving it a sense of personality.

Lisa Frank is a pop artist, and she started her company in the late 70's. According to her girlified website, she creates the basic ideas for different designs and characters, at which point a team of illustrators takes over and draws them in marker. Then there's market research (talking to kids), and plenty of tweaking and redrawing, and then it goes to the computer where the computer painting "takes a long long time." So every part of this process is planned and engineered and calculated specifically to be consistent with the brand, and also to be desirable to kids. When I was growing up, it was pretty much mandatory to have several products of hers in your school supplies. Stickers and school supplies are meant to be used, and therefore disposable, and so you'll need to replace your Lisa Frank stationary set with another one after a while. So on those terms I think their illustrations and the whole corporate art factory is extremely successful. The company still seems to be going strong, so these illustrations still seem to be successful, though I don't know if Lisa Frank stuff is as "necessary" to kids as it once was.

for the sake of sake of.

This week I realized, I don’t have too many artist whos work I like enough to feature.
As I was going through my sites i am a member of looking through my saved artist I came across Lasean Thomas. I had totally forgotten about him because I had slightly moved past the phase I was in when I was into him heavily, but today I re-realized Lasean is a monster.

Hes a perfect example on the other extreme of my argument that my beef with more modern art from 1900 onward I guess is that art is such a “oh we have to keep doing the totally opposite than the last guys” thing. So much so that it all begins to just feel forced.. like that group who had an incredible first album, whos second album sucked because “all real artist make total 100% different sounds between every album because thats how you know they are true artist” bullshit.

We have the fortune to be alive after so many great artist in ALL fields to draw inspiration and learn from that we don’t have to completely deny their existence for the sake of sake of...

Lasean proves my point in the face that his style is obviously more cartoony (specificially because he does story boarding for Ben 10 and boondocks).
What I love about his style is the dynamism his images creates, he sat down for years and learned his anatomy and honed his technical skill, and knew all along is was for the improvement of his cartooning.

Laseans work reminds me of Disney in the sense that like an old Tom and Jerry cartoon his characters animations are pushed to the exaggerated breaking point to really make them truly dynamic

Bunny Man

I am really frustrated right now because of this cover. I have spent hours searching for more information about it and have come up with a lot about the artist’s other work, but nothing regarding this specific painting. I wanted so badly to talk about it, but much of the context is lost without hard facts. So I decided to supply educated guesses with some of the actual information I found about this piece.

This is a book cover for a set of short stories by Etgar Keret, an Israeli author I discovered because of his storytelling on the podcast “This American Life”. I just got this book and loved the cover. The artist who illustrated it is Scott Musgrove. Musgrove is a contemporary artist who had previously done comic book illustration, most notably a comic called “Fat Dog Mendoza”- which eventually turned into a Cartoon Network Europe television show. His new paintings can be classified as figural surrealism. They are mostly of fantastical creatures that look like they are extinct species. Musgrove claims he is allergic to most animals but is fascinated by them, which is why it is easier to just make his creatures up.

The illustration is on the book “The Nimrod Flip Out”. I think the publisher (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) commissioned it, and I think that because it is unlike the other work the artist has done. I mean it is not completely dissimilar, but the subject is definitely not his usual fantastical animal painting. It is of a man in a bunny suit, who looks as though he just shot a few duck/fish things (yes, that was my best description of what those look like to me). The colors are of Musgrove’s usual palate, and he still uses oil paint (I think). The cover is successful in my eyes because the short stories in the book are surreal and have a male protagonist most of the time. I also think the man in the bunny outfit looks similar to the author. I think it doesn’t give too much away, which is what keeps me looking at it.

non toxic oil pastels

I found this lying in my room faaaar inside a cupboard. I don't know how i even still have this! This was given to me probably 19 or so years ago, before i even moved to America. Its a case for oil pastels. Its obviously an asian brand. My first impression was Japanese but....i dunno, im not too good with my asian languages but, the writing looks Korean to me. Which i only just noticed..haha. Anyway it obviously looks like it was created for childern,( specifically girls?) just by the content, colors, and drawing style, and possibly is based of a cartoon or comic at the time. Im willing to steak its work from the early 90's. I think it's a fun little crayon box and i think the design works, it looks pretty girly to me but i enjoyed it as a kid. I even used to try drawing the cover using the crayons included. Now that I have found this, im really interested to find out the whole story behind it, unfortunately the only english writing on the whole case is non toxic oil pastels. Oh and THE MORE CO.LTD but i tried looking it up and couldn't find anything. Must not exist anymore. Anyone read Korean?