Slagsmålsklubben – Sponsored by destiny is an animation by Tomas Nilsson, in which the classic fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood is reinterpreted as a series of animated infographics.

The video traces, in that wonderful isometric projection style of vector art common to modern infographics, not only Little Red Riding Hood’s route to Grandma’s house and the events that transpire there, but lots of “info” about stuff on the way, from wild animal density of the forest to the specs for a classic VW microbus as it passes by.

The info also includes such tidbits as the nutritional content of one Grandma, presumably for the wolf’s benefit.

[Via Daring Fireball]

I first wrote about illustrator, animation art director and painter Eyvind Earle back in 2006.

Since 2007, I’ve been waiting for a new site promised to be “Coming soon April 2008″ at eyvindearle.com to materialize; but as the promise is unchanged as we approach April of 2009, that looks unlikely.

Fortunately, in the meantime, some additional Eyvind Earle art resources have appeared on the web.

The best is still Gallery 21, who I believe are the official representatives of his work. There are galleries of Originals and Serigraphs, as well as Books, Videos and a Chronology of Earle’s career.

There are now other galleries and unofficial sites, and I’ve listed some resources below.

Earle was noted in particular for his stunning design work on Disney’s 1959 feature, Sleeping Beauty, as well as major contributions to Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp and a number of shorts. (See this 2006 article about Eyvind Earle and Sleeping Beauty on Cartoon Modern.)

He was awarded the Winsor McCay Award (named after pioneering animator, illustrator and cartoonist Winsor McCay) for lifetime achievement in animation at the 1998 Annie Awards.

Some of Earle’s artworks were among the 250 pieces of original animation art recently returned to Disney after being misplaced in storage following an exhibit in Japan five years ago.

There are books of his work, as well as an autobiography, Horizon Bound on a Bicycle.

Earle was a dazing designer and painter. In addition to his beautiful work for Disney, he painted strikingly graphic and graceful landscape paintings, with compositions that blend the lively draftsmanship of mid-20th Century animation design and the elegant compositional influence of Japanese woodblock prints (images above, and middle, with detail at bottom).

His handling of color is just as amazing as his compositions, taking chances on color combinations and juxtapositions that would simply not work in lesser hands.

“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]

For lovers of all kinds of art, the internet just keeps getting better and better.

Grandma’s Graphics is a little treat that popped up recently with some vintage public domain illustration. Though some of the images aren’t of as high reproduction quality as one might like, it’s still worth a look, even if it’s just to familiarize yourself with some art you might not have seen, and seek out printed copies of better quality later.

The collection, mostly pen and ink of course, given the eras, includes some of Harry Clarke’s intricate penwork, and illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Through The Looking Glass by Sir John Tenniel (above, top) and Harry Rountree (above, bottom), one of the few who doesn’t wilt in Tenniel’s presence when tackling Lewis Carroll’s flights of fancy. (See my post on Sir John Tenniel.)

I love the fact that the Colouring section includes two of Tenniel’s more intricately detailed (and non-coloring book like) illustrations, including the image above (larger version here). (You can see my own nod to this particular drawing by Tenniel in this cartoon from my book of Dinosaur Cartoons.)

[Link via Illustration Inspiration]

I’m usually not a fan of the destructive ego stoking defacement of buildings that is grafitti, at least not until it gets sophisticated to the point of impromptu wall murals (and I’ll point out that the illusionistic sidewalk art I like is done in chalk and washes away); but defacement aside, I’ll make an exception for this.

MUTO is a frame by frame animation in which the “cells” are grafitti drawings on building walls, and the canvas is sections of the cities of Buenos Aires and Baden.

The artist, known only as BLU, has painted and repainted sections of wall with drawings that, photographed in sequence, make an animation.

If you can put up with the shakiness inherent in making a stop-motion animation with a hand-help camera, and the occasionally creepy tone of the story (such as it is, actually more of a stream-of-consciousness narrative), the interaction of the animations and the environments in, through, around and on which they play out, is fascinating and genuinely different.

[Via Digg, via SoulPancake]

Boyko Kolev is a Bulgarian artist about whom I have little background information. Most of what I know is simply gleaned from his web site, which offers no biographical profile, and his space on deviantART, which has a few odds and ends.

His painting style might be classed as hyperrealism, though he seems to play with the very fact that he is chasing that state of realistic illusion in art by offering up images that reference other images, or the act of creating other images.

My favorites of his, though, are his simple, directly and keenly observed still life subjects, like his painting The Bread (above, top, larger version here); in which his delicate handling of textures, subtle colors and deft suggestion of the interplay of shadow and light immediately put me in mind of the early still life studies of bread by Salvador Dalí. I later saw that Kolev had, in fact, done a bread painting directly inspired by Dalí’s bread paintings (and here).

Kolev has spent time investigating the work of past masters, including painting replicas of works by Van Gogh, Monet, Klimpt, Bruegel, Correggio, Vermeer and, others. (See my posts on Klimpt, Correggio and Vermeer.)

I particularly enjoy his painstakingly detailed replica of Jan van Eyck’s beautiful Portrait of Giovani Arnolfini and his Wife (See my post on Jan van Eyck in which I talk about this remarkable painting.)

Kolev has a special fascination with the works of Leonardo da Vinci, and has done several replicas of Da Vinci’s works, as well as referencing Da Vinci’s work in many of his illusionary self-referential paintings, like his oil painting of his own preparatory sketch (above, bottom left) for his replica of Da Vinci’s wonderful Lady with an Ermine (bottom, right, Da Vinci original here).

When viewing Kolev’s web site galleries, take note that there are multiple pages, both in original paintings and replicas, accessed by numbered links at the bottom of the thumbnail area.

[Suggestion courtesy of Robert Tracy, see my previous post about Robert Tracy]

Urban Sketchers is a group blog that I first wrote about last November.

Since then, hundreds of additional sketches have been added; and the blog’s layout has been updated, with a wider format and better organizatation (though I still wish they would somehow limit the Flickr slideshow widget at page bottom to a single page and make the “Older Posts” link bigger).

Urban Sketchers has kept the tagline of “See the world one drawing at a time”, and continues to a be a source of constant delight, filled with location sketches in a variety of media, size, approach and degree of finish.

There is an increasing list of contributors, as well as an impressively extended list of represented cities and countries from around the world; though much of the content is still provided by a core of frequent contributors, including founder Gabi Campanario. (Sadly, Gabi’s recent sketches have been chronicling the impending demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a terrific newspaper; image above, top right)

Many of the images are linked to larger versions, and most of the contributors have their own blogs and web sites to which you can go for even more sketches and finished work. Some of them are profiled on the Meet the Correspondents page, but others are worth tracking down through links at the bottom of their posts, or looking up via Google.

Updates are frequent and you can check in with Urban Sketchers any day and find fresh new sketches to enjoy and take inspiration from. In fact, it’s sometimes hard to check in frequently enough to keep up with the new posts.

(Images above, left to right: Pete Scully, Gabi Campanario, Tommy Kane, Tis Boon Sim, Roger O’Reilly, Gerard Michel, Stephen Gardner, Maarten Ruijters)

It’s interesting to note that Japanese artist Takashi Murakami was the only visual artist included on Time magazine’s 2008 “100 Most Influential People” list. Not that I put that much stock in such lists, but it’s a glimpse of the wide ranging notice Murakami is receiving.

Muuakami’s style covers a wide range as well, with influences from traditional Japanese art, which he studied at Tokyo national University of Fine Arts and Music, combined with 20th century Modernist notions and contemporary pop culture streams from manga, anime, and “otaku” culture, in a kind of glorious art mash-up explosion of brightly colored graphic patterns and iconic imagery; as if Peter Max was channeling Utagawa school artists by way of Masamune Shirow in an exhibit put together by Andy Warhol.

Murakami seems to have the ability to slip back and forth at will through cultural layers as well, passing from gallery art to pop culture to outright commercialism, with his name appearing on designer goods along with Louis Vuittom.

There is a major show of his work currently at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, from now until May 31, 2009.

The show has previously traveled to MOCA in California, which has videos of the exhibit and interviews the the artist; and The Brooklyn Museum in NY.

Murakami doesn’t have a web site per se as an artist, but rather an art production company, Kaikai, Kiki (roughly meaning “oddly fascinating”), devoted to art related merchandise, animation and art promotion, of which his art is a part.

[Via Art Knowledge News]

Liz Lomax describes herself as a “three dimensional illustrator”. Before assuming that means illustration created in a 3-D CGI application, step back and think in more immediate, real-world terms.

Lomax creates her stylized, whimsically exaggerated images as small scale sculptures, which she then places in environments that she also hand crafts, and photographs the result to achieve her illustration image.

Much of her work is based on likenesses, or more accurately, caricatures, of well known individuals, including pop music stars like Sting, Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson and the Rolling Stones, movie personalities, political candidates and various other newsmakers.

She also does theme based editorial illustration, with conceptual interpretive images much in the vein of many contemporary illustrators, but realized in her hand-sculpted models and environments.

Lomax starts with a sketch, and her sketches have a nice feeling to them that would suit being followed up as a finished illustration in traditional media; but she then takes them to the third dimension, modeling the figure, tweaking the likeness (which must work from several angles), then painting, finishing and arranging the sculpted figures in 3-D environments, much like dioramas, for the final photograph.

Her client list includes major publications like The Boston Globe, Advertising Age, Newsweek, MAD, The new York Times, Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal and many others, as well as a number of advertising agencies and commercial accounts.

There are a variety of her works on her web site in various categories, including some done just for fun.

The Telegraph site has a slide show of her work and some of her working models. There is a video of her working process for a sculpture of Noel Gallagher, and her blog shows work in progress, discusses her working methods and has photos that show the sculptures to scale as she works on them.

There have traditionally been only two images accepted as true portraits of the man who is generally acknowledged as the greatest writer in the English language, William Shakespeare.

One is his monument bust in the Holy Trinity Church in Statford-upon-Avon (left, 4th down), and the other is the famous engraving by Martin Droeshout (left, bottom) that was used as the cover piece of the First Folio of Shakespeare’s work (and has been repurposed in a gigazillion ways since). Both of them were done after his death in 1616.

On Monday, the chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stanley Wells, unveiled a painting that has been in the house of the Cobbe family outside of Dublin for centuries, that is now suggested to be the only image of the bard painted from life (image at left, top).

This status was previously held, but always in question, for the painting called the Chandos Portrait, attributed to artist John Taylor (left, third down), but that claim has been discredited to a large extent.

The painting from the Cobbe family shows an energetic and bright eyed man, younger than the portrayals we commonly see, most of which have been based on Droeshout’s engraving.

In this portrait, Shakespeare would have been 46 at the time, six years before his death.

The painting bears a resemblance to a painting once thought to be of Shakespeare and attributed to Flemish painter Charles Janssen, that is in the National Gallery in London (left, second down).

Though this painting has been established to have been of another person, and to have been altered sometime before 1770 to make it resemble Shakespeare, it is what prompted the Alec Cobbe to begin inquires among Shakespeare scholars and art experts to see if his family’s painting was, indeed, of the great playwright.

Though the jury is not in, sophisticated dating techniques and the opinions of the experts in both camps suggest that this may, in fact, be the only portrait we have of Shakespeare painted during his lifetime.

Unfortunately, in all of the media attention the painting has received, I can find no mention of an attribution, or even a suggestion of a probable artist’s name. I suppose that may remain a mystery, like much about the bard himself.

Though out of context (and though by “paintings”, Hamlet is referring to Opheila’s makeup), the issue of identifying portraits brings to mind:

“I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face and you make yourselves another,…”

[Thanks to Larry Roibal]