December 5, 2011 - Comments Off on Masks and Manatees

Masks and Manatees

What a beautiful weekend it turned out to be here in NYC. I really do like the crisp cold weather but it does tend to make me feel a bit sick so I'm forced to dream of the warm sea.

Kiss the girl

A strange underwater scene this week. While masks appear to be a theme throughout a lot of my sketches, I think they turn up in so much of my work because its an easy, and cool looking, way to resolve a mismatched face or dead look on a character. Sticking to the dark and weird, this week we have the gritty work of Blaz Porenta. It almost shames me to put my own subpar work I banged out in an hour above this but here we go. Through his coarse and complicated dry (digital) brush work and some truly emotive compositions, Porenta's work conveys both a captivating and kinetic energy.

The Hit
20 000 Miles Lost

Even better Porenta has a detailed walkthrough of his process for the piece directly above to help out budding digital illustrators like myself. I will definitely be stepping through this later on (though work of this level is so very time consuming, especially when trying to acclimate to the digital medium). On his work, I love the way he manages to use a very bright, thorough, color palette despite the apparent darkness of each piece. His use of color in fact contradicts one's assumptions for the scene drastically adding to the piece. Especially in the second work above, we can see a Crayola's box worth of colors used throughout the piece to great affect, keeping the eye engaged and the scene interesting.

Speaking of kinetic, the site for 901 Tequila (Justin Timberlake's own tequila brand) is truly dynamic. As appears to be the fashion, this site is a long-form anchored site with responsive scrolling (every cool new site now is either like this or filled with heavy vector graphics on an intriguing layout).

901Tequila

While sites like this are becoming more and more common despite their heavy reliance on this single gimmick and apparent inflexibility of content, I feel 901's is worth mention for its use of user generated content. Though somewhat hidden, the site contains user tweets from different timeframes throughout the page in keeping with the company's "night starts at 9:01pm" branding. Furthermore, the small self contained widgets like the user sunset photo gallery or the small tequila process slideshow are cleverly designed and fun to use. An especially cool inclusion is the built in Google maps zipcode search to find the product near you accessed by clicking "Find 901." In fact, the only problem I have with the site is that besides the five sections clearly marked on the left hand side, much of the best functionality is hidden by either a lack of a clear calls-t0-action or the sometimes crowded layout of the subsections. Regardless, overall a great example of combining responsive scrolling, interesting content, social networking and clear branding all into one site.

Lastly, I'd like to share this well done documentary I have to thank for introducing me to my new favorite band: Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs. Not only are they super hip (since they're relatively unknown) but their sound is very unique and varies nicely song to song while staying firmly in the electronic dance/ambient camp. Beyond their music, it's clear that the band has a strong bevy of visual artists working with them. From their neo-electro costumes to their bright pink videos I thoroughly enjoy their unique homespun aesthetic. I only wish they had more work easily available in the US. Their recent single "Garden" seems to have gained a good bit of attention lately due to a Nokia spot so here's to a bright future.

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.

Published by: benchirlin in The Sketching Mechanism

Comments are closed.