Some of the readers of this site will know that this story is the original piece of material behind Candlelight Stories. Back in 1994, I sat at a very flimsy folding table in a Los Angeles apartment with a box of pastels, crayons and ballpoint pens to scratch out a pile of illustrations that vaguely added up to some kind of Christmas tale. I still have all those original drawings in a big department store box. The interesting thing about the illustrations for me is the series of actions that they caused which led me directly into the various skills and technologies that I have used and made a living from ever since. After finishing the illustrations and creating a large bound book to give as a Christmas gift, I scanned the pictures and decided to try to put them into a slide show. I had an early version of the Mosaic web browser and soon realized that I could use my AOL account to post things in a folder that could be accessed by the web browser. Having done that and been very impressed with myself I showed it to my non-technical friends and received some half-hearted congratulations and was asked how I could ever hope to make any money that way. Within a few months I received a letter in the actual mail from the USA Today newspaper requesting permission to put an illustration and a web link in a listing of good things on the web. So I said they could and they printed their thing. So I began to add new things to the web site as I could.
It’s pretty much the same today. You just make a little thing and stick it on the web to see who likes it. But back then it was a little like magic. My web experiment grew quickly and when the higher-speed DSL technology first came into Los Angeles I jumped on it and got myself a Digital Alpha server and put it at the end of a DSL line in my own home to serve the web site. According to the company which was the first one up and running in L.A., I was the first person to attempt running a web server over the DSL technology in Southern California! They gave me totally free ISP service for several years in exchange for a little advertising. I’d actually have late night conversations with their engineers – sometimes from their cars as they made their way to hubs and switches in the dead of night to fix something. Imagine that kind of technical support today with your blog host! Won’t happen! This all worked well for a time. But then the DSL technology began to fail and I quickly realized it was a dead-end technology with too many players involved on the back end who could not adequately maintain the service without blaming each other for failures. But my point is that during that time, with that kind of approach, one could really get a sense of being visited by the world. I could watch the lights blink as people came onto the server to visit. There were times, during serious outages of some sort or other, when I’d throw the big Alpha server into my car and drive it to some other location for a temporary connection. Amazing. Fun.
It’s still fun today. That’s why I still post this odd little story every Christmas. It’s the original first thing of this site.
Mature Language
Levni Yilmaz has released another episode in the Tales of Mere Existence series.
This is the best artistic advice you could possibly give to anyone in any artistic situation anywhere.
Quirky Pictures conducts another animation workshop for school children. This time it was a nine day workshop at Great Missenden C of E Combined School. The students made four films based on tales from around the world. I love the freely drawn lines and cutout characters combined with the very matter of fact narration by the kids. They are good storytellers. What fun art classes like these must be. I never had so much fun when I was a kid. I’m a bit jealous.
Ryan Spring Dooley (aka MarvinTiberious on YouTube) made this animated art film about home and what that means. He does lots of these free-form works that are actually the current state of the art as far as I’m concerned. The artist lives and works in Italy, painting on nearly everything.
My latest artwork is an image that is never quite the same twice. I worked hard on it. Framed it. Hung it in a gallery. Now you come along with your paints and markers and mess it all up. I’m curious to see what you decide to do. So when you deface my best work ever just hit the ‘upload art’ button to send your artwork to me. You can get a copy for yourself by clicking the ‘download’ button. You get 3 uploads, so try to make it count.
Have fun destroying one of my proudest creations!
Diego Maclean animated this film which is narrated by the poet Billy Collins.
Some of the readers of this site will know that this story is the original piece of material behind Candlelight Stories. Back in 1994, I sat at a very flimsy folding table in a Los Angeles apartment with a box of pastels, crayons and ballpoint pens to scratch out a pile of illustrations that vaguely added up to some kind of Christmas tale. I still have all those original drawings in a big department store box.
Continue reading
Illustrator Bridget McKenna sent me these pictures and I thought they were nice. So here they are for you to admire. She could work on quite a nice children’s book I think.
She has a web site called Funkolicious Creations with a bunch of totally awesome stuff on it.
Her mixed media art is incredible. Yike! A talent! It’s been a while since I delved into the children’s art where this site began its life long ago. It’s really nice to do it again. I love this woman’s pictures!
See more of her illustrations after the jump.
Having realized in a blinding flash of insight this week that the geek/tech outlook has essentially taken over most of the web world like some sort of a skin cancer and is absolute death to art, I offer an artist’s messy and incoherent view of urban life. It is very uncool and not technically proficient. But it is an artist speaking directly, without falsehood intervening. This piece is by Marvin Tiberious who lives in Italy.
I’m having a huge vomit reaction to these blogs run by little gangs of cool-cats who spread themselves thinly across all domains and offer a smug smirk when photographed. We’ve turned too much of the web over to the ugly little nerd group that wants everything to be just a tad retro. If I see something that looks steampunk I’m going to smash it. Steampunk is the white-supremacist version of cyberpunk which is simply a reference to any book you have read but cannot remember.
South African artist William Kentridge made this film in 1996. It concerns the recognition of white guilt expressed through the medical investigation of a real estate magnate as he lies in a hospital bed. Kentridge makes his films by drawing and erasing in charcoal. He photographs each alteration to create movement.
I love Bob Dylan’s recent album, Christmas in the Heart. Listened to it many times on Christmas day. This is his video for Little Drummer Boy. The people do seem awfully pink but maybe it’s just my eyes playing tricks on me.
Art Director Tommy Kane went to Lebanon and made a film about his wanderings. He also drew magnificent illustrations of what he saw. Those are in the film too. The combination of the beautiful street scenes and the cheerfully expressive drawings make me want to get on a plane and go visit this stunning country.
I found this via Drawn!
More finger sketching from the iPod. The major problem I see with drawing on an iPod or an iPhone is that it doesn’t work well in the sunshine. You can’t see the screen well enough to draw. Paper works better on a beach.
I’ve been having fun with my iPod Touch today. I got inspired to draw with the excellent Brushes app but my fingers are big fat and clumsy, so it required lots of zooming to make the view big enough so my painting wasn’t just a bunch of gigantic blobs. I drew the umbrella against a backdrop of foliage in my yard. The weather has been just as excellent as it should look in the picture.
I’ve learned that David Hockney, one of the greatest artists in the world, is drawing on his iPhone with the same application. His drawings are much more successful than mine, but it’s fun for anyone to draw with a finger!