Happy cyber Monday. In honor of a weekend full of gluttony in both food and consumerism enjoy this strange sketch of a guy enjoying web deals and trade fx, his ideas of material wealth being shot down by the realities of money.

Painting is hard as evidenced by the quick coloring  above. That shabby piece of work took me an hour or so just to add some hue and it looks pretty miserable though still better than a drab black and white sketch I feel. That's why I have the utmost respect for hyper-realistic painters like Jeremy Geddes. My greatest difficulty to this day is color since I've worked so long with just paper and pencil (if you want to be an artist/designer start working in color ASAP!). I feel like I have a fairly strong intuition with color but doing things right still takes me awhile and regardless its nothing close to what Geddes, and others like him, manage. The way the subtlety of his color both pushes and maintains the sense of  realism in each piece is jaw-droppingly beautiful. Add to that the surreal subjects of his work, a genre my dreamy brain can't get enough of, and I could stare at his work all day. I hope it's exhibited somewhere nearby. I can only imagine that in person the detail of these works is even more impressive and immersive (though their size remains a mystery).

Online people keep upping the ante and I'm beginning to gain back the wonderment I lost when I learned how all this stuff works under the hood and the curtain was drawn back. Sites like this one for Long Street in Zurich blow my mind. I love novel uses for played out navigation methods like scrolling and the guys who designed this site for Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen over at Hinderling Volkart in Switzerland seem to know what their doing. One look at their demoreel/portfolio makes me both envious and inspired. This site is a work of art with its buttery smooth scrolling and Google Maps-like movement down the street which syncs nicely with floating annotations and the accompanying navigation anchors on the right hand side. On the downside the audio can be a bit annoying but its subtle and mutable. Also its kind of a bummer that clicking any link inside an circular red annotation takes you to another page shattering the sense of space but this leads to a nice accidental effect when you backup to the homepage and you quickly scroll/stroll down the street. They may have done this for performance reasons so I can't fault them for not making the 360 view, interviews and more appear in this one window.

This site is so inspiring I've already though of a multitude of spin offs; imagine if instead of a real street one were to use a fabricated one modeled and rendered in a 3D program. In fact, why need it be a street at all. This type of navigation could allow us to travel down, around, through or across all sorts of inconceivable spaces...or lack thereof! All the more power to the developers for doing everything without Flash. I need to tear this one apart and find out how it ticks.

Long Street got me thinking of a short stop-motion animation I saw over the break that also amazes and inspires by rethinking old ideas and technologies. The animation "Address is Approximate" by the Theory (aka Tom Jenkins) is marvelous. Using the actual Google Maps and some clever manipulation of everyday office items, we accompany an isolated toy as he dreams of traveling West towards sun and sea. A moving score rounds off this touching piece.

I hope you all had a marvelous Thanksgiving break filled with food, family and friends. Better get on that holiday shopping though. I think I'll be getting myself a Kindle of Christmahanakwanzika this year.

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.