Tag: painting

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Arty Awesomeness Weirdness

Will You Be My Ghoul Friend?

Monsters need some love, too. And back in the 60s, the Topps candy company tasked the late pulp artist Norman Saunders with painting a series of cards called Frankenstein Valentine Stickers.

Saunders painted iconic monsters from TV and film together with the cute, punny, and creepy pick-up lines they might try on the opposite sex. Mole Man has eyes for your silky skin, while Dracula vants you in vein, and all Zacherle hopes for is a ghoul friend.

Have a look at the Frankenstein Valentine Stickers after the jump.

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Arty Awesomeness Video Clips

Painting a Russian Pipe Plant in Time-Lapse

When I think of time-lapse, I am immediately drawn to the creations of Randy Halverson, Terje Sorgjerd, and Tom Lowe. Their works are shot in nature and I’d imagine with some very expensive, custom-made equipment.

In his video, Russian filmmaker Sasha Aleksandrov creates an impressive time-lapse without the use of fancy dolly rigs. He does it the old-fashioned way — point, shoot, move tripod, rinse, repeat. His shooting location was an interesting one, it was an old Russian industrial plant that was getting a new coat of paint. Aleksandrov spent two months at the site to create Pipe Plant. See it below.

[via This is Colossal]

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Arty Awesomeness Featured

You Won’t Believe They’re Oil Paintings

Artists do photo-realism with strokes of a brush. Swedish artist Linnea Strid considers the photo-realistic style as her medium of expression and it certainly shows. In this post we take a look at her fascination with water and its, erm, watery qualities. But it’s not all skin-deep as Strids mentions in an interview with My Modern Metropolis:

Art can be viewed in different ways, and one person can look at a piece that I’ve made and just think “oh, that’s a pretty picture, it’s very well done”. I don’t judge people who can’t spot anything more in my work than that, and it’s ok. But after a first glance you can also come to the conclusion that a painting like “Rinse and exhale” can tell you some sort of alternative story, like why is she taking a shower with her clothes on? And the water running on her face, is it only water or are they tears? I don’t want to be too obvious when I make a painting, I want the viewer to decide what it means and what the painting is telling them.

Find some of Strid’s impressive photo-realistic oil paintings after the jump.

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Featured Game Reviews

We Review: De Blob 2

De-Blob-2-bringing-colour-to-the-world

Famed cubist artist Pablo Picasso once said: “The world does not make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?” He had a point. These days it seems that everything needs to be more and more realistic, and video games are no exception. Modern games push the boundaries of realism, and this may not always be a good thing. Consider that it may be our obsession with realism that has led to the rise of ‘reality television’, the horrors of which I need not delve into. Cast your mind back to a time before ultra realism, where game-play and having fun were the order of the day. Let’s see if De Blob 2 can take us back to those days where fun was paramount, after the jump.

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Arty Awesomeness Featured Inspirational Designs Movies Video Clips

The Birth of a Jedi: A Beautiful Painting in Time-Lapse

As you get older, you tend to lose the sense of awe and freedom you experienced as a child somewhere in mire of despair and cynicism that is adult life. I think artist Robert Burden feels that way, but in his paintings he likes to think back on his childhood days when the action figures he played with captivated his imagination. He says his with his paintings he wants to “renew my faded sense of awe”.

The Birth of a Jedi is an amazing 10ft x 7ft oil on canvas that took him over seven months to complete using action figures as his models. Iconic Star Wars figures adorn the borders of the painting with Luke and his Tauntaun as the centrepiece.

His seven months of effort have been condensed into a 2.42-minute time-lapse video. Check it out below.

Prior to this, Burden spent an inordinate amount of time painting a man-sized Voltron and He-Man’s fighting mount, Battle Cat. See those time-lapse videos after the jump.

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Arty Awesomeness Featured

Julie Heffernan paints magical self-portraits

Today is one of those days when I’d rather be at home, shnuggled up with the dogs watching mindless sitcom reruns and drinking a steaming mug of hot chocolate with marshmallows, Jack Daniels and Prozac. Anyway I’m stuck at my desk and the next best thing is escaping into the internet, and today I found something truly beautiful – the paintings of American artist Julie Heffernan.

The paintings are as David Cohen, New York art critic aptly put, “a hybrid of genres and styles, mixing allegory, portraiture, history painting, and still life, while in title they are all presented as self portraits.” I think they’re what would have happened if Botticelli and Hieronymus Bosch had a baby, and magical realism and fairy tales had a baby, and those two babies had a baby, and that baby had a baby with LSD, and THAT baby could paint.

I can lose myself in Julie Heffernan’s paintings – they make me feel better.

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Arty

Amazing Trompe-l’œil Art

Trompe-l’œil, or “trick the eye” is an art technique that has existed as far back as Greek and Roman times, and involves creating incredibly lifelike 3D scenes on flat surfaces. And Californian-born artist John Pugh creates such trompe-l’œil murals on the sides of buildings. Here are three of my favourites – click to embiggen.

This is an Egyptian style mural adorns a wall in Los Gatos, California.

This earthquake scene located in Los Gatos was created following a genuine earthquake in 1989.

This mural in Honolulu tricked the fire crews into thinking a child was about to get crushed underneath a tidal wave.

More of Pugh’s murals can be found at Damn Cool Pics.