Wednesday wallpapers: Animals II

"Fur"





"Bird's scale"





"Tiger Fur Wallpaper"





"Urchins Revisited"





"Pachyderm"





"Islands"





"frog silhouette"





"Eye of the World"





"snakeskin"





"Son of the Earth"





"Untitled Wallpaper"





"Untitled Wallpaper"





"Kiki"





"Lion"





"WP: blue frog"

Bold illustration

Illustrator Dan McCarthy does a few things very well: trees, power lines, ships, houses, skeletons. At least, these are the things he does repeatedly. More generally, he's a master at bold compositions relying on the interplay between line and negative space, from rigging to cables to twigs to ribs. Not only is there some stellar work on display here, but also a limited selection of very affordable and very beautiful prints for sale.






Creative director Gregori Saavedra is a prolific commercial illustrator whose stark line work replicates the look of photographs run through a trace filter, to beautiful effect. His portfolio also includes a variety of stylish video and other work.

Tales in pen and ink

Kunio Kato, a member of the ROBOT Character and Animation team, is a Japanese animator whose quietly surreal films portray a curious world of fantasy and whimsy. This year, his short Tsumiki no Ie ("La maison en petit cubes" or "House of Blocks") won the Annecy Cristal prize at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival and Market.

In the highly surreal short The Apple Incident (2001), giant apples begin falling from the sky onto a bemused city. Winner of the Best Prize in the 2001 Laputa International Animation Festival.





Dreamy and dreamlike, Aru Tabibito no Nikki ("The Diary of Tortov Roddle" or "A Traveler's Diary") (2003) is a series of unconnected episodes of strange and whimsical happenings in the life of the eponymous hero, a tall traveler in a top hat who wanders the world astride his curiously long-legged pig companion. The film comprises Episodes 1-6. Selected for the 2004 Annecy festival, it was the winner of the Best Prize in the Laputa Animation Festival in 2003 and the Grand Prix in the Hida International Animation Festival of Folktales and Fables.

An excellent review of the film can be found at the Nishikata Film Review.





The adventures of Tortov Roddle continue in the bonus Episode 7, The Red Berry, in which the traveler encounters a garden of hallucinogenic red fruits.





Fantasy Story (2003) is another collection of vignettes illustrating various flights of fancy. It was a selection in the the 8th Seoul International Cartoon & Animation Festival (SICAF) and the Ottawa 04 International Animation Festival.





Michaël Dudok de Wit is a Holland-born animator living in London whose charming, spare, Japanese-influenced cartoon animations have won numerous awards, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA, and the Annecy Grand Prix for his 2000 film Father and Daughter.

The Aroma of Tea (2006) is Dudok de Wit's latest film. It is drawn entirely in washes of tea.





Father and Daughter (2000) is a quiet, moving tale about a young girl awating the return of her lost father.





In the ancient tradition of cat-and-mouse cartoons comes Le Moine et Le Poisson ("The Monk and the Fish") (1994), a delightful, minimalist short about a monk's obsessive attempts to catch the fish he spies in the monastery pond.





Tom Sweep (1992) is a humorous little cartoon about the travails of a beleaguered street janitor.

No calendars, please

Earlier this year I wrote about how hard it was to find interesting, stylish, high-quality calendars year after year. Well, I wanted to warn you against showering me in calendar gifts this Christmas, because I found enough to tide me over for a few more years, at least.

Most exiting is the discovery that illustrator Steve Thomas, whose retrofuturistic space travel posters I showed off a while ago, offers a calendar of his shiny space art. I will have one for my wall.







For graphic inspiration, I adore the bold, bright prints in this Paper Source Art Calendar.






Etsy of course has loads of beautiful and unique art calendars, particularly of the postcard desktop variety. I like this charming Jardin Desk Calendar by MagnoliaMoonlight.






And this Objectification II Postcard Desk Calendar by SureAsBlue.






And this Screen Printed Botanical Calendar by annacote.






And this Animals of the Land, Sky, and Sea Desk Calendar by InkDropDesign.






And this Helvetica Typography Calendar by ovendoorowl.






And this Letterpressed and Silkscreened Calendar by ilee.






And this TTV Desk Calendar by ebonypaws.






And this Polaroid Calendar by AliciaBlock.






I'm in love with the stationary company Cavallini & Co., particularly their calendar offerings. They have great vintage art themes like travel, maps, plants, and animals.







I also made a few finds in photography calendars of abandoned places. In the slightly surreal category, there's the beautiful Retrospect Calendar by farhmboy, who explores out-of-the-way locales in his native Michigan.







In more moody ruins, there's the uplifting Abandoned Places Calendar by Richard Rizzo.







Then there's the beautifully photographed tribute to that ever-photogenic ruin, the Eastern State Penitentiary Calendar by 13 Black Cats Designs.







So please...no calendars! Unless you've found some great ones, too.

Wednesday wallpapers: Animals

"Spotted Spiny Lobster"





"Nr 2 - Scratch, scratch..."





"colors"





"Grainy Elephant"





"Crocodile Skin"





"Giraffe Hide"





"Starfish"





"Texture 1"





"Snooze"





"Shellfishes"





"Cat's Eyes"





"Feather Water"





"Peacock"





"wanna touch it"





"Snow Fox"

Here there be trolls

Information Architects is the creator of the Web Trend Map series, the latest and greatest of which is Web Trend Map 3. (For the best view, try the adaptive Startpage.) Modeled on the Tokyo subway map, it envisions the web as a network of stations and exchanges linked by common lines like Technology, Video, eCommerce, and Politics.





Because they're still beautiful, here's the Web Trend Map 2007 Version 2.0 (below), and the Web Trend Map 2007 Version 1.
Via Strange Maps.





Xkcd presents a Tolkien-style Map of Online Communities, which handily situates social groups along the axes of "pratical—intellectual" and "focus on real life—focus on web".





There's also xkcd's nifty Blogofractal, which helpfully distills all the output of the Internet and crystallizes it in visual format:





In more practical maps, this one at Strange Maps is a world map showing all of the country code top-level domains (ccTLDs), weighted by population.





Here's another xkcd Map of the Internet showing the distribution of IP addresses.

Musical interlude

John Coltrane - Giant Steps.
Via { feuilleton ].





Gershon Kingsley - Popcorn.





José Feliciano - California Dreamin'.
Via A near life experience.