March 5, 2012 - Comments Off on Mirrors and Muscle

Mirrors and Muscle

Some say our ability to recognize ourselves in our reflections is a defining human characteristic. From Narcissus to Snow White, our obsession with reflections has permeated our lives. You could say this is an extension of our vanity and consciousness. A close relative to reflection, symmetry, is in fact one of the most important aspects of any creative work. Either playing to or against it can create striking works from simple elements. We seem to prefer this sameness but asymmetry can be just as potent if not more so.

Reflection

Deadlines loom and thus today's sketch is a quick one. More of a proof of concept rather than a full piece. Reflections have been integral to my work. It is by looking at a mirror that I learned much of the human face and anatomy. In fact, to this day when I draw a face from scratch it looks quite similar to its creator. I'm convinced it is this self-modeling that makes it easier for artists to make things that resemble themselves. For instance I've always found it easy to draw tall lanky men but difficult to draw female, elderly, or fat people without reference.

Christian Montenegro experiments with symmetry extensively in his vector work. I love how his work evokes the medieval portraiture of old while maintaining a modern graphic and comic feel. Many feel like details of some larger Bosche piece, a classical favorite of mine, seen through a modern illustrator's lens. In fact, many of his series deal with similarly classic themes such as the Seven Deadly Sins or Tarot Cards (seen below).

El Gran Jardin Amoroso

Anger

Of course there is no lack of symmetry in web design. Most pages rely on it in fact, with small exceptions made for logos and menus. But few do it with the precision or resplendence of the website for studio Soleil Noir's 2012 New Year's wishes.

Soleil Noir 2012

The site is a mesmerizing cacophony of color and animation. Truly, I'd say this is less a website as it is an interactive power point presentation. However I have to commend it for its use of  brilliantly colored, overlapping and animated elements. Sadly it has the same failings of many of these ever-so-trending parallax scrolling sites: performance, navigation, purpose, and smoothness are all lacking.

If you stick solely to the navigation links on the right, each slide animates nicely. However as you scroll they begin to slow down. Thankfully the animations are not driven by the scroll itself like on so many other sites of this ilk but since they're all animated seemingly all the time, performance seems reduced (I find it ironic that one slide is titled "believe in flash" but the entire site is done in HTML5). Also, the lack of a clear purpose makes this an interesting art piece but little more. But this is fitting as the piece is meant solely to highlight what the company is looking forward to in the New Year, a visual resolution list of you will.

What spurred this interest with reflections, symmetry and mirrors this week you may ask? Well it was one well done, rainbow colored (this week's sub-theme apparently) video. Reminiscent of an OK Go music video for its lo-fi ingenuity, the music video for Off the Wall by Yuksek is disarmingly gorgeous. After feasting your eyes on its magnificence I'd suggest shutting down your computer and enjoying your reflection in the darkened reflection of your monitor. Not only will you disconnect for a bit but you'll get a feel for what your poor computer has to stare at all day. Enjoy!

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

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