My "In Rainbows" boxed set arrived at my doorstep today, after waiting nearly a full month. I took half-a-dozen images of the packaging and various inserts here, for anyone who wants to see how much music-geek-ware 40GBP can buy you these days. (Answer: apparently, quite a lot if you don’t have a record label to split profits with.)

*iPod Touch not included, of course. Just wanted to show how huge this thing was.

**Oh yeah, and the second disc has about 150 photos and artwork by the band and some guest artists. Jesus, it’s a fanboy’s dream!

My recent fascination with movie posters resulted in this rather interesting discovery today, while viewing the poster for the upcoming Katherine Heigl romantic comedy "27 Dresses." Cute concept, but isn’t that a direct ripoff of The Illusionist’s poster from last year?

Check out my small collection of random movie posters here. I’m working on adding some commentary to all of them, but I’ve got over a hundred now so it’s bit of a job.

	Kirsten Drunk pretty darn drunk.(Spotted at The Blemish.)
	Possibly the world’s biggest Rubber Duckie. Those French guys have all the great ideas. (Spotted at SFGate.)
	As far as concept cars go, this VR Concept from Paulin Motor Company is straight out of a Will-Smith sci-fi. (Spotted at Crave.)
	The world’s tallest man meets the world’s shortest man. Their height discrepancy was a total 5 ft, 5 inches. (via Laughing Squid.)
	The Optimus Prime Gold Masterpiece edition. Less than 20 of these were ever produced, and this dude has one.

All images originally posted at Highfiber.org. 

I’m a bit of a frustrated mathematician, owing mostly to the fact that I didn’t have the guts to try to get a degree in Mathematics back in college (I took a visual arts course, instead). I was reminded of this yesterday as I was reading about NodeBox, a computational-art package for designers with numbers fetishes. One look at the galleries and I was immediately hooked (Superfolia, in particular, blew my mind). NodeBox is Mac OSX-only, and uses Python (a language I’m only vaguely familiar with, so it took me a bit of time to get comfortable with the very spartan programming environment).

Here’s my first piece, "Lolly", which finally came together after about  an hour or so of mucking around this morning. From a math standpoint, this is all really, really basic stuff, but I have a small advantage in the color department, so this actually doesn’t look half-bad for a first-timer.

Lolly’s source code:

def lolly(x,y,sizelimit):
    w = random(5,sizelimit)
    h = w
    r = random(0.6,1.0)
    b = random(0.6,1.0)
    c = color(r,0.75,b,1.0-(w*0.02))
    c2 = color(r,0.5,b,0.6)
    c3 = color(r,0.5,b,0.2)
   
    fill(c)
    stroke(c2)
    strokewidth(3)
   
    transform(CORNER)
    rotate(-(random(0,90)))
   
    oval(x,y,w,h)
    stroke(c3)
    strokewidth(2)
    line(0,w/2,x,w/2)

    reset()
   

background(0.15,0.04,0.03,1.0)

for i in range(200):
    lolly(random(350,500),0,40)

c = color(1.0,1.0,0.95,1.0)
strokewidth(0)
fill(c)
star(0,0,50,400,10)  

for i in range(100):
    lolly(random(100,200),0,15)

I’ve been looking forward to Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain ever since I saw the trailers late last year and spotted the gorgeous art book at A Different Bookstore (there’s also a graphic novel illustrated by Kent Williams). Aronofsky has been quietly making small art films since the late 90’s and his two previous movies (Pi, and Requiem for a Dream) both received great reviews and — as if often the case with these types of movies — floundered at the box office.

The Fountain is Aronofsky’s third feature, stars Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz and talks about big, sweaty topics like life, death, love and immortality. Mostly it depicts Jackman’s quest to save Weisz, in an adventure that spans two millenia. (Check out the trailer here).

I was looking at The Fountain as being similar to Tim Burton’s Big Fish, or Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth — a visually lavish masterpiece from a visionary filmmaker. For the most part, it does fulfill those expectations, although I guess I wasn’t expecting it to be quite so … insubstantial. The Fountain is wildly ambitious and reaches out in at least three different directions without really capturing anything, and I left the theater wondering what it was that it was really trying to say. (Was it to accept death as inevitable? That love conquers all? That life and death are cyclical? That not all dreams are achievable without compromise? All of the above?)

Still, this is easily the most visually arresting film I’ve seen over the past 12 months (although I should probably qualify that by saying I haven’t seen Pan’s Labyrinth), and you should check it out if only to see how far Aronofsky has taken the art-form with this one feature.

Spending two days a week at Seattle’s Best for the past three months has been allowing me to eavesdrop … uh, observe all the different people that hang out there. This afternoon, for example, I found myself sitting a table away from this college girl who was complaining very loudly to her friend about her boyfriend.

I don’t want to pass judgement on people I don’t know, but if she looks and sounds like a bitch … well, you know.

I fell asleep for a few minutes this morning, and dreamt of a small winged puppy in a shoebox. He was asleep when I found him, and when I pulled him out he blinked and kinda yelped softly. He couldn’t fly away because I was holding his wings together, so he just kinda looked at me solemnly, and waited for me to put him down so he could go back to sleep.

The Joker is one of my favorite villains to draw, because the entire character is defined by his facial expression and body language. He could be wearing a monk’s sack-cloth and he’d still be the Joker if you could draw him just so, and I love that, which is why I’m devoting a whole post to how I drew him in Adobe Illustrator.

@##@

For those of you who don’t know, Illustrator is pretty different from Photoshop, although they work really well together. For this drawing though, I stayed away from Photoshop completely, mostly because I’m an arrogant purist and I like showing off.

Every vector drawing starts with a fast and loose sketch using the Pencil tool. I wanted to have the Joker lighting a cigarette, because that provides a convenienty opportunity to use shadows and highlights all over the place. Also, it makes him look cooler when his smile is one-sided.

Here I’ve started blocking the various parts of the drawing, and added some general lighting. I’ve also decided to keep his cigarette short because, well, the long black filter thing is something the Penguin uses and I don’t think it’s a good idea to mix up their accessories.

This is the part where it starts getting fun: drawing the shadows around the wrinkles in his face is where all the attitude is.

More face detail. The eyes and teeth were really fun to do, although the hair was tedious as hell. At this point, I’ve been drawing for about an hour and a half, and I’m getting kinda tired. I go online for a bit to look at how other artists drew the Joker, which is when I realize that his hair is green, d-uh.

Hehe, you’d think I could remember a simple violet and green color scheme. So now I need to start drawing his forearm and the match he should be holding.

Man, i don’t draw hands well.

Details on the suit, which i decided had to be pin-stripe.

Darker gradients all around, for that extra menacing feel. Notice I forgot to change the eyebrow colors to match his hair.

All done! My font kinda sucks, but i’m no pro.