Ooh, how I’d love to see all the entries in the Charity By Numbers gallery show. The Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, CA and the Alliance for Children’s Rights are presenting a collection of vintage paint-by-numbers pieces transformed into new original works by a serious crapload of great artists (over 100!) including Gary Baseman (shown here), Amy Crehore, Mark Ryden, Tim Biskup, Shag, Paul Frank, Jeff Soto, Gary Taxali, Kaz, Patrick McDonnell, Kozyndan, James Jean, Souther Salazar, and, well, the list goes on and on… Kent Williams has the full scoop, as well as more samples like the one shown here.
Here’s a short interview at PingMag with L.A. cutie-pie illustrator couple (just scroll down the interview, you’ll see a photo) Kozyndan (that’s Kozue and Dan = Kozy-n-dan), who just opened their exhibition at Paul Smith SPACE in Shibuya, Tokyo. They have a blog too (but it has no RSS feed! How can I track their every post without a feed?!)
One of your first questions, as it would be for me, would be: How do two illustrators create a single piece together? Their answer:
Kozue: It depends. Sometimes, it’s just one of us finishing off a piece and other times we would draw an illustration together. The usual process is that we draw rough sketches with a pencil on paper and scan it in. Then we start to color it in on Photoshop. If you take a closer look, you can see the lines drawn by a pencil on the background.
Honestly, that still doesn’t answer the question, so it, along with how many licks to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, will have to remain shrouded in mystery. What ain’t a mystery, is how amazing their work is. The image above is only about a quarter of a full-360 degree panoramic illustration they did. You can view it in full size and rotate spin around the QVTR here.
