Perhaps you’re already familiar with Hallie Bateman (@hallithbates)? She’s a cartoonist and illustrator, and she will make you smile. And laugh. And think. While chuckling. At yourself…
This cartoon answers the inevitable and perennial question:
“What is the difference between art and illustration?” ~ Hallie Bateman
Smile. Laugh. Think. Chuckle. On with the adventure!
A recent trip to Paris rekindled my fascination with 3D chalk art. Half performance art, half epic mural… Witnessing a completed image is amazing, but watching the process of creating something like that snake charmer scene above is spellbinding. Before diving in, here’s a micro-intro for newbies:
3d Street Art, often known as 3d chalk art is 2-dimensional artwork drawn on the street itself that gives you a 3-dimensional optical illusion from a certain perspective. (hongkiat.com)
Sidewalk Art Flashback
I first posted about 3D chalk art that will blow your mind a few years ago. I saw it as a form of street art, or street performance art since observing the creation of 3D sidewalk art can be so enthralling. I even acknowledged the crossover with another form of public art that is often decried.
I even wondered if a great gaping 3D chalk art chasm or some similar dramatic scene sprawling across the road in front of our house might slow speeding cars and trucks. Maybe an arresting scene of a police barricade with armored swat team? Or Champ, the friendly Lake Champlain monster, rearing up and pretending to be super unfriendly. Am I pushing too far? Yes. But I’m not being flip. I’m trying to remember that there’s an exciting alternative on the flip side of most coins.
In a subsequent post I revisited the graffiti question but inevitably slipped into a reflection the 3D chalk art as a form of storytelling. Not that I’m obsessed with storytelling or anything… ;-)
[3D chalk art] transcends mere graffiti and many other art forms in its capacity for interactive storytelling. 3D art on sidewalks introduces a narrative possibility that engages viewers. Pedestrians and drivers stop and look. Perhaps they reorient themselves to better appreciate the optical illusion. They pause and let their eyes wander over the mural, actively suspending disbelief in order to engage with the image. In many cases the audience/viewer even choose to step into the image, playing along with the illusion, often posing for friends with cameras to memorialize the encounter. ~ virtualDavis
Maybe you’ve had the is experience. If not, make time for it the next time you come across 3D chalk art. It could very well change your day. (Your mileage may vary.)
3D Chalk Art Goes Mainstream
While I’m not yet able to report that street chalk artists and law enforcement have partnered up, it’s fair to say that 3d chalk art has entered the mainstream. I mean, any time advertising adopts a new art form, you know that it must be on its way into the mainstream. If you feed the Google monster a search string related to three dimensional chalk art, you’ll discover millions of hits, and a surprisingly high number of them are directly or indirectly related to advertising.
For example, the team at We Talk Chalk can transform your marketing campaign into crowd-stopping marketing.
Creative Visual Solutions for your event or marketing needs through the innovative use of 3D Street Painting and 3D Chalk Art. (wetalkchalk.com)
Many of the most successful street chalk artists like Manfred Stader now have slick promotional websites touting their work. And scan any of the top articles (i.e. 33 Brain-Melting Works Of 3-D Sidewalk Chalk Art), videos, etc. celebrating three dimensional sidewalk and street artwork many of the biggest dazzlers are actually promoting a product or brand. Johnnie Walker scotch and Coca Cola were among the early adopters.
But despite the migration of 3D chalk art from the margin to the mainstream, I remain intrigued. No, more than intrigued. A little obsessed. One benefit of the widespread popularity is more artists creating more inspiring projects, and celebration/recognition of top street artists. Result? 3D chalk art is improving in leaps and bounds.
Creating 3D Chalk Art
The increasingly massive, intricate, sometimes beautiful (though often grotesque) murals are often magnificent once completed. No doubt about it. But for me, the most appealing aspect is observing the process of creating the 3D chalk art murals. In public. Often under considerably less than ideal conditions. With the threat of rain, snow, wind, pedestrians, and even police or other authorities who consider the art form graffiti, etc. From soiled ground to transcendent illusion. With chalk, a straight edge or two and an unshackled imagination.
Rather than than blathering on, I’ll finish with two examples. Enjoy!
Illustrator Eric Maruscak creates a chalk mural at the 2013 Utica Music and Arts Festival, September 14th, 2013. The mural was 10 feet square and took approximately 8 hours to complete over the course of the Festival. The art is known as an anamorphic drawing, where a distorted perspective is used to create the illusion of a 3D image when viewed from the proper angle. For more illustrations, cartooning, chalk art and time lapse photography visit Eric’s site at www.pepperink.com. (YouTube)
Chalk Urban Art Festival, Sydney 2014 – Australia’s largest 3D Street Art ‘Wasting Time’ designed by Artists Jenny McCracken and Leon Keer. Support artists Rudy Kistler, Bernardo von Hessberg, Mealie Batchelor, Dom Intelisano, Brian Tisdall, Mike Walton. Creative Producer Andi Mether. (YouTube)
Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about. ~ Rumi
Some days, like today days, it’s easy to forget, easy to slump downward, shoulders and spirit drifting grave-ward. The artist within cowers behind to-do lists and do too lists, hides his eyes beneath furrowed brows, and rolls his toes under in apology for being at all.
But it’s especially these days, these gloomy, confidence wilting lump in your throat days that you need to remember, need to affirm in guttural grunts or soaring anthem – shoulders back, chest extended, forehead stretched upward – that you are an artist. From that first wailing, ass smacking moment until your last triumphant gasp you are an artist. Always. Until you’re not. At all.
You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there. ~ Maria Callas
Let there be fireworks. Or drifting smoke, fading booms and gunpowder perfume. Let there but art in your flash and in your fizzle. Let there be art.
Everything you do is art.
From the moment you wake up until the moment you sleep, you’re creating art…
Get caught stealing like an artist! Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) did… And it seems to be serving him rather well.
Newspaper Blackout will take you down the blackout poetry path, demonstrating the visual and literary appeal of Kleon’s quirky poems. Kleon derives poetry by crossing out most of the words in a given publication, discovering meaning in the remnants, and he’d like to show you how to do the same. (I can’t help thinking about refrigerator leftovers for some reason, but most leftover success stories involve adding/combining rather than subtracting…)
In Steal Like an Artist Kleon deploys his full quiver of mashup, remixing and doodling tricks to offer some practical wisdom about the creative process to his 19 year old self. We’ve all wished our way back in time, yearned for a redo knowing what we now know. Kleon skips the wish and gets it done.
With the increasing popularity of electronic readers and e-books, the future use of hard-bound books also comes under question… French Canadian artist Guy Laramée tackles it from a decidedly philosophical — and creative — perspective, carving intricate, three-dimensional landscapes that look amazingly real up close. (TreeHugger)
Based in Montréal (only an hour and a half north of me), French Canadian artist Guy Laramée tickles the already ticklish debate over the destiny of printed books. Fusing art and anthropology Laramée carves books into sculptures which arrest the viewer not only with their intricate three dimensional beauty, but with the cascade of questions each piece compels. Why books? Why vintage books? What are the implications of destroying words and ideas in order to create romantic, usually natural scenes? Read the rest of this entry »
A while back I stumbled upon (tweetled?) The Doodle Daily, a clever creative crash course in the art of doodling.
Actually, Warren, the blog’s creator wouldn’t call it that. He’s a fair share less pretentious than that. He originally set out to create and share a doodle each day for a year. He succeeded. And he got stuck succeeding, so we all can benefit from his so-far-bottomless fount of doodles.
I’d actually almost forgotten about Warren and his addictive designs until yesterday. He materialized out of the ether. Poof!
Okay, so it wasn’t really a poof. But he did post a comment that sent me somersaulting back to his doodle blog to catch up on his creative enterprise. And much catching ensued including the dazzling image above.
Deft doodle design! I like it a lot, but why? It’s just another dandy doodle, dude.
Or is it?
There are doodles and there are doodles. There are dumb-ditty-doodles and there are whipper-doodles. (Also Labradoodles, but they’re really far off topic, and I’m hoping to limit my present acrobatics to merely-slightly-off-topic…)
So what makes a whipper-doodle special? What defines a super whipper-doodle? Warren sums up his SuperDoodle thus:
Simple, clean classic
He’s on to something. Of course whipper-doodle rules are far from universal, but it does seem that at least a few essential ingredients can be found. Perhaps simple, clean and classic should be on the list. Classic might be too limiting, though I understand what Warren’s going after here. It’s a familiar design despite being original. Or it seems familiar. It exudes familiar canonical design roots, perhaps…
I’d suggest that there’s more to it though. In this doodle, for example, there’s symmetry or near symmetry. Warren’s SuperDoodle combines two separate, reverse mirror images. The symmetry is instantly appealing, especially so because the design is a bit complex, a bit ornate. And yet Warren’s inky oracle plays with the symmetry, plays with the viewer really, by distorting the scale of the nearly symmetrical half. Perhaps the composite consists of two conceptually symmetrical halves that deviate in execution. Now I’m approaching the sort of gassy verbiage upon which dissertations are built!
Suffice to say that a whipper-doodle is more evolved than a dumb-ditty-doodle. It contains a sort of universal design appeal. I think of the glorious paisley in its infinite iterations, or the minimalist lines of prehistoric hieroglyphs or globally familiar brands such as the Red Cross, the Jewish star, the Nike swoosh. (If tucking these dissimilar entities into a single rucksack and calling them “brands” offends, please excuse. This is not my intention. Simply overlook that last sentence and leap-frog to the next paragraph!)
After the first flush of my aesthetic crush fades, I catch myself asking what compels me, what draws me into Warren’s doodle? It’s clean and elegant, but it’s also playful. The near symmetry flirts with me, cocks her ringleted visage coquettishly and bats her eyes, smiles just enough to draw me in. I study the image, my eyes volleying back and forth, back and forth verifying accuracy, chuckling at the elements shrunk and stretched just enough to intrigue… I am drawn in. And I am smiling. Thank you, Warren.
Is it an accident that the palm of the hand is cool and inviting, a brookside grotto inviting us in to rest and listen to the water burbling past? Is it an accident that the index finger knuckle suggests an eye awakening a children’s book character from the hand, index finger and thumb? Is it an accident that the fingers and their shadows echo the sensuousRubenesque topography of a woman’s legs and posterior?
Yes. Accidents.
Just as the grotto feels safe and calm, like sitting in the earth’s gentle hand. Just as the improvised puppet inspires a child’s laughter and imagination despite being “just your hand”. Just as the nude napping in early evening light suggests cupped fingers, a shadowy hand gathering sheets.
I missed an opportunity to bid on another great old photo postcard of Rosslyn’s dockhouse/boathouse in an eBay auction this weekend! The photograph shows the Essex-Charlotte ferry early in the 20th century and beyond the ferry boat the Rosslyn boathouse is distinctly visible and looking very much like it does today.
Do you recognize the circled dockhouse/boathouse in the blown-up image I grabbed from a current eBay auction? It’s a bit difficult to discern from the fuzzy photo, but that’s Rosslyn’s dockhouse fifty or sixty years ago. Historic photos and postcards of this unique building protruding out into Essex, New York’s North Bay are not uncommon on eBay and elsewhere. Soon enough I’ll be sharing some of those images over at the Rosslyn Redux website.
I’ve been longing for winter; its chill and drifts having mostly passed us by so far this year. And now — after wandering through this watercolor by Michelle Rummel (@shellartistree) — I find myself longing for spring! And I haven’t even planted seeds for my spring starts yet! An evocative and intriguing image, but the undulating forms and colors are only part of the story. There’s a playful energy too. I think it springs from the quasi-stainglass technique, breaking up fluid, representational forms with geometric lines and color changes. The scene is vibrating, slowly, quietly, enticingly. I’ll wander in again!
That image above is one of the “picture poems” I included in 40×41: Midlife Crisis Postponed and it combines contour drawings that I made in 1994 during my final year in college with abstractions from photographs that I took in Peru in 2011. I’ve previously posted elements of “Contours & Artifacts” in Choice (June 4, 2012) and Wonder (December […]
