Google, in cooperation with Time Life, has posted a ton of photographs from the Time Life archive online, most of which have never been published before. The photographs are categorized by decade, and if you take a look at the 1950s section, you will find pictures of Walt Disney Studios, many featuring the man himself, but also others featuring the brilliant folks behind the scenes (such as Ward Kimball, Frank Thomas, and who I think maybe Marc Davis?)
Bay Area artist Yasmine S has a blog entitled A Print a Day in which she has been posting a series of patterns, illustrations, and art prints. She also regularly provides some fun downloads with Photoshop brushes, patterns, labels, and other assets.
This is a really great opportunity for emerging Canadian animators. So listen up if you are one…
Submit your film proposal by Friday July 18, 2008 for a chance to take one of 6 seats in the Animation Hothouse, an intensive paid apprenticeship for emerging filmmakers which runs this year from September 2 – November 21 at the NFB Animation Studio in Montreal.
Your proposal must be tailored to a 1-minute film idea and be based on, or a reaction to, the theme: “The Time I Changed My Mindâ€.
What does that mean? You tell us…
You can check out the Hothouse website for submission details and selection criteria, eligibility, etc.
Full disclosure: I work at the National Film Board, blah blah blah…
Also of interest:
NFB Hothouse Films Online
Here’s a nice little essay by comic book artist and creativity maven, Lynda Barry (What It Is) on the creative value of working with a paintbrush as opposed to the computer.
Also, the Free Library has posted a podcast of their recent Lynda Barry event in Philadelphia.
Also of interest:
Podcast: Adrian Tomine event at the Free Library
I can’t for the life of me remember where I first saw this post, but Chanpory Rith over at LifeClever.com shares handy links to 10 Free web-based alternatives to Photoshop*:
I’m fed up with Photoshop and its one billion rarely-used features. How about a simple photo-editor that’s quick, easy, and doesn’t cost a thousand dollars? Fortunately, there’re tons of web-based photos editors popping up.
By far the most outstanding one on his list is Picnik (pictured above) for its simplicity and five-second learning curve (it’s free, but ad-supported). You may be familiar with Picnik since it was recently integrated into Flickr. I admit I loved how, when saving a file as a low-quality JPG, it describes it as “Big, ugly blocks of pixels, teeny tiny file size.” And when saving as a medium-quality JPG: “Meh quality, small file size.” It’s the kind of photo-editor your Mom would understand.
I found Picnik particularly useful this week when a client needed to convert a bunch of BMP files to JPGs for their site. They are not tech-savvy, nor did they have the interest in purchasing and learning new software for such a simple task, but they figured out how to use Picnik in just a few minutes.
*Johnny posted similar free Photoshop-clones just over two years ago here as well.
Just under a year ago I posted a link to Pose Maniacs, a collection of rotating 3D human models that you can use as reference for sketching or drawing. Though always easy to navigate, until this launch of their site in English, it was in Japanese only.
Previously: Pose Maniacs: Human Model Resource
This awesome new game brings your drawings to life. Draw a ball and watch it fall, draw an incline and watch the ball roll down. A demo version is available for download on the official site.
Looks like it’s based on this MIT software (watch the demo here) which everyone was blogging about last year.
It also looks like the game requires a tablet. Could be another fun way to use the Wacom Cintiq.
via kottke.org
The Design Police help you “bring bad design to justice” with these awesome, printable “Visual Enforcement Kits“.
Brilliant.
(via MomentFactory)
A few years back we looked at a site called Patchblox, a simple links page for illustrators and artists made up of a patchwork of icons. A new version has just launched. The new Patchblox site is the work of illustrator Anneka Tran and Rob Laro, both tremendous artists.
As you can see, the new site is pretty vacant still, which means there’s plenty of opportunity for you to get your own patch of the quilt and start filling up the site with brilliant illustrators.
Say THAT ten times fast. Rolls right off the tongue. Anyhoo…
You spoiled rich kids who’ve already upgraded to Leopard can give your Mac’s seemingly-useless Color Picker a little extra zazz with Mondrianum, a plugin that pumps Adobe’s Kuler into CP:
Lithoglyph’s Mondrianum is a powerful plug-in that enables Mac applications to leverage the resources of the kuler community. Once installed, Mondrianum acts like a built-in, system-wide color picker, available in any Mac application that supports this feature of Mac OS X. Apple’s own iWork™ and iLife® suites, Google Sketchup™, and renowned applications like Coda, CSSEdit, and many more, all work well with Mondrianum.
And, no, it doesn’t work in 10.4. I tried. Wahh!
What do you do with a million public domain images that need context and description?
The Library of Congress is putting them on Flickr.
“The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to show how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.
. . .
Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.”
Nate Williams, illustrator and all around nice guy, gets asked how he got his start a lot by artists all over the globe (myself being one of them). Lucky for all of us, Nate sat down one day back in November and took the time to answer this question in depth on his blog, covering topics such as style, marketing yourself, attitude… he even included a break down of his work process! Go check out his post here.
Posted images are the property and copyright of their respective creators and/or owners.
