Collaboration Stations

Nous Vous
Dumb Eyes

SuttonBeresCuller:

Work in progress from Rodrigo valenzuela on Vimeo.

education paradigms

See above clip for thoughts on education, artists' brains and the power of collaborative thinking.

Unorthodox Storytellers

Check out some more character builders. Below are links for artists who have built a cast of characters and/or alternate worlds that wander through their studio practice:

Ernesto Caivano

Ernesto Caivano "...it is very important to be able to resonate with other narratives. Other stories from the history, folktales, science…. It is kind of like a collage, traditional historic collage of all those different elements also the current collage. We cannot have folktale mythology but by looking at the pictures, we can tell that the contemporary cultures are connected, and in the end, looking at these images, you will essentially find the mythology and how those things are connected.
I am very interested how these images told in school, history and books are connected and resonated. For instance, some cultures have similar symbols but different meanings. I am interested in what kinds of meanings these objects can help bring to the culture and how these objects establish the culture. You make a story collecting these objects and the story becomes something real to us in the end. But in fact they are abstract, very abstract. I like that very much." (mildly edited for grammar)

Matthew Barney

Amy Cutler "Siege"

Amy Cutler "Cautioning writers against merely reweaving the same old narrative threads when translating fairytales to contemporary settings, A. S. Byatt recently wrote: ‘We live in a world very far from woods, castles, and gibbets. We live in a world of urban myths – alligators in sewers, grandmothers on car roofs, and a burgeoning virtual world of gossip and storytelling, real and fantastic, on the Web.’ Similarly Cutler mines an especially productive vein when she draws on current events. The elaborate gouache titled Siege (2004), for example, was inspired by the hunt for Saddam Hussein: flurries of arrows descend like heat-seeking missiles on bewildered people, some of whom clutch geese like their only treasured possessions." Kristin M. Jones-- Frieze Magazine

William Kentridge "World Walking"

William Kentridge

Matthew Ritchie

character building

Chris Ware

Junichi Tsuneoka 

Trenton Doyle Hancock

"The characters which populate his imaginary worlds include the Mounds, half-animal, half-plant creatures, which are preyed upon by evil beings called vegans."

Craig Frazier Studio (Underwater)

Hope you had a terrific summer and are ready to get some good work done! As many of you know, this is the blog designated as a resource for illustration at Seattle Pacific. This quarter is Digital Illustration, during which we dig into exactly what the boundaries are for communicating through and by the filter of ye olde computer. Straightforward approaches toward illustration will be wrangled, but we will also take experimental romps. Get ready get set!

In the meantime, check out this documentation of a design/illustration team working on an album cover for Son Lux:

The Made Shop's film documenting the creation of Son Lux's "We Are Rising" album artwork (CD and digital download available now, LP on 6/28).
www.music.sonluxmusic.com
"The plan is to do the entire record cover for the new Son Lux album in 28 hours, since he recorded the whole thing in 28 days. If all goes according to plan, we're going to shoot 28 smoke bombs going off in a parking lot behind some warehouses on top of a crane, and then cut out the Son Lux title out of the smoke."
Music: "Rising" by Son Lux
from We Are Rising
Anticon. Records
The Made Shop
www.themadeshop.com
Shot and edited by Michael Chiarelli (www.vimeo.com/michaelchiarelli)

Graphic Novelists who should not be missed: Part Two

Joe Sacco.

Graphic Novelists who should not be missed: Part One

Art Spiegelman

The Loose Edges of Storytelling

Acting, animating, drawing, singing, writing, filming and dancing. All of these methods and more have been used fluidly over centuries and centuries in order to satisfy our desire for a good story. One interesting form, a precursor to cinema and comics as we now know them, was a storytelling practice outlined in a recent book by Eric P. Nash, Manga Kamishibai. Storytellers on the streets of Japan would tell elaborate stories with the aid of a sequence of paintings. From the publisher's site:

During the height of kamishibai in the 1930s, storytellers would travel to villages and set up their butais (miniature wooden prosceniums), through which illustrated boards were shown. The storytellers acted as entertainers and reporters, narrating tales that ranged from action-packed westerns, period pieces, traditional folk tales, and melodramas, to nightly news reporting on World War II. More than just explaining the pictures, a good storyteller would act out the parts of each character with different voices and facial expressions. 

Read some more excerpts and quotes from the author here.

re-post

Jillian Tamaki's idea-foraging workshop.

Content for next gig!

^Harry Campbell^

Astronauts Seek Next Frontier:
students with last names between A and C
The beginning of fire insurance:
students with last names between D and E
Synchronicity:
students with last names between F and Ha
Doctors for Homeless Teens:
students with last names between Ho and I
Birds Twitter:
students with last names between J and L
Surprise Matisse crits:
students with last names between M and Z

see sam sketch!

Samantha Kallis keeps a terrific blog with lots of illustration process. Check it!

it does not comprehend reductions...

"You have two brains: a left and a right. Modern brain scientists now know that your left brain is your verbal and rational brain; it thinks serially and reduces its thoughts to numbers, letters and words… Your right brain is your nonverbal and intuitive brain; it thinks in patterns, or pictures, composed of ‘whole things,’ and does not comprehend reductions, either numbers, letters, or words."


From The Fabric of Mind, by the eminent scientist and neurosurgeon, Richard Bergland. Viking Penguin, Inc., New York 1985. pg.1

drawing lines

contours

David Hockney

Matisse

it starts with a line

(Image credits in order of appearance: Guo Fengyi, public domain, Drew Beckmeyer, Ben Nicholson, Fuyuko Matsui, Gustav Doré, Kids at MoMa, The Clay Princess, Jillian Tamaki)


The language of line is something we tend to take for granted. Some of the earliest traces of mankind on earth are outlined animals and people. A line doesn't exist in actuality, but it's a great shorthand for the edge of something. As such, it's a huge part of many illustration styles.

Welcome!

This is home for a continuous blog for illustration, and this post here marks the start of Spring Quarter 2011.

On second thought...

Poster? What?

When I heard that many of you are designing posters for two other classes, I had to change my tune. Let's do CD/album covers.

Check out grammy winners,

Unified Manufacturing,

Some classics...

post and...

...REPOST

understanding comics...

...and more...

Johanna Goodman
Jonathan Viner
Jack Teagle
Anita Kunz

P.S. This and the last post are devoted to compelling caricatures or portraits of famous or reg'lar people.

that face, that face

Hibiki Miyazaki

Sven Raye

Joshua Williams

Joshua Williams

Aaron Scamihorn

Iain Macarthur

Sterling Hundley

Sterling Hundley

amzing in town event: FREE!

{click poster to enlarge}

A Quarter Begins!

Maquina de Escrever by Amedeo de Souza Cardoso

This is your go-to spot for Illustration in Winter quarter, friend. Please get your feet wet by browsing any of the links to the right. Content is updated quite frequently-- even after you are no longer enrolled in this class!