Superflat Takashi Murakami

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?

Lion Spider = Lider? Splion? Arachleo!

Back in April when it was still summer here in Chile and life was coming back to normal after February's massive quake, I remember seeing a mosquito-like insect on a wall. I associated it
with horses due to its rather strange shape and although it wasn't much like a mosquito I began wondering what a horsequito would look like. So I had this:


Horsequito by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART

Yeah... so in the description I jokingly mentioned its natural predator, the Lion Spider. And here I am now, several months later with my Splion (for the lack of a better name). It was even tougher to conceive since spiders and lions share almost nothing in common anatomically. Spiders have 2 body sections while lions, uh... I'd say 3 although the difference between abdomen and 'butt' doesn't mean anything in vertebrates, does it? :3

So, here are a few sketches (I got rid of the roughest unfortunately) with roughies of the idea:



As the sketches above show, I wasn't entirely sure where the hell the legs would go (again, spiders have abdomens that don't have legs and then they have thoraxes with legs), because the way a spider's legs kinda 'spread' outwards while a lion's legs jut below the body and are parallel. So it's just experimenting while the final design was a mixture.
And well, the final (although far from perfect work) is this:

It looks a whole lot better than Horsequito (a million times!) but I'm not perfectly happy with it. That irritates me. Argh!

Click for larger image:

Scrotoss! - It's nuts!

The sport that was supposedly going to grab the world by storm.. and didn't. Plenty of fun! Tell all your friends!

Scrotoss headquarters? ---> http://scrotoss.blogspot.com/





What are you still doing here? Shouldn't you be enlightening your friends?