Patrick LaMontagne  

Alberta-based artist Patrick LaMontagne received a compliment on his portrait of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield from up on the International Space Station. "Thanks Patrick - what skill!" tweeted Hadfield.

Alberta-based artist Patrick LaMontagne received a compliment on his portrait of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield from up on the International Space Station.

Hadfield, who is aboard the ISS on a five-month stay, was tagged in a mention on Twitter about a portrait of him and he wrote back.

"Thanks Patrick - what skill! I wish you could be up here to see and be inspired by what we can see," he said.

The Canadian Space Agency wrote to LaMontagne on Twitter saying, "Well done! Nice blog entry too!"

According to LaMontagne,

There is no better legacy than to inspire those around you and the next generation to believe in the possibilities before them. I can’t imagine how many children are now considering futures in the space program because of Hadfield’s example. Whether they’ll remain on the ground as part of the team that sends us further into space or actually get to be one of the few who go, will be up to them.

LaMontagne painted the portrait to commemorate Hadfield taking over as commander of the ISS on March 13th. In a blog post, he says he was inspired by the images and videos Hadfield has been sharing from space.

The portrait was digitally painted in Photoshop CS6 Extended with a Wacom Cintiq 24HD. Final file dimensions are 32″X24″ at 300ppi.

The reference was a screen capture from the YouTube video that according to LaMontagne, "Meant the quality wasn’t great, but I muddled through. Photos are never used as part of the painting, all was painted from scratch. I wanted desperately to put stars in those windows, but they just wouldn’t be visible in real life, so I kept that urge in check."

  The Creators Project  

As part of a part of a collaboration of SOFTlab with The Creators Project uses algorithms and 3D printing to create data visualizations of your Facebook relationships.

Crystalized is a unique 3D representation of your Facebook relationships , it is part of the collaboration of SOFTlab with The Creators Project to create data visualization that can actually be printed via Shapeways.

SOFTlab is a design studio based in New York City. The studio was created by Michael Szivos shortly after receiving a graduate degree in architecture from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University.

The studio has since been involved in the design and production of projects across almost every medium, from digitally fabricated large-scale sculpture, to interactive design, to immersive digital video installations. As the studio adjusted to a wide range of projects, we began to focus less on the medium and style and more on ideas.

You can check it out here along with other projects done by Sticky Monster Lab and Sosolimited.

 Alex Kozhanov  

A frequent poster on the ZBrush Community Forum, Alex Kozhanov's work has been described as a cross between H. R. Giger and Terry Gilliam.

Alex Kozhanov is a freelance artist operating in Kaliningrad, Russia. He works for commercial industry, as a concept artist, matte painter.

A frequent poster on the ZBrush Community Forum, Kozhanov's digitally-created work has been described as a cross between H. R. Giger and Terry Gilliam.

 Animation  

Paperman is a 2012 black-and-white animated short film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios and directed by John Kahrs. The short blends traditional animation and computer animation and is now available online.

For people who missed Wreck-It Ralph at the end of last year, Disney Animation’s Paperman has debuted online, giving everyone a chance to look at the Oscar-nominated animated short that blends hand-drawn and computer-generated imagery in a beautiful, innovative way.

Paperman is different from many recent cartoons, not just because of the limited color palette and retro styling of the characters and the world they live in, but because it doesn’t look like the generic, quasi-photo-realistic CGI that is becoming more and more common. Paperman actually looks as if real people have created it, not machines, and that’s something we haven’t really seen in feature animation for years.

That’s intentional, according to the man behind the short. Director John Kahrs told Cartoon Brew that the origin of Paperman “really came out of working so much with Glen [Keane] on Tangled.” After looking at the work of Keane — a classic Disney animator who worked on The Little Mermaid, Beauty and The Beast and Aladdin, among many other projects – Kahrs found himself with a new appreciation for traditional animation and drawing techniques. “I thought, Why do we have to leave these drawings behind? Why can’t we bring them back up to the front of the image again? Is there a way that CG can kinda carry along the hand drawn line in a way that we haven’t done before?”


Paperman‘s seemingly seamless way of blending the personality of hand-drawn animation with CGI in the physical space of the story is the result of new in-house software called Meander, a vector-based drawing program that allows for manipulation of the line after the fact — something that Kahrs described as “just like painting on the surface of the CG.”

 Cesc Grané  

Artist Cesc Grané's work has evolved from two dimensional scenes, produced on vinyl stickers to more three dimensional digital prints and animations. He is also currently working to release some of his characters as art toys.

Cesc Grané is a digital illustrator whose iconography is inspired by Japanese aesthetics and Art-Toys. His imagination is inhabited by loads of simple characters through which he builds particular worlds and elaborates dreamy and positive stories.

In his early works he made two dimensional scenes, usually with ink and often in the form of vinyl stickers. Currently, and in order to create volume for the scenes, he also uses three dimensional, mainly formalized in digital prints and animations.


Parallel to this shift in computer applications, he is studying the details that give personality to his characters.

Grané commenting on the toy concept in the top image:

After staying some time in Japan and soaking up its culture, I've created this character - inspired by Mount Fuji and Tengu, a Japanese mythological creature. Presented in a toy-matryoshka form, it is expected to be produced some day...