Illustrations by Charlie Bowater

January 6th, 2011

I stumbled upon illustrations by the very talented Charlie Bowater this week. Not only is Charlie a talented sketch artist but her Photoshop skills are impressive as well. I’ve included mostly just sketches in this post but you should check out more of her work in her Deviant Art gallery. I’m certain you’ll be as impressed by her talents as I am! I would love to be able to draw half this good. Just looking at these is inspiring me to get out sketch book and try to learn.

Charlie Bowater

 

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Kawah Ijen by Olivier Grunewald

December 30th, 2010

Kawah Ijen is a volcano in East Java, Indonesia and the site of a labor intensive sulfur mining operation where miners collect and carry huge loads of pure sulfur up from the crater floor along a steep, rocky path amid clouds of sulfur dioxide gas, all for the equivalent of about ten dollars a day. It is also home to the largest lake of sulfuric acid in the world. The ph of the lake water is 0.5, similar to the strength of car battery acid. Photographer Olivier Grunewald has recently made several trips into the sulfur mine in the crater, bringing with him equipment to capture surreal images lit by moonlight, torches, and the blue flames of burning molten sulfur. The miners of the 2,600 meter tall (8,660 feet) volcano trek up to the crater, then down to the shore of a 200 meter deep crater lake of sulfuric acid, where they retrieve heavy chunks of pure sulfur to carry back to a weighing station. The colors are beautiful but I’ll bet it stinks something awful.

Kawah Ijen - Olivier Grunewald

 

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Thought of You – Ryan Woodward

December 20th, 2010

I just stumbled upon this animation at Vimeo and fell in love with it. This little treasure was animated by Ryan Woodward with music by The Weepies. The minute I started watching I knew I had to post it to my blog. I also knew I had to hop over to iTunes and buy the album. Hope you like it!

Posted in Art & Design, Music | 2 Comments »

Illustrations by Fiduciose (Skan Srisuwan)

December 15th, 2010

Today I’m featuring the fantastic designs of Thai artist Skan Srisuwan (aka Fiduciose). A graduate of Silpakorn University, Skan is mostly known for blending human forms and machines into intricate, metallic creations. Skan co-founded and is currently Creative Director at Studio Hive where he focuses on providing clients with comics production, concepts, illustrations, I.P. creation, as well as developing internal projects. His style is certainly distinctive and not one you’ll easily mistake. Enjoy!

Skan Srisuwan - FIDUCIOSE

 

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Google Font API and Font Directory

December 7th, 2010

Google Font APIBack in May, Google introduced their Font API and Font Directory. The API currently serves over 17 million requests a day to users across the globe. Roughly 400,000 unique websites use the Google Font API. Last week Google added more fonts to the directory bringing the font count up to 34 not including variants and character ranges. The fonts in the directory are all released under open source licenses so you can use them on any non-commercial or commercial project. Applying one of these fonts to your website is easy – just add a stylesheet link to your web page, then use the font in a CSS font-family property. When Google receives a request for a web font, they detect the browser and device and serve the font file format that works best. This ensures the most consistent results across browsers and devices.

 

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Digital Matte Artist Головченко Алексей

November 19th, 2010

I stumbled upon the matte painting collection of Alex Golovchenko this week. He’s done some truly fantastic work. Alex is currently Senior Designer at Inter TV Channel, the Ukrainian national broadcaster. Matte Painting is another one of those amazing skill sets I would love to develop some day if I wasn’t so busy writing sub-par PHP code. Golovchenko’s work is vividly imaginative and his use of color and lighting is delightful. Enjoy!

Alex Golovchenko - Головченко Алексей

 

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Illustrations by Grandpa Charlie

November 16th, 2010

My grandfather didn’t live long enough to see the advent of the internet and even if he had, I doubt he would have cared for it much. He didn’t even like having a TV. He was a stone mason and loved to work with his hands, but he was also very creative, innovative, and an entrepreneur. He patented a new type of plaster he called “durostone” and started his own plastering company. As a kid, I loved to visit the house he built because it was unique in many ways. He created a steer skull design with huge horns in plaster over the garage door and the posts in the basement were plastered to look like tree trunks. Before his plastering career, he served in the Army. He also enjoyed sketching and doodling. My dad helped me track down a couple scans. So for the first time ever on the internet, enjoy some sketches by my grandpa Charlie!

Grandpa Charlie

 

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