Paper, a cloth canvass, a wall, 140 characters on Twitter, they are all restraints on dimensions. Price/advertising space on newspapers force comic strips to be usually just 3 small panels for this reason. And of course computers and that sort of stuff has been eroding these size restrictions gradually on the web, cartoonists tend to forget that really, a comic strip can be pretty much any size!
Reading through genius comic artist Scott McCloud's website, an article precisely about the infinite canvass (a must-read for comic artists!), he gives us a few examples of ways in which we can elegantly defy size. Because size matters, yo.
This one by McCloud himself: (click on the images)
Somehow Japan is really good at taking English words, combining them in unlikely ways and exporting them back to the West as a brand new thing. Think about the Walkman, for instance. The term I'm bringing up here however is ''superflat''. Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is a pioneer. His art screams in wild colours and outrageous characters with roots in anime and pop art (like Warhol's). He creates things in many media and he's able to merge all of them into one unified entity, hence the ''flattening'' (not 'flat' as in lacking). Truly something I'd like to try.
Anyway, this video provides some insight into his art and how the new wave of Japanese art owes to his particularly crazy and colourful mindview:
Warning: if you get offended by strange things, then don't watch this. Open your mind a little and maybe you won't get offended =P
And here I have the two adverts which he made for Louis Viutton. I say the first one was a mixture of crazy awesome music by the Fantastic Plastic Machine with Murakami's distinctively seizure-inducing colour explosion. The second one looks like a continuation a few years later, but it lacks the bang of the first loco one.
And
Seen enough? Kaikai Kiki Co., an artists' collective founded by Murakami himself. Apparently, they are working on a film called Kaikai & Kiki, to be released this year, featuring many of Murakami's brainchildren. More of this infectious stuff:
Now let's see, what will this mean outside of Japan?
Radiate by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART I've been trying around different painting programs and so far my two favourite are Paint Tool SAI and Corel Painter X. Paint Tool is simple yet versatile and fast, while Painter X is quite realistic and if used properly can be quite powerful. Here's a progress animation on how I painted this thing: (you'll notice I started three times, I tried in Corel twice and gave up, then went to SAI and I felt it was better to start there. However, I changed my approach and started with a black and white thing first.)
Beware: it begins okay and gets ugly from there. Making art can sometimes be like making sausages, it's ugly, specially when you are just learning how to.
