Raptors zombified

The Work of Frank Frazetta

On May 9, 2010, the art world lost a great legend.
If you were lucky enough to grow up as a young boy in the 1970′s, than you would remember the bigger than life artwork of comic artist Frank Frazetta, who recently died at the age of 82.  His work and style were instantly recognized:  Massive muscles, swords and axes, busty and scantly clad women, legions of the damned, and battle… lots of battle.  His work was the epitomy of the Heavy Metal movement of the 1970′s and rock bands like Molly Hatchet.
As boys, we grew up desiring the physique and the call to battle.  I remember having a poster of Fire and Ice on my wall.  It was “fantasy” art, but not the kind of fantasy you would typically attribute to young adolescent boys.  I’m talking about The Call of grand adventure in far off lands.  At least that is what I remember.
Whether, it was a enormous barbarian on horseback or a pencil sketch of Tarzan, the work of Frank Frazetta was world-renown and instantly recognizable.  He contributions will be greatly missed, but his legacy will be here for a long time.

http://www.workbook.com/portfolios/rick_jacobson

Fruit drop

20 Iconic Weapons From the Most Legendary Gunslingers in Film

Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan - 

 

Even for people who are vehemently anti-gun, there’s something fun about seeing how filmmakers and writers imagine weapons of the future, regardless of how unrealistic they are. Federico Mauro, an Italian art director, has taken it upon himself to make them real.
Mauro is an award-winning commercial director, but in his free time, he hones his rendering skills with projects like this one: Famous Guns, a collection of guns used by classic film characters. “There’s an iconic legacy between an object and a famous person,” he told Gizmodo over email, “be it real or imaginary.”
His collection includes plenty of actual guns (like Samuel Jackson’s 9mm pistol from Pulp Fiction), but the best ones are the fictional weapons. They range from District 9‘s Arc Generator to Rick Deckard’s Blaster pistol from Blade Runner, and the Ghostbusters Proton Pack even makes an appearance, too. Check ‘em out below.

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http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/07/20-iconic-weapons-from-the-most-legendary-gunslingers-in-film/

Van Gogh's Yellow

by johnandann@theartistsroad

It is well known that the rise of Impressionism was due in part to the new developments in paint chemistry which created brighter, more stable colors previously unavailable for oil painting.

View of Arles with Irises by Vincent van Gogh, oil painting.

One of the artists who embraced and experimented with the new color technology was Vincent van Gogh. The brilliance of some of van Gogh's most famous fine art oil paintings are due to his use of these newly available vivid industrial pigments. These pigments begin to show up in his work after his move from Holland to France. Unfortunately, the chemists of the time did not have the tools to perform accelerated aging tests to determine the lightfastness over time of their new creations.
One of the colors, Chrome Yellow, is not only toxic, but is now also known to darken under exposure to the ultraviolet rays in sunlight. As less toxic alternatives to Chrome Yellow were finally developed in the mid-1900s, artists tended to switch to them. But, for a critical period of time, the brilliant color that Chrome Yellow provided was an important tool in van Gogh's and other artists' palettes. It was perhaps most famously used in some of van Gogh's Sunflower paintings. Researchers have found that some, but not all, paintings containing chrome yellow suffer from the severe browning that exposure to sunlight can cause.
To understand how paintings age and how best to preserve them for the future, researchers conducted an in-depth study of the browning seen in some of Van Gogh's work painted with Chrome Yellow. Scientists from four countries performed the study. They began by collecting samples from three historic chrome yellow paint tubes and artificially aging the paint for 500 hours using an ultraviolet lamp. They also took samples from two van Gogh paintings, View of Arles with Irises and Bank of the Seine. The paint from the tubes darkened to a chocolate brown after exposure to the UV light.
Using an X-ray beam that is one hundred times thinner than a human hair, the scientists were able to analyze the darkened chrome yellow at the very surface of the two paintings as well, just below the varnish. Their analyses discovered that the chromium in the pigment gained electrons from the UV light, effectively reducing Chromium (VI) to Chromium (III), turning bright yellow to brown.
Of great interest was the finding from the microscopic X-ray beam that the darkening was most prominent where chemical compounds containing barium and sulphur were. This may prove why some of Van Gogh's paintings seem to be especially susceptible to the darkening, as it is speculated that he sometimes blended white (containing barium and sulphur) with his yellow paint. The next phase of the research will be the most important of all in trying to understand if there is any hope to revert pigments to the original state in paintings where the darkening is already taking place.
In yet another blending of science and art, we are able to look backwards to understand more about the lives and the works of the great masters. "I am not aware of a similarly big effort ever having been made for the chemistry of an oil painting." - Joris Dik, Professor at Delft Technical University. (More information is available from the Journal of Analytical Chemistry.)


Please join us on The Artist's Road for more interesting and informative stories. We believe that more artists in the world is a good thing!
--John and Ann

She Nearly Threw Her Grandpa’s Scrapbook Away. Til She Opened It And… WHOA!

A Redditor discovered this scrapbook in her family’s home. It was musty, plain and almost falling to pieces. To most people, it may look like just a piece of junk that could be thrown away during a round of spring cleaning. She had a feeling it was special… and it ended up being absolutely priceless. Her great-grandfather was a cartoonist for Walt Disney, and inside of that scrapbook was some of the coolest sketches we’ve ever seen.

It didn’t seem like much on the outside…

But on the inside, this scrapbook was filled to the brim with vintage Walt Disney cartoons.

Some of them you may not even recognize, aside from one delightful little mouse.

This book is a piece of history, containing some of the earliest versions of a favorite cartoon character we know today.

We don’t support hoarding, but if you see a tattered book in your family’s attic, you might just want to take a peek before you throw it away. It could contain priceless Disney gold!

New work Black Berry with Splash

Found in the Trash: A Box of Otherworldly Notes

In "Nostalgia" 

You know why the internet is awesome? Because you can share the experience of someone discovering a mysterious treasure. Reddit user TramStopDan documented and shared his recent experience of unlocking and discovering the contents of a box which his friend found discarded on the street next to the trash. When he managed to open it, Dan found a mind-boggling collection of posters, illustrations, text, maps technical drawings and personal belongings.

Speculating on the original owner of the case, Dan writes: “Clearly something happened to this guy that was very memorable. It measures roughly 29″ by 38″ and almost all the drawings are very large… It appears that he was making a diorama/tabletop display. (Why? I have no idea). There are numbered parts and instructions/explanations.”

So let’s take a peak at what he found…

Pretty normal so far…

Text on a poster with corrections and a few eyebrow-raisers to quote, such as, “…but after 12 years it developed that this picture of an obvious other-world invasion…”

‘Fairly small maps, hand-drawn on a clear-ish plastic-like material.’

They all have a hole in the middle, to be overlaid on something else.

Hmmm…

Getting weirder… (or cooler) …

And as Dan puts it, “begin the crazy”…

“Now things start to get a little odd. It seams that the artist saw something in Tampa, FL in 1977 that changed him … This appears to be an early sketch of the event”. 

“An obvious blending of the religious and the extraterrestrial…”

One Reddit commenter had this theory to add:
Apparently the guy went slightly insane over finding extraterrestrials in the bible. He was obsessed with “living creatures” described in Ezekiel 10 that are described as having four faces: “the first face was the face of a cherub, and the second face was the face of a man, and the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.” I guess he really wanted for that to be an alien encounter.

Also found in the briefcase was this technical drawing that looks like a patent application, quite large and very detailed. Dan looked but could not find any registered patent of this design.

So there’s your daily dose of “what the heck am I looking at?!”