JabJab’s latest original music video, He’s Barack Obama, which premiered at the White House Radio & Television Correspondents Dinner this week, is my favourite yet.
I visited the JibJab studios last month, and everyone was hard at work putting the finishing touches on this piece. It was great fun to see all the work in progress, and bless their hearts, the JibJab team has put all of it on their production blog.
Anyone interested in how these sorts of things are put together owes it to themselves to check it out — they cover the initial writing process, scratch music tracks, character designs, rough storyboards, and the production of all the design and animation. Don’t miss the unused stop motion sequence.
Poster Boy remixes ads in the NY subway, often with hilarious results. Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan says:
Art: is it what he does? Culture jamming: a term too annoying to use any more, though everyone knows what it means. Sell out: is he bound to, eventually? Questions: he asks them.
This weekend I’m looking forward to a Symposium to be held at Parsons, The New School of Design in New York. On the topic of “illustrative responses to world events… both visceral and intimate”, it will explore “the current state of political and social visual commentary“. The impressive speakers include Steven Heller, Rutu Modan, Peter Kuper,Steve Brodner, Luba Lukova, and Anton Kannemeyer.
Symposium: Saturday, November 15, 2008, 1:00-5:30 P.M.
The New School, Tishman Auditorium
Johnson/Kaplan Hall, 66 WEST 12TH STREET Free and open to the public!
I wish I could make out the illustrator’s name for the image above – best I can do is “Gary ____”. It’s printed tiny alongside it as it appears in blog entry for the Symposium.
UPDATE: Dave Tabler and mortadel tell me the artist is Guy Billout.
There is also an exhibition of illustrated covers for Der Spiegel magazine at 2 West 13th street, 8th floor, from November 14th to November 30th, with a reception happening on November 14th, at 6pm.
(Disclaimer: I’ll be teaching at Parsons next year).
It’s still several hours before any results pour in for the U.S. presidential election, but that hasn’t stopped editorial cartoonists from making predictions and readying their submissions. Daryl Cagle’s online hub of editorial cartoons has already started compiling cartoons depicting Obama’s victory.
MAD cartoonist Tom Richmond also recently posted a look at MAD’s efforts to not predict election results, but to prepare two versions of features or cover art that feature a winning presidential candidate.
I guess if there’s any proof to the far right’s claim that Barack Obama is a socialist it’s that his face is on more t-shirts than Che Guevara these days. The Art of Obama blog aims to document the outpouring of artwork inspired by Obama’s message of hope and change, and his image itself.
There are some hits and misses, but I was struck by the elegance of this wire sculpture entitled Tension by artist Michael Murphy.
An ad agency working on the Obama campaign called me a few weeks ago. They saw my drawings over words and my drawing with words posted here and asked if I would be interested in doing a drawing for a campaign poster. They wanted a portrait of Barack Obama made from a list of issues most important to the Senator written out to form the portrait. I employed this technique once before when I was so frustrated with the media coverage I thought it an appropriate way to show the subtext. But that drawing was done for this blog rather quickly and designed to be seen 6 inches at 72 ppi (pixels per square inch) this would be viewed much larger and needed to be much more detailed. That means many many more words,.. so many in fact, that at 72 ppi, I could only show a small fraction of the drawing here, otherwise it wouldn’t read as words.
Over the next few days I’m going to post the rest of the drawing in fragments. If you’re a college student and you print the fragments out, tile them together on your dorm room wall and send me a picture, I’ll give you a shout out and post the pics here on my blog.
With all that’s going on upon the American political stage, it’s almost easy to forget about the impending election up here in Canada.
Louis Riel cartoonist Chester Brown has become the Libertarian candidate in my riding of Trinity-Spadina here in Toronto. He’s interviewed comic-jam-style by my friend and Extremely Bad Advice columnist Steve Murray of the National Post, who tries to get at the heart of Chester’s forays into libertarianism using the medium they know best.
Feeling left out of the political process? Not quite sure how to field-dress a moose? Plenty of hope but far too little cash left in your 401k? Sure, McCain and Obama both feel your pain, but now you can play along with them!
Illustrator Bob Staake invites you to play LINGO during the presidential debates with these game cards you can download from his site.
Here’s a treat. In promotion of his new retrospective book Monsters, The BBC has posted a short, but altogether enjoyable slide show of the work of political cartoonist and savage caricaturist Gerald Scarfe. Scarfe talks about the politicians and personalities that act as inspiration for his trademark wickedness. I didn’t expect him to sound so… pleasant!
