Empathic Civilsation

Amazing and fascinating (amazingly fascinating) video from the RSA, somewhere between animation and illustration, of Jeremy Rifkin's ideas about empathic civilisation. This idea is close to my heart and the method of presentation is nothing short of incredible.

(via Scott McCloud)

Penguin on fire

Penguin Books does (do?) it again, with another fantastic cover for a modern classic. White Noise, by Don DeLillo is one of my favourite books. Michael Cho does full justice to the toxic airborne event in his atmospheric illustration for the cover.

(via The Beat)

Doodle for Google

Aww! This Doodle for Google competition for schoolkids - themed around the idea 'what I wish' - has inspired some pretty great ideas.

(via Illustration Friday)

Declan Shalvey - Scott Pilgrim

I really like Declan Shalvey's take on Scott Pilgrim, posted on the Eclectic Micks blog. It sort of corresponds with Bryan Lee O'Malley's pinup of Kitty Pryde, for the recent Full of Pryde exhibition, the remaining unsold artwork (including Bryan's) for which is now up on ebay.

By the way, did I mention it's my birthday?

Alison Bechdel book review

Check out Alison Bechdel's wonderful graphic book review for NY Times. I'd like to see more reviews like this. In fact I'd like to see all reviews like this.

(via http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2009/03/30/robot-6-comic-book-resources-covering-comic-book-news-and-entertainment-%c2%bb-six-by-6-six-other-comics-i%e2%80%99d-like-to-see-more-of/)

Adrian Tomine

The Creative Review blog featured a short interview with Adrian Tomine, last week.

From his earliest work on Optic Nerve, Tomine's delicate linework was always strongly graphic, so it's no surprise that he has to become a regular illustrator for The New Yorker.

Tomine says little in his interviews. I read a really long interview with him in The Comics Journal, ten years ago, which revealed about as much as this one. Tomine lets his artwork do the talking.

(via Scamp)

Eclectic Micks-up!

Double the pun! Double the fun!

Here's a picture of the Rocketeer doing a double-take at my amazing wit!

(sigh...)

Anyway, OK Erok! wishes to belatedly draw your attention to the Eclectic Micks blog, where the cream of Ireland's comic creative talent - Bob Byrne, Declan Shalvey, Stephen Mooney, Stephen Thompson and Will Sliney - post sketches every week!

Finally got around to updating my links too. Check out the drop-down menus to your right. Nice!

Comics Archetype Times Table

Brilliant! Never again be lost for how to depict Lincoln as a platypus.

(via Waxy.org)

Brendan and the Secret of Kells

Congratulations to Tomm Moore, Cliodhna Lyons and all at Cartoon Saloon for bringing The Secret of Kells to our cinema screens! It's getting great press and as you can see from the trailer, the artwork is fantastic.

It's out this week. The Comic Cast recently interviewed Tomm Moore. Also check out the beautifully illustrated storybook - a nice helping of Irish graphic history - published by O'Brien, to tie-in with the movie.

(via Forbidden Planet)

Of course Hellboy drives a muscle car!

Dusty Abel's poster of 1970s action heroes is simply class! But I like his take on Mike Mignola's Hellboy even better.

(via Conor via Wired)

Joyce

What if James Joyce had been born with a huge, pendulous nose? Has this thought never crossed your mind?

Celebrated Irish writer and expat, James Joyce, was a man of many words. Too many, I often thought, as I trudged through his ‘20th century Modernist masterpiece’ Ulysees, required reading in college.

Joyce had rather neat, Irish features, gathered in the middle of his unusually long face. And even if you didn’t like his writing, his majestic chin was the pride of Ireland.

If not exactly a matinee idol, the young Joyce was good-looking, in his way. (Later on, and even after failing basic seamanship and being rejected from the crew of a three-master heading for the Nicobar Islands and from there to pirate in the Indian ocean, Joyce indulgently continued to wear an eye-patch.)

But things could have been so different for Joyce. For example, if Oliver St John Gogarty had not merrily opened fire at Joyce, one morning, over breakfast. If Joyce had remained in Ireland, rather than exiling himself to the continent. Or if Joyce had possessed a nose of giant proportions.

Certainly, we all wonder how Joyce would have coped with such a pendulous, olfactory protuberance.

Things would have been different for this floppy-nosed Joyce. It might have led him deeper into labyrinthine Modernism; he might have revolutionised the literary potboiler. It might have caused Nora Barnacle (awesome name, by the way) to spurn him as a sausage-nosed freak.

Joyce would have been different. His life and his work have taken a radically different course. It would have been much funnier.

Lovely picture: Kid Acne

Kid Acne is an old favourite of mine, but I've not written about this multi-talented artist/illustrator/musician before. Maybe because I'm jealous. He is an illustrator, grafitti artist and rapper/musician.

I love his style: simple, sweet, obsessed with Amazon women.

Check out a little portfolio of his work here.

Lovely picture: Kali Fontecchio

I haven’t written one of these posts in a while. Let’s go!

After seeing Kali Fontecchio’s work at Sketch Theatre (via Scamp) - and drawn in, I admit, by her awesome name - I went to her blog and spent ages looking at her work. It's amazing.

Fontecchio is a recent graduate from Otis College of Art & Design in California (Kim Gordon, from Sonic Youth went there) and now works with cult animation... er, person, John Kricfalusi (of Ren and Stimpy fame).

Fontecchio has a unique style that is tricky to pin down. She blends classic Walt Disney, Loony Tunes, satirical cartooning and greeting card schmaltz together in a compelling (disturbing!?) way; there's an interesting interview with her here in which she cites Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy as influences.

The sketch above is a good example of Fontecchio's style (though there is loads on her blog): sweet, beautifully rendered, but with something askew. Her cartoons are either cute to the point of grotesqueness or grotesque to the point of cuteness.

Hello Alien Items!

As I wrote before, I am playing bass with Conor’s Alien Items project. Part of the fun of it is taking my creativity in new directions.

Here’s a character I developed, inspired by the music and the project. I have no idea what (if any) part it may play, but it’s here in my mind and now in yours. Enjoy.

Lovely picture: Ashley Wood

Australian artist and illustrator Ashley Wood (probably best known here for illustrating Tank Girl: The Gifting) loves war and robots. He's a fine draughtsman, but it is in his painting that he really shows off his talent; and this painting (above) illustrates it, with three qualities in particular (four, if you count robots!):

1. The composition gives a sense of tension and anticipation (the robot to the left, gun raised in readiness, the shadowed foreground and the crooked street sign in what looks like a modern city street all evoke feelings of disharmony and uncertainty).
   
2. Wood's trademark muted palette, all browns of varying degrees of warmth, plays on conventions of war-reportage, economically and realistically evoking hot, dusty futuristic warfare.
   
3. finally, eerie light effects, give the painting depth and add to the realism of the scene. The main subjects, are in the middle-ground in mid-tones, the empty foreground is bisected by shadows and squeezed off to the right by shadows from the building on the left and in the background pale, dusty ruins loom out of a paler void.

Nice one!

Lovely Picture: Sam Hiti

Comics illustrator Paul Pope posted this wonderful diagrammatic illustration, by Sam Hiti, of a Japanese archer/ samurai donning his armour.

Lovely Picture: Michael Hague

Keeping up the Hobbit theme from last week, here is a beautiful illustration by Michael Hague.

Hague's realistic style and lush use of colour really brought The Hobbit to life for me, as a child, and I pored over the pictures for hours, wishing I was in Tolkien's world.

Hague says:
"Only after coloring everything do I go in with my ink lines. This is in some ways working backward."

Perhaps this is what gives Hague's illustrations their wonderful, soft, lived-in feeling.

I Make: Death-dealing Robot

Inspired by Ashley Wood. And this:

'Everyone knows that [Asimov's] laws will not work, because human beings will not use them when they build robots. Humans are lazy and weak and greedy, which is why robots will inevitably decide to kill them. We should expect this and come to terms with it. We have had a good run.'

I, for one, would like to welcome our robot overlords!

Blade Runner, Syd Mead and the Future

Just read this interesting interview with Ridley Scott, from last October's Wired, in which he talks about the influence of Blade Runner on design and particularly architecture.

I think of Ridley Scott as a kind of cinematic designer - dispassionate, cool, technical (he came from an advertising background) - and that seems justified by many of his early films.

Syd Mead was the concept designer and 'visual futurist' who created a lot of the famous vehicles and street scenes for Blade Runner, Aliens and many other films and computer games.

Mead is more or less credited with inventing contemporary concept design and influencing everybody from Katsuhiro Otomo (Akira) to, well, everybody. For example, Imagine FX did a big feature about Syd Mead last month, with workshops about how to create a Mead/ Blade Runner-esque scene in Photoshop and so on.

Of the aesthetic in Blade Runner, Mead has said:

"We called the whole look 'retro deco.' What I did in my imagination was to mash together every architectural style I could think of. So, I violated architectural motif, and it's funny because architects love that film. Maybe it's cathartic for them."

"Because it's a wholly fabricated world, and the typical thing to do would have been to give it one style. Again, the point is, when you go into the future, you don't start from zero, you take everything along with you. You have to have old stuff to overlay the new stuff. And that's part of what gives "Blade Runner" it's unusual look."

While I love Mead's drawing, with its profuse detail and interest - and his Blade Runner paintings, which evoke the atmosphere evident in the film - most of his gouache painting is pretty awful; lurid, 1960s, Sci-Fi confectionary, full of bubble furniture and naked people wandering about (as you do in the future).

Although Mead's Blade Runner design is exceptional, it has also been given exceptional prominence in his work.

Lovely picture: Nicolas Klein

Nic Klein is a German artist and illustrator, who has worked on a lot of comics, most recently Marvel's Dead of Night: Man Thing 4. Nic's painterly work shows elements of manga, golden age comics and graphic design.

Of his influences, Nic says, "I believe everything we see and do influences the art-making process; reading a book, watching a film, sitting in a cafe and watching people. It all gets stored somewhere in the back of the mind and perhaps works its way into a piece or a process of creating."

[via ConceptArt.org]