Frank Gonzales

Frank Gonzales paints a lot of birds and he's really, really good at it.

The Backwater Gospel

It's Sunday. Time for The Blackwater Gospel!

This stunningly cool animation was a final project from The Animation Workshop. Amazingly talented! Makes me want to weep!



Waaaah!

Rifle Paper Co.

Rifle Paper Co. is a husband-and-wife team of Anna and Nathan Bond. Anna's whimsical illustrations and hand-drawn typography create sweet and pretty stationary and paper goods for all!





So cute!

Psyop + Bambinomonkey + Kool Aid

Advertising is so incredibly slick these days. Take a look at this KoolAid ad Psyop did, for example.



There are three super cool ads in total, each for a different color/flavor. They all feature character designs by Bambinomonkey (aka Ignacio Fernandez Maroto).







You can see all three ads (along with more character studies) at Bambinomonkey's Behance page.

Compare that to what I remember about KoolAid, as a child of the eighties:





Hmmm. Maybe not that much has changed. They do share a similar sense of frenetic chaos.

Eszter Burghardt

Eszter Burghardt is a Canadian/Hungarian artist with a passion for Iceland. And who can blame her? After completing a residency in Iceland, she began projects that recreated that epic scenery on a miniature scale.

The first series on her site, Edible Vistas, uses food (such as poppy seeds, coco powder, coffee, milk and chocolate cake crumbs) to recreate the varied and peculiar landscape of remote Iceland.





The second series, Wooly Sagas uses Icelandic wool to similar effect.





I've visited Iceland and found it immensely inspiring. I took over a thousand photos while I was there, but I think Eszter's dioramas recreate the calm and strange beauty of Iceland more convincingly than my snapshots of the real deal.

MBMBAM - Peepum's Nastí-gum

Today was an insane day full of ups and downs - and most of the ups were a direct reaction to this clip from a My Brother, My Brother and Me's Episode.
Peepum's Nastí-gum became my rock as I battled a ruthless case of food poisoning from about 1pm - 3:30pm.

All I could do to stay coherent was to replay this Peepum's clip over and over and hope not to pass out or throw up (from the food poisoning, not the podcast).

We've been listening to MBMBAM in the office for months now, and each one gets better and better. It seems that their back and forth bantering and made-up-scenarios match our kind of humor. (None of it makes sense and most of it makes you want to cry with laughter.) I was cry-laughing for various reasons today. Most of it was from MBMBAM.

If you haven't had a chance to listen to them until now, you can get their shows for free on www.maximumfun.org, along with a bunch of other free, hilarious podcasts.

For now, I am healed from my horrible Caesar's salad situation - mostly from the ray of hilarious-light that is MBMBAM.

TasteSpotting

We here at Paper Bicycle Towers love to eat. I think we'd eat non-stop if we were physically able. And we love presentation, when it comes to food, which is why we love TasteSpotting is "a community driven visual potluck" where everyone sends in amazing looking pictures of food.



YUM. Even if you just ate a huge meal, I'm pretty sure you'll look at this site and feel hungry again immediately.

The website has different categories to make sure you can drool over whatever you're in the mood for.

Schooled

Since all of us have been in and out of classrooms a fair amount throughout this past year, the academic products of Heather K Phillips caught my eye.
The cynical stamps are entertaining at the least, and the color assortment on the prize ribbon collections are kind of pretty.

Yellena James

Yellena James' work is bright and vibrant. She participates in showings nation wide and has done work for a long list of clients that includes Anthropologie, Nike and K2 Snowboards.







Visit Yellena's blog!

Sword Shadow Dance

Sword Shadow Dance was produced for the Galaxy Theatre in Tokyo, Japan. It combines animation and projection with some sweet sword skills to create a totally unique and amazing performance that wouldn't be out of place in a crazy anime.

Lufdesign

Lufdesign has some really cool stuff. My attention was drawn to these leaf cord ties–a cute way to keep power cords in order!





There's also a flickr gallery for people to post their creative leaf tie photos.

Dead Island

Warning: The video embedded in this post is gory and not suitable for everyone.

I first heard about Techland's Dead Island more than a year ago, maybe even two or three years ago. All I knew was that it's a game with lots of zombies and that it's set in some sort of tropical resort. Which obviously sounds quite cheesy. I kind of forgot about it immediately.

Out of nowhere, the official trailer came out and I was quite surprised by what I saw. What I expected to be a clichéd, action-heavy video game trailer was actually a very well done, and sad, 3 minute zombie story that rivals a lot of thoughtful horror movies.



P.S. I promise the next post will be extra cute and cheery.

100 Creatives and Me

The Dressing Room is the Art and Culture blog of the City Pages, Minneapolis/St.Paul's ubiquitous alternative weekly newspaper.

I was recently interviewed as part of their 100 Creatives series, which is an interesting series featuring some of our favorite local artists like Jennifer Davis and Zander Cannon.

So give it a read if you want to know a little more about yours-truly.

And stay tuned for the remaining 71 artists!

Irina Werning

Although it's hard to feel too self-conscience about an artifact from our youth, we all have photos from our past that we might consider embarrassing, to say the least.

Irina Werning convinces her friends and family to recreate photos from their past with stunning accuracy. The results are pretty special.







Check out the whole series, which is an ongoing series titled 'Back to the Future'.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentines Day Everyone!! :)
Hope your Monday is filled with lots of chalky heart candies and hugs!!

Mollinex + Kinect

Just last night we almost bought a Kinect, the new motion sensor peripheral for Xbox 360. We had it in our hands; Lindsay was chomping at the bit to play some Dance Central.

But (being the nerd I am) I've followed all the hands-on impressions and coverage since it was launched and I don't think we have the proper space or lighting to make it work right. Although I wish I did.

As cool as Dance Central is, what hackers and modders have been doing with the hardware even cooler.

For instance, Mollinex created this video for their song,Catalina using the data pulled from Kinect's 3-D depth-sensing camera.



I might try to round up a lot of cool kinect hacks for a future post. There's a lot of cool stuff happening around that tech.

Godmachine

As I youth I remember looking at Heavy Metal album covers and being blown away from the combination of taboo subject matter and intricate detail. I was never into the music all that much, but I did love the art enough to own a few albums.

Godmachine (link probably NSFW) captures everything I loved about those strange and dark drawings. As self-taught artist inspired by skateboarding, comics and music, Godmachine obviously loves what he does and draws like a maniac.







Super sick. I love it.

Taylor James

Taylor James is a Creative Production Studio, which basically means they create stunning imagery for print, motion and web.

I was really impressed with some of their amazing photo manipulations.







The woman shedding her skin is actually a 3D model and can be viewed from all angels. Creepy.

Annette Marnat

I could post a million pictures from Annette Marnat, a french animator and illustrator, but it should only take one to be utterly convinced to click the link...



Whaaa? So good! So click it!

Oh fine. Here's one more just because I know Lindsay and Francesca will flip out over how cute he is.

Slow Motion Fun

I've said it before; things in slow motion are totally awesome. Combine that with some cute animals, and you've got my full attention.

Lucky for me, TPS Film Studio is on the same wavelength. At least, I assume they are based on the videos they've released showing off their slow-motion camera.





Not only do they film tiny cute animals, but also science-y stuff like superconductors and things blowing up! In slow motion!





Wowee!

Jason Pollan for West Elm

West Elm has a HUGE array of amazing things this season - including surface designed bath, tabletop and decor pieces by Jason Pollan.

Jason has a really awesome naive and human style and I love the simplicity of his drawings. My old drawing teachers would have swooned over his gestural style. I remember trying to draw with a piece of charcoal attached to the end of a huge stick.

THAT's how I feel about his drawings. They look easy and hard to draw at the same time.



Jason runs a blog called everypersoninnewyork.blogspot.com where he's drawing... yes, you guessed it... Every person in New York that he can possibly catch. There are some great loose drawings of the colorful characters of the city.

I love the small details about where and when they show up. I hope he manages to reach his goal!

We went over to West Elm on a chilly Saturday and ran into these amazing bath accessories by Jason Pollan.



Right now they're lying about on our huge white table, collecting random things, rings, change, pencils. I'm apparently not going to use them in the bathroom (we have a shared bathroom with the rest of the 6th floor here at PB), so I think I'll just admire them as "Stuff Holders".



The tumbler is already my pencil cup of choice.



We also grabbed this amazing mustard pillow with a HUGE faceted burst on it. I know the dogs would like to use this as well, but for now I'll keep it far far out of their reach.

Song of the Sea

The Secret of Kells came out a few years ago and became one of my favorite animated things ever. If you haven't seen it, it's out on DVD (I think it may be available on Netflix, too) and you should most definitely watch it if you've got a penchant for pretty visuals.
I was delighted to see there is a short animated piece by the same studio on Youtube. It has nothing to do with Kells, but is gorgeous nonetheless.

Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China

Traveling and seeing new places is the golden highlight of my life. Whoever has the chance to experience a new place, I encourage and envy you. But if right now you don't have the time or funds for traveling, you can always read about it until you can.
One of my favorite graphic novels is Shenzhen:A Travelogue from China.



Guy Delisle relates his experience in China as a foreigner who doesn't speak the language, and there's something kind of comforting in reading about his experience.

Late Night Working & Goodbye Wacom Pen, We'll miss you.

And so we say goodbye to a dear friend. Goodbye Francesca's Wacom Pen, We will miss you dearly.

We've all been working really hard on drawing, editing and getting files ready for production on over 120 Christmas Cards over the last month or so for a one of our newest clients. It's been a whirlwind of creating over here - and as we all know, too much of a good thing sometimes creates a little craziness.

Francesca's Wacom pen was a casualty last night. We're all still in mourning as we consider that it had only just begun it's young life. It hit Francesca the hardest - losing her pen must be like losing her hand. Still, all things must pass. And so, we honor all of it's good service over the last year and a half... le sigh.




Adam came over last night to keep us company and give us a little coloring support. (What a nice guy). We've got some great pictures of Twink and Adam trying to console Francesca over the loss of her Wacom pen.






As you can see, Twink's efforts are helping!


All that cheer-uppering effort wore him out.

At the end of the night on a Friday we were listening to all of the Drunk people spill out of the bars here on Lake & Lyndale around 2am. I remember thinking to myself that once I graduated from MCAD that I'd be going to bed around 10 and getting up at 7am every morning like the rest of the world - and that my projects would be short and sweet so I wouldn't pull late nights as often.

I've come to realize it's part of the creative lifestyle. I'd probably be working on my own art til 2 anyway!




Here's Chris at the final stretch of the night! Surprise, Chris!

In reality, we were all in pretty awesome spirits last night! Francesca has been drawing her heart out on these Christmas cards, most of which feature Santa with some type of clipboard and a jumpsuit. We're on the final stretch!
Wish us luck as we finish up this huge project!!