Since March of last year, a series of wonderful and whimsical paper sculptures have been anonymously left on tables and shelves in libraries in Edinburgh, Scotland.

It feels like something from a novel, and may in some way have a connection to the detective novels of Ian Rankin, but there is no indication he is involved, other than perhaps in inspiring a fan.

The sculptures are made from books and pages of books, and extol the virtues of book and libraries. They were often accompanied by notes, one of which reads in part: …” In support of Libraries, Books, Words, Ideas [...] and All things ‘magic’…”

There were, over a period of months, 10 sculptures left by the mysterious artist, who on the last sculpture left a note signing off with “Cheers Edinburgh it’s been fun!”

Most of the articles I’ve come across refer to images from this Flickr set of photos by Chris Scott.

I’ve written previously about 3-D animation video projection on the sides of buildings, specifically about those created by NuFormer.

I’m uncertain who created this example in Berlin (the only credit line I can find says “Facade Mapping Image Show”, but I can’t find a site for that name), but it’s probably the most striking one I’ve seen.

This is basically a kind of 3-D animation projected against the side of a building, and initially, at least, “mapped” to the buildings surface, allowing the animators to have their way with the building, both as a subject and as a surface for projecting other images.

You can watch it on YouTube or Vimeo or on the BoingBoing site, which is where I learned about it initially.

View it full screen for best effect. It must be even more striking to see this projected against a building in person. The small still images above don’t do justice to the visual charm of the animation.

In this case the entire thing is a commercial – an ad for LG, though the actual advertising component is nicely incorporated. If more ads were this dazzling and visually imaginative, I’d seek them out as entertainment.

[Via BoingBoing]

Here’s a fun notion; the Slate Magazine blog, Culturebox, has put together an interactive color wheel of cartoon characters arranged by their hue (and, correctly enough, by intensity, as indicated by our grayish friends at the center of the wheel).

In the original, you can mouse over the characters for identification.

[Via Cartoon Brew]

1923 aka Heaven (images above, top five) and 1925 aka Hell (above, bottom 5) are two animated film by Max Hattler that were inspired by two paintings by French outsider artist Augustin Lesage.

The two paintings are both named A symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World, one painted in 1923 (above, middle left) and one in 1925 (middle right).

Hattler’s animation loops are just that, motion and sound, no story, and they repeat phrases and sequences with variations in color and other characteristics. They are exercises in rythym, pattern repetition and recursion. They were created over a five day period with students at the Animation Workshop in Viborg , Denmark.

You can see more of Hattler’s animations on his website; I’ll try to post more about Augustin Lesage in an upcoming post.

[Via DATAISNATURE and MetaFilter]

another sight is a website on which artist and designer Mike Guppy displays a series of short art pieces, most using animated gifs, JavaScript, CSS and other web based techniques.

Of them, the one I find most interesting is Selected ~ 2011, a series of animated GIF images in which familiar artworks by Botticelli, Leonardo, Magritte, Munch and Fuselli are represented with with principle elements missing; their formerly occupied space represented in the image by an animation of a selection marquee (sometimes known as “marching ants”), as found in image editors like Photoshop, Fireworks, GIMP and others.

The image above, and detail below it, are still screenshots of the animated image.

When viewing the gallery for Selected, be aware that all of the pieces are on the same page, but arranged horizontally, requiring the use of a horizontal scrollbar at bottom to view them.

Guppy also has a blog, More Sight on which some of the pieces appear.

[Via BoingBoing]

Hobo Lobo of Hamlin is a side-scrolling webcomic by Stevan Zivadinovic that uses multiple planes scrolling at different rates to give a nice dimensional effect, augmented with other touches of animation.

My screen captures above attempt to give some idea of the changing relationship of the planes, but they’re inadequate to the task; you need to see the actual effect.

You can use the controls at top to move through the panoramic images one “scene” at a time, or just grab the horizontal scrollbar at the bottom of the window and have at it.

The animation and multi-plane scrolling are apparently created in HTML and JavaScript rather than Flash, which means you should be able to view the effects on the iPad, but outdated desktop browsers may have issues.

On his “What is this thing?” page, Zivadinovic implores users of Internet Explorer to get a real browser, as well as explaining a few other technical considerations and indicating his intended update schedule; according to which an update should be coming 1:25am (CDT) on this Friday, April 29th, 2011.

The strip, which appears to be loosely based on The Pied Piper of Hamlin, is only two sections long at the moment, but looks promising to be watched for coming updates.

Zivadinovic also has a primary website called The Nihilist Canary, where you can see more of his work.

[Via Scott McCloud]

Back in 2006 I noticed the delightfully idiosyncratic work of a South African artist and illustrator named Ree Treweek (images above, top).

In the time since, I have followed with fascination as Treweek and her partners Jannes Hendrikz and Marcus Smit, collectively known as The Blackheart Gang, produced a strikingly original and truly strange animation titled The Tale of How (above, 2nd down), which brought them to international attention, and leveraged that notice into a successful production company for animated commercial spots called Shy the Sun.

Shy the Sun produced a stunningly bizarre commercial called Sea Orchestra (above, 3rd down) for United Airlines (which was experimenting with exceptionally creative ad spots, like Jamie Caliri’s Dragon).

After that, I found a commercial not shown here in the U.S. that put their eccentric talents in service of selling Bakers Precious Biscuits (above, 4th down).

It was in the latter ad that I think they added to their techniques of combining hand drawings with computer coloring and compositing an additional animation style incorporating miniature models and sets. This approach has been very successful for them and they have utilized both approaches, as well as traditional CGI, in a series of terrific spots and promotions, some well known, others more obscure.

If you’ve ever wondered, as I did initially, who created the psychedelic cat food commercial, Friskies Adventureland (above, 5th down), it was Shy the Sun.

They applied their miniature set skills to ads for the South African subscription TV service Mnet in Ladybug and Firefly (above, 3rd from bottom). More traditional CGI seems to have been the choice for the darker ads for Electronic Arts’ game Alice: Madness Returns.

Treweek has been art director on most of the projects and co-director on some. She also contributed character design to the bizarre creatures seen at the end of Pete Candeland and Passion Pictures’ wild promo for Harmonix “The Beatles Rock Band” (above, 2nd from bottom).

My slightly blurry screen captures don’t begin to tell you what these animations look like in motion, particularly The Tale of How and Sea Orchestra.

There are now also videos available on The Making of The Tale of How, The Making of Sea Orchestra (above, bottom) and The Making of Bakers.

I’m looking forward to whatever projects they take on, as their work continues to be imaginative and original.

Now, if only someone would give them a big pile of money to do a feature length animation…

About Face is a short (4 minute) hand drawn animation featuring a series of nicely imaginative morphing sequences, with animals, faces, even caricatures of figures from history and pop culture, like Picasso and Dal&iacite; (above).

Written and drawn in 1977 by Chris James, with camera work by Julian Holdaway and music by Claude Jouvin, the short demonstrates that imagination, not CGI, is the necessary element for this kind of clever and amusing image dance.

[Via Cartoon Brew]