Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

Here’s a cool video for the concept artists and industrial designers in the crowd. ILoveSketch is a 3D sketching system being developed at the University of Toronto described as an “as-natural-as-possible sketching system for creating 3D curve models”.

MAD Magazine’s Tom Richmond has written up a lengthy review of Wacom’s portable sketchbook-sized tablet screen, the Cintiq 12WX. The consensus: perfect for those who can’t afford the larger model or want to be able to take their work on the road.

Related:
Tom Richmond’s numerous tutorials
Wacom Cintiq 12WX video review
Wacom Cintiq 12WX LCD Sketchbook

So, how many of you know what an anorthoscope is? What, you don’t know?! Well, don’t feel bad…. there’s dozens of amazingly cool obsolete technological doodads out there, all of which contributed to the animations and films and video games we all enjoy today. Lucky for us, one Thomas Weynants has assembled them all in one place. I’m sending you to the sitemap page rather than the homepage – it’s easier to navigate. You’ll get lost for hours perusing the phantasmagorias, the Danse Macabre pages, and the billions of links to other sites. enjoy.

A fun little advert/video that Saatchi Moscow created to turn more Russians on to Gmail.

I’m embarrassed to say I never realized the little red envelope in the Gmail logo was an ‘M’ before this. (An aside: why can’t Gmail’s amazing spam filter figure out that Cyrillic messages in North America are usually spam?)

Also check out this fun video by Commoncraft about how Twitter works. It’s a great video – Commoncraft doesn’t say it’s an ad – but at times it sure feels like an ad.

via Art Threat

Also of interest:
Follow Drawn! on Twitter
More illustrators on Twitter

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

I love the Dezeen design magazine website. Every day, you get glimpses into some stunning architectural and design ideas for the future. Many of them seem like something out of science fiction, while some are in production right now. Above:

San Francisco architects IwamotoScott (it’s an all-flash site, but worth it) have won a competition to propose a futuristic vision of their city, organised by the History Channel. Hydro-Net proposes a new, underground network of tunnels for hydrogen-powered, hovering vehicles plus a forest of new towers sprouting from lowland areas inundated by rising sea levels.

Check out the full set of images on IwamotoScott’s Flickr page.

[via Dezeen]

Photographer Stuart Nafey and artist Lori Stotko create Light Doodles with custom-made LED pens. In addition to their website, they have work on Flickr, and what’s really cool — they’ve uploaded a step-by-step tutorial to Instructables on how to make your own LED pens.

CBC just published an article on a research team that is figuring out a way to make updateable holographs. Of course, they’re marketing it at the medical industry. But all I could think was, update those suckers at 12 frames a second and make them full colour! CBC does eventually make a reference to gaming further down the page.

The image above I swiped from the website of Joseph Perry, a professor working on the project. He describes the research in techno-speak, and lists the scholarly articles about it, for those of you ejjikated enuff to understand them.

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!

Don’t have a scanner? Here’s a creative workaround: using the Mac’s built-in iSight and PhotoBooth. Any webcam would work, of course, and for something a little higher-res (though not as immediate) you can surely use your digital camera.

This is the first in a series of screencasts by illustrator Garth Bruner demonstrating the differences between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe’s acquired-and-now-discontinued Freehand. It’s a plea for Adobe to migrate and incorporate some of Freehand’s more intuitive features into Illustrator. Can’t wait to see more.

EDIT: Garth informs me that the videos will do more than just compare Illustrator to Freehand. He’ll be using several other applications as reference points in order to pinpoint some of Illustrator’s shortcomings.

via Garth’s Twitter

In this wonderfully geeky/surreal art project called “the bubbles of radio,” Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas illustrates different types of radio waves, (Bluetooth, DMB, GSM, RFID (shown above), Wifi and Zigbee) as if they were animals in a biology text book:

“Using inspiration from richly illustrated books on botany, zoology and natural history, Ingeborg arrived at the concept of an encyclopaedia of radio waves that contains a selection of fictional radio ‘species’.”

Link from Hugh!