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

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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.

Photoshop helps the Hubble!

I saw this great video on Boing Boing and I had to share. A brief video showing how PhotoShop helps create all those great Hubble images of the universe. It reminds me of a line from the Manifesto of the Constructivist Group from 1922:

PREVIOUSLY: Engineers relaxed with art
NOW-Artists relax with technology

A Beatnik Inspired Video About Paul Rand

While pursing the deep (and not so deep) waters of You Tube, I found this great video about Paul Rand. I dig the beatnik inspired sensibilities, daddy-o. More importantly, the wisdom of Paul Rand imparts in the video about graphic design, communication and art is worth any designer’s attention.

The New Yorker cover created on an iPhone

The New Yorker Magazine has a tradition of excellent, challenging and often times controversial covers for its weekly magazine. This was evident during the previous American election, with two covers illustrating the stereotypes of both candidates (see here and here). The propriety and tastefulness of the covers created something of a political firestorm, or at least in media circles. It gave the media a chance to feign indignation, point fingers, and flog one if their own, something that seems to be great sport amongst the fifth estate. Of course, the Daily Show had the most rational and hilarious take on the controversy see here.

Politically the New Yorker takes risks not only in content, but also in style and technique.  I admire the way their editors and art directors take chances and have cover illustrations not only by a wide assortment of artists using a staggering assortment of medium; from oils or watercolors,  pen and ink, even the amazing illustrations of Bob Staake created using the 3.0 version of Photoshop (the latest version of the program is 11).  Now we can add the Apple iPhone to such august company.

The current issue features a cover created by illustrator and designer Jorge Colombo. It’s pretty amazing, he drew the cover using Brushes, an application for his iPhone. According to the New Yorker he drew it while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square. Which I find a delightfully quirky and surreal factoid for some reason.  Watch him creating his cover below:

Seeing Colombo’s fantastic work being created on a simple iPhone app and the work that Staake can do using only Photoshop 3.0 is pretty amazing. It should reinforce the point that computers and software mere are tools, powerful and great tools to be sure, but they exist only in service of some other purpose. In this case we should not  be blinded by the technology and forget the meaning of the art. Photoshop, iPhones and their ilk are wildly different that the primitive brushes of the Lascaux caves, but are singular in that they are means to an end, the creation of art. I need to remind myself of this when I obsessively pour over the latest tutorials on PSD Tuts or slobber over the newest bells and whistles in the next Adobe release. Photoshop is a wicked tool, but still just a tool.

via Gabriel Campanario / Urban Sketchers

If your interested check out these related links:

• The New Yorker article on the cover read it here…
• iPhone Brushes Flickr Group, it is pretty amazing. here…
• Jorge Colombo’s Website here…
• ABC News interviews Jorge Colombo here…
• Bob Staake’s Website here…
• More Bob Staake illustration techniques on YouTube here…
• Peruse the Covers of The New Yorker Magazine for inspiration. Search the archives here…