GazeAndStare

Audrey Kawasaki On Board

Love her work. Been feeding off her beautiful work for a long time now.

Taken off Ms. Audrey’s website. Her bio.

The themes in Audrey Kawasaki’s work are contradictions within themselves. Her work is both innocent and erotic. Each subject is attractive yet disturbing. Audrey’s precise technical style is at once influenced by both manga comics and Art Nouveau. Her sharp graphic imagery is combined with the natural grain of the wood panels she paints on, bringing an unexpected warmth to enigmatic subject matter.

The figures she paints are seductive and contain an air of melancholy. They exist in their own sensually esoteric realm, yet at the same time present a sense of accessibility that draws the observer to them. These mysterious young women captivate with the direct stare of their bedroom eyes.

She has been rocking hard at numerous art shows and it seems she is getting the recognition she deserved. I would be hard pressed if I was asked to pick out my favorite piece. Her artwork was chosen by Gelaskins (the people who makes protective covers for your beloved iPods)

Check out Aud’s online journal to see what she has been up to recently. You might find something like this.

Wall Street Journal - Stipple/Hedcut Illustration

For those of you who reads Wall Street Journal or even glanced through it before, you will definitely be greeted by stipple potraits. The Wall Street Journal utilizes the detailed art in their articles and personally every one of it, is beautiful. The two artists responsible for bringing the art of stippling or hedcut illustration to thousands of readers daily are Randy Glass and Noli Novak.

Randy Glass’s work - Website

Noli Novak’s work - Website

Stipple/Hedcut Via Wikipedia

Stippling is the technique of using small dots to simulate varying degrees of solidity or shading.

In a drawing or painting, the dots are made of pigment of a single color, applied with a pen or brush; the denser the spacing of the dots, the darker the apparent shade — or lighter, if the pigment is lighter than the surface. This is similar to - but distinct from - pointillism, which uses dots of different colors to simulate blended colors.

In printmaking, dots may be carved out of a surface to which ink will be applied, to produce either a greater or lesser density of ink depending on the printing technique. In engraving, the technique was invented by Giulio Campagnola in about 1510. Stippling may also be used in engraving or sculpting an object even when there is no ink or paint involved, either to change the texture of the object, or to produce the appearance of light or dark shading depending on the reflective properties of the surface: for instance, stipple engraving on glass produces areas that appear brighter than the surrounding glass.

The technique became popular as a means of producing shaded line art illustrations for publication, because drawings created this way could be reproduced in simple black ink. The other common method is hatching, which uses lines instead of dots. Stippling has traditionally been favored over hatching in biological and medical illustration, since it is less likely than hatching to interfere visually with the structures being illustrated (the lines used in hatching can be mistaken for actual contours), and also since it allows the artist to vary the density of shading more subtly to depict curved or irregular surfaces.

Images produced by halftoning or dithering and computer printers operate on similar principles (varying the size and/or spacing of dots on paper), but do so via photographic or digital processes rather than manually. These newer techniques have made it possible to convert continuous-tone images into patterns suitable for printing, but artists may still choose stippling for its simplicity and handmade appearance. The Wall Street Journal features stippled portraits known as hedcuts in its pages, as part of its long-standing avoidance of photographs.

MTV Japan - USAVICH Prisoner Bunny Animation

Great animation work about the tale of two bunny prisoners. Smooth animation and sound effects to boot. Really worth watching. A story about them spending their time in jail to getting out of it. Hilarious and nicely done. I am assuming its the work of a Japanese production house but I might be awfully wrong. Be glad if anyone could fill me in on the details.
Check out the screen shots quality. The works are shown on MTV Japan’s website.
View the animations here. There are 20 episodes online now. Cheers!

London 2012

My first impression when I laid eyes on the logo for Olympic 2012 was a mixture of shock and disbelief followed by my curiosity of who done it. For all the Olympics that I grew up with, there were cute mascots and cultural/national related logos. This is the first time that I have experienced a shocking pink logo in geometrical forms. It was like browsing through the techno/drum n’ bass album section and chancing upon a new group. Yes, it does not lack in the attention sector with it’s design and color choice.


My inquisitiveness led me to Wolff Olins. The people behind the London 2012 campaign. The logo was unraveled amidst negative feedbacks and it seems that it will not be embraced so open heartedly soon. Well, the Brits would have another five years to warm up to it. They would be seeing it on TV, billboards and everywhere and anywhere possible.

Related links:
Wolf Olins Agency
London 2012 Case Study | Get more insight about the concept
London 2012 Official Website

Since I am on the Olympic subject, I would like to say that I think the torch for the Beijing 2008 Olympic is cool. It’s designed by the people at Lenovo and it’s called the “Cloud of Promise”. Embodied with Chinese symbolism based on the cloud theme and inspired by ancient scroll designs the torch looks truly astounding. Dug out more info at StartDrawing.org
Here are some pictures taken from their site.

Blu or Notblu - Art on Walls

Feast your eyes on works from Blu. A lot of walls have been graced by his artwork. Check out one of the many animations he did. It’s a bit dark and morbid but it’s awesome work. Many more on YouTube. Keyword “notblu” Watched a few of his animated stop motion work on walls and there are loads of resurrection scenes in different form and ways.

Drop by his sketchbook-notebook website and look around at www.blublu.org. He has two(2) blogs one BLU/blog and Megunica. There he tells of his projects and process. Nice warm up for the Halloween. One of his many huge ass work.

Update :
Blu is from Italy.

The Rebirth of GazeAndStare.com

GazeAndStare.com used to be my portfolio site, where I showcase my past and present projects for job interviews or to get freelance clients. I have since moved the portfolio to a subfolder and decided to change GazeAndStare.com into a blog. Am steering it towards the art and design category from graphic to product design. The portfolio was never up-to-date and instead of wasting my domain and hosting fees hence the blog. As of now, GazeAndStare will be my outlet for design discoveries and occasional ramblings. Expect to find some simple tutorials. May this reduce my slacking off a little from writing and sketching too.
Cheers and thanks for dropping by.