Archive for July, 2010
You’ve probably seen the work of Guido Daniele though you may not know it. His trompe l’oeil hand paintings have been featured in a slew of AT&T ads touting their international roaming service. On his own site, Mr. Daniele has all of the photo galleries divided into two categories: art and ads. The art portion tends to be hyper-realistic renderings of animals, called manimali, which combines the Italian words for hands, mani, and animals, animali. The AT&T ads seem to force him outside of that comfort zone, asking him to represent whole countries through his art, I’d say to great effect. Daniele, who is based in Milan, has been developing his hand painting technique since 1990. He uses a combination of airbrush and brush-painting to achieve the effect. After the break, I’ve posted a gallery of his best work – the ads come first, then the art. There’s also a video that goes behind the scenes on his AT&T work, if you’d like to see him in action. I’d be curious to know which one are your favorites. (Mine is the teapots.) As you may know, every feature film made by Pixar film is preceded by an animated short. Night & Day, the short that accompanies Toy Story 3 is the newest of these and it’s breathtakingly original in its mixing of traditional 2D and 3D animation styles. I hesitate to post it on had to remove it from the blog only because it really deserves to be seen on a full size movie screen. So, if you’re thinking you might go see Toy Story 3 in the theater, you may want to hold off and just know that you’re in for a special treat when you get there. In the meantime, this behind the scenes look at it is a nice teaser. As a rule, I don’t like to cover anything from the movie industry on the Jailbreak just because it’s not really what we’re about and they get enough coverage already. However there’s an exception to every rule and Pixar is one such exception. They are putting something truly special into the world and I admire their style and ethos. I read an article in Newsweek when Up came out last year which made a really valid case for Pixar being in the midst of its own Golden Age. I think they are. And it’s rare that we get a chance to recognize we’re witnessing something so significant while it’s still occurring (yet all too easy to recognize in hindsight once it’s gone).
New York based creative Jason Freeny has a unique specialty. He creates anatomical drawings of fictional characters. Freeny seems to be partial to dissecting toys and edible treats that bank on their cuteness. His work is summed up quite artfully in his online bio:
As to that last sentence, here’s hoping that one day Jason and the Jailbreak Collective can do a little product collaboration! In the meantime, there are a some buyable items available on his site. There are plenty more anatomies after the break, including gummy bears, Dunnies, Domos, Lego Men and a whole bunch of other unusual suspects.
While doing some online research on the relationship between drug use and creativity, I came across this story on a website called Cowboy Books. I’d actually read about this experiment years ago in my Psych 101 textbook. I remember finding it absolutely fascinating at the time but I’d totally forgotten about it since. The general premise is quite simple: A doctor (in the employ of the US government, of course) dosed an artist with acid. The artist was given an “activity box” full of crayons and pencils. Over the course of his trip the artist drew nine different portraits of the doctor and, along the way, reported on his psychological state as his trip and his portraits progressed. As you can see from the drawing on the left above, the artist is highly skilled, technically speaking. And as you can see from the drawing on the right, the acid has an absolutely remarkable effect on his work, leading him to pure abstraction. Click through to see the full experiment in chronological order. I must admit… I’m lovin’ these. I’d love it even more if I could have been a fly on the wall as the director was instructing the models on these shoots.
By Plaid Creative. Click to make it bigger, or check out some screen grabs below.
Man’s best friend just got a major 21st century reboot. Meet the BigDog, a project being carried out for DARPA (the same people who brought us such hits as the Internet and GPS). For those of you who have never heard of them, DARPA is the Defense Advnaced Research Projects Agency – in other words, they’re the Pentagon’s team of mad scientists. Given that they are quite possibly the most innovative tech outfit in the world, DARPA’s website is hilariously bland, outdated, and understated. Here’s their full description of the BigDog:
The rest is left to our imaginations. However, after the break, we’ve got video of the BigDog in action!
If you’re a creative professional, chances are Portland-based duo Always With Honor has included you in this infographic that breaks down the various categories and sub-categories within the design community. They also include the top 10 career paths in fields like illustration, fine arts, and game art and design. The icon table on the left is screen-grabbed below. Blow up the image above here. [Via Information is Beautiful]
You may have noticed our new tagline at the top of the page: “Infotainment for Creatives”. The Jailbreak is evolving and expanding in scope. More and more, we’ve come to realize that the glue that holds the Jailbreak community together is not just “art” or “products.” It’s “creativity,” which, of course, comes in various forms. Our intention is to focus on professional creativity – in particular, those industries and niches where the Creatives typically go uncelebrated and remain behind the scenes. In our real lives, here in Brooklyn, we have the good fortune of being surrounded by an enormous and vital community filled with Creatives of all stripes. Some write, some draw, some make costumes , some animate, some teach… The list goes on and on and on. Even though we all do different things and work in different fields, we all find ourselves in the same larger scene, which often leads to unexpected thoughts, ideas and inspirations coming our way. Just by being exposed to each other we make each other better. Our aim with the blog is to try to replicate that community’s energy here. We’ll be experimenting over the coming months as we try to figure out how to best achieve that goal but one thing we know we’ll be doing is looking all around for examples of professional Creatives with top-notch skills so we can feature their work and their stories on our pages because it seems like a good way for us to start getting to know each other. So here goes… The illustration above is by Mark Summers, a Canadian illustrator who specializes in a style called scratchboard which is feels instantly familiar because of its use on money and in newspapers. Summers is obviously a master of the technique. He’s done covers for Time, corporate work for Eddie Bauer and Parker brothers, and book covers for classics by Dickens, among other things.
We discovered Mark’s work on Behance. In addition to a fairly extensive gallery of his work, there is contact info and a brief bio that are all worth checking out. After the jump, we’ve posted a selection of his works from that site as well as a little “How To” explaining his scratchboard technique. It seems that Mr. Summers shares our love of caricaturing historical personalities …
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