Hope you all had a great weekend. I know mine was filled with Skyrim and that experience is amazing. The boundary between reality and entertainment is truly starting to blur. As such I was inspired to draw a dragon but it seemed to take on a sci-fi spin. Add in a tribal priestess I drew over the weekend and voila you have a strange summoning scene. I'm trying to maintain last weeks precedent of simply having a more finished sketch with a splash of quick color added behind.

My weekend was so filled with playing Skyrim in fact that I had little time to hunt down any interesting videos to share today. Luckily I have a back catalog of content from last week. Firstly, in motion, we have this extremely surreal and ambient piece that plays with our sense of reality and physics from London-based artist Bif.

This piece is extremely interesting to me since 3D animation has always fascinated me. I love how Bif uses the unique capabilities of the medium and its rendering to create these hyper-unreal scenes  that defy our instincts. The small plastic figures become characters unto themselves despite their static poses and almost join us, the audience, in their disbelief and surprise. Lastly the sound, by artist Azael is an interesting mix of IDM (Intelligent Dance Music), glitch and ambient.

For stills we travel to Spain to observe the breath-taking street art of Aryz (with a great website by the way). While the scale of his works alone is enough to merit his mention, he proves throughout his works at every scale his ability to create stunning scenes of pure imagination, often with an emphasis on the skeletal, in a gorgeous muted pastel palette.

 

I can only dream of a day when large-scale street art like the above takes over American streets and isn't limited to feel-good murals in run-down communities and quickly sprayed tags hiding in plain sight. I fully support the "art everywhere" movement and hope that someday all outdoor advertisement is completely banned (thank you for setting such a good example Sao Paolo with your "Clean City" law) and replaced with massive art space (get on that Brazil!). To me art in any form is a a daily requirement and how could one miss a giant installment on modern-day advertising scale.

This weeks bonus video is a short clip documenting how artist Alexandre Farto (aka Vhilis) executes his unique pieces of street art by painting and carving into eroded walls and plaster. Truly and interesting process. The soothing music and seeing such art emerge from these shattered abandoned surfaces is a joy. Definitely look at his other works on his website (though much plainer than our other featured artist's, still quite functional).

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.