12 Months Of Illustrated Aliens And Their Animated Planets - A Project by Andy Martin

Begun in January of 2013, illustrator, animator and music maker Andy Martin (Handymartian) has just completed his wonderful year long project - "The Illustrated Aliens."

Each day for a month Martin created an alien and, at the end of each month, he revealed the planet upon which they live via an animated short. He did this for an entire year, culminating in 12 different alien species, 12 animated videos and 4 posters.



Having revealed the final Planet Twelve animation on the 15th of January 2014, the galactic adventure has concluded and I want to share all twelve months of his wonderful work with you.

The Aliens

Planet One Aliens:



Planet Two Aliens:



Planet Three Aliens:



Planet Four Aliens:



Planet Five Aliens:



Planet Six Aliens:



Planet Seven Aliens:



Planet Eight Aliens:



Planet Nine Aliens:



Planet Ten Aliens:



Planet Eleven Aliens:



Planet Twelve Aliens:




The 12 Planet Animated Videos


I had intended to embed all 12 animated videos here but it was taking too long to load and crashing. Instead, please view his planet videos here in Vimeo.

The Posters:
The first of his four posters features all the Illustrated Aliens from the year long project starting with Planet One's characters at the bottom and moving up to Planet Twelve's characters at the top:


The second of four posters has all the planets from this year long project in a 3x4 grid:


The third of four posters has all the characters from this year long project mixed together:


The fourth of the four posters shows the universe created by the planets in this year long project:


You can purchase prints of these posters here at Society 6

Andy will be updating his Tumblr with any further news about the Illustrated Aliens and The Planets as he hopes to send them to animation festivals this year. Best of luck to you, Andy!

All illustrations by Andy Martin.
Follow him on Tumblr.
Follow him on Twitter.
See the sketches on Instagram.
Buy prints on Society6.

The Elio: An Eco-Friendly, Revolutionary 3-Wheeled Vehicle Hits The Road.

It's green, It's lean. It's got three wheels and can be ordered now. Introducing the Elio.




Founded in 2008 by Mr. Paul Elio, Elio Motors set out to provide affordable transportation to those commuters seeking an alternative while providing vital American jobs.

The result is a street legal three wheeled environmentally friendly vehicle that goes from 0-60 in under 9.6 seconds and gets 84 miles to the gallon. For students, the vehicle provides a safe and reliable means to commute around campus. For those families with mini-vans or SUV’s, Elio provides an efficient and economical way to get to and from work. The price-point of the vehicle ($6800 USD) allows Elio to be an addition to a family's fleet without adding any additional cost to an already stretched budget.



Features:
• 84 Miles per Gallon
It gets 84 miles to the gallon on the highway. That means you can go from Detroit to New York City on a tank of gas – or drive from Shreveport LA to Dallas and back – then back to Dallas again – and still have about 110 miles left before a refill.



• 8-Gallon Tank:
It can go 672 miles, or thereabouts, because it has an 8-gallon tank and 8X84=672. Of course, other factors will affect your mileage.



• Eco-Friendly:
It gets 84 MPG on the highway, but you’ll be doing your share of city driving, too. With its city rate of 49 MPG, you’ll be consuming only 1/3 of what the average American vehicle consumes.

• Transmission:
5-speed manual or automatic. And yes, it has a reverse gear.

• Power:
An inline, 3 cylinder, .9 liter, 55 HP, fuel-injected, SOHC gas-powered, liquid-cooled, automotive engine. Top speed is in excess of 100 MPH, and the 0-60 speed is under 9.6 seconds.



• Traction:
The engine is in the front and it is a front-wheel-drive vehicle. With a low center of gravity and weight towards the front, you’ll get great traction action – even in the snow.

• Suspension:
The Elio is built on an independent suspension with unequal length control arms, coil-over-spring and shock in the front and mono-shock with coil-over-spring and shock in the rear. The ground clearance is 5.75″ — similar to most of the passenger vehicles you see on the road today.

• Brakes:
3-wheel disc brakes with the Anti-Lock Braking System on 15″ wheels.



• Safety:
Each Elio comes equipped with a Safety Management System that includes three airbags – a reinforced roll-cage frame, Anti-Lock Braking System, and 50% larger crush zones than similar vehicles. Preliminary safety tests on computer models anticipate a 5-Star safety rating.

• Quiet:
The body panels are made of a composite (which is more sound deadening than steel) and attached to a tight, solid body that doesn’t have a lot of moving (read squeaky) parts. These two design features help keep outside noise from getting into the cockpit and getting in the way of your favorite tunes playing on our AM/FM radio (that’s standard).

• Space:
The trunk space will be at least 27″ x 14″ x 10″, enough for an airline carry-on bag or a golf bag with the rear seat down (47″+).



Exterior Specs:
Overall Length: 160.5″
Overall Height: 54.2″
Front Wheel Track: 66.8″ (center rim to center rim)
Wheelbase: 110″ (center of front wheels to center of rear wheel)



Interior Specs:
Headroom: Driver 39.8 Passenger 36.4 in
Seat width: Driver 20.6 Passenger 25.3 in
Interior Shoulder Width: 26.8 in
Front seat Legroom: 42.7 in
Rear seat Legroom: 33.1 in

Comfort:
Elio has been designed to fit 95% of all people, whether it be a 6’8″ former college basketball player, a 6’3″ 365 lb man or a 5’0″ petite woman.



American Made = American Jobs
It should come as no surprise that Elio will create a number of much-needed jobs for American workers. The company is estimating 1,500 jobs at their Shreveport, LA plant beginning in 2014.

Price:
It only costs $6,800. That’s about what you would pay for an outboard motor to power a rowboat.

Warranty:
The Elio comes standard with a 3 year/36000 mile warranty.



When you own an Elio, you’re not just a customer, you’re part of a family. So we’re not going to lure you in with that $6,800 low price, only to mention things like A/C and an AM/FM radio are extra. They’re not. You get those items plus heater, defrost, the three airbags, power windows and door lock, seat belts, tempered glass, and windshield wiper at no extra cost.


Learn more and/or pre-order the Elio here

Classic Romantic Paintings Get Subtly Animated in BEAUTY Video by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro

In this 10 minute video, BEAUTY, director Rino Stefano Tagliafierro takes 116 classic romantic paintings (all of which are listed at the end of this post) and slowly and subtly animates them, bringing the beauty in them to life. A slight tilt of the head, a dress raising ever so gently, petals falling from flowers - tiny, almost imperceptible movements, are expertly executed without changing the general composition or color of the original painting.



William Adolphe Bouguereau's original painting of The Nut Gatherers compared to a screen grab of the subtle animation. Note the arms, hands and grapes on the figure on the right:


The Manifesto: The Enigma of Beauty

«Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood;»
(W. Shakespeare, Sonnet no. 19)

Over Beauty, there has always hung the cloud of destiny and all-devouring time.
Beauty has been invoked, re-figured and described since antiquity as a fleeting moment of happiness and the inexhaustible fullness of life, doomed from the start to a redemptive yet tragic end.

In this interpretation by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro, this beauty is brought back to the expressive force of gestures that he springs from the immobility of canvas, animating a sentiment lost to the fixedness masterpieces.

Its as though these images which the history of art has consigned to us as frozen movement can today come back to life thanks to the fire of digital invention.

A series of well selected images from the tradition of pictorial beauty are appropriated, (from the renaissance to the symbolism of the late 1800s, through Mannerism, Pastoralism, Romanticism and Neo-classicism) with the intention of retracing the sentiment beneath the veil of appearance.

An inspiration that returns to us the sense of one fallen, and the existential brevity that the author interprets as tragic dignity, with an unenchanted eye able to capture the profoundest sense of the image.

Beauty in this interpretation is the silent companion of Life , inexorably leading from the smile of the baby, through erotic ecstasies to the grimaces of pain that close a cycle destined to repeat ad infinitum.

They are, from the inception of a romantic sunrise in which big black birds fly to the final sunset beyond gothic ruins that complete the piece, a work of fleeting time. - Giuliano Corti (english translation: Thomas McEvoy)

The short film:


The paintings, in order of appearance:

Asher Brown Durand - The Catskill Valley‬

Thomas Hill - Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe

Albert Bierstadt - Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains

Ivan Shishkin - Forest edge

James Sant - Frau und Tochter‬

William Adolphe Bouguereau - L'Innocence

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Song of the Angels

Ivan Shishkin - Bach im Birkenwald

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Le Baiser

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Nature's Fan- Girl with a Child

William Adolphe Bouguereau - The Motherland

Ivan Shishkin - Morning in a Pine Forest

William Adolphe Bouguereau - The Nut Gatherers

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Two Sisters

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Not too Much to Carry

Thomas Cole - The Course of Empire: Desolation

Martinus Rørbye - Entrance to an Inn in the Praestegarden at Hillested

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Sewing

William Adolphe Bouguereau - The Difficult Lesson

William Adolphe Bouguereau - The Curtsey

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Little Girl with a Bouquet

Claude Lorrain - Pastoral Landscape

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Cupidon

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Admiration

William Adolphe Bouguereau - A Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Dawn

William Adolphe Bouguereau - L'Amour et Psych

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Spring Breeze

William Adolphe Bouguereau - The Invation

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Nymphs and Satyr

William Adolphe Bouguereau - The Youth of Bacchus

William Adolphe Bouguereau - The Birth of Venus

William Adolphe Bouguereau - The Nymphaeum

Gioacchino Pagliei - Le Naiadi

Luis Ricardo Falero - Faust's Dream

Luis Ricardo Falero - Reclining Nude

Jules Joseph Lefebvre - La Cigale

John William Godward - Tarot of Delphi

Jan van Huysum - Bouquet of Flowers in an Urn

Adrien Henri Tanoux - Salammbo

Guillaume Seignac - Reclining Nude

Tiziano - Venere di Urbino

Louis Jean François Lagrenée - Amor and Psyche

Correggio - Giove e Io

François Gérard - Psyché et l'Amour

John William Godward - Contemplatio

John William Godward - Far Away Thought

John William Godward - An Auburn Beauty

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Flora And Zephy

Louis Jean François Lagrenée - Amor and Psyche

Fritz Zuber-Bühle - A Reclining Beauty

Paul Peel - The Rest

Guillaume Seignac - L'Abandon

Victor Karlovich Shtemberg - Nu à la peau de bete

Pierre Auguste Cot - Portrait Of Young Woman

Ivan Shishkin - Mast Tree Grove

Ivan Shishkin - Rain in an oak forest

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Biblis

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Elegy

Marcus Stone - Loves Daydream End

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Head Of A Young Girl

Hugues Merle - Mary Magdalene in the Cave

Andrea Vaccaro - Sant'Agata

Jacques-Luois David - Accademia (o Patroclo)

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - San Giovanni Battista

Roberto Ferri - In Nomine Deus

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Cristo alla colonna

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Incoronazione di spine

Paul Delaroche - L'Exécution de lady Jane Grey en la tour de Londres, l'an 1554

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Decollazione di San Giovanni Battista

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Sacrificio di Isacco

Guido Reni - Davide e Golia

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Giuditta e Oloferne

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Davide e Golia

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Salomè con la testa del Battista

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Davide con la testa di Golia

Jakub Schikaneder - All Soul's Day

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - San Gerolamo scrivente

Guido Reni - San Gerolamo

Pieter Claesz - Vanitas

Gabriel von Max - The Ecstatic Virgin Anna Katharina Emmerich

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Gardner

Jan Lievens - A young girl

Johannes Vermeer - Portrait of a Young Girl

Luis Ricardo Falero - Moonlit Beauties

Joseph Rebell - Burrasca al chiaro di luna nel golfo di Napoli

Luis Ricardo Falero - Witches going to their Sabbath

William Adolphe Bouguereau - Dante And Virgil In Hell

Théodore Géricault - Cheval arabe gris-blanc

Peter Paul Rubens - Satiro

Felice Boselli - Skinned Head of a Young Bull

Gabriel Cornelius von Max - Monkeys as Judges of Art

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Medusa

Luca Giordano - San Michele

Théodore Géricault - Study of Feet and Hands

Peter Paul Rubens - Saturn Devouring His Son

Ilya Repin - Ivan il Terribile e suo figlio Ivan

Franz von Stuck - Lucifero Moderno

Gustave Doré - Enigma

Arnold Böcklin - Die Toteninsel (III)

Sophie Gengembre Anderson - Elaine

John Everett Millais - Ophelia

Paul Delaroche - Jeune Martyre

Herbert Draper - The Lament for Icarus

Martin Johnson Heade - Twilight on the St. Johns River

Gabriel Cornelius von Max - Der Anatom

Enrique Simonet - Anatomía del corazón

Thomas Eakins - Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic)

Rembrandt - Lezione di anatomia del dottor Tulp

Peter Paul Rubens - Die Beweinung Christi

Paul Hippolyte Delaroche - Die Frau des Künstlers Louise Vernet auf ihrem Totenbett

Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau - Too Imprudent

William-Adolphe Bouguereau - The Prayer

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Amorino dormiente

Augustin Théodule Ribot - St. Vincent (of Saragossa)

Caspar David Friedrich - Abtei im eichwald



CREDITS

DIRECTOR: RINO STEFANO TAGLIAFIERRO

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: LAILA SONSINO

2ND ASSISTANT DIRECTOR: CARLOTTA BALESTRIERI

EDITING - COMPOSITING - ANIMATION: RINO STEFANO TAGLIAFIERRO

MUSIC & SOUND DESIGN: ENRICO ASCOLI

ART DIRECTION: RINO STEFANO TAGLIAFIERRO

HISTORIOGRAPHER: GIULIANO CORTI

The Five New Celebrity Disney Dream Portraits by Annie Leibovitz - And A Look Behind The Scenes.

In the past, I had shared all the Disney Dream Portraits (wonderful photographs of celebrities portraying Disney characters by photographer Annie Leibovitz) up through 2011 here.

Ceramic Sculptures That REALLY Look Inflated by artist Brett Kern.

I discovered Brett Kern's fabulous ceramic sculptures while reading about them on io9. The sculptures look remarkably like inflatable vinyl toys, but are made of glazed ceramic, complete with blow-up tab glazed in gold or silver and featuring the artist's stamp. I couldn't help myself and did something I rarely do. I bought one immediately - a large yellow T-Rex.


above: Brett's work on display

above: Brett working on one of his "baby" sized dinosaur sculptures

Some snarky critics might find his work derivative of Jeff Koons' inflatables (actual vinyl inflated toys placed on mirrors), Hybrids and blown-up looking metal Rabbit (made of stainless steel with chromium color coatings). But Brett's are of a different subject matter, different medium, different process and of course, a different end result.


above: Jeff Koons' various 'inflatable' sculptures are made of different materials and using a different process

That said, you've now got to see his work.

Triceratops ceramic, glaze, 12.5" x 28" x 13":


Brontosaurus ceramic, glaze, 4" x 13" x 23":



Stegasaurus ceramic, glaze, 4" x 13" x 23":


Tyrannosaurus Rex ceramic, glaze, 15.5" x 13" x 8":



The sculptures shown above range in price from $500 - $800.

Also available are "baby" sized sculptures for approximately $100. These ceramic smaller versions measure approximately  (6" x 5" x 8") depending on the dinosaur.

Baby Dinosaur sculptures:



He also collaborated with artist Justin Rothshank on a cool series of his ceramic dinos embellished with decals.




Of these, only the one shown below is still available for purchase at the price of $1,250. - at least it was at the time I am writing this post:


Also available is a fabulous Astronaut that looks like a blow-up toy ($1,500):


Brett, who hails from Pennsylvania and now lives and works in Elkins, West Virginia, started out as a graphic design major but after one year of college he discovered his love of clay and switched his focus to ceramics.

Upon graduating in 2010, Brett was awarded a long term Artist-In-Residence position at the Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, MT. After a year there Brett returned to West Virginia to begin his teaching career at Davis & Elkins College and to continue his own work.

His self-professed infatuation with pop culture of the late eighties and the nineties influences the subject matter and purpose of his work.  'My predilection for producing collectible objects comes from my training as a potter and my persistent preoccupation with collecting toys, pop memorabilia, and nostalgic items from my youth." says the artist.

The resulting products are a collection of what look uncannily like inflatable dinosaurs whoopie cushions and toys, but are made of cast clay ceramic and glazed in various colors. (Brett has also crafted other ceramics that don't look as though they are inflated).


above: Brett creates other ceramic works, such as the items shown above

Brett's work is available to purchase here at his etsy store

While maintaining his teaching career, Brett continues to show nationally and regionally. Taylor Books in Charleston, WV and The White Room in Thomas, WV both display his art. Brett received Best in Show in the HxWxD juried sculpture show at the Rosewood Arts Center in Kettering, OH and has work in the 5th annual Beyond the Brickyard show at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT.

Brett Kern Art