This Is Where We Live is a short stop-motion animation by Apt Studio and Asylum Films.

It is a promo for 4th Estate Publishers, and the “where” it refers to is the world of books. The designers and animators have taken a literal take on the phrase and created a world made, literally, from books.

You can see a time-lapse video of the animators preparing materials and another of them arranging a shot for the film here.

The animation was produced over a three week period in 2008, and was produced to mark the publisher’s 25th anniversary.

It starts, aptly enough, with a bit of flip book style animation in the pages of a book, and transitions nicely into a walk through the the book world; including nicely atmospheric “night” scenes, in which the darker side of things is displayed.

Charming, imaginative and beautifully done.

[Via Metafilter]

Ericka Lugo is an illustrator based in Puerto Rico. Beyond that, I know little as her web presence doesn’t include much in the way of bio or a published credits list.

Her illustrations, done digitally or in ink and gouache, have a whimsical stylized feeling and are often punctuated with passages of bright red. I like her use of outline, which sometimes has a “lost and found” quality.

Both on her blog an in her space on deviantART, you will also find some nicely direct drawings from life.

I’ve written previously about Erik Tiemens, and his blog Virtual Gouache Land.

Tiemens has recently redone his web site at watersketch.com with an emphasis on his gouache and watercolor paintings and sketches. There are also galleries of oil paintings, drawings and photography.

Tiemens’ gouache paintings, though sometimes combined with watercolor or pastel, often take advantage of the unique qualities of gouache that allow it to be both painterly and linear at the same time.

Gouache often gets short shrift as a medium for gallery art, perhaps because it is often associated with design and illustration, or simply seems like the poor bastard child of transparent watercolor.

Tiemens uses it to great effect, contrasting slabs of flat color with drybrush passages, linear hatching and wonderfully loose and suggestive washes of wetter blending. His paintings and drawings sometimes have a feeling of Dutch masters, and at other times reflect his fondness for Corot and the painters of the Barbizon school.

The galleries on his site give an overview of his gallery work, but you will find larger versions of may of the images on his blog.

There is also a brief video demo of gouache sketching in a blog post form 2008.

After graduating from Clemson University, William Smith started his career in advertising, eventually working with clients like Coke, Novartis, Wal-Mart and Procter & Gamble.

In 2008 he shifted into a new career as a concept artist in the gaming industry, and is now working with TimeGate Studios.

His online portfolio is divided into three sections, through which you scroll horizontally. I don’t know anything about the individual projects for which they were created, but there are a variety of environments and scenes, most with a science fiction flavor.

Smith often contrasts bright, high chroma colors with more muted passages, and sometimes with passages of complimentary colors, giving the focal points in the compositions an extra jolt of intensity.

[Via Annalee Newitz on io9]

Charlie Powell is an illustrator whose incisive, entertaining and deftly rendered likenesses of public figures have been featured in print and online publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, The Washington Post, Wired, Fortune, Playboy, Slate.com and Salon.com.

He has a knack for capturing both a likeness and a characteristic pose and expression for his subjects, rendering them in the big-head little-body style common to caricature with both style and wit.

His web site includes 3 portfolio sections of his work, and you can view additional pieces on his iSpot portfolio.

Luc Desmarchelier is an art dierctor at Sony Pictures Entertainment as well as a concept and visual development artist who has also done work for DreamWorks Animation and Amblimation/Universal Studios.

Desmarchelier maintains two blogs, Ushusia, which showcases his professional work, and harmattan, which is devoted to his personal projects, paintings and sketches.

He doesn’t include much biographical information on either, but you can see his professional film credits on the IMDB.

His concept art pieces, in pencil, watercolor, gouache and acrylic as well as digitally painted, are evocative, atmospheric and wonderfully textural, with a marvelous sense of place, season and time of day. His professional blog also includes sketches and the final piece for his contribution to the Totoro Forest Project (image above, top right, see my post on the Totoro Forest Project.)

Thumbing back through his blog posts takes you not only through several films, but through numerous locations that feel like a kind of travel adventure.

In his personal blog, the travel and places are real, and beautifully expressed; particularly in his directly observed but poetically rendered Moleskine sketchbook watercolors (image above, bottom).

You will also find figure studies, and paintings in acrylic and oil, as well as digital sketches in Painter and Photoshop, of subjects and places both real and imagined.

This is an amusing little animation that was made as a course assignment by a design degree student in Singapore, who goes by the handle “saggyarmpit” on Vimeo.

She points out that it was done fairly quickly, the drawings illustrated with technical pen and rough around the edges, and expresses surprise at the degree of attention the piece is getting.

What’s amusing and appealing about the piece is her clever use of folded paper, flip book techniques and stop motion animation to move the character through his parkour motions.

(Parkour, or “the art of moving”, is a practice originating in France of traversing an environment, usually urban, by physically adapting to it using climbing, jumping and running skills that are honed in a way comparable to martial arts training. You may have seen it displayed in the opening of the Casino Royale James Bond film from 2006.)

Here the artist, with post production help from Noel Lee, moves the figure through the illustrated environment, her hands acting as part of the stop motion action.

“Saggyarmpit” does not have a web site yet, but promises one soon.

Jules Breton, whose full name is Jules Adolphe Aimé Louis Breton (what, no hyphens?), was one of the most famous and in demand academic painters of the 19th Century.

He fell into disregard and semi-obscurity in the 20th Century, suffering particularly at the pens of Modernist critics who deemed him one of the terrible academic painters from which Modernism was here to “save” the spirit of pure art.

Though he started as a history painter, for the majority of his career Breton largely devoted himself to images of peasant field workers, seasonal laborers at the bottom of the social ladder, toiling in the fields.

His subjects are represented with sympathy, but his fields are idealized, glowing seas of grain bathed in late day sun. He also portrayed other elements of village life, as in The Commuincants (above, top).

He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, and later in Paris at the atelier of Michel Drolling.

Breton focused in later years on compositions of single female workers, posed in sunlit fields, a genre that proved highly popular with buyers in the U.S. He became highly regarded and his work in demand in the UK and the U.S. as well as his native France.

His later paintings moved from realism to a poetic vision more in keeping with Symbolism. His painting The Song of the Lark (above, bottom left) was the source of the title for Willa Cather’s famous novel.

Reportedly, Van Gogh at one point walked 85 miles to try to meet him, but was put off by Breton’s high wall and never contacted the elder artist.