In celebration of what would have been Maurice Sendak’s 85th birthday today (June 10, 2013), Google has a nicely done, affectionate, respectful and fairly extensive tribute to the artist in the form of an animated Google Doodle on the Google home page.

After today, look to the Google Doodles archive, or view this video capture on YouTube.

Shintaro Ohata is an artist from Hiroshima, Japan who is both a painter and a sculptor.

Artists who are both sculptors and painters are not unusual. Ohata, however, frequently combines the two mediums in single works in which a painting and sculpture are displayed together as a mixed two dimensional – three dimensional work.

The sculptures are textured and painted in a way that carries forward the colors and textures of a painting. The painting and sculpture are then arranged and lit in a way that gives them additional visual continuity. These form scenes, in which the painting acts as a backdrop for the sculpture and the sculpture acts as a three dimensional projection of the painting.

As remarkable as the effect is in photographs, I would love to see these in person.

Ohata also paints stand-alone paintings in acrylic, in which the figures in the paintings bear an uncanny resemblance to his sculpted figures (above, bottom).

[Via Gizmodo]

Back in 2010 I reported on They Draw and Cook, a project in which illustrators and other artists contribute recipes in the form of illustrations.

In something of a variation on that idea, food site Saveur has been running Recipe Comix, a series in which they have asked a number of comics artists to contribute recipes in the form of comic strips.

The index page shows an excerpt from each strip anda capsule description fo the recipe. ClLick through for the full feature in each case.

(Strip excerpts above: Laura Park, Joe Ollman, Jillian Tamaki, Lisa Hanawalt, Frank Gibson and Becky Dreistadt, Ryan North, Gordon McAlpin, Lucy Knisley)

[Via MetaFilter]

Ji Lee is a designer and illustrator, born in Korea, raised in Brazil and currently living and working in New York.

Inspired by an art school typography class assignment almost twenty years ago, Lee has been since then working with the concept of creating images out of the letterforms of words that depict something of the meaning or character of that word.

The result is a long-term project Lee calls Word as Image.

(You will sometimes see logo designers trying to work with a similar concept, but in a more limited way.)

In 2011 Lee published a book, Word as Image, that collects 100 words.

A number of the word/images have been animated in a short film with animation by Bran Dougherty-Johnson that can be viewed on Lee’s site or on Vimeo.

On Lee’s website you will also find examples of his personal, professional and editorial work. I find the editorial selection exhibits much of the same kind of “turn things on their head” imagination as the Word as Image project.

[Via MetaFilter]

An art student at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts who lists himself as bENCE hAJDU on Behance has posted a short series of images in which he has used digital image editing to remove the people from some classic paintings and fill in the backgrounds where they once existed.

Makes you think twice.

[Via NewsWorks]

Guido Daniele is an italian painter and illustrator based in Milan.

In 2000, Daniele started creating his “Handimals”, in which he applies body painting techniques to hands, poses them in positions that, along with the painting, result in images that resemble animals, portrayed with a wonderful sense of dynamics.

He has extended this to painted hand images of monuments, flowers and other objects, and his images in this series have been in demand for advertising and commercial clients, including a series for the World Wildlife Federation.

Daniele’s current website features galleries of his hand painting as well as body painting. (Note that the pop-out links to the right of those categories are that appear to say “Advertising Art” are in fact links to two different sections, “Advertising” and “Art”.)

You can also find additional work on his previous website, including his trompe l’oeil murals and other series of advertising art.

You can also find selection of larger images in this article on Beautylish.

[Note: some images in the Body Art section are NSFW.]

[Via Aesthetica Studios]

As much as I love art, I’m also fond of words; and I find the the origin of particular words fascinating because it shows, as in art, how we develop things and put them into use over time. I also like animation.

Mysteries of Vernacular is a series of short, artfully crafted stop-motion animations explaining the origin of individual English language words.

Set in a bookcase website interface, the animations themselves largely take place in and on the pages of books. You can view them small in the context of the interface, or, once they are started, click again to view them larger (usually on Vimeo).

The project is young and the bookshelves are still thin, and some of the volumes are blank (“coming soon”). As of this writing there are videos for the words Assassin, Clue, Hearse and Pants, accessed by clicking on the book spines showing the letter with which they begin.

In addition to being amused, you may actually learn something about the origin of words, or at least get a Clue.

[Via hurdy gurdy girl on MetaFilter]

OK, now this is how you do an online wedding invitation.

I can’t possibly do better in describing “Jess and Russ” than Scott McCloud did in his tweet this morning:

“Another day, another stunning, collaborative, parallax-scrolling, infinite canvas wedding invitation.”

Exactly.

Collaborative refers to the contributions that the couple, both designers, elicited from their friends — many of whom are apparently talented illustrators (and some of whom I’ve featured previously on Lines and Colors).

The “infinite canvas” refers to McCloud’s own long term experimentation with the capabilities of the web in presenting comics and other graphic material without limitations of dimension as in print.

In an infinite canvas presentation, separate panels, text blocks or other bits of content are tied together in directional continuity by lines, borders or other graphic connectors, in this case in a long vertical scroll (image above, top).

“Parallax scrolling” is a method of limited animation achieved by dividing HTML content into planes that are moved by different degrees when scrolling a page.

The images I’ve shown above are just to give you a glimpse of the surprising quality and variety of the illustrations the project encompasses, but they don’t give you any of the feeling of the effect of the parallax scrolling animation.

There is an About page that describes the project and gives contributor credits.

(Images above: Josh Cochran, Christopher Silas Neal, Frank Stockton, Alex Eben Meyer, Sam Weber, Neil Swaab, Chris Buzelli, James Gulliver Hancock)

[Via Scott McCloud]