I don’t often talk about my own projects on Lines and Colors, but sometimes they’re enough fun to be worthy of note.

PumpkinMixer is my new app for the iPhone and iPod touch. Like my other apps, DinoMixer and MonsterMixer, it was developed with my friend and colleague Leon Stankowski, who created the coding to fit with my design and illustrations, worked with me on the functionality and coordinated the sound.

Similar to the other “Mixer” apps, PumpkinMixer is based loosely on the old Surrealist game of Exquisite Corpse, in which artists would fold over paper and draw three independent parts of a drawing, head, body and legs, without seeing the outcome until all were in place. This concept made its way into popular culture as a children’s game (my friends and I played it in elementary school), and was eventually adapted in publishing as “mix-n-match” children’s picture books (usually spiral-bound, with stiff cardboard pages that are divided in three).

PumpkinMixer, like DinoMixer and MonsterMixer, is an electronic version of this. In the case of PumpkinMixer, you swipe side to side to swap sets of eyes, noses and mouths, with an extra horizontal band at the top to switch between three backgrounds. Swiping on the iPhone screen vertically switches between pumpkins and swaps out the colors of the animated “candle flame” behind the face cut-outs.

In designing the interface and creating the artwork, which was done digitally in Painter and Photoshop in the same way I draw my webcomic, Argon Zark!, I faced the same challenges I outlined in my post about creating the artwork for DinoMixer.

Like many illustration projects, this one, in addition to the design and technical challenges, had a deadline. Since PumpkinMixer just made it through the App Store approval process and became available today, one day before Halloween, you might say we just made it; though we obviously had an earlier release in mind.

On the other hand, you could say we’re just really really early for next Halloween!

Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s wonderfully bizarre blendings of nature and humankind, incorporating natural forms like vegetables, twigs and leaves as well as fish and other small animals in the representation of human faces, can still “turn heads” today, as they must have in the 16th Century.

Largely forgotten shortly after his death and re-discovered in the 20th Century, Arcimboldo is the subject of a new exhibition at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Arcimboldo, 1526-1593: Nature and Fantasy includes sixteen examples of his work, seen here in the U.S. for the first time. The exhibition also includes drawings by Da Vinci and Durer, along with other works intended to provide context for the paintings.

His hallucinatory arrangements of images within a larger image delighted the Surrealists, who saw in him a precursor to their dream inspired visions. His “still life” paintings (done at a time when still life was not an accepted genre) that only revealed their human face when inverted, have entered pop culture in the form of countless “optical illusion” variations on the theme.

The National Gallery has provided a very nice PDF Exhibition Brochure, that can be downloaded from the right hand column of the exhibition page, as well as a short video.

Arcimboldo, 1526-1593: Nature and Fantasy will be on view until January 9, 2011.

For more, see my previous post on Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

[Via Art Daily]

Actually, pseudo tilt-shift Van Gogh, but that’s a small quibble.

Tilt-shift photography is a process in which depth of field and lens angle are manipulated to make a real scene look like a miniature.

The effect can be simulated in Photoshop with judicious selections and applications of blur filters.

The folks over at ArtCyclopedia, one of my favorite online art resources, decided to apply the Photoshop version to some paintings, just to see what would happen.

The chose some of Van Gogh’s paintings as their subjects. The results are uneven, but where the effect works, it works quite well, and produces amusing and enlightening versions of familiar paintings that have the charm of children’s pop-up books or dioramas.

At best, they let us look at these paintings with fresh eyes, always a delight.

[Via Gizmodo]

OK, after years of resisting, I’ve finally decided to start using Twitter.

Despite the original intention that Twitter be used to be “sociable” and inform your friends and “followers” that you’re having 2% milk on your Cap’n Crunch this morning, I’ve always thought of Tweets as basically 140-character blog posts. I just couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to do with 140-character blog posts.

But it’s occurred to me over time that in my digging and sorting through the attics and basements of the internet, gathering the seeds for Lines and Colors posts, I encounter lots of tidbits of intriguing links and items that are interesting enough to mention, but not something to which I want to dedicate a full post (or at least not at that point in time).

So most of my Tweets will consist of short mentions and links to things of potential interest to Lines and Colors readers (as well as announcements of new posts).

You can follow my 140 character or less ramblings at http://twitter.com/CharleyParkerLC.

(Note: there is already a “linesandcolors” on Twitter. Probably a nice person, but not me. There’s also a CharleyParker, again not me. Price you pay for coming to the party late.)

Those of you who have been living in a cave on the tip of Tierra del Fuego for the last four years and are unfamiliar with Twitter, can find more here and here. (You don’t need an account to view the posts on the page linked above, but an account lets you follow multiple sources and become a twit, er… Tweeter, yourself.)

(Image above: Common Bluebird, John James Audubon)

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]