Japanese artist Nagai Hideyuki has created a fun series of drawings that span two sketchbooks propped at 90° to one another, and when viewed from the proper angle, give the illusion of continuous three dimensionality.

You can see a selection on his website and on his deviantART page.

There is a video on YouTube that gives a clearer picture of the relationship between the two sets of drawings.

[Via Visual News by way of Colossal and io9]

There is a fascination to drawings and paintings in which many figures are arrayed in the same space, often in a semi-aerial view that allows for lots of them to be seen at once.

Argentinian cartoonist and illustrator Daniel Sponton has developed an illustration style that features hundreds of small figures arranged in sometimes complex environments that are wonderfully playful and inventive.

Sponton’s approach to this is in ways similar to, and takes inspiration from, the illustrations of Martin Handford, whose “Where’s Wally?” character became well known in the U.S as “Where’s Waldo?”. Sponton has an article on his blog in which he briefly explores the historical use of lots of figures in paintings and drawings.

The article, like most of Sponton’s blog, is in Argentinian Spanish, but non-speakers can try Google Translate. Also, many of his more recent posts have brief descriptions in English as well as Spanish.

Sponton applies this kind of drawing to more general uses, illustrating maps and doing a series of complex illustrations for children’s weekly magazine called Genios.

He not only takes on detailed arrangements of figures, but complex backgrounds and environments in which to place them. His compositions are filled with amusing characters, fun details and whimsical touches that provide rich environments for visual exploration.

He starts these with a written idea, sometimes suggested by his client, sometimes of his own choosing, that he develops into rough pencil drawings on thick A3 size paper (roughly similar to 11×17″).

He starts with the backgrounds and then arranges the figures, usually 100 per drawing on an A3 sheet.

He sometimes considers these A3 size drawings as modules, putting two of them together, sometimes more for some personal experiments, to create compositions with 200 or more figures.

Sponton refines the initial light pencils with sharp, softer leads, and then does a finished drawing in ink. He inks “front to back” starting with the foreground characters which often receive heavier outlines than the background figures, part of a process of visual organization which helps make the final images more readable.

This challenge of keeping the complex compositions visually readable continues into the coloring phase. (This is something that the multi-figure compositions you’ll sometimes encounter that are inspired by video games don’t always handle well.)

Sponton brings the inked drawings into the computer, composites the double ones, and applies color in Photoshop, sometimes assisted by friend Federico Duelli.

He continues to visually organize the compositions by applying the rules of atmospheric perspective, with darker, more saturated colors in the foreground and lighter desaturated colors in in the background objects and figures.

Sponton has an article about his process here.

There are numerous examples of these kinds illustrations on his blog, along with other work in both similar and different styles.

His complex, multi-figure illustrations have a variety of themes and subjects; most have links to versions large enough to see the detail and enjoy exploring the fun touches Sponton has added throughout.

18th Century Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi was famous for his set of etchings titled Carceri (“Prisons”), sometimes referred to as “Carceri d’invenzione“, or “Imaginary Prisons”.

These were architectural fantasies that were more in keeping with grand imaginative stage sets than any real prisons, filled with arches, bridges, sculpture and elaborate stonework.

Artist Grégoire Dupond, working with Factum Arte in Madrid, has taken images from Piranesi’s etchings and projection mapped them to 3-D CGI models and created an animation of the camera moving through the environments, giving you a moving tour through Piranesi’s fantastical srtructures.

Dupond has recreated 6 of Piranesi’s architectural spaces, including the most iconic of them. As the film moves through them Dupond includes clouds of mist or steam as well as projections of Piranesi’s sketchy figures, which take on a ghost like character in the adaptation.

There is an article on the project on the Factum Arte site.

The still screen captures I’ve shown above don’t begin to convey the feeling of moving through these images.

Piranesi Carceri d’invenzione can be viewed on Vimeo.

For more see my previous posts on Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Piranesi’s Prisons: Architecture of Mystery and Imagination.

[Via adamvasaco on MetaFilter]

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]