Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

You may not immediately recognize this image:

But if I were to zoom out a little you’d see that it was the eye of the central figure in Goya’s “The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid” closer than you’ve likely ever seen it, unless you’ve seen it in person at the Prado Museum in Madrid:

It’s the result of Google’s launch of the Prado layer in Google Earth. Don’t miss this video documenting how they did it:

CNN has an article about Dennis Hwang, the otherwise-anonymous creator of all the wacky variants of the Google logo you see pop up on holidays and special dates. See some of the variants here. Google has an absolutely hideous logo, so it’s always somewhat nice to see some illustrative flourishes distract from its ugliness.

(Previously: Family of Joan Miro upset over Google logo)

Elise Ackerman, from the Mercury News, writes:

After angering authors last fall with a wide-ranging book-copying project, Google may now be alienating some visual artists as well by allegedly reproducing famous works in drawings on the search giant’s home page.

Today, the family of Joan Miro was upset to discover elements of several works by the Spanish surrealist incorporated into Google’s logo. Google has since taken the logo off its site.

Google had altered their logo in celebration of Joan Miro’s birthday, which was April 20.

Update: The Wikipedians have already covered this story in detail:

The Artists Rights Society, a group that represents the Miro family and more than 40,000 visual artists and their estates, asked Google to remove the image early Thursday morning.

“There are underlying copyrights to the works of Miró, and they are putting it up without having the rights,” said Theodore Feder, president of Artists Rights Society.

In a written statement to the Mercury News, Google said that it would honor the request but that it did not believe its logo was a copyright violation.

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