Blackmoogle

OS X: We've shown you how to download subtitles for movie files on your computer through services like Opensubtitles or Subscene, but Subtitles for Mac makes the process as simple as dragging and dropping a video file.

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Ottale’s rock-hard scaled belly is used for combing sea and lake-beds to dislodge shell-fish. They possess an adeptness for using tools and are deceptively strong due to an excess of muscle tendons. A single strike from an Ottale can crack even the hardest of objects, whether it is a clam or an enemy. Ottale can float for days, expending little energy as they travel from place to place. They often travel in pairs and hold hands so they don’t drift apart. Local folklore considers Ottale a messenger between humans and creatures.

標本　－　specimen

watercolour + 140lb paper + white gouache

(Video link) There are ten days left in a crowdfunded campaign to provide Lensen drawing kits to sight impaired kids. The Lensen is simple wooden drawing tool that makes drawing lines a tactile experience.

The pen unspools wool yarn onto a Velcro surface, which grips the yarn. The pens are designed for children with visual impairment, but they would be a great experience for any artist to use blindfolded and actually feel the lines coming out of the pen.
Link to "Start Some Good" crowdfunding page
Thanks, Rob Nonstop

If you missed the Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses concert series last time because you were getting your Tingle costume dry cleaned, you have another chance coming. Nintendo has just announced a second season of the concert, with new material and dates in two new cities, Baltimore and Grand Rapids.

The show starts touring June 6 in Atlanta, with performances through October 19. Please don't wear a Tingle costume to the symphony.

Continue reading Zelda concert series returns this summer

Zelda concert series returns this summer originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Scientists have discovered an entire new genus of bats including this specimen from southern Sudan. The new genus is called Niumbaha. They have incredible black and white markings.

(Want more? See NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com)

If you have kids it's never too soon to start thinking about back to school. So keep these adorable Rubber Barber erasers, designed by Chen Lu Wei, in the back of your mind for when it's time to start shopping for school supplies again. More »

small drop in a pond

Let’s do it!

This is what a major chord looks like! (3D printed sculpture) The Harmonics Series is a nice exploration around visualization of musical harmony.

(Want more? See NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com)

People are really getting into the animals in clothes look... the latest are Zoo Portraits by Yago Partal

(Want more? See NOTCOT.org and NOTCOT.com)

Some spring plants

sepia/red ink + watercolour + 90lb paper

Life Drawing at The Book Club from Wriggles & Robins on Vimeo.
(Direct link to video) This video is made up of separate figure drawings made by a group of twelve artists arrayed in a circle. As the intervals speed up, the individual drawings merge into a three-dimensional sense of the figure as an animated form.
Thanks, Mary

Herbert James Draper was a late Victorian / early 20th century artist who specialized for much of his career in mythological subjects.

His most famous painting, The Lament for Icarus (above, top with detail) is in the Tate (high-resolution version on Google Art Project and Wikimedia Commons).

Earlier in his career he was an illustrator. As the popularity of his mythological and literary subjects, and his classical Victorian approach to painting, waned in his later career, he turned more to portraiture.

[Note: some images on the sites linked could be considered NSFW]

SIGN PAINTERS (OFFICIAL TRAILER) from samuel j macon on Vimeo.
(Direct link to video) Directors Faythe Levine and Sam Macon documented the stories of sign painters who still follow the traditional methods of lettering by hand. Here's the trailer for their documentary "Sign Painters," the first anecdotal history of the craft, featuring the stories of more than two dozen sign painters, young and old, working throughout the United States.

"There was a time, as recently as the 1980s, when storefronts, murals, banners, barn signs, billboards, and even street signs were all hand-lettered with brush and paint. But, like many skilled trades, the sign industry has been overrun by the techno-fueled promise of quicker and cheaper. The resulting proliferation of computer-designed, die-cut vinyl lettering and inkjet printers has ushered a creeping sameness into our landscape. Fortunately, there is a growing trend to seek out traditional sign painters and a renaissance in the trade."

Book related to the project: Sign Painters by Faythe Levine
Documentary website: signpaintermovie.com
Previously on GurneyJourney: "Hand Painted Signs" and "Irish Hand Painted Signs"
Documentary "Up There" about artists who paint murals on buildings (thanks, Marney Morris)
There are several Flickr groups devoted to this subject:
“Hand-Painted Signs of the World.”
“Folk Typography”
“Signpaintr,” dedicated to the lost art of hand-lettering
“Hand-Painted Signs of Cambodia.”

If Lucian Rudaux was the Grandfather of space art, Chesley Bonestell was the father. He was born on January 1, 1888, 15 years before the Wright brothers first flew and 38 years before the launch of the first liquid-fuel rocket. When he died 98 years later, men had walked on the moon and spacecraft had visited most of the planets and many of the moons of the solar system.

Bonestell's paintings not only anticipated 20th century space exploration, they helped to bring it about. So realistic were his depictions of other worlds that visiting them no longer seemed fantasy. His artwork looked like picture postcards taken by some future astronaut.

Bonestell started drawing at age five and be­gan formal art instruction by the time he was 12. When he was 17, he visited Lick Observatory where he was in­spired by seeing Saturn through the observatory's giant refractors. As soon as he returned home, Bonestell sketched a picture of the planet as he had observed it—probably his first attempt at space art.

Bonestell eventually became an architectural designer and renderer. One of his first professional jobs was working with the legendary Willis Polk on the reconstruction of San Francisco after the great earthquake and fire. Polk quickly made Bonestell his chief designer. In New York, Bonestell assisted Wil­liam van Alen in the design of the Chrysler Building (its famous gargoyles are Bonestell's work). Later, Bonestell worked on the Golden Gate Bridge.

During this time, he kept up his interest in astronomy, filling sketchbooks with extraterrestrial scenes, like this one:

In 1938, Bonestell began a new career in Hollywood as a spe­cial effects matte painter. The first film he worked on was Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. All the views of turn-of-the-century New York and of Charles Foster Kane's mansion, Xan­adu, are Bonestell's artwork. In The Fountainhead, Bonestell in a sense was Howard Roark: all of the buildings created by Ayn Rand's superheroic architect are by Bonestell. He eventually became Hollywood's highest-paid matte artist.

After his success as an astronomical artist, Bonestell returned to Hollywood to provide spe­cial effects art for George Pal’s Destination Moon, War of the Worlds and When Worlds Collide. The complete panoramic matte painting for the latter is here, and an unused alternate version below:

And Bonestell's 14-foot-wide lunar landscape created for Destination Moon:

It occurred to him that he could employ what he’d learned as a special effects artist to create astronomical art with a level of realism never seen before. "As my knowledge of the technical side of the motion picture industry broadened,” he wrote, “I realized I could ap­ply camera angles as used in the motion picture studio to il­lustrate 'travel' from satellite to satellite, showing Saturn ex­actly as it would look, and at the same time I could add inter­est by showing the inner satellites or outer ones on the far side of Saturn, as well as the planet itself in different phas­es."

For instance, he often employed a laborious technique of constructing detailed model landscapes, which he then photographed, painting over the final print. This resulted in a level of realism that was utterly convincing. It was a laborious technique, however, that he seldom used after the 1950s. Here is a detail from one these models:

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This project resulted in his first published space art, a series of paintings depicting scenes on Saturn’s moons, that appeared in the May 29,1944, issue of Life. The public—to say nothing of science fiction fans—were astonished and delighted. Among the paintings was a ethereally beautiful view of Saturn seen from Titan. Inspiring an entire generation of scientists and space enthusiasts—countless scientists, engineers and astronauts have been inspired in their choice of careers by Bonestell's images, including a young Carl Sagan—it has been called “the painting that launched a thousand careers.”

Around this time, Bonestell began a long-term collabora­tion with Willy Ley, an expatriate German historian and sci­ence popularizer who had been a member of the German Spaceflight Society (Verein fur Raumschiffahrt). Taking advantage of Ley's advice, Bonestell began adding spacecraft to his paintings. In 1946 Life published another set of his il­lustrations, this time depicting a manned flight to the moon.

Bonestell's art began appearing regularly in magazines, from Look, Coronet, Pic and Mechanix Illustrated to Air Trails, Scientific American and Astounding Science Fiction. So popular had his art become that Bonestell once mistakenly sent the cover painting for a science-fiction magazine to the wrong publication. The editor of that magazine promptly ran it! Bonestell's first book, The Conquest of Space, created in collaboration with Ley, featured 48 of his paintings. It became an immediate best-seller. The cover painting has become one of the iconic images of the 1950s:

In addition to the artwork he was creating for books, magazines and movies, Bonestell created a magnificent mural for the Boston Museum of Science. Forty feet wide, it depicted a lunar landscape with breathtaking realism. The mural was removed after the Apollo 11 landing in 1969 because “it was no longer accurate.” The mural is now in the collection of the National Air & Space Museum, where plans are being made to restore and display it.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke tried to explain Bonestell’s popularity at this time by saying that his “...remarkable technique produces an effect of realism so strik­ing that his paintings have sometimes been mistaken for ac­tual colour photographs by those slightly unacquainted with the present status of interplanetary flight.... In the years to come it is probably destined to fire many imaginations, and thereby to change many lives."

Clarke was only too right. In 1951 Cornelius Ryan, the asso­ciate editor of Collier's magazine, invited Bonestell to illus­trate a series of five articles on the future of spaceflight. The prime author was Wernher von Braun.

Just as Clarke had been, von Braun found himself awed by Bonestell's sharp eye for scientific and engineering accuracy. He once wrote that "Chesley Bonestell's pictures... are far more than reproductions of beautiful ethereal paintings of Worlds Beyond. They present the most accurate portrayal of those faraway heavenly bodies that modern science can offer. I do not say this lightly. In my many years of association with Chesley I have learned to respect, nay fear, this wonderful artist's obsession with perfection. My file cabinet is filled with sketches of rocket ships I had prepared to help him in his art work—only to have them returned to me with pene­trating detailed questions or blistering criticism of some in­consistency or oversight."

The Collier's series—published between 1952 and 1954—took America by storm. The country turned space-happy; reproductions and knockoffs of Bonestell's paintings appeared in settings ranging from commercial advertise­ments to television programs to school lunch boxes. The series was eventually collected in three books: Across the Space Frontier, Conquest of the Moon and Exploration of Mars, now all collector’s items. Bonestell's artwork strongly influenced the American pub­lic and, in turn, the government to support an investment in space exploration. An influence that has been repeatedly acknowledged.

Over the following decade Bonestell watched manned space explo­ration become a reality. He grumpily noticed that the softly rolling lu­nar hills seen by the Apollo astronauts bore little resemblance to the craggy, romanticized, Doresque landscapes he had painted. But such inaccuracies do little to diminish the primary importance of Bonestell's work. His illustrations gave immediacy and veri­similitude to dry astronomical data. What had once been columns of numbers and blurry telescopic images took on a new, compelling reality.

Bonestell continued to work until he died in 1986, an un­finished painting still on his easel. Asteroid number 3129 and a crater on Mars have been given the name "Bonestell"—a fitting honor for the man whose art contributed to the birth of the space age.

All art copyright by and reproduced courtesy of Bonestell LLC