Mosaic Monday / Video

I think you guys will like the work of Australian mosaic artist Brett Campbell. The video below shows a wide range of subjects including a few animals. You can learn more about Brett on his web site. The site offers supplies and kits for those that are new to mosaics and need help getting started.

DAWN OF VICTORY concept ship art

Dawn of Victory is a modification in the works for the game Sins of a Solar Empire.



















Keywords: concept spaceship art for dawn of victory (DoV)a modification in the works for the game sins of a solar empire an interstellar real time strategy game with a strong focus on empire building sins developed by ironclad games and published by stardock

Dragon Ball Z Papercraft: Scouter

A scouter is a device commonly worn by soldiers in the Dragon Ball Z animated series. Scouters perform numerous functions including power level readings of opponents and interstellar communication. The papercraft scouter pictured above is a modification by deviantART member Ryo007 of a template located here. Ryo007's version has a larger lens than the original and may be downloaded here.

Last Day Off For Awhile

Well its is Saturday and we have one more family gathering to enjoy. Today I am going to relish my last day off from work for a few weeks. On Sunday I will be back at my desk and working on portraits. I will also get caught up with e-mail and try to touch base with any clients waiting on proofs for longer than one week. I am about to go into the last long stretch of intense work & creating. The finish line is just ahead and I am hoping to wrap up all my projects by 12/20.

Have a great weekend everyone. Enjoy your families.

Escape into Life: Issue no. 4

Paper Geography by Letha Colleen

We have another fantastic issue of Escape into Life for your entertainment and enlightenment this weekend. You'll find two excellent art essays, a poetry and illustration double feature, and a musical blend.

What is Genius? . . . . Tony Thomas examines the question of genius in the arts and science.

Creativity, Institutions, and Outsider Art . . . David Maclagan, author of Outsider Art: from the margins to the marketplace, discusses defiant creativity and the use of the term "outsider art”.

Poetry by Emari DiGiorgio . . . In this double feature, the poetry of Emari DiGiorgio is presented alongside the illustration art of Raphael Vicenzi.

Jam Tape 2: A Musical Mix . . . Experience a musical blend of blues, electronic, jazz, and Irish music by Jamreilly, the Official Escape into Life DJ.

Marvel Comics Papercraft: Galactus Cubee

Another one of those fantastic comic book characters created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, Galactus is a giant being described in the pages of one Marvel comic book as "the most awesome living entity in the cosmos". To befit Galactus' titanic stature, deviantART member Viper005 has created a king size custom Cubee papercraft which is greater than twice the size of a usual Cubee (see the blank normal size Cubee in the photo for comparison). The two page template for this Galactus Cubee may be found here.

Concept ship art by Joseph Martinez

We try to do holidays right... Joseph Martinez. HAPPY THANKSGIVING!













Keywords: concept spaceship industrial car design art blog 5th term transportation design art center college of design los angeles la california joseph martinez

Thankful For So Many Great Clients

"Henry" ( see all proofs)
© 2009 rebecca collins/ artpaw.com

Harper ( see all proofs)

© 2009 rebecca collins/ artpaw.com

Lexxi ( see all proofs)

© 2009 rebecca collins/ artpaw.com

Today as I organize new orders and review all the projects that need updating I am feeling a bit overwhelmed, which is a very good thing and the normal way I should be feeling as we go in to the final month before Christmas. I am also feeling very thankful to all of you guys that have been ordering early and paying attention to the holiday deadlines.

I probably will not be extending the deadline this year as we are officially swamped. I will be having a sale on Friday though for both existing and new clients that may want to do a Gift Certificate Purchase. Gift Certificates are a great way to order a portrait for your self or a loved one and not have to worry about photos right now. So even if you have an order placed with us for your own pup you might consider doing a gift certificate for Mom & Dad. They will enjoy working with us and picking out their favorite proofs.

Check Back for our Black Friday Sale and order a Pet Portrait Gift Certificate this month that we will create for you later in January of 2010.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Candy Corn Gift Box Papercraft

Halloween is past, but since it is still candy corn season I couldn't pass up posting this cute papercraft. :) This is a glue-less gift box that is held together only by a ribbon at the top. I think it would be cool to put some real candy corn inside some of these boxes and give them away on Thanksgiving Day tomorrow (Happy Thanksgiving! BTW). This candy corn box was created by deviatART user "Soupcomplex". The template is located here.

Concept ship art by Frank Hong

Frank's blog and deviantart page.



















Keywords: concept ships artwork designs by freelance artist frank hong currently majoring in animation at sheridan college specialized in digital painting and other forms of computer graphics

My Santa Scottie

"Big Tommy Says HoHoHo"

( above back-side of card)

This weekend I spent some time designing our holiday card. Back in the mid 1990's I worked full time as an independent greeting card designer. I recall that I really enjoyed designing the backs of my cards. I am pleased with the back of this one. The tiny word in the center of the ray beams is "wag". The interior copy reads "joy". I had a version with the snowflakes on solid blue and one with just the ray beams. When I asked Dan which to use he said combine them .... and that was the perfect answer.

Oh ...and yes ... this is repurposed art from the Party Animals Project. Originally Tommy was shot with a party hat.

Goonies Papercraft: Copper Bones

I have had this papercraft sitting on the back burner for quite some time, but last weekend I finally got it finished and ready to post. The Goonies has over the years become something of a cult movie classic. This papercraft is of the "copper bones", a skull shaped key that the kids in the movie make use of to find a pirate treasure. Details of the template are as follows:

Scale: 1:1
Finished Size: 6.25" (15.9 cm)
Number of sheets: 1
Number of parts: 10
Difficulty: 1/5
Download

Special thanks once again to Indy Magnoli at Indyprops.com for his help in producing this papercraft.

Related Papercraft:

Masonic Medallion

Ra Staff Headpiece

Kitty Mosaic

Dinner?
Originally uploaded by cbmosaics

Lovely kitty cat from Christine Brallier. See more from Christine over at: cbmosaics.com or click through to her Flickr stream.

I am swamped with work. Will try to post some new projects soon. This will be such a short week.

The Song Is You

It might seem innocent.

Yes, this is innocence. It is the purity of what happens when the postmodernisms and the camps and the sooavantgardes have made their statements and played their anti-tunes, and yet, we are still there, trying to listen in to that something special.

Call us romantic. Call us Those Who Couldn't Stand The Progress And Stepped Back.Retrograded, taking the easy way out, exploring the (music's, world's, history's) feedback.

Yet feedback is not the sound that comes back to its source. It is not the echo. It is the echo used as an input.
Thus, what you call feedback is the mere beginning, the source material of the process of creation. As the world comes back crumbling to the imperfection of our ever-childish senses, our feeble gestures, breaking through our inherited self-irony, make things possible. Better, they give us back the light.


Too light? Too naive?
Would you prefer this?


The Gospel was right: The meek shall inherit the Earth. Actually, they've inherited it already. Along with the self-irony, they took what was most precious, and what many deemed lost - the damn aura. Yes, the damn aura still shining and glowing through all the mechanical reproductions. We still want their bloody flesh, we still want to know this is where it's at, right here, between the stage and you, between the song and you.

x x x
All this crossed my mind when watching the brilliant The Song Is You festival at Powiększenie in Warsaw recently.
The song that stayed with me the most was simple.
Here it is:

Do you get it? Beyond the gorgeous lyrics, can you feel how it was, listening to it in the club basement, with the grand piano behind Momus, the lights, the weekend dying away? Or can you imagine it? How different is the song you hear from mine?
More on the festival here. Don't miss tonight (12.03), the last part of the festival, with Kyst and AU.

Kyst

Blue Angels Fighter Jet Papercraft

When I was young, my dad took me to see the Blue Angels Aerobatic Team, so I had to smile when I saw this papercraft. The jet which the Blue Angels used in the late 50's and mid-60's was the F11F Tiger. The F11F was the second aircraft of the U.S. Navy with supersonic capabilities and also the first fighter known to have caught up with the bullets of its own gun. The template for this F11F (as well many other 1:60 scale aircraft by German designer Christoph Stahl) may be found here.

On Genius

Rene Margritte, Clairvoyance (Self-Portrait)

Reading the New York Times Book Review, one frequently comes across assertions like:

But looking at her writing from this perspective misses the most interesting part: her sentences. No one writing in English today produces anything quite like them. Take, for example, the following passage, early in the novel, in which the principal narrator, an authorial stand-in named Mimi, looks east from the track around the Central Park (or, properly speaking, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) Reservoir.

“Windows high above Fifth Avenue flashed the bronze setting of the sun. I will never understand how that brilliant display, mostly blocked by the apartment houses on Central Park West, leaps the reservoir’s expanse. And do not care to understand, demanding magic from this forbidden journey, though the simple refraction of light at end of day may be grammar-school science.”(1)

The reviewer has chosen a specimen, if you will, in order to demonstrate the author's genius. This hardly seems offensive to most of us; this is the critic's job, to make statements like that. But this morning, whether it was because I hadn't slept the night before or because something had finally occurred to me, I found myself questioning the way in which we--I do it too--talk about artists and their work.

Specifically, their finest work.

We read, "No one writing in English today produces anything quite like them." And then, a passage that illustrates the reviewer's claim.

The passage is beautiful; I was certainly moved by it. But let me challenge you to another point of view, a point of view which is provisional and openly philosophical . . .

What we think of as a writer's unique and individual gifts, those sparkling sentences that critics extol--in my present understanding--are really the effervescence of language itself.

What I mean to say by that is, art in poetry or prose is language in its purest, most accessible, most fluid form, nearly on a separate wavelength. It's on a wavelength most of us can hear, just not all of the time. When we hear it, our hearts swoon, our minds expand.

This is a language that is common to all, a language that resonates with large numbers of people. My immediate reaction, like the critic of the New York Times Book Review, is to elevate the artist who created these lines, to point to the individual. But there is something behind this reaction that bothers me.

It seems we like to pick out the gifted as if they were our own shiny fruit. We like to exclaim, "Ah, this is genius!" It gratifies us to make these declarations, and it somehow serves us.

A critic will point to a work of art, or a beautiful sentence, as if it were possible to isolate perfection--to sever the part from the whole, the text from the context. I am doubtful of this ability to zero in on transcendence.

I believe the magical passage, the stunning work of art, is not the watermark of individual genius, but instead the reflection of a higher state of mind. The artwork is evidence of some journey. Art criticism flattens the journey, however, by making it into a vacation. Now it's as if the artist went on a vacation and brought us back a souvenir. We grab for the souvenir at our first chance because it really is magnificent to have such a beautiful thing in our hands. Blinded by the act of possession, having stamped our names across the material object, we see no further--

In this mode of appreciating art, the furthest I can see is not far enough. Fixated on the individual and her gifts, I lose sight of the deeper meaning or beauty in the work of art. By reducing art to the individual, and setting a spotlight on the hand that wrought perfection, I mistakenly short-circuit the whole enterprise of art.

The author's passages, or the artist's brushstrokes, should be signaling the opposite reaction. Art is a universal language, not an individual one. What if we approached the appreciation of art from the other side, from the side closest to the collective "we"? Do we even have a universal language to praise art? Or is our criticism and praise decidedly individualistic?

Furthermore, all art is in flux, even after its creation. This makes it hard to pin down exact marks of genius; evidence for genius seems to move around a lot and vacillate. After all, the concept "art" is in our minds.

In sum, there is no permanent, eternal art. Art wavers between a radiant work of genius, an emblem of culture, a historical artifact, and a hundred other possibilities. Art can be or mean almost anything, as recent -isms have shown. Culture will continue to see it differently as it passes through the kaleidoscope of history.

Artists have in fact done themselves a great disservice by allowing others to praise their works. (I expect you to disagree with me here.) But, suspend disbelief for a moment, what if we attributed an author's sparkling sentences to a state of mind rather than an individual person?

What if we looked upon great works of art, looking beyond the individual creator, and toward something common to all--the underlying language that makes this art so moving in the first place.

Prior to these insights, I trumpeted individualism. I trumpeted individualism because I felt a strong sense of being an individual myself, and I felt a strong sense of being able to identify other individuals. I saw the enterprise of art as essentially individualistic. The artist works alone, the works are understood alone. Art is the conversation between two individuals, one real and one imaginary (the author's ideal reader, or artist's ideal viewer).

But now I'm coming to believe that individualism in art is not what makes it special. Individualism is the coat an artist sheds over time, growing closer to the patterns of her art as she moves further and further away from her individual sense of self. And those moments of greatness, the superb execution, exists outside of the artist. What we point to when we declare, "What genius!" is the second space the artist has created between herself and her work, the plane onto which the universal occurs. Exquisite sentences arise here, but so do many other things, such as wisdom and love and a profound synthesis of mankind and nature.

Could it be that the beauty we perceive in art is not the mark of an individual genius, but instead evidence of a higher consciousness, evidence of a God I don't believe in, or simply the invisible rails between two people who have never met?

More Essays by the author at Escape into Life

A Dog Named Dylan

"Dylan" ( see all proofs)
© 2009 rebecca collins/ artpaw.com

This morning I have been playing with a dog named Dylan while listening to a man named Dylan. I am trying out the Rhapsody music site. Currently I am enjoying Bob Dylan's Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Live 1964.

About The Art:
I rotated this handsome Chocolate Lab's head just a bit and brightened the photo before I started. Everyone always comments on Mr. Big Paws, another lab on the site and so I referenced that older work a bit before I started. The images above have a posterize effect applied to the painted work. I have a softer painterly option available in the proofing set.

Concept ships by Dr. CM Wong

Koshime's cg portfolio, blog and company. An interview on it's art magazine.































Keywords: concept ships digital art design renders by dr. cm wong koshime founder of opus artz in london england uk visual development agency concept art for the entertainment industry high definition animation hd anime flash art