New animation from Parisian artist Horfe. Love the style of his illustrations.
24.05.12
I have been looking at the character designs for Frank Millers series of graphic novels “Sin City”.
Here are some images that have been influencing me in my character designs.
I am really interested in the noir style of the illustrations and the depth and atmosphere conveyed in the images through minimal use of colour and tone.
16.04.12
Illustration Brief.
For my Illustration brief I am creating 20 characters from a list and looking at their contemporary examples found in the a metropolis. My ideas are loosely inspired by frank Millers urban dystopia ‘Sin City’.
The 20 characters I have chosen are.
The Alchemist
The Artist
The Damsel
The Dilettante
The Don Juan
The Femme Fatale
The Gambler
The Hero
The Liberator
The Lover
The Martyr
The Poet
The Prostitue
The Rebel
The Samaritan
The Seeker
The Slave
The Vampire
The Visionary
The Warrior
16.04.12
Critical Review of Gorillaz Doyathing official music video.
I just saw the official music video for Gorillaz’ Doyathing. The video features a number of characters animated in both 3d and 2d typical of the gorillaz illustrative design waking up and dragging themselves around a disheveled student house before a breakfast of ‘ears on toast’. The illustration styles are really cool and the gangly proportions on the characters make for interesting motion as the characters move around the house. Although the characters are all animated the house is real and this has an interesting effect on the relation between the characters and the background in the shots.
I struggled to make sense of the things that were really going on in the video, in between shots of the main character dragging his feet around the house and a second taking a stair master down the stairs for the duration of the entire video as well as a third who at one point is collecting his sweat in a bathroom and then appearing throughout in drawers, cupboards, and fridges.
Despite the bizarre premise for the video the actual visual effects of the animation are really interesting to watch and the whole thing was made for me by the eery interactions between the animated characters and items in reality, like at the beginning of the music video where the gangly character bangs his leg on his bedside drawer which then shakes back and forth as if hit by a real object.
To conclude the video was an interesting watch but clearly didn’t require much thought, despite interesting visual effects I found myself coming away from the video with a feeling of ‘what did I just watch?’.
27.03.12
Critical review of Steve Powers ‘a love letter for you’ project.
Steve Powers is a philadelphia based muralist who specializes mainly in large scale typographical paintings on the buildings of his city. Over the past few years he has worked mainly on large scale phrases about love for his project ‘a love letter for you’ the love letters aim to show Powers’ love for his city.
Powers work is very bold and shows great variety of style as well as ideas. Powers works actively with the property owners of his city and sees his artworks as a regeneration project in the city.
Steve Powers’ art work is heavily reminiscent of the age of classic sign-writing and uses hard contrasting colours to really isolate his paintings amongst the urban sprawl. The scale and proportion of Powers’ work is meticulous and visually very well balanced.
(Source: coffeespooons)
27.03.12
Critical Review of Hellboy 2.
This evening I watched Hellboy 2: The Golden Army for the first time. Although I am not usually a fan of anything with too much CGI and special effects I thought I would give the film a go because the Character of Hellboy is an interesting concept and because of its obvious roots in graphic novels.
Sadly to say the film was a clear representation of everything I dislike about films with heavy special effects, not to mention the somewhat limited depth to the story which seemed to cram in as much demon on demon fight action as possible. The character design however was interestingly bleak and very surreal, and was probably one of two factors which kept me watching the film, the other being some occasional interesting dialogue between character albeit predictable.
Inbetween lengthy and needless extensive fight scenes characters conformed to predictable stereotypes like ‘nonchalant bad boy protagonist’, ‘Bumbling sidekick’ and ‘angsty femme fatale’. There was also a frustratingly needless romantic sub-plot between two CGI’d oddities.
Overall the film was a lengthy drawn out affair, and it seemed like the full purpose of the film was to see how far CGI and extensive make up could be pushed, not to mention needlessly repetitive fist fight and gunshot action.
27.03.12
Crytical review of designers 123klan #1
123KLAN.
For me there was no other place to start this feature on my blog than with the 123klan.
Married couple Scien and Klor (who still to this day work under the monikers of their graffiti ‘tags’) are two designers from France who have been active and busy in the graphic design world for the past 10 years.
123Klan are strongly influenced by the hip hop culture of 1980s New York, and were in my opinion some of the first designers to do graffiti-style graphic design in a way that wasn’t tacky or clearly borrowing a style, however as they have matured as designers so has their work.
123Klans work has recently been more reminiscent of american baseball and basketball designs working with flowing stylized hand drawn type and characters like cartoons of team mascots, but thats not to say in anyway that Scien and Klor have in any way lost touch with their roots, the 123Klan’s design work is still one hundred percent real and stylish.
The recent character work the 123 klan are some of my favourite pieces of clothing design I’ve seen in years, not to mention the totally infallible array of awesome type faces they have.
The 123Klan made me want to paint graffiti and as I’ve grown up have turned me on to graphic design.
See more of their work at;
26.03.12
Critical Review of Francoise Neilly.
Francoise Neilly is a french artist whos work commonly features portraits painted in fluorescent colours using thick layers of paint and very hard edges and linework.
Her work is very interesting and captures great movement and energy. The strokes and lines she uses to paint her portraits are very expressive and give her imagery a very dynamic appearance. Also the way she layers her colours to indicate the tone and depth in her paintings is greatly skillful and shows great understanding of colour theory.
Its also interesting how the colours and hard shapes don’t subtract from the expressions and feeling of each painting. The thick layers of paint also give the paintings a very visible tactile effect.
(Source: rimonitmd, via vanstheomega)
22.03.12
