Tag Archives: Illustration

Sally Saves Christmas

by Cimaxion

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.

Happily Ever Over: An Epic Illustrated Fairy Tale by C Merry

by Cimaxion | 1 Comment

C Merry has created an epic rambling fairy tale that weaves her own modern perspective through the classic stories that children have been familiar with for centuries. The result is both humorous and unsettling. C Merry combines these tales with mythology and Christmas to explain things that have been long forgotten. It’s a beautiful way to start the holidays. You’ll find out that the Pied Piper had money troubles and was working out of his van. Santa Clawz is a wormhole-travelling wildman who began the holiday tradition of sneaking into houses to counteract the effects of war. Instead of dropping bombs, he dropped gifts. He was also descended from grizzly bears.

The story unfolds over a series of partially animated illustrations that are gorgeously detailed, showing squiggly pen lines inside every detail. These pictures are backed by a dense and mysterious soundscape.

What C Merry seems to be doing is connected the world’s most charming tales for children to the much deeper and darker subterranean world of mythology. It works. She has created a mystical world of danger and beauty.

You can also read the entire illustrated tale at the author’s blog.

Visions of the Future – Science Fiction Art of the Second Golden Age

by Cimaxion | 1 Comment

This is an amazing and obsessive immersion in science fiction illustrations from what is known as the Second Golden Age. It’s mainly lots of cool science fiction imagery from the 1970s and 1980s.

Part 2

Parts 3 – 5 after the jump

Continue reading …

Sally Saves Christmas

by Cimaxion | 5 Comments


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 …

Illustrations by Bridget McKenna

by Cimaxion

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.

Continue reading …

Film: Sweetheart

by Cimaxion

Here’s a music video made entirely out of illustrations, photos, and text from second-hand books! I never watch music videos all the way through. But I watched this one and admired its clever associations of images to lyrics. It’s all spelled out for you in the most charming and humorous way.  Good song too!  Ben Reed made this for a band called The Wave Pictures.

Alice In Wonderland For iPad

by Editor

I’ve got lots of grumps against Apple’s iPad, like the lack of support for Flash, one of the greatest web technologies in existence. But this Alice in Wonderland eBook looks fantastic. I’d love to make all the pictures move around and I think kids will too. This must be right because when I was a kid I fervently wished for every illustration to wake up and start moving.

Animation: Muzorama (An Illustrated Surrealist CG Film)

by Editor

Muzorama is a short surrealist animation made by students at Supinfocom Arles. Elsa Brehin, Raphaël Calamote, Mauro Carraro, Maxime Cazaux, Emilien Davaud, Laurent Monneron and Axel Tillement directed the film which took only six weeks to complete.  It reminds me of surrealist painting and film work being done in Europe during the twenties and thirties.  I will not link to the Supinfocom web site because it is the most inexcusable mess I have ever seen on the web.  Their animations are wonderful, but they need to immediately terminate whoever builds their web sites.  Seriously.

Cellphones are Destroying People

by Editor | 4 Comments

WareNewYorkerLook at that cover.  Look at exactly what’s going on there.  Makes you almost cry, doesn’t it?  It better.  Because if it doesn’t, then baby you’ve got it coming.  Chris Ware, one of our finest cartoonists did this cover for the New Yorker and made a comic strip for the issue.

I see people crossing streets while typing on their ‘devices.’  I see them driving and sitting in fine restaurants with their dates and they’re answering email and texting.  Makes you want to walk over and plant a big kiss on some guy’s date right in front of him while he texts his mother.  Would serve him right.  People are not even remotely aware of other people anymore.  They drive right through stop signs while texting or chatting on a cell phone.  They wipe out entire families on freeways because they were trying to type, ‘OMG Heeee’s sooooo hot!!!!’

These people are simple dark abominations.  They are fools who understand only how to be dead, dried husks that resemble human beings.  They think they are part of the information overload and that they are multitasking through life.  They’re just obliterating themselves.

Let me put it this way: if somebody sees you using your device, you’re not using it properly.

Sometimes I see a woman in the grocery store answer her cell phone and say something like, ‘Yes, honey,  I’m in the grocery store.  I’m looking for those little pepper things now.’

Do you know why the guy calls her there?  I do.  It’s because he thinks she’s cheating on him because he knows she wants to because he’s a total flaccid drip.  That is why 99.9% of all cell phone calls on the planet are placed.  That is why the cell phone economy works.  It’s nervous people checking up on their significant others to make sure they’re still around.

You know I’m right.  You’ve done it too.  Haven’t you?

But look at this cover illustration and think about trying not to do such an awful thing to your kid this Halloween.  Try hard, because that kid will never forget that little screen in your face.

Marvel Makes a Create Your Own Comic Tool

by Editor | 4 Comments

IronDolt

Marvel Comics has a Create Your Own Comic tool that lets you put together either a simple 3-panel strip or an entire 22-page comic book.  You don’t actually draw anything, but you choose layouts, backgrounds, characters and objects.  You can re-size everything and layer objects on top of each other.  It’s great for trying one’s hand at designing a layout that tells a story effectively.  So write your comic book and start designing!

75 Ways to Draw More: Advice for People Who Don’t Draw

by Editor

Michael Nobbs has posted a little booklet on Flickr that has a list of 75 ways to draw more.  Interesting concept.  But of course it should go without saying that if you need to read a list of 75 ways to find more time to draw, you probably should be doing something else anyway.

I think the main information to take away from an illustrated list like this is from the illustrations that show you how to print the list out.  What they show you is that you can just look at an object and start drawing lines on a piece of paper.  Something will emerge.  It might be messy.  It might be neat.  That will be your drawing.  I call this little piece of advice ‘1 way to draw less.’

Don Quixote Illustration by Gustave Doré

by Editor | 2 Comments

Here’s an illustration from Miguel de Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote. It was done by Gustave Doré. It shows Don Quixote reading a book of chivalry in his library.  I love the way Doré shows all the madness of Quixote’s imagination surrounding him in his chair as if his imagination and the book were coming to life.  It’s a reminder that the sanest guy in the entire novel is really the Don himself… even though he does go off tilting at windmills as if they were giant monsters.

Click the image to enlarge.