I mentioned Sam Bradley, the guy who’s been doing the illustrated social experiment on Twitter, a week or so ago. Since then he’s put all the illustrations he’s produced up on their own website, SWFT.ca, and added me to the ranks alongside such glitterati as Douglas Coupland and Drawn’s Robot Johnny.
Might need to lighten up the tone of my tweets though — I appear to have been depicted as a miserable tiny balding man!
Browsing through my backlog of blog feeds this morning a post by Nick Asbury caught my eye. He was looking for more information about the illustrator who created these beautiful covers for Country Fair magazine, signed “Hanna”, in the 1950s.
By the time I had found the post he had already managed to discover that it was an Australian artist by the name of John Hanna who lived in England from 1948 to 1962.
Surprisingly there’s very little the web about him, but I have managed to dig up a few additional scans of his work for Country Fair. (via Ace Jet 170)
Update 5th Sept 2009: Lots more lovely images here on the Delicious Industries blog. Frustratingly they appear to have been dug up at a boot fair very close to home! (via Drawn!)
Artist Sam Bradley has started a new social art project: He’s pledged to illustrate, four times a week, an individual tweet from the social networking site Twitter.
He hasn’t set up a site for it yet (I’ll update this post when he does) but you can see his drawings as he posts them on his Twitter stream @abysmalred.
Update: You can now find all of his Twitter illustrations at SWFT.ca
National Geographic Magazine: What’s in an American Name?
Native American words echo in the names of lakes, rivers, mountains, states, cities, and small towns across the United States. The first settlers, who put many European words on the map, also borrowed names from local tribes. They often mispronounced what they heard—that’s how the Washoe word dá’aw, or lake, became Tahoe.
(via Aegir)
It’s no secret that Blade Runner is one of my favourite movies so I’ve just been salivating looking through some superb images created using Sandbox 2 and CryENGINE 2, the video game engine used for the first-person shooter Crysis.
The images were created as entries to a movie-themed contest at game-artist.net and winning entries included sets from The X-Men, Aliens and I Am Legend. This Blade Runner set deservedly took winning place and you can view the process behind the construction on this message thread. (via N4G)
Ever wondered what your SNES looks like under an x-ray? Yeah, me neither. This guy did, though, and has managed to scan the insides of a whole range of consoles from the Atari 2600 (mostly empty) to the Wii (with accessories, no less) and the Playstation 3 (pictured above).
Reintji’s X-Ray Funnies (via Destructoid)
Update 10th June: Here’s the Partly Cloudy short in full.
Absolutely superb! Be quick though, I doubt it’ll be around for long.
Here’s a fleeting 30 seconds from Partly Cloudy, the Pixar short that will accompany their next feature, Up. Directed by Peter Sohn, the voice of Emile in the movie Rataouille, it tells the story of Gus, a lonely grey cloud who makes babies for storks to deliver.
From the Pixar wiki:
Everyone knows that the stork delivers babies, but where do the storks get the babies from? The answer lies up in the stratosphere, where cloud people sculpt babies from clouds and bring them to life. Gus, a lonely and insecure grey cloud, is a master at creating ‘dangerous’ babies. Crocodiles, porcupines, rams and more—Gus’s beloved creations are works of art, but more than a handful for his loyal delivery stork partner, Peck. As Gus’s creations become more and more rambunctious, Peck’s job gets harder and harder. How will Peck manage to handle both his hazardous cargo and his friend’s fiery temperament?
There’s a lengthy interview with Peter about the short at Animation World News.
View a higher quality version of the trailer. Partly Cloudy will debut with Up on May 29th.
(via Cartoon Brew)
I’ve just been browsing The Art of Penguin Science Fiction, a website “that explores the history and cover art of science fiction published by Penguin Books from 1935 to 1977.” I’ve always been a big fan of classic Penguin paperback books covers and this tied neatly to yesterday’s post on man’s vision of the future through the years.
The cropped image above is from the 1963 paperback of John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes. It was scanned by Michael Bojkowski — he has a few more higher resolution scans of classic paperbacks on Flickr. If you’re into Penguin covers be sure to browse Penguin Paperback Spotters’ Guild Flickr pool too.
(discovered via Noisy Decent Graphics)
Stephen Worth has an interesting article over at the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive on how we’ve imagined the future throughout the past century. It includes scans of an article from a 1950 issue of Coronet magazine, illustrated by Chesley Bonestell, about a family trip to Venus in the year 2500, along with some clips from the Disneyland TV show’s “Mars and Beyond“. Mars and Beyond was one of three space-themed specials:
It’s impossible to overstate how important the Disney space shows were to the American space program. President Dwight Eisenhower requested a copy of “Man in Space” to screen for his top military officers to convince them that space travel was indeed possible. Six months after “Mars and Beyond” aired, congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act which established NASA. The launch of Russia’s Sputnik satellite in October 1957 might have been the immediate impetus for the swift passage of the funding for the program, but the groundwork for the concept behind NASA was laid by Wernher von Braun and Walt Disney.
Clearly, scientists like Wernher von Braun and politicians like Eisenhower and Kennedy were responsible for America’s space program. But it took more than science and funding to put man on the moon. It took will. The awe inspiring imaginary vistas of Chesley Bonestell and the fantastic animation of Ward Kimball and Walt Disney became our collective dreams. The day after “Man in Space” aired, every man, woman and child in America had the same fantasy in their head- the burning desire to go to the moon. The visions created by these artists and filmmakers became reality because they crystallized and energized our collective will.
Animation has the power to mobilize society to do great things.
Mars and Beyond can be found on the Walt Disney Treasures – Tomorrowland: Disney in Space and Beyond
If that’s not enough, here’s some Ward Kimball concept art.
