Cartoonist and illustrator Chuck Dillon, who teaches at the Hussian School of Art here in Philadelphia, has condensed some of his observations about students over his 10 years of teaching, and produced cartoon drawings/infographics of 20 student “types”.

Inspired in part by Daniel Clowes Art School Confidentaial, a graphic story (made into a movie by Terry Zwigoff) that did a bit of similar classification of art students, Dillon came up with 20 classifications, like Student 1.0, the Anime Student, the Snob/Fine Art Student, the Mom Student, the Comic Book/Geek Student, etc.

Dillon posted them on his blog, 30×30, asking “Which Student are You?“.

You may be disinclined to identify, as most of his characterizations are negative and drawn from the inevitable frustrations of a teacher who is trying to communicate something through the barriers people often erect in the name of identity, but it’s amusing to see his take on them.

Personally, I found it difficult to identify for another reason. Enough years have passed since I was in art school that many of his types don’t resonate with me, largely because the social/pop culture phenomena to which they’re tied (anime, metal, gaming) didn’t exist at the time. Other types with which I might have identified (60’s counterculture types) no longer apply. Also I went to a different kind of art school, Hussian is a small commercial art school, a sharp contrast in some ways to the medium sized fine arts academy that I attended.

Still some things are universal, and even though we all know it’s not a Good Thing to classify people by their appearance, it’s fun to sort into “types”.

It’s also fun to compare Dillon’s categorization of student types with his assessment of himself over time in a two part series called “Through the years…” and “Through the Years (part2)“, which preceded his student types, and was inspired by the Draw yourself as a teen meme started by webcomics artist Dave Valeza (see my post about Draw yourself as a teen).

The rest of Dillon’s blog varies from posts about his process to train sketches to various finished and unfinished projects, like his Philadelphia Zoo Annual Report Comic Strip. Dillon also has a web site which showcases some of his other work.

[Via Drawn!]

Regular readers will know that I rarely feature my own projects or work on Lines and Colors, but once in a while I’ll be indulgent (as on my birthday, which happens to be today), particularly if I have a project going that is of interest.

I tend to be involved in many things — web site design, web comics, Flash animation, cartooning, sketching and painting, among others.

I also have a long running fascination with dinosaurs and paleontological art. Recently, I had the opportunity to combine several of those skill sets and interests; and, along with a two friends of mine, programmer Leon Stankowski and artist/sound designer Bruce Gulick, created an application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

If you ever wanted to put a tyrannosaurus head on a pachycephalosaurus body and add a stegosaurus tail — there’s an app for that!   It’s called DinoMixer.

DinoMixer is an amusement, in which kids and dinosaur art fans of all ages can mix and match dinosaur heads, bodies and tails to make crazy mixed-up dinosaurs, or un-mix them to match up the real dinosaurs.

I designed the app and did the illustration for it, which proved to be an interesting process.

Any form of illustration has its intended method of final display, from paperback book cover to CD jewel-box to computer monitor to console game screen. The iPhone is its own display paradigm.

If you haven’t seen one in person, the screen is very nice, it’s 480×320 pixels displayed in a relatively small area, so the the actual pixels-per-inch resolution is sharper than most computer displays (160ppi vs 103ppi or less for monitors) and the color is excellent; so even though the screen is small, the image is detailed and sharp. It’s a nice platform to do art for.

I had to do a little digging to find out the preferred image format. Though the iPhone will display a variety of image files, PNG is the native image file-type for the device. PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is an underrated and terrific image format that allows both a wide color gamut of millions of colors and a full channel of alpha transparency.

Beyond those basics, though, I had given myself a challenge simply in the design of my particular app. To make the dinosaur parts match up, I had to divide the screen proportions into a grid, one that would accommodate the disparate body sizes and shapes of the various animals, and allow them to meet up at critical junctures where the illusion of joining them together could be accomplished. In addition, I wanted the dinosaurs to be relatively large on the screen, and use the small area to best advantage.

Fortunately, I’ve had this idea in one form or another percolating in my brain pan for several years (originally intended as a web feature, in dHTML or Flash), so the grid was a matter of adaptation to the iPhone screen proportions and refinement. But it was still quite a challenge to draw the animals so that they fit the grid, matched against one another and still retained a degree of scientific accuracy (there is no one quicker to notice discrepancies than a 10-year old dinosaur fan).

Once the dinosaurs were penciled to fit within the grid, I inked them, and in saying “penciled” or “inked”, I’m speaking of the digital equivalents, using a Wacom tablet and Corel Painter. I then applied digitally painted color and texture using Painter and Photoshop, in much the same method as I have used for the 15 years I’ve been doing my Argon Zark! digital web comic.

The use of ink lines filled with color wasn’t just a choice from my comfort with the technique, but vital, I realized, to producing the sense of unity necessary to make the dinosaur “mixes” work — the outlines connect precisely at their juncture points and form a whole.

I also took pains to blend the colors to an extent. While I wanted the colors of the dinosaurs to vary, to provide eye-pleasing variety, I also wanted some relationship between them. Though it’s difficult to see in the reduced resolution images, I found that working multiple colors into each dominant color, a technique often used by painters to produce overall harmony, was useful in giving the different colored dinos a bit of additional visual “glue”. Each of the dominant colors had accents and highlights of several of the other dominant colors within them.

In addition, I had to design a background that would showcase the animals and also connect them to the ground with a shadow, one that would meet the feet of all of the different shaped dinosaurs and serve as a universal shadow for all of them.

Lastly, I was not just creating illustrations that mixed and matched with one another, I was creating an application, and interface, with room for branding and functional controls, and the images had to work within that.

The final images, in particular the dinosaur heads, bodies and tails, had to be saved out as set-sized PNG files with transparent backgrounds, that would line up precisely with one another and allow the background to be seen behind them.

I created the original art at a much higher resolution than the target screen (3000 x 2000 pixels), both to give myself lots of leeway in creating detailed art, and to allow for repurposing the images (perhaps for T-shirts or other uses). I do the same with my web comic, create the original art at many times its intended display size.

10 dinosaurs (divided into 30 parts), a background, splash screen, nav bar and application icon later, I’m happy to say the resulting app works well, and has been getting good reviews. The seemingly simple premise took a lot of work (I conservatively estimate 200+ hours just on my part), but part of that was uptake on learning how to design and publish an iPhone app.

You can see the DinoMixer web site here, which includes screen shots as well as a short video, and those who use iTunes can see the DinoMixer app page in the iTunes App Store (link opens in iTunes).

I just submitted a new upgrade version of DinoMixer (v1.1) to the App Store yesterday, with features that include an additional dinosaur, multiple backgrounds and a dinosaur name box that pops up when you match a dinosaur correctly. If all goes well, it should make its way through the App Store approval process and be released in about a week.

Like many iPhone and iPod Touch apps, DinoMixer will be contine be upgraded with free revisions that add features and functionality. In my case, I’ll be drawing and adding new dinosaurs and backgrounds (as well as other features) for weeks to come. I can also update or revise the existing art whenever I want to invest the time and effort. It’s an illustration project with no set end or limit, something that makes it particularly appealing.

“From Washington to Obama in Less than 4 Minutes” is the description line on this little amusement by “HerBunk”, the handle of a YouTube contributor who describes himself as “an old retired guy who likes to play with computers”.

In it, he morphs the likenesses of all of the American presidents to date from one to another in sequence.

The older ones, of course, are represented by paintings, which is one factor that makes it interesting. The filmmaker has tried to use paintings where he could, though some of the more recent presidents are represented by photographs, or manipulated photographs.

The other thing that makes it interesting to me is the fascinating way that morphing between faces points out the way we distinguish faces from one another, and provides a few clues about the nature of portraiture.

For another example, see my post about a video that uses similar morphing, in this case all paintings, to demonstrate The History of Women in Art.

The only disturbing thing about the presidential history morph sequence is that the last few are genuinely creepy.

[Via The Public Reader]

Anyone who is familiar with Watchmen, the darkly dystopian and very adult graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, or the much anticipated feature film adaptation that is being released today; and/or those familiar with 1980’s style Saturday morning superhero cartoons; will get a kick out of this perfect and spot on send-up by Harry Partridge.

He’s got it all down perfect, Ozymandias and his mutant pet recast as Shaggy and Scooby-Doo, the light and happy take on Rorschach (”I’m nutty!”), the Josie and the Pussycats girl band version of Silk Spectre, and the gang sitting around eating pizza, encouraging you to say no to drugs and be in bed by 10; plus lots of “in” jokes for those familiar with the graphic novel… absolutely hilarious.

The funniest thing is that you know for certain that it could have happened. The people who made these cartoons were so monumentally clueless about their formulas that they would have cheerfully taken on the material and “cleaned it up” for the little Saturday morning cereal consumers.

Who watches the Watchmen, indeed.

[Via Geekdad/Wired]

Whenever we look at a representational drawing or painting that appears to have depth or dimensionality, we are looking at a “projection”, a two-dimensional representation of a three dimensional object or scene.

There are several types or projections, the most familiar are “perspective projection” (traditional linear perspective), in which lines drawn from the sides of parallel objects converge on vanishing points, and “oblique projection”, in which those lines remain parallel (the “Sim City” look).

In any of them it is possible to create an image that superficially seems reasonable, but would actually be impossible as a three dimensional object. Many of us are familiar with these in the form of traditional “optical illusions” and in the graphics of M.C. Escher.

Andreas Aronsson is, in his words, a “Professional IT‑technician. Spare time multimedia experimenter. In Sweden.” He has a fascination with impossible objects, and regularly posts his own playful “Impossible Figures” to his blog.

These often take the form of objects (usually done in perspective projection) with shared sides or lines of connection that defy real-world geometry. They make for fun visuals; and examination of them generates a playful brain-tickle that gives us pause to reflect on the nature of the visual presentation of objects, what we take for granted and how easily our eye can be fooled into accepting the three dimensionality of lines in a two-dimensional surface (even if that surface is a screen).

You can flip through the posts on his site tagged with “Impossible Figure“. You can also read his page “About Impossible Figures” in which he talks about his fascination with them and his working process in creating his images.

[Via Neatorama]

An anamorphosis is an image that is distorted in such a way that it only assumes the proportions of recognizable forms when viewed from a certain angle, or by reflection in a curved surface.

The term comes from the Greek anamorphoun, to transform. Anamorphic images have a long history in art. The earliest examples in Western art are found in Leonardo’s notebooks, though anamorphic images may have been developed in Chinese art around the same time.

Anamorphic perspective was employed in the illusionistic painting of church vaults, like those of Andrea Pozzo (image above, top, large version here) and Andrea Mantegna, but it has most often appeared in art as a curiosity or entertainment; or been used for the creation of hidden or secret images, requiring a matching mirrored surface to reveal their true nature.

Anamorphic images can be of as much interest to scientists as they are to artists, as NewScientist reports in their mention of a recent seminar on technical aspects of anamorophic art at the London Knowledge Lab; and an event at the National Gallery in London called Curious Perspective: Anamophosis in Art.

The NewScientist article is accompanied by a slideshow of anamorphic images.

The event at the National Gallery in London centered on the wonderfully enigmatic painting The Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger, which is in their permanent collection. I devoted a post to The Ambassadors in 2006.

One of the notable modern applications of artistic anamorphosis that is missing from the NewScientist article (and many other resources) is the use of anamorphic images in sidewalk art, as exemplified by the work of Julian Beever and Kurt Wenner.

You can also add to the list the illusionistic point-of-view dependent paintings of Felice Varini and the modern continuation of traditional anamorphic art by István Orosz (image above, bottom). I’ve gathered some other anamorphic art resources below.

[NewScientist article link via Digg]

Trial and error.

What artist has not at some point resorted to “I’ll just try this and see if it looks better.“?

You might say that, in light of Darwin’s model of natural selection, nature itself does the same: make a genetic mutation or two, or a billion, and see what works.

Swedish programmer Roger Alsing has created a playful experiment in “genetic programming” applied to image making, in which he wrote a small program for rendering 50 translucent polygons into an image area.

He set it to mutate slightly with each iteration, so that each pass of the program produces a different distribution of the polygons (the “genetic mutation”).

The fact that the polygons are translucent allows for many smaller subtle shapes within the composition, produced by overlapping areas of color, like laying an area of yellow glaze over both blue and green shapes in an oil painting.

At the end of each rendering sequence, the program uses a “fitness function”, basically a small routine to compare the resultant image pixel by pixel with a target image, in this case an image of the Mona Lisa.

Based on the “fitness” of the image, the program keeps either the new “dna” or the existing “dna”, whichever is more like the target, as the basis of the next mutation and iteration.

Trial and error. Survival of the fittest.

There is a selection of images on Alsing’s blog showing various renders, from which I’ve pulled a few representative samples, above. (For those who are programmatically inclined, there is also a faq with some of the basics.)

Under each of the sample images is a filename that shows the number of times the program had to run to reach that particular image.

The one at bottom-right shows 904,314 incidences of “I’ll just try this and see if it looks better“.

[Via Kottke]

The FM 100 Hue Test is a seemingly simple test of your ability to discern close hue relationships, a sort of “color IQ test”.

The interactive is provided by x-rite, a company that makes Munsell-based color measurement products.

It consists of four bands of small squares of varying colors. Each band represents a scale of colors between two specific hues, represented by fixed squares at either end.

The task is to rearrange the drag-and-drop squares within each row to set them in the appropriate order of hue.

When you get down to the fine discrimination between hues that are very close, it becomes harder than it seems at first.

You get a score at the end, “0″ being perfect, and the opportunity to compare your score to others of your gender and age group. There is also a feature, that I was unable to take advantage of because I came up with a perfect score, that allows you to see the color ranges within which you had the most difficulty discerning the close hue relationships.

Scorekeeping and the game-like element aside, this is an enlightening exercise in comparing closely related hues, something of concern to anyone working in color, particularly painters looking to match the colors they see when mixing paint.

One of the keys that helped me with the exercise was not being shy about moving closely related colors side to side after they were in position, making it a bit easier to compare them briefly in a different context. Many of the color squares, arranged in their correct relationship, can appear identical until you shift them one position to the right or left. That in itself is an interesting phenomenon.

As always when viewing or judging color, whether in isolation, on a palette, in a digital color picker or in a painting, the important factor is the relationship of a color to its adjacent colors.

Have fun.

[Via Art School at Home, via Making a Mark]

Back in 2003, I stumbled across a promotion for the book The Da Vinci Code, little known at the time, in the form of a series of web-based clues, originating on author Dan Brown’s web site and leading through a series of automated emails and other web sites to an eventual puzzle solution that garnered the first group of participants free copies of the book. That initial Di Vinci Code “Webquest” was, I think, in no small part responsible for the web buzz that helped push the book into bestseller status.

I couldn’t help but think of that again when I received a rather cryptic email from the folks at LAIKA, an animation studio in Oregon (983 miles from Hollywood, as a later missive points out), informing me that “Coraline is a fan of your work” and promising a mysterious gift, to be delivered by package carrier.

This was a promotion for the new stop-motion animated film, Coraline, due in early February, adapted from the book by Neil Gaiman, and directed by Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach.

(Stop-motion is a painstaking animation process in which small models are carefully positioned and re-positioned for each shot, one frame at a time, 24 frames per second of running film time. The models utilize hundreds of variations in faces to create mouth and eye movements and expressions. It is a filmmaking process that requires a Zen-like level of patience and an obsessive watchmaker’s devotion to detail.)

I was expecting a small package with a simple promotional object, perhaps a booklet of postcards or something similar, but received instead a sizable box, well packed for shipping, in which was an astonishingly elaborate series of objects.

The outermost was a wooden box, marked to hold seed packets, labeled “Ferry’s” and declaring that “Every Packet Dated”, “Flower Packets 10¢ (Except as Marked)” and “Vegetable Packets 5¢”.

The box was complete with an inner label informing the vendor how to set up and arrange a seed packet display, below which was loosely glued an envelope, sealed with wax into which was set a black button. The envelope contained a note from the team at LAIKA. The note let me know that this was a one-of-a-kind collection assembled for me personally, a fact reinforced by details that let me know they were indeed familiar with Lines and Colors, the small metal plate on the lid of the box stating “Handmade in Oregon, 15/50″, as well as some references I’ve since found to other unique packages in the series, that were sent to other bloggers.

Inside the box, under fancy patterned wrapping paper used as packing, was an array of objects: a large and antique-looking scrapbook, closed with cloth ribbons and a button (buttons being a key feature in the story), a heavy skeleton key attached to an old and worn looking luggage tag with a label of “Coraline dot com, Password: BUTTONEYES”, and a small ribboned gift box containing two large buttons, a needle and a spool of thread. The latter, one learns on investigating the story, is for replacing one’s eyes in order to remain in Coraline’s alternate world. Mmmmm….

The scrapbook, though, was the main attraction, and offered surprises on par with my initial shock at the extravagance of the entire package.

It opens, past patterned inside cover papers that match the wrapping paper used as packing, with a bookplate signed by director Henry Selick, declaring the volume to be Coraline – Magical Garden – Book No. 1 of 1.

Under a sheet of sewing-pattern tissue that frames the pages front and back, the introductory frontspiece tells that: “Coraline Jones moves into a house situated on large, rambling grounds. In her real world and her other world, the pleasure of exploring such uninhabited nature is hers, and now yours. In this book, you can follow the exacting replicas of flora we hand-made to make Coraline’s fantastic garden come to life.”

What follows is a beautiful series of images, with reproductions of production drawings and paintings as well as photographs of hand-made models, depicting various plants, flowers and odd flora, elaborate garden plans and related images from the film.

As I leafed through the book (sorry, couldn’t resist), I was struck not only by the painstaking work that went into the design and creation of the flora for the film, but the unbelievable level of detail and attention that had gone into this package; which was indeed, as the initial email had promised, a gift, not merely a promotional gimmick. This is like a nice book of production art that I might purchase if it were available in a commercial printing, but far more than that, a hand-made one-of-a-kind art object, an assemblage with an attention to detail bringing to mind the obsessively designed book/object creations of Chris Ware.

The images are printed on antique toned card stock, and hand-placed into traditional photo-album corners, some eighteen pages of them. They range from individual plant studies to production art for whole scenes. Many of them are exceptionally beautiful, all of them are delightful and indicative of the effort and imagination that has gone into the making of the film; visual ideas that have been carried out by a team of designers, illustrators, model makers, puppet makers and animators, evidently devoted to (obsessed with) crafting Coraline’s world with uncanny detail, visual texture and other-worldly delight.

Missing, unfortunately, are credits for the images, particularly the illustrations. I know that the superb illustrator Tadhiro Uesugi has done a number of illustrations for the production of the film, and I believe the illustration I’ve chosen above, bottom, is reliably one of his, the others I’m less sure of. His own web site doesn’t seem to make mention of the project. Hopefully more of the actual production art will be made available, and eventually released as a book that everyone can buy.

In the meanwhile, I’ve done something I essentially never do and posted a large number of images here from the “unboxing” of the Coraline Mystery Box, starting with the box itself and running through the pages of images. My apologies for the limited quality and lighting in my photographs, but I don’t have the facilities or time at the moment to do better, I’ll try to replace them in the future if I can.

www.linesandcolors.com/coraline-mystery-box-images

The one thing that was a bit anti-climactic after the amazing package, was the coraline.com web site, to which I (and you) now have a key (”BUTTONEYES”), that provides access to a short promo film showing the assembly of some of the models, and clips from the film, to the tune of early 1960’s “here is your modern kitchen” music.

The password key is one of several, as I’ve found on looking up references to some of the other unique Coraline Mystery Boxes that have been received by other bloggers. Each different key opens the door to a different promotional video. The films are good, and well worth watching, but leave me looking for more (which, perhaps, is the idea).

Hopefully, there is more to come as the movie release date approaches, and there is an option at the end of the clips to sign up for a mailing list.

There is a currently more filled-out site devoted to the Coraline movie on FilmInFocus, with a Flash-based puzzle interface, that rewards the finding of clues with access to additional video clips, scenes from the film and info about the characters and story.

Of course there is also the original book, and a graphic story adaptation with art by P. Craig Russell.

You can see a number of the other fascinating and wonderfully varied Coraline Mystery Boxes that various bloggers have received on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive site, with links to the individual postings by the recipients detailing the contents. As a promotional campaign, this is certainly one of the most clever, imaginative, and work intensive I’ve ever encountered or heard of.

If the Coraline film reflects the imagination, detail, artistry and obsessive effort exemplified by my encounters with the LAIKA team so far, it should be quite a treat.

AddendumThe Coraline web site has been updated with a more extensive interactive site, and no longer requires of uses the passwords. The small trailers can still be accessed by exploring various sections of the site.

As a long time Photoshop user, I just love this version of the Photoshop interface as represented by real-world objects.

It’s a poster for software-asli.com, the creative credits are: creative director : Hendra Lesmono, art director : Andreas Junus & Irawandhani Kamarga, copywriter : Darrick Subrata and photgrapher : Anton Ismael.

The mock up is actually quite large, as you can see in the accompanying Flickr set that shows how they assembled it. Be sure to view the full size image to get the real effect.

I love the little details like the fact that the grabber hand glove is smudged.

[Via BoingBoing]