
Above are stills from a lovely biomechanical bug animation by Autofuss. It's titled "The Experiment" and you can watch it here. (Thanks, Stacey Ransom!)
Recently in Art and Design

An assortment of 1970s cover scans from the motorcycle magazine Easyriders.
Articles included: "How to Get Rid of Your Woman," "Trouble With Twats," "Why Men Wear Beards," and then: "Positive Prison Reform Plan."
Above, the cover art for an issue which contained a feature article titled "How to Select a Good Ol' Lady." Apparently, the courtship ritual involves strangling her. Then, meth!
Some of the images on the aforelinked link are not work-safe.
(Submitterated by MikeOliveri)
I was going through my photo archive and came across this sign for funnel cakes that I photographed in Austin a couple of years ago. Doesn't it whet your appetite?
If you enjoyed the CB QSL cards posted on Mitch O'Connell's blog, myQSL.org has 8,372 more. Hurray for weird America!
I've posted a few choice examples after the jump.
Giant, fetishistically detailed Little Nemo art

Zak sez, "If you've ever seen Windsor McCay's LITTLE NEMO -- particularly the gorgeous full-sized collections -- you know how involved the illustrations got. Cartoonist Jeremy Bastian just did an enormous commission of Little Nemo that captures McCay's style perfectly. It is 13 by 9 inches and is inked by brush. According to the person who commissioned it, it took Jeremy two weeks of 10-hour days to draw it. The person who commissioned it has several close-ups of the details on this page."
Jeremy Bastian, The Little Nemo Commission
(Thanks, Zak!)
Odd CB radio cards from the 1970s
Artist Mitch O'Connel bought a some unusual CB radio cards at a flea market.
Love these personal CB radio cards, the more homemade looking the better. The sometimes naive art seems more personal, contains great left field imagery and, as an artist, less threatening!CB radio cards: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
Have fun in a capsized ship at Machine Project in Los Angeles, 9/5/2010
Mark Allen of Machine Project in Los Angeles says:
For a period of five weeks Josh Beckman’s Sea Nymph will be host to a whole series of nautical-themed events, performances, lectures, and workshops, as well as an opera by and for dogs. Inside the capsized hull of the ship there will also be a crystal cave. Join us at Machine for the opening on September 5th from 5-10pm, where you can gaze upon the wreckage with accompanying performances by Clay Chaplin, Ambient Force 3000, Ecce, OK Music, Chris Kallmyer, and Colin Woodford.Josh Beckman’s Sea Nymph: A shipwrecked boat inside Machine
Sweet little steampunk automaton
Kamill1 sez, "My first attempt at an automata, I think it turned out pretty well! Super fun build. A little wink to Jake Von Slatt, sitting down to play the pipe organ. Huzzah!"
Steampunk Automata "Orchestra Von Slatt", Completed Friday, Sep 3 2010 (Thanks, kamill1, via Submitterator!)
- Wooden automata -- hand-crank animations
- Pirate theater automata built from Legos*
- Twisted-wire junk-sculpture automata from Zimbabwe
- Hand-cranked undersea automata made from twisted wire -- no welds ...
- Automata for sale -- papercraft, DIY and wooden
- Video: The Trons, homebrew automata band Gadgets
What Things Do: excellent webcomics
Panels from "Unraveling," part 2, by Jordan Crane
What Things Do is a stunningly good webcomics site, launched by comics artist Jordan Crane and featuring some of the best independent comics artists around, including Gabrielle Bell, Abner Dean, Sammy Harkham, Jaime Hernandez, Kevin Huizenga, Ted May, John Porcellino, Ron Regé Jr., Steve Weissman, and Dan Zettwoch.
Many of the artists here seem to have been mildly influenced by Tintin's Hergé (and Joost Swarte). This is not a big surprise, since Jordan Crane selects all the artists for his site, and Crane himself shows a little Hergé in his work. (I can't think of a better artist than Hergé from which to draw inspiration.)
The comics in What Things Do all have the same yellow-gray color scheme (with a few exceptions) that give the site an elegant cohesiveness. The comics are large clear and readable.
In addition to showcasing the work of contemporary cartoonists, What Things Do, runs "decades-old work" from worthy but not-so-famous cartoonists, as well as articles about comics. What Things Do: excellent webcomics
The Wilderness Downtown: Chrome experiment by Chris Milk and Arcade Fire

The Wilderness Downtown is perhaps the best browser-dominating Net art piece I've experienced since Jodi.org's best work more than a decade ago. An experimental, interactive film by Chris Milk, it's a tour-de-force for the Chrome browser and a lovely visual poem to accompany Arcade Fire's excellent "We Used To Wait" from their album The Suburbs. I won't give the "story" away, but I found it to be a deeply personal and moving experience.
Choreographed windows, interactive flocking, custom rendered maps, real-time compositing, procedural drawing, 3D canvas rendering... this Chrome Experiment has them all. "The Wilderness Downtown" is an interactive interpretation of Arcade Fire's song "We Used To Wait" and was built entirely with the latest open web technologies, including HTML5 video, audio, and canvas.The Wildreness Downtown (Thanks, Jean Hagan!)
"Behind the Work: Arcade Fire 'The Wilderness Downtown'" (Creativity Online)
Curator and artist Aunia Kahn selected a group of 23 lowbrow/pop surrealist artists to interpret one card each of the Major Arcana of the Tarot deck. Hi-Fructose has a sneak preview of 14 of the cards, which will debut October 1 with a full show at Los Angeles's La Luz de Jesus Gallery, a book, and of course a deck of cards. Above left, card back by Daniel Martin Diaz; right, The Devil by Chet Zar
The LowBrow Tarot Card Project preview (Hi-Fructose)
UPDATE: You can see the entire show at the La Luz de Jesus site here.



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