Machinarium is a point-and-click adventure game with a unique look; the product of hand drawn environments and characters by artists from Amanita Design.

The game, as far as I understand it, involves moving a small robot through a series of environments in search of something. The images have a wonderful quality of texture, imaginative design and a sense of atmosphere and age.

There is a trailer on the website for the game, and, despite the disclaimer that has been there for months, there is also a playable online demo as well as a downloadable demo available from the Amanita Design Blog.

There are also large wallpaper size images available on the Machinarium site. (I can’t give you direct links because the site is in Flash.)

Last fall, before the game’s release, Boing Boing featured an article with preliminary concept sketches by Jakub Dvorský and Adolf Lachman, as well as finished screen captures from the game.

I believe Adolf Lachman is the lead artist. You can find more of his work here.

Dr. Fritz Kahn was a Berlin based gynecologist who wrote and illustrated a number of popular science books that showed the processes of the human body as though they were machines.

While the metaphors may be limited in terms of actually understanding biological functions, they make for great imagery.

Kahn was active in the 1920’s. In the 1930’s his books were banned by the Nazis and copies were burned along with other works by Jewish intellectuals. He was expelled from Germany, and just before the onset of WW II, escaped from Europe to the U.S. with personal help from Albert Einstein.

There is a website devoted to Kahn and his work, that includes a gallery.

A large reproduction of the image above (shown with details) can be found at the National Library of Medicine as part of their Dream Anatomy feature (see my post on Dream Anatomy).

His book, Fritz Kahn: Man Machine Maschine Mensch is still available in an edition that includes both the original German text and an English translation.

Henning M. Lederer has created an animated and interactive interpretation of the work above, for which there is a preview video on YouTube.

[Via Cyriaque Lamar on io9]

Pencil vs. Camera is project by Belgian painter, illustrator, caricaturist and photographer Ben Heine, in which he draws part of a scene, usually in a fanciful interpretation of it, and then takes a photograph of the drawing held up against the original scene or photograph.

The drawing is usually on a ragged-edged, odd shaped piece of paper, creating a more interesting intersection between the photograph and drawing. In some cases he plays rather fast and loose with his rendition of the scene, in others, his drawing is quite faithful.

Heine has posted the 13 drawings that are (so far) part of this project to a Flickr set, as well as posting them on his blog.

You can see most of the images to date on the page with his 13th image (mildly NSFW).

[Via Metafilter]

70 Million is a song by Hold Your Horses, a French-American band, that has been made into a video by L’Ogre Productions in which members of the band (and presumably a few friends) pose in hilarious mock-ups of 25 or 30 famous paintings from the history of Western Art.

If you get tired of guessing, you can try similarity based image search, or you can just cop out and visit Flavorwire, where Kelsey Keith has put together screen captures from the video with most (but not all) of the referenced paintings.

Somebody (the video director?) has a sense of humor — and a pretty good grasp of art history.

[Might be considered mildly NSFW]

[Via MetaFilter]

NuFormer is a design firm based in the Netherlands. They have developed a computer-based projection system for creating the illusion of moving, 3-dimensional alterations to the surfaces of buildings.

The results are striking, as you can see in this video on Vimeo. Bear in mind that these are not CGI in the usual sense, the computer imagery is in the projections on the buildings, not in the manipulation of the video images themselves. This is essentially what you would see if you were standing on the street in front of the buildings.

Take note of what each of the two buildings actually looks like early in the video, as their actual appearance will be delightfully called into question in the course of the display.

[Via Metafilter]

Like its predecessor, The Zoomquilt I, which I wrote about in 2006, The Zoomquilt II is a collaborative art project by 34 different artists.

Basically an amusement, this is an animated sequence of scenes, each one of which is related to the others by a transitional area within the image that allows for a continuous zoom, one scene leading into the next, leading into the next and so on.

The effect is nicely hypnotic, and the images are fun pseudo-Surrealism, full of monsters and trippy landscapes. You can control the speed and direction of the zoom with a slider on a pop-out panel at the left, that also contains the credits.

The Flash based animation is set to render to the size of the browser window, so maximize your browser for best effect.

In what may turn out to be an unfortunate choice, one of the participants used Disney characters in one of the scenes, so if the web site is hosted anywhere that has a copyright treaty with the U.S. this version may not be available for long. Enjoy it while you can.

[Via BoingBoing]

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]