jwbjerk.com : art gallery & blog
My friends at Portland Studios have recently opened a store, currently featuring T Shirts with illustrations all (if i don’t mistake his style) by Chris Koelle. Congradulations. Portland Studios has gone from a crazy idea to a growing buisness in a few years.
Should i decide to put down the money, i’d go for this one: (i can empathize with the emotion displayed)
Click the banner to visit their store.
In spite of how obvious & straight-forward it seems, visual perception entails a lot of convoluted mental processing. The fact that we so seldom notice our perception’s “blind spots” is a testament to how well it works. But there are quite a few odd circumstances where our brains give us false readings. These optical illusions, i find fascinating. Here’s one that gives an almost nauseating sense of movement.
This works much better if you click on the image to enlarge it.
I might make a series out of this…
In spine of the drab title Websites as Graphs this is a really nifty thing. It would make as much (or more) sense to call it Websites as Flowers, because as far as i can tell, it has no practical purpose other than to look pretty.1 Which is in no way a criticism.
It works simply: Enter a URI and the website unfolds like a blooming flower. That’s what makes the links worth going to— seeing the dots unfold & disentagle themselves like a living thing. As another organic touch, each unfolding is different. While the network between dots is the same, the network seems to disentangle itself different each time. If you care, the different colored dots represent different tags within a webpage. Violet represents images, for instance.
Transmogrify the website of your choice into a flower. Enjoy.
I recently ran accross this site, and i’m impressed. Most free font site that i’ve seen seem to grovel in the worst web-design of 5 years ago. Dafont.com is different. It has an attractive, clean interface. It sorts fonts into numerous categories. It credits the creator of the font. But most importantly it allows you to preview your own words in all the typefaces. What more is there to ask of a font website?
Tonight i put togther this invitation for my sister’s big art show. (with her over-my-shoulder input) I’m proud of it. The typeface is Avignon. Naturally the image is from her show. Click it to see the whole thing.
You can preview some of the stuff that will be in the show at her under-construction website. Continue reading ‘Annalisa’s Senior Art Exibition’
I spent quite a bit of time tweaking Brown as Milk the theme i used for the first month of attempting:Lucidity’s life. It’s the direct decendant of Azeem Azeez’s beautiful White as Milk theme. Probably i messed some stuff up, but i altered the CSS to support a bunch of plugins & Widgets, along with altering the already great design to something i like better. But i’ve been allured by some of the AJAX features being included in K2, so i’m dropping Brown as Milk, & making what i’ve accomplished available for other WordPress Bloggers. In my opinion it’s far from the ugliest WordPress theme out there.
You can download Brown as Milk here. Continue reading ‘Brown as Milk’
I’ve just got an account set-up and going with one of the many Microstock sites. Basicly Microstock is a way to buy stock photography cheaply, or from my perspective to sell photos via the internet with no financial risk, & little set-up. At this point i’m going to try to sell my collection of fodder— scans and photos not worthy in themselves, but useful to create other pictures. The textures in most of my illustrations & some of my design come from the fodder.1 Continue reading ‘Selling little Pictures’
Once i realized that the The Hardy Boys were extremely predictable books, the continuation of my love of books, is in large part due to the Medieval stories of the illustrious Howard Pyle (writer and illustrator). Yet it has been some time since i revisted Robin Hood and the Knights of the Round Table. Last week I downloaded another story from LibriVox, the tragedy of Tristan & Iseult. Continue reading ‘Librivox review: Tristan & Iseult’
One of the things i like about the iPod, are the rare moments when i’m out and about, and suddenly there’s a congruity between the world outside, my mood, and the music playing in my head. The music ceases to be merely background, and suddenly becomes theme music— orchestrated to that moment in my life.
Tonight that happened. I put in some hours rather late, and when i left, i found it was raining outside. I like rain, but cannot deny that a rainy night in an empty parking lot has a desolate feel. Then the a melancholy song came up over the ear buds. It intesified the flavor of the moment, as i stood under the overhang watching the rain. When the song was over i walked home. But i’ll probably remember those few minutes of rain longer than most other rainy night i’ve seen.
In order to force some creativity i did the following sketch with 3 basic colors, and one brush, and no initial idea. Also since didn’t feel like getting off the couch, i used my laptop’s trackpad instead of a mouse or wacom. There’s really no artisticly defensable reason for using a track pad. What is it? An alien landscape, i suppose.
I’ve been recently listening to more audiobooks (naturally on my iPod) as i do chores at home or work. LibriVox is a volunteer project, which i mentioned in passing in a previous post. They turn public domain (in the US usually a work at least 75 years old) books into audio books. You might consider it the logical second step from Project Gutenburg. Currently LibriVox has completed over 100 audiobooks, but at least that many more are in progress. Quality, as you might expect, varies.
The King in Yellow was my first LibriVox book. I found this book (and Librivox) via Gwangi’s review of the first story, The Repairer of Reputations. The King in Yellow is a collection of short stories bound together by an eerie atmosphere and (usually) a malign play, The King in Yellow. Robert W. Chambers’ (the author) style of writing reminds me of Poe, & dimmer memories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Not a cheerful genre. Continue reading ‘Librivox review: The King in Yellow’
Today i found something rare: more than a few of the illustrations of my hero T.S. Sullivant in one place. His work (at least for me) has been very hard to find. The extreme, but believable amplification of shape that marks his caricature in my opinion has never been beaten. (The previous sentence veers close to being twaddle, but that is always a danger when using words to describe visual art. Those two worlds don’t wholly overlap.) It takes an amazing amount of understanding to condense the human or animal form into such a compact package.
Sullivant’s illustrations were usually accompanied with captions that were supposed to be funny. Sometimes they are, but most of the verbal humor doesn’t transmit from 100 years ago. But the humor of the drawing has kept fresh. These illustrations are a delight to behold.
If found this via Filboid Studge, a nifty blog on historical illustration & animation, found via Drawn! A great blog with frequently updated links to and brief write-ups of all manner of illustrational things, found via Portland Studio’s new Blog.
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