Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

This collection of vintage Space Age illustrations not only makes one ask, “Where’s my flying car?” but also “Where’s my personal submarine?” and “Where’s my motorized water polo horse?”

The previously-blogged Shelby Fischer has updated her site with lots of great new samples of her surreal mixed media and assemblage pieces.

Previously:
Shelby Fischer

I love the paintings of Edward del Rosario featuring strange characters isolated against stark backgrounds.

(via Booooooom)

Melanie Bilenker creates jewellery featuring drawings made with human hair.

From her artist’s statement:

The Victorians kept lockets of hair and miniature portraits painted with ground hair and pigment to secure the memory of a lost love. In much the same way, I secure my memories through photographic images rendered in lines of my own hair, the physical remnants. I do not reproduce events, but quiet minutes, the mundane, the domestic, the ordinary moments.

The folks at MySoti and I can’t decide who should win our winter contest, so we’re asking you to vote on three finalists. We asked users to submit winter-themed artwork to MySoti for a chance to win 5 free shirts, 1 free poster print, and 1 free canvas print featuring any artwork the winner chooses. Here are the three we like best:

#1 - “Ruldulce” by user designsbygaunty:

#2 - “Winter Sucks” by user grootfontein:

#3 - “Winter” by user tmdurn7:

Voting will end 24 hours from the time of this post: tomorrow at 1pm EST.

Lovely illustrations and type design from Jessica Hische.

(via)

Andy Helms draws a dude a day, and I love how he applies his style to various movie franchises, like these Star Wars dudes.

(Thanks, Box Brown!)

17-year-old Fernanda Frick of Chile is making and selling these fantastic-looking flipbooks. Fernanda writes:

Some of the animations are made in flash, one is made in TVPaint studio and the other is made with stopmotion using real fruit (it was really messy…)

James Jean has posted roughly 150 sketchbook images from years past on his site. Happy new year to us!

Who owns the paintings made by a WWII concentration camp prisoner, if those paintings were arguably made as payment for her freedom? The artist? Or the state? Is the art public domain?

This is the decades-old question being asked by artist Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, wife of famed Disney animator Art Babbitt. She saved her own life and her mother’s life essentially by painting portraits of Gypsy prisoners at the behest of Josef Mengele, during their incarceration in Auschwitz. Years later, she moved to Paris and then to California, where she earned a living working for Warner Bros and Jay Ward.

Today, aged 86 and recently suffering from cancer, she is desperate to get these old paintings back.

Below is her impassioned plea on YouTube to the curators of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, who, while they acknowledge that she is the artist who created the paintings, still refuse to relinquish them to her, claiming they are the property of the state.

This story was also covered over at Animation Artist two years ago, and more recently on CBC’s The Current (where I just learned about it this evening). Here are parts one and two of that interview, about 50 minutes long in total, and quite powerful. Below this, some reproductions of these paintings.

These reenactments of Gary Larson’s The Far Side on Flickr are worth a chuckle or two. Make your own!

(via)

Enjoy this stunning piece of pixillation made with 300,000 candles:Happy New Year by Electrebel.

There is also a making-of video at that link, but it is in French with German Dutch subtitles. Still worth watching, tho!

Happy new year!

JibJab’s latest year in review is my favourite yet, due mostly in part to the aesthetic spin they’ve put on their famous collage-style animation. The illustrative, slightly photocopied-and-cut-out look is gorgeous.

Apart from the Prozac, watching Martin Pickles’s Like Me, Only Better is like looking in a mirror. A horrible, horrible (yet hilarious) mirror.