The work of Japanese artist 非 (hi) are rendered digitally, leaving dreamy, ill looking young men, clad in an explosion of pastel geometric fireworks, bruises and pattern work. Mesmerizing...

http://xhxix.tumblr.com/

Clever & effective Ad Campaign by Amnesty International Switzerland

Matt Jones outlining the importance of reportage.

You have to be familiar with architecture, landscape and the human form from every angle to be able to draw storyboards or animate traditionally. 

That's where maintaining a sketchbook comes in; to help build that repository of observation. I find once you draw something it sticks in the brain. The larger your mental library is the easier it'll be to draw whatever is required.

Classical life drawing is a fundamental requirement also- the ability to really observe and draw the human form is a discipline that seems to be dying out. 

To complement this quick 'gesture' studies are essential too- to capture a fleeting pose or attitude in seconds is good practice for doing the same in a storyboard or animation drawing. 

                                                                                                         Matt Jones 

 Initial sketches... 

 (Will add text digitally later)

I love these sketchbooks: 

 ^_^! 

Recent reportage.. 

.First I captured people.. 

 Then
I 
captured 
objects... 

Then I looked out of the window for a bit... 

Finally I
drew
my
hands
and 
feet
.
.
. 

Thoroughly bored I reassessed my life status:  

"Collecting cats to die alone with." 

"Sometimes things aren't meant to fit in sketchbooks..."  -Zade

As the prospect of filling yet another 5 sketchbooks started to fill me with the creature fear,

I had an idea.

On my previous project, i'd had to start to consider anatomy.

Before...

After...

  

I also did some quick 

research into hands:

Afterwards I found it much easier to draw hands and feet at speed. This realization has inspired me to do a brief study into human anatomy in order to, (hopefully),improve my reportage skills... 

I hope that this will help me to be able to produce stronger, tidier sketches at speed, whilst also helping me to be able to recognise, and accentuate unusual features that are unique to us as humans. 

Things I have learnt today; 

1. NO ONE uses paper portfolios anymore. (Not even the ironic retro hipster kids.)
2. Work in A3 when scanning work to use in photoshop for better print quality.
3. Mucking about with levels in photoshop can remove colours individually. 
4. RGB is web format.
5. Political illustrators aren't 'people' persons. (I'll fit right in.)
6. If you are editing an image in photoshop, sometimes it's worth zooming in and taking a lot more time than you would have intended to, in order to avoid making the image look too 'processed'. 

www.thequietrevolution.co.uk




Science Fiction.. 

Binosaurus

Bejewelled... 

Octopus

Typographic...

'furlined' type experiment inspired by a squirrels tail

Portraits...

Self Portrait 

Nature Drawings... 

Bird roots 1

Bird roots 2

"My work displays a mix of strange utopian worlds and parallel universes with juxtapositions of the unexpected, playing with scale and narrative."

13 Hauntingly Beautiful Places Abandoned by Humans

Found this amusing... 
What The Future Looked Like In 1900 

31 days of food creativity. 

Jay Chou made of Coffee Cup Stains

This project was inspired by the opening and closing lines in Jay Chou’s song, ‘Secret/不能说的秘密’. The opening line is about lifting a coffee cup off the saucer, “冷咖啡离开了杯垫” . The ending line of the song is about autumn leaves and fragmented pieces, “飘落后才发现 这幸福的碎片, 要我怎么捡?”. Hundreds of individual coffee stain rings, many of them broken and imperfect like fallen autumn leaves, form a whole portrait.

The singer tells a heartbreak tale of a lost romance with a girl from 1979 who time-traveled forward 20 years and met Jay in 1999, and they fell in love. She then went back to 1979 and sketched a portrait of him. My painting is meant to look like a sepia-toned old photograph to capture the essence of this story.

The project took about 12 hours to finish. Coffee is quite a challenging medium to use – too little water and the rings wouldn’t form easily, too much water and the rings would blend into each other, resulting in just a deformed pool of coffee. I had to also wait for the lighter parts too dry up before stamping on the darker rings, or else the rings would not be visible.

Zhang Yimou portrait in socks, pins, bamboo sticks

Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou’s portrait made of socks and pins, hung off bamboo sticks in an old Shanghainese alleyway. The piece was inspired by how locals hang laundry off bamboo sticks in the old town area, and how Zhang portrays the Chinese tradition beautifully through in movies.

A wonderful human making us look at mundane objects in ways we could not have even imagined.