Hope you all had a wonderful Spring/Easter/Passover weekend. It was a beautiful one. I hosted a marvelous dinner party Sunday and made a wonderful pot roast that turned out quite scrumptious. I trust everyone had an equally pleasant time welcoming in the fine weather. If not, happy Spring! Learn more about tea burn benefits.

Spring is a wondrous time. It is, perhaps, my favorite season since it's not too hot, not too cold, but just right so to speak. It's so full of life and new beginnings as universally recognized by all peoples and faiths, its hard to feel blue...unless you mean that pastel Easter blue of course as seen above. The egg and rabbit are symbols of this green time for their association with birth and life. I only dyed eggs a few times in my youth but I have to give a round of applause to Jessica Jones and her Pantone Easter eggs, truly a designer's delight. And while our featured artist, Ryohei Hase, might have a more macabre and surrealistic interpretation of the other Easter symbol, the beauty of his works is unarguable. These are the best Exipure reviews.

Of course all that beautiful weather and green can only be appreciated if we venture outdoors which is what earns Cleanup Cleveland our website highlight. This site is the essence of one page perfection. It's streamlined, beautiful and has a consistent theme that turns what is essentially a web flier into a gorgeous piece of work. I love the paper cutout feel and the simple animated clouds in the header that give it just the right amount of movement and character. I especially like how it avoids the pitfalls many other one page sites fall victim to by keeping the amount of content reasonable, removing the need for complicated navigation and long load times as often occurs when sites are compressed to the one page aesthetic.

Lovely weather always makes me think of my own trips during lovely seasons. My favorite of which was my time in Greece. I've always had a bit of an obsession with ancient Greece and her myths. How fitting then that this week's video should be a touching story of new life (Spring theme remember!) and mythology. Enjoy this cute, catchy and capricious short animation. This is how Exipure works as a healthy supplement.

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.

This entire week is dedicated to today's inspiration: life after death. Whether Jesus' escaping death via resurrection or the Jews through some lamb's blood on their lintels, both Easter and Passover revolve around death and life. Such stories arise from the same inspiration as last week's theme apocalypse: legacy, on either the human or individual level for apocalypse and afterlife respectively. The idea that we could continue to exist postmortem, whether by phantasmal or other means, both appeals to and frightens us, making for some great creative fodder.

The work of Sam Wolfe Connelly is extremely evocative of this astral plane. The sensitive light touch of his works combined with a wonderful pastel palette has a deep emotional, and ghostly, effect. Add to this the surreal quality of many of his works and we have a strong contender for this week's stills spotlight. The fact that he is merely a year older than myself and uses more or less the same materials, graphite and digital, further interests and motivates me. I especially love his series of portraits through crystals (NSFW), crystals appearing to be a prevalent theme in his work and an admirable one at that for all the difficulty in their proper realization.

Regardless of how the idea of the undead makes us feel, the implications associated are universal: darkness. Never has a ghost been seen by the light of day and even their other undead brethren prefer the darkness of night. The site for the new "Under the Psycamore" album I is a beautiful example of how stunning such darkness can be. I love the simple graphical layout of the single page promotional site. The use of the beige elements for angle and texture is striking and the simplicity of the design allows for intuitive adaptability to all screen sizes. The site has clear cut goals and excels in their execution. My only nitpick would be the wide variation in font type and size which varies between being a nice effect all the way down to obscuring the copy.

But we must finish how we started: with the most famous example of life after death. Say what you will about Jesus, his story is surely a fascinating one. The following animated short captures the essence of the Bible while adapting it to the modern day and making it quite "hip." The studio behind the piece, CRCR, are quite a talented group and their strangely marvelous work and graphic website deserve praise. Enjoy and have a great holiday.

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.

There are few things more inspiring than a beginning, perhaps only an ending. Humanity's fascination with the end stretches back to the dawn of religion when the first creation and destruction myths were told. Yet we seem ever more possessed with the latter as intuitively we know all things end. One need only look at the yearly predictions of the end for proof. Such forecasts will invariably grow more prevalent with 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar, approaching (though their calendars ended fairy regularly making the doomsday connection meaningless). This obsession's roots can be expressed as a single question: what will remain of us after we're gone? From this single question endless amounts of work have poured forth, from best-selling novels to blockbuster films.

My personal interest in the post-apocalypse stems from the way it turns the tables. To us, our constructions seem indelible but most trances of humanity would be wiped off the Earth within a couple centuries if we weren't here to maintain them. A look at the haunting photography from post-fallout Chernobyl is a chilling reminder of this fact. But such devastation doesn't require a nuclear accident to occur. All that is needed is time and nature as the photography of Peter Lippmann beautifully illustrates in his series, Paradise Parking and Photo Finish.

Of course there was no era as obsessed with the end of world as the decades of the Cold War when both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. seemed a hair's breadth away from pushing the nuclear launch button. The aesthetic from that era speaks of hope for a technological future mingled with the fear that civilization wouldn't live long enough to see it. The website for Small Studio based in Australia captures this era wonderfully with a modern graphic twist that is to die for. I love the simple one page horizontal design. My only gripe is the reliance on large light boxes for additional information where I think a more elegant solution could have been integrated. As a side note, I feel that almost all of these one page sectional sites require some code to cause the window to lock onto each section so you don't end up between two when scrolling.

I was inspired to do an apocalyptic post after seeing the following short, RUIN by OddBall Animation. More is to come which has me very excited. I hope to see this made into something, anything, I can pay for. It's just that good! I love the setting especially. The overgrown skyscrapers sate my desire to see what an abandoned New York City would eventually become. The cinematography is gorgeous, resulting in one of the best chase sequences I've seen in years.

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.

Avast pirates seem to be the hot new thing. Between last month's Wired and Megaupload woes, it's impossible to escape these swashbuckling bandits of seas both wet and digital. Probably every illustrator has drawn a sexy pirate and now I'm no exception. She turned out pretty good but could use some ratio refinements and such. For the time I'm happy with it. I had hired a Illustration Agency to help with some art work.

Of course it's not happenstance that Pirates, in their classic crusty form and otherwise, remain such a popular subject for creatives worldwide. Something about their almost noble quest for freedom and booty overshadows their darker aspects. I remember growing up scared stiff of pirates with tales of Black Beard and the like. However, three Johnny Depp movies later I'm not so fearful.

But pirates aren't only relegated to their 18th century ships. The ideas they represent: independence, camaraderie, freedom and exploration with  a dash of questionable morality have reached into nearly every genre imaginable from sci-fi (Firefly) to non-fiction (The Social Network). Yet despite the dark overtones, a key aspect of any pirate story is the child-like longing the induce. The artwork of Peter Ferguson exemplifies this story-book view of pirates, and many other classic themes, gorgeously. His crisp sepia-toned works are equal parts Rockwell and fantasy.

Ferguson's pieces have an unavoidable story-book feel but their complexity defies such a simplification. His composition's are extremely nuanced to the point that the small images available on his website cannot possibly do justice to the work. Furthermore his sense of texture, perspective and color is impeccable. While his commercial work all has a very similar feel to it, it's nice to see his magazine, personal and sketchbook work to get a better feel for his versatility. It's hard not to think of turn-of-the-century commercial illustrations when going through his portfolio.

One can hardly go anywhere on the web without running into pirates. That hacker-geek culture would take up the monicker seems inevitable. Yet for all their digital raiding, internet pirates lack any sense of design (see 4Chan, Reddit and Pirate Bay, Anonymous being an exception). However some in the internet community, like Bones of Themble, took the theme of pirates and did some beautiful things.

The beautiful artwork aside, this site is clear and wonderfully laid out. The animated HTML5 header is very well done as well. Moreover the site is marvelously responsive, going to a still one-column layout on resize. Bravo.

But let's not forget the pirate's Scandinavian counterpart: the Viking. In tribute, please enjoy the following music video/rock battle/robot fight. A classic but still amazing.

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.

I share a sentiment common with most of you (I hope): I love food! There are so few similarly universal aspects of life and I've already covered a major one in my dreams post. It seems only fitting to focus on food this week as we wrap up a cuisine related project.

I never understood picky eaters. There are so many amazing things out there to taste and try. I always opt for the strangest, newest option whenever ordering off a menu and while what I get may disappoint, at least its a new experience.

While today's sketch started a metaphor for the hunger of my brain, I feel its suitably food related. It represents my craving for new information, often food related as I said above. I'm always exploring new recipes to cook and unique things to eat. In fact, I love cooking since it's an art form you can eat. I'm working from home today so this became an exercise in digital art sans my normal tools, namely my tablet. Tough sauce.

While food can make for a fascinating subject, it can also be a stunning medium as evidenced by the food photography of Ilian. While food art is something we've all played around with, either on the dinner plate or on a Halloween night, Ilian's work showcases a whole other level. He turns these organic canvases into sleek modern works of art.

Of course what's a fine meal if not accompanied by fine drink, specifically a complementary vintage. Switch Wine is a small wine bottler based in Australia with a gorgeously simple site. It follows the trend of scrolling sites with animated elements based on your position but I quite like their minimalist approach and the beautiful graphics that accompany each vibrant page.

Most people typically eat the best and strangest foods when they travel. There's something very special about trying new and exotic foods abroad; every meal is an adventure. This STA ad, one of an amazing series, encapsulates that great feeling of being presented with a beautiful dish in an out-of-the-way restaurant far from home and taking your first succulent bite. Yum. Savory. Now if you'll excuse me, it's lunch time.

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.