Art

Every so often I will come across a piece of work that blows my mind, rarely does this happen with student work. Reza Dolatabadi took two years to painstakingly create over 4000 painted images and then animated them to produce this short film. The running scene is fantastically done, and the splatters and texture really bring it to life.

Although I originally thought these were hand painted pieces, in reading the comments on the viemo post, I discovered that they were all digitally created. He also created the pieces over 3d rendered scenes. While this may take away from the finished piece for some people, in a project of this scope you need a blueprint to work around in my opinion. I feel like if he did not go this route; colors, perspectives, and styles would become a mush that did not work in the way the artist intended.

At any rate check out the video it is a very inspiring piece of work.

Khoda from Reza Dolatabadi

I am a fan of vector art and illustrator work. As a graphic artist now, sadly I have all but left my paint brush and pencils in favor of Illustrator. I have become much more aware of line and color work, gone are the days where I can use a brush and smudge colors and strokes all over a canvas to cover up my lack of talent. Recently I read a post on vectortuts.com.

The work displayed on the post ranged on work i found amazing, to work I found sub par for a professional illustrator.

It did make me consider the medium a bit more though, and I felt pretty inspired by some of the website examples they presented.

I would love to see a fall back to more illustrator work. I have always thought it shared a commonality with turn of the age graphic design. From the woodcut signs of the middle ages to the propaganda posters of the world wars. The feeling you get from an illustrated piece is like a characteur of life rather than something mundane we see everyday of our lives. Check out the vectortuts.com post here.

It is two of my favorite things. Dexter the best series I have ever seen on telivision hands down, and Shepard Fairey the hipster quasi graffiti stencil artist of his day. The poster looks great (accept for taht showtime logo in the center of it. The 30$ is not unheard of for a Fairey print. So why is it this poster is leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I am never the guy to say some one is selling out, and I will not even say it this time, but when your Shepard Fairey and your work in many ways speaks out against blindly following large corperations then it is going to make me question why you choose to do a poster for showtime. This is a quote directly from Fairey’s web site:

Since starting his growing Giant art campaign Fairey has said the experiment behind his explosive phenomenon is targeted to expose the “conspicuously consumptive” nature of our culture, the eagerness to buy in that results from image repetition.

This same thought crossed my mind when Fairey did a political poster for obama. Though with Obama my mind was quickly changed. Obviously Obama is the canidate Fairey identified with and to show his support he created a poster for his campaign.

Nothing in this train of thought says that Fairey is mindlessly following anything, or that he is attempting to have us mindlessly vote for Obama. In this same veign if Fairey happens to be a huge fan of Dexter (like me) why should he not create a poster for his favorite show. I am sure Fairey has done posters for bands before why is this not considered selling out. Even with this thought process the dexter poster does not sit well with me in terms of Fairey’s art. I finally came to the conclusion that Dexter being a telivision show is used to sell advertising and by Fairey supporting the show he is supporting the cause of advertising which he speaks against in many ways. I do not hold this against him, hell I am a graphic designer, I am a slave to advertising every day of my life, but I just saw this artistic outing as very odd coming from someone like Fairey. I think I will just take the rest of the day and admire my new Dexter poster and think about things.

Here is an article I ran across from Inhabitat.com. The images are actually cleaned from the wall rather than painted onto the wall. It is very impressive the way the texture of the wall works with this art.

The pieces were done by Paul Curtis aka “Moose”, here is an article about him also on inhabitat.com that goes into his reverse graffitti. This particular piece was comissioned by Greenworks, which is actually a subsidiary of Clorox. I think this is a brilliant advertising idea on their part.

I think the art is very tasteful and a vast improvement over the dirty wall. I wonder though how and if they paid somone for use of the wall? And if not is surgical cleaning against the law? Well anyway please check out the article for more detail and enjoy the images.