Cigue (Hemlock). J.J. Grandville, Les fleurs animées.
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Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Cigue (Hemlock). J.J. Grandville, Les fleurs animées.
English cards translated from Japanese by Rachel Mimms.
Getting arrested is a scary experience in every country, but perhaps even more so in Japan, where the conviction rate is over 99%. Last month, the Japanese government passed a new anti-terror conspiracy law that has drawn controversy among Japanese citizens who feel it is a threat to civil liberties and privacy. Artist Megumi Igarashi (pen name Rokudenashiko), famously arrested in 2014 on charges of obscenity for distributing 3D data of her genitals, is creating a set of playing cards that educate people about what it’s like to be arrested in Japan.
Critics of the anti-conspiracy law claim it is too broadly worded and contains acts that have little to no connection to terrorism, such as: copying music, picking mushrooms in conservation forests, and competing in a motor boat race without a license.
No stranger to the absurdity of Japanese law, Ms. Igarashi is responding by making a tongue-in-cheek karuta card game set depicting scenarios of arrest and imprisonment in Japan partly based on her own experiences. Each one has a drawing humorously portraying the situation described on the other side of the card. Through these “jail cards,” players can learn about Japanese prison conditions, police interrogation, and testifying in court.
She has already posted 17 of these cards to her Twitter account and says she plans to create an entire set of 50 — one for each Japanese syllable — so that anyone can print them out and play along.
You can read and see more at Spoon & Tamago. Cop shops, same all over the world.
Tulipe, J.J. Grandville, Les fleurs animées.
Bleuet Et Coquelicot (Cornflower and Poppy), J.J. Grandville, Les fleurs animées.
© Lauren Machen.
The name of Lauren Machen’s premiere art photography series was almost Finally. As in, “I am finally addressing something that is at the very core of my being,” states the artist, who has previously worked in art direction for musicians such as St. Vincent and Rihanna. “Finally because a lot of subtle racism that people of color have had to struggle [with] are bubbling to the surface. People who aren’t of color just simply thought it didn’t exist or we were past that.”
Instead, Machen named the series Elemental, as in, “The very basis of my being. What my soul feels. My truth. Being mixed race, I was left to just sort of float in space because we didn’t really talk about race and ethnicity in my household… This is about peeling the layers away. Taking a moment to identify as I am rather than how others think I am or what I should be.”
Machen cites the 2016 election as a turning point for how she sees her racial identity, and even more specifically, Grey’s Anatomy actor Jesse Williams’s knockout acceptance speech for the BET Humanitarian Award. One of Williams’s most prominent lines from that speech was, “Just because we’re magical doesn’t mean we’re not real,” and its resonance is felt in Machen’s photos that capture surreal insertions of earthly elements into stark, honest portraits of people of color.
“I chose to incorporate the classical elements in the photographs: water, earth, fire, air, and also used falling sand as a symbol of passing time,” Machen explains. “There’s a mystery and magic to these elements, yet they are very real.
© Lauren Machen.
A brilliant series. You can read and see more at The Creators Project and Lauren Machen’s website.
Contra and Castlevania are two of the most iconic video games in history, and both recently got brand new poster art and soundtrack LPs from Mondo, a record label and gallery that specializes in collectibles for classic and contemporary movies. As Mondo’s record label manager Mo Shafeek tells Creators, commissioning artworks for standalone screen-printed posters and the soundtracks was refreshing, given that the company has mostly worked on film and television soundtracks for many years. For Mondo, these two new sets of work are designed to appeal to anyone with a special reverence for classic video games from the 80s.
Mondo’s Creative Director Eric Garza tells Creators that the posters came about after he got a sneak peek at the soundtrack art. Garza and Shafeek, who were fans of the artists behind the soundtrack work, Eric Powell and Sachin Teng, felt it was a no-brainer that the art could translate into posters.
You can read and see more at The Creators Project.
I’m afraid the plot is boring. Very boring. These are basically the very old precursors to Chick Tracts, albeit, without the manic melodrama of Jack.
Representation of the inner state of a man, who is a servant of Sin, and suffers the devil to reign within him.
The Peacock represents Pride. The Goat, Unchastity. The Hog represents Voracity and Gluttony. The Toad, Avarice. The Snake, Envy. The Tiger, Anger. The Tortoise, Indolence.
I have a turtle tattoo on my wrist. I guess that means I’m a hopeless slave to the sin of indolence? A lover of laziness? Yeah, okay. Several panels later, we come to:
Representation of a person’s inward State who being reconciled with God, will know nothing more than the crucified Jesus.
That certainly goes a long way in explaining the willful ignorance of christians.
Via The Public Domain.
Yacarebaby’s paste ups are a common sight on the Buenos Aires streets. Photo courtesy of PMF.
Gas and electricity bills, and estimates for bricks, paint, toilets, or doors are being turned into canvases—as we speak—by the indie graphic arts scene in Argentina. Through a program called #pimpmyfactura, the underground visual arts scene scene is bailing out three community day cares by transforming their debts into artwork. Top graffiti, paste up, collage and graphic design artists are merging from diverse disciplines towards one common goal: converting those unsettled bills into marketable works of art.
Over 40 artists from Argentina, Spain, Brazil, Uruguay, the Philippines and Colombia answered #pimpmyfactura‘s call and created artworks to be sold for charity for the value of the bill turned canvas.
This Icarus is brought to you by Colombian illustrator Chaparro on a paint store estimate of 1163 Argentine pesos.
The #pimpmyfactura project emerged last year in a contest that linked a foundation involved with low income daycares to TBWA, an advertisement agency that came up with a creative and concrete way of generating funds for the foundation. TBWA copywriter Enzo Ciucci is co-creator of #pimpmyfactura, and drew a bird’s skull on a hardware store estimate.
[…]
All pieces will be on exhibition at Buenos Aires’ Centro Cultural Rojas from August 4th to the 14th. They will be for sale for the amount of the bill they are painted on, and 100% of profit goes to the debts of these daycare centers through the Publicidar foundation.
You can read and see more at The Creators Project.
:D There’s a nice bit of 12th century medicine. I’m afraid that all the actual medical treatments shown and addressed only make a person very happy they are in this century.
Those little circles are cautery points. Yikes. The hemorrhoid treatment looks damn scary, too.
This collection of acerbic animal fables, originally published in 1842 as Scènes de la vie privée et publique des animaux, boasts among its contributors some of the finest literary minds of mid 19th-century France, including Honoré de Balzac, George Sand, and the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel (under the pseudonym of P. J. Stahl). The book is also home to some of the finest work (some featured below) by the caricaturist J. J. Grandville, drawings in which we can see the satirical genius and inventiveness that would be unleashed in full glory just two years later with the publication of his wonderful Un autre monde.
So far, I have only read The Philosophic Rat, and it’s a wonderful tale. I have gotten this downloaded to my tablet though, and am looking forward to all the stories. The illustrations are magnificent, and you can see many of them at The Public Domain. The book can be read or downloaded here.
Just a few of the illustrations:
Illustrations from a delightful piece called the “Future Dictates of Fashion” by W. Cade Gall and published in the January 1893 issue of The Strand magazine. On the premise that a book from a hundred years in the future (published in 1993) called The Past Dictates of Fashion has been inexplicably found in a library, the article proceeds to divulge this book’s contents – namely, a look back at the last century of fashion, which, of course, for the reader in 1893, would be looking forward across the next hundred years into the future. In this imagined future, fashion has become a much respected science (studied in University from the 1950s onwards) and is seen to be “governed by immutable laws”.
The fashions run from 1900 to 1993. You can see all of them here, and read the full original piece from The Strand here. The 1950s tickle me the most, it has to be those rather fab pirate/cavalier boots. And I’m a sucker for capes and cloaks. The 1970s were never that fabulous. :D
Researchers at software brand Adobe have developed a prototype tool that allows users to mix colours on screen as if they were working in real paint.
Playful Palette offers artists and illustrators an alternative to the standard colour picker that most graphics software, such as Adobe Photoshop, relies on. Users would be able to blend colours more easily and compare different shades.
The tool is based on research into the ways artists work in traditional media – and the shortcomings they experience with digital counterparts.
The Adobe Research team set out to create a user interface that could replicate the variations of a physical palette, with the ability to mix colours and compare combinations of shades.
“Choosing and composing colours is a critical part of any painting process,” the Adobe Research team of Maria Shugrina, Jingwan Lu and Stephen Diverdi wrote in a paper on the subject.
“We conducted a pilot study that found artists interact with their palette several times a minute, and many of the interactions, such as exploring harmonising colours, are not well supported by digital colour pickers.”
Playful Palette is designed in contrast to the usual sliders or swatches that many apps rely on. Instead, it allows dabs of colour to be added, moved, blended with other colours or completely deleted. Blobs are moved by touching and dragging, to recall the tangibility of real paint and paper.
A ring surrounds the palette and records a history of shades used – allowing the user to easily return to them. Entire colours can also be selected and swapped out for new ones, allowing the details of an image to be updated all at once. Playful Palette can also record an infinite number of “dishes”.
Dezeen has the full story. One of the commenters linked a petition to Adobe to place a reasonable price on their products for students. I’d say how about a reasonable price for everyone? There’s a reason I still run pshop 6. The amount of money adobe wants for pshop is piracy, especially when you consider how many people buy at least one or more programs from them. I would love a current edition of pshop, but there are a lot of people who are not walking around with a spare $400 to $800 bucks in their pocket. It’s not like Adobe really cuts the price all that much for upgrades, either. I think they have enough money that they could easily pull the price into a much more reasonable range for all people. That said, playful palette sounds great!
I’ve never been one for taking baths, I didn’t even like them as a child, and couldn’t wait until I was allowed to shower instead. If I could get this sort of treatment, though:
If people could afford a to have private bath – and not many could – they would use a wooden tub that could also have a tent-like cloth on top of it. Attendants would bring jugs and pots of hot water to fill the tub. In John Russell’s Book of Nurture, written in the second half of the fifteenth-century, he advises servants that if their lord wants a bath they should:
hang sheets, round the roof, every one full of flowers and sweet green herbs, and have five or six sponges to sit or lean upon, and see that you have one big sponge to sit upon, and a sheet over so that he may bathe there for a while, and have a sponge also for under his feet, if there be any to spare, and always be careful that the door is shut. Have a basin full of hot fresh herbs and wash his body with a soft sponge, rinse him with fair warm rose-water, and throw it over him.
He adds that if the lord has pains or aches, it is good to boil various herbs like camomile, breweswort, mallow and brown fennel and add them to the bath.
I might well change my mind.
Via Medievalists.net.