American Madness

Today’s installment of art comes from Jerusalem and Seattle.

First up we have some older work by Desiree Palmen. Between 1999 and 2006 Palmen worked with fabrics and paint to make jumpsuits that camouflaged nicely with their surroundings (if you are standing in a certain place that is). For fans of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the idea seems similar to the “Mimetic Polycarbon” jump suit worn by the Panther Moderns,* except these don’t change with their environment. The jumpsuits are all painted with some consideration given to the way the individual will stand (or sit) and have a realistic look to them. Makes me wonder what they look like in real life. It is interesting to see the jumpsuits mixed with some of the older parts of Jerusalem (like in “Old City Suit“). There is even text to some of the projects (located on the main page) that discusses some of the ideas behind them.

Next up** we have the work of Chris Jordan. His work is billed at “Photographic Arts,” which seems like a questionable name for a medium until you start to look at his pictures, and I mean really look at them. His most recent project is called “Running the Numbers” and spans from 2006 to 2008. (more…)

Peter Vallone Jr. is a huge… Let’s just simply say he is a big name in the ‘war’ against graffiti. In a recent Colbert Report segment Stephen Colbert took aim at Vallone. Apparently the Colbert Report used him because they “wanted to speak to they person most despised by the graffiti community.” The video is about a six year old who was reported to the department of sanitation because she was drawing on her stoop with chalk (we wrote about it a few months back).

Also for your viewing pleasure (I just found this one to be pretty impressive): (more…)

Do you have incredible skills with a digital paintbrush? Love tooling around in Photoshop and creating really nice images to impressive your friends with? Well then Sketchfu is the site for you.

Oh, you don’t have those incredible skills? Well, neither do I, but Sketchfu is still pretty fun. Pretty much it is an online doodle pad that actually records your brush strokes. It is pretty neat to just play around with.

What is better though is watching some the replays of other folks who have clearly mastered the process. Oh, plus if you really like what you have drawn you can even embed it on your own webpage for others to see.* To see the best of the best, just jump to Best of Sketchfu and watch the work of the masters. Personally I can’t even figure out layering, oh right, plus I am not that talented an artist.

*Note, I have not even come close to mastering it, so I am just going to use their logo as the picture here.

I just discovered Speak Up due to an interesting write up they did on movie posters and their color schemes.

Here is the basis of their post- they looked at the movie posters for the top 5 grossing movies by rating (top 5 NC-17, top 5 R, top 5 PG-13, etc.) and then broke these posters down by colors. What they found, although scientifically problematic was pretty interesting. At the top, with the NC-17 rated movies, they found lots of dark colors and, not surprise here, flesh tones. Moving down the rating slide, they start to get more and more colorful until they hit G with bright posters with lots of colors.

It is a relatively interesting analysis of film posters and ratings. My biggest problem being that most movies have multiple posters. These multiple posters usually employ different color schemes to attract different people to the movies. Regardless though this is a pretty interesting look at the role color plays in relation to rating.

So, yesterday I posted about MyFrienemies. Today’s social network is for colour enthusiasts.

ColourLovers is a place to go to to talk about colors, your favorite palette, recent trends and fads in colors and the influence colours have. they are “a resource that monitors and influences color trends… a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news, and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.” I guess ideally it is a place for people who deal with color on a daily basis, designers, artists, etc.

But it is also cool to check out different color palettes, see what is new and hot in the world of color, and if you are a color lover, chat with folks with similar interests and debate the merits of Forest Green over Pine Green. If you love colors and are looking for folks to talk to, or are just repainting a room this could be an interesting resource to check out.