Here’s a collection of newspaper masthead clip art from the time of China’s Cultural Revolution.
Category: art
Artists, illustrators, designers, and creative folk share the stuff on their desks. I like this voyeuristic peering into other people’s minds sort of thing. Reminds me of the Flickr tags whatsinmybag/whatsinyourbag.
“The Cinema Redux project explores the idea of distilling a whole film down to one single image. Using eight of my favourite films from eight of my most admired directors including Sidney Lumet, Francis Ford Coppola and John Boorman, each film is processed through a Java program written with the processing environment. This small piece of software samples a movie every second and generates an 8 x 6 pixel image of the frame at that moment in time. It does this for the entire film, with each row representing one minute of film time. The end result is a kind of unique fingerprint for that film. A sort of movie DNA showing the colour hues as well as the rhythm of the editing process.”
I like this collection of photographs called Wee Planets. Each photo is a panorama stitched and warped in a way that makes the scene look like a little globe floating in the void. Some of my favorites are the Eiffel planet, glass building planet, Louvre planet, and the Luxor obelisk planet. [via dooce]
Last October in London the Detour Exhibition was held to showcase how creatives use their Moleskine notebooks. There’s more than 70 videos flipping through the work of illustrators, designers, architects, writers, and other Moleskine afficionados.
Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void wrote a manifesto on creativity over at ChangeThis.
I Went to a Bookbinding Workshop!
This past weekend I went to a leatherbound bookbinding workshop. I spent 4 hours learning from the wise and affable Berwyn Hung of Praxium Press, which is just outside of Atlanta. Berwyn does workshops for a bunch of other book forms, as well as teaching letterpress and boxmaking. I’m absolutely going back as soon as I can fit it in. Here’s a look at my finished product. It’s about 6 inches on either side, bound in pigskin:
Here’s a glimpse of the nifty blue endpapers:
So yeah, I had a blast. You can see the full documentary of the workshop process in my Flickr photo set.
Tom Edwards makes comics on ceramics/ panels on pottery.
Whose art is it? Interesting essay in Newsweek about museum acquisition and returning artworks to their countries of origin:
Why should objects from ancient civilizations go back to modern nations that didn’t exist when the art was created? Yes, the law “must be obeyed,” he said, but antiquities “are the patrimony of all mankind.” In other words, who really owns the past?
A medieval bestiary with some good links to old manuscript illustrations, engravings, woodcuts, etc.
Jen Stark makes incredible sculptures from hand-cut stacks of construction paper. [via dooce]
“The problem with kitsch is deeper than its appeal to the mob. Kitsch is an insult to the purposes of art.”
Tiny Showcase is releasing a cool limited-edition set of letterpress artwork to accompany the release of Beasts!, an illustrated, collaborative bestiary of old supernatural creatures.
Mental note: I need to check out Art House in Decatur. In the meanwhile, I think I’ll sign up for this Million Little Pictures interactive exhibit thing they’re doing: “We’re sending out disposable cameras to hundreds of people and then we’re going to plaster our walls with the photos.”
An archive of rare books on calligraphy, penmanship, and pen art; they’re all out of print, but still available as PDF and image files. I can’t believe how clean some of the illustrations are, like this deer.
Here’s some artwork that represents everyday scenes by using the names of the objects to build them.
Here’s an interesting idea for highbrow post-ironic art-qua-self-conscious-subject (etc.): paintings of the descriptions of paintings.
Mark Larson 