How They Did It — Ed Emberley Edition

For this week’s How They Did It, I had to share another great gem from Lynda.com. They have pro­duced a fan­tas­tic doc­u­men­tary about artist and author Ed Ember­ley. He is an icon for chil­dren and adults around the world. I love his books and they are an inspi­ra­tion to all artists of all ages.

Watch more at http://www.lynda.com/tutorial/86560?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=viral&a…

Award-winning children’s book author and illus­tra­tor Ed Ember­ley is truly a national trea­sure, hav­ing drawn nearly 100 books. The warmth of his fam­ily and his 17th cen­tury home are an essen­tial part of his work. In this install­ment of the lynda.com flag­ship doc­u­men­tary series, we go to Ed’s home in Ipswich, Mass­a­chu­setts, to meet him and all of the mem­bers of his tal­ented fam­ily, includ­ing his wife and author, Bar­bara; chil­dren, illus­tra­tors Rebecca and Michael; and grand­daugh­ter, record­ing artist Adrian Ember­ley. A gen­er­a­tion of chil­dren have learned to draw using Ed’s draw­ing books and we watch as a new gen­er­a­tion puts crayon to paper. At 80 years young, Ed is push­ing ahead and we meet with his team as he works on his newest iPad app—with graphic artists that, as chil­dren, learned to draw with his books.

A Random Design Quote

A ran­dom quote from a famous graphic designer on design, cul­ture and art.

One who has attained mas­tery of an art reveals it in every action.
– Samu­rai Maxim, from the book The Zen of Cre­ativ­ity by John Daido Loori

Experiments in Digital Painting

I am a mem­ber of Lynda.com and it is one of my favorite sites. I recently fin­ished an excel­lent course, Trans­form­ing a Photo into a Paint­ing with Pho­to­shop taught by John Derry. It was an excel­lent class and I have been inspired to try my hand at his tech­nique. Let me know how these two dig­i­tal paint­ings turned out. They are based on some pho­tos I took on a recent trip to Port­land, Ore­gon. Click for larger versions.

Weird Port­land, Novem­ber 2011

Port­land Sky­line, Novem­ber 2011

Beautiful Time Lapse Photography of the Sky

A His­tory of the Sky is a truly beau­ti­ful video cre­ated by San Fran­cisco based musi­cian, pro­gram­mer, artist, and tin­kerer Ken Mur­phy. It is truly beau­ti­ful way to look at the sky, some­thing that we often take for granted even though it is above us all the time.

To cre­ate this video, Mur­phy installed a cam­era on the roof of the Explorato­rium in San Fran­cisco and spent a year doc­u­ment­ing the sky in time-lapse pho­tographs taken every ten sec­onds. Why would he do that? As he says on his blog:

From these images, I cre­ated a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each show­ing a sin­gle day. The days are arranged in chrono­log­i­cal order. My intent was to reveal the pat­terns of light and weather over the course of a year.

He cer­tainly did that, well done!

More infor­ma­tion on the project site:
http://www.murphlab.com/ahots

His blog post on the project:
http://www.murphlab.com/2011/11/15/a-history-of-the-sky-for-one-year/

His YouTube Chan­nel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/obeyken

The music is “Aer­ial” by Moby, from www.mobygratis.com (royalty-free music for inde­pen­dent filmmakers).

Typography Tuesday: Typeface the Movie

I just watched an amaz­ing doc­u­men­tary, Type­face. As an unabashed typophile I must highly rec­om­mend this film. It is the true tale of a The Hamil­ton Wooden Type Museum and it’s role in try­ing to doc­u­ment and try­ing to keep alive the art of hand type­set­ting.  If you are inter­ested in any way in his­tory, print­ing, design or art, do your­self a favor and check it out!

In rural Wis­con­sin, a lone employee waits in a cav­ernous old museum for vis­i­tors to come. A few indi­vid­u­als strag­gle in every few days and then, come Fri­day, the museum fills with life. Machines hum, presses print, artists buzz about. One week­end each month, the quiet of Two Rivers is inter­rupted as car­loads of arti­sans drive in from across the Mid­west. The place comes alive as print­mak­ing work­shops led by, and filled with, some of the nation’s top design tal­ent descend on the sleepy enclave. — from the offi­cial film site.

Type­face Trailer 1

Type­face Trailer 2

For more information:

• Hamil­ton Wooden Type Musuem
• The Offi­cial Type­face Movie Page
• Hamil­ton Wooden Type Museum on Twitter
• Hamil­ton Wooden Type Museum on Flickr
• Hamil­ton Wooden Type Museum on Facebook

How They Did It (Spray Paint Art Edition)

This week’s install­ment of How They Did It will focus on artist who cre­ate paint­ings using spray paint and a few other objects, includ­ing news­pa­per, sticks, plates and their hands. It’s a pretty cool exam­ple of how adding lay­ers of under paint­ing fol­lowed by increas­ing detail are the hall­marks of all styles of painting.

I love the swag­ger and show­man­ship of the spray paint artists, not only are the works of art pretty inter­est­ing, but they put on a great show. I remem­ber once see­ing a guy who was set up near a some casino in Las Vegas cre­at­ing sim­i­lar paint­ings. It was pretty sur­real, this young tal­ented artist cre­at­ing a sci­ence fic­tion inspired land­scape paint­ings of Sin City in front of a huge crowd of drunks, who stood around utterly trans­fixed with the art of cre­ation. It’s rare for most artists to be cheered when they fin­ish a paint­ing, let alone by twenty-somethings hold­ing three foot long plas­tic cups con­tain­ing some fright­en­ingly syrupy booze con­coc­tion. Vegas is full of sur­real moments, that was one I was priv­i­leged to wit­ness, as I like to say even if you aren’t inter­ested in the absurd, the absurd is inter­ested in you.

A Mex­i­can street artist cre­ates sci­ence fic­tion worlds in 15 min­utes
I found this on YouTube, it is very sim­i­lar to what I saw in Vegas.

Part 1

Part 2

Sci-fi Land­scape by Bran­don McConnell
A pretty cool video show­ing McConnell cre­at­ing worlds quickly that looks awesome.

I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more.…
Con­jure Spray Art cre­ates a cool ver­sion of the Emer­ald City from The Wiz­ard of Oz.

Typography Tuesday: 5 Awesome Web Based ASCII Generators

#####                                        ##
  #                                           #
  #   ##  # ####   ##   #### #### ###  ####   ####  ##  #
  #    # ##  #  # #  # #  #   # # ###   #  #  #  #   # ##
  #    # #   #  # #  # ####   #   # #   #  #  #  #   # #
 ###    ##   ###   ##  ##### ###  ## #  ###  ######   ##
        #    #         #   #            #             #
       #    ###        ####            ###           #

Ah, it’s Tues­day and that means it is typog­ra­phy time! This I’d like to share five awe­some web based ASCII art gen­er­a­tors. ASCII Art is one of the finest of the geek arts, plus it’s a fun lit­tle trick to add to your HTML code, a sort of Easter Egg like on a DVD. I have found a lot of soft­ware you can down­load to cre­ate ASCII art, but maybe I’m just para­noid about down­load­ing unknown soft­ware to my sys­tem. With that dis­clo­sure, I pre­fer these web based gen­er­a­tors. Some do text, some do images and some do both.

A major tip for gen­er­at­ing images make sure that your images have lots of con­trast, that will aid these tools quite a bit.

• patorjk.com/software/taag/
  My per­sonal favorite for text, an online web appli­ca­tion that allows you to type in large ASCII Art text in real time.
• degraeve.com/img2txt.php
  My favorite for con­verts images to ASCII.
• glassgiant.com/ascii/
  This one con­verts pic­tures to ASCII text art
• network-science.de/ascii/
  Gen­er­ate a ASCII graphic from a word or text.
• ascii-art-generator.org/
  This one is very good at cre­at­ing images, though they are rather large. I cre­ated the self por­trait below with this tool.

Roman Art and Architecture Slide Show from Flickr

Friends, Romans, coun­try­men lend me your eyes, for today I come not to bury the Roman Empire but to praise in in pho­tos. Flickr has some amaz­ing groups, one of my favorite is The Roman Empire Pool, a col­lec­tion of images that show Roman art and archi­tec­ture in all it’s glory.

As an ama­teur his­to­rian, artist and lover of antiq­uity I love these images, I hope you do the same.

All hail SPQR!

Preschool Prehistoric Art!

There are flut­ings of ani­mals and crude out­lines of faces

This is amaz­ing! Evi­dence of children’s art from 13,000 years ago! Chil­dren are artists and have always been artists, cre­ativ­ity and cre­at­ing art is as much an instinct for humans as breath­ing. More infor­ma­tion on this discovery.

Some other good resources on pre­his­toric art:

• Art His­tory Archive
• The Her­mitage: Pale­olithic Art
• 20 Fas­ci­nat­ing Cave Paintings

A Primer in Mid Century Modern

 Mid-Century mod­ern is an archi­tec­tural, inte­rior and prod­uct design form that gen­er­ally describes post-war devel­op­ments in mod­ern design from roughly 1945 to 1965. –from the video Eames Era (Mid Cen­tury Mod­ern Design Today)

The post war, Mid Cen­tury Mod­ern era is one of my favorites in terms of design and archi­tec­ture. In case you would like to learn a lit­tle more about it, you should check out this great video primer on YouTube. It’s a good overview of the prod­uct design, archi­tec­ture and cul­tural his­tory of post war era. After watch­ing it you should come away with an even greater appre­ci­a­tion of the detail found in Mad Men.