It all started when he wanted to give his son a boost on his first day of preschool (how sweet, right?), so he planted a doodled Post-It in his son’s lunch box. His son loved it so much, he decided to keep it up for the entire week.
The Designer Daddy often draws his son’s favorite characters, and sometimes lets him suggest the caricature or message. We see that his son is a fan of superheroes and other familiar faces in pop-culture, and we’re a fan of these hand-drawn love notes. Follow Brent Almond on Instagram or see his also super blog.
Hope these Post-It doodles will inspire you to create your own! Don’t forget to enter it in our new Doodle Show, Pen & Post-It. Just doodle on a Post-It note, share on twitter or instagram and tag #penandpostit .
By now, you’ve probably heard about this best-selling coloring book that has sold over a million and a half copies. Suddenly it seems that “adult” coloring books are trending — they’re not R-rated, but created with an older audience in mind. Why the sudden popularity? NBC News reports that coloring is calming. Lisa Congdon, artist/author of several Just Add Color titles: Botanicals, Geometric Patterns, and Folk Art, believes that it’s not only creative, but meditative. She explains that the hobby is a refuge from all the screen stimulation and stress that we receive everyday; it’s an analog activity that takes us back to our childhood. Even coloring groups are now all the rage: a Facebook Group called “Coloring For All” has over 4000 followers!
Need more convincing to pick up some crayons? Here’s 10 coloring books to try:
Images by Team Art
Game of Thrones A Coloring Book from Team Art in Canada features 22 characters to color from the popular show based on George R R Martin’s books. Added benefit: constructive coloring while watching your favorite show!
Art by Steve McDonald
Fantastic Cities: A Coloring Book of Amazing Places Real and Imagined by Steve McDonald (Chronicle Books) is full of lovely cityscapes for travel and architecture buffs to color and contemplate.
Just Add Color: Botanicals by Lisa Congdon (Rockport Publishers) is part of a great series of coloring books, in which Ms Congdon has contributed three. It’s hard to choose which one to get first, so I suggest splurging on them all!
The Mindfulness Coloring Bookby Emma Farrarons (Boxtree Ltd) is the perfect antidote to a busy day. The best thing about this book is its small size—you can carry it around with you.
Outside the Lines: An Artist’s Coloring Book for Giant Imaginations edited by Souris Hong-Porretta (Perigree Books) is a terrific collection of drawings from artists including Keith Haring, Gary Baseman, and Ryan McGuiness. A portion of the profits is donated Moca’s Education Program.
I recently saw this clever tumblr blog that I had to share because it’s so relevant to our current theme: self-portraits. I’ve been calling our drawn portraits “selfies,” but that term, of course, refers to taking a photo of oneself (or a group) with a smart phone. Olivia Muus, an advertising art director at agency Seligemig (who coincidentally has a great collage of portraits on their homepage) created this Museum of Selfies that combines the two references: the phone selfie and the artist self-portrait in the most unexpected way—it’s brilliant! Take a look:
taken by @Koenigdeseinfallsreichs
taken by Anna Schuster. Nicolas Regnier, “Büßende Magdalena,” Martin von Wagner-Museum, Werzburg, Germany
taken by Olivia Muus
taken by Lucas Strabko. Lasar Segall, “Emigrantes,” at the Pinacoteca in São Paulo
taken by Anke von Heyl
taken by Mikkel M. Henriksen
taken by Hamburg Museum
I love how the photographer and subject seem to blend, and the painting comes to life—they really do appear to be taking selfies! This amusing blog is curated by Olivia Muus, but some of the images were taken by contributors. Please note: The artist and title of the work are only indicated when such information was provided by the blog.
Petica Watson, of Studio Bricolaged, experiments with ‘the world’s first 3D printing pen’ : The 3Doodler
When I first read about the 3Doodler printing pen, initially funded through Kickstarter, I was very intrigued. I thought it sounded amazingly fun, but then deemed it unnecessary and forgot all about it. A year later, I won a Wacom Inkling for doing a 2 minute video for the The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design courses, but when the Inkling was discontinued, I quickly suggested they give me a 3Doodler pen instead — and to my joyful surprise they agreed! As a gadget lover I found myself keen to play with it.
It is fairly easy to use BUT takes practice to get the hang of it. The promo videos show deft hands creating a perfect Eiffel Tower, lampshades, toy cars, etc, but I had a feeling it wouldn’t be as simple as that! The pen extrudes hot plastic which cools down instantly but it behaves in a way that is slightly hard to predict and leaves wisps and squiggles everywhere. I found that I had to “let go” and NOT have my final outcome too fixed in my head before beginning — as with many artistic endeavors! Having said that, I quickly realized that the quality of line is more controllable if you are pressing the nozzle against paper, rather than in the air. You have to plan in advance and think about how you are going to construct and connect all your elements, before beginning anything complex.
“Ladle”
It’s another way to explore drawing – line drawing in particular – but then having the third dimension gives a surface pattern designer a chance to explore 3D work and get away from their computer screen and their flat surfaces! Imagine a drawing of a figure that can come off the page and then standup by itself!
As soon as I did my first piece, just a flat figure, I wanted to explore its shadow using lighting and photography. So I played with the idea of pulling it up from the page using pins and hidden corkboard, and lighting.
One of the effects I seem to get are these wisps of plastic when I stop pressing the extrusion button — I can’t seem to avoid it, so I started cutting them off with scissors initially. Then I decided to see if I could get them to be part of the effect, as with “Eye.”
“Eye”
I’m also really interested in exploring how to add other materials such as scraps of Gelli printed paper and other found objects to create a collage. I’ve started looking at wire art to see what inspiration I can take from there.
“My Cup Runneth Over – Not”
Since I have a whole lot of deep Ikea frames to fill, I might next explore drawings which stick out from the canvas!
Text borrowed from the novel “Station Eleven,” by Emily St John Mandel
So far I’ve only used ABS (Acrylonitrile-Butadiene-Styrene), a low-cost plastic that is easy to work with, but I’d like to try PLA (Polyactic Acid) bioplastic, a biodegradable polyester made from renewable resources such as sugarcane, which sticks to paper and glass better, and has a translucent option. The 3Doodler comes with two packets of various colors of ABS filaments, which you feed in a bit like a glue gun. You get through them pretty quickly! It might be nice if the pen had different-sized nibs to allow for more variation in line-weight and strokes.
Since I haven’t explored much “proper” 3D stuff I would like to make a bespoke lampshade perhaps involving a geometrical design and tissue paper. Or why not a whole chandelier! I will need to plan it out in Adobe Illustrator, print to paper then use that as a template to draw over with the 3Doodler. Then I’ll do that with flowers, butterflies, birds and maybe make a hanging mobile! I can see it will be very good for making jewelry, kids’ fancy dress accessories, architectural models, or 3D text — and I’ve just realized I could make stamps for printing with it too!
—PW
***
Petica Watson, of Studio Bricolaged, is a surface pattern designer based in the UK. She previously made television documentaries about art for 14 years, and has traveled or lived in 46 countries. All images above courtesy of Petica Watson. (Thank you so much to Petica for letting us publish her review.)
Here’s the promotional launch video from 3Doodler 2.0 that blew our minds:
You can order the 3Doodler pen here. And see more amazing creations on the 3Doodler blog. It’s officially on my wish list!
KCD is so smitten with Charlotte Love’s food-centric Instagram portraits. The London-based stylist creates clever images using paper, fresh ingredients and a lot of imagination. We first spied her work on event planner Jordan Ferney’s gorgeous blog, and were pleased that Charlotte agreed to let us share her work in our forthcoming mini-mag! We couldn’t wait to post a few images here too!
This week, the online fashion community was buzzing about the upcoming collaboration between cartoonist Tiffany Cooper and iconic fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. The artist made an announcement on Instagram sharing a photo of herself with her doodles of Mr Lagerfeld and his kitty Choupette, who will be featured in the capsule collection to premiere April 1 at Colette stores in Paris, and then at his namesake boutiques a few days later.
(Photo credit: Karl Lagerfeld)
I wanted to see more of these drawings, so I continued researching this story, and discovered that Ms Cooper had previously created drawings for the designer last year. These items also debuted at Colette stores. Take a look at these photos from Ms Cooper’s website:
I also learned that the fashionable feline has been the designer’s muse for a previous collection, “Monster Choupette,” as promoted by this animated video. And of course, the pampered pet can be followed on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Or you can check out her High-Flyingbook.
(Photo credit:Vogue Magazine, Getty Images)
The fashion icon has also been caricaturized in a daily comic competition called “Kartoon.” We’ll have to follow up this story in a couple of months when the collection debuts!
Hope these Post-It doodles will inspire you to create your own! Don’t forget to enter it in our new Doodle Show, Pen & Post-It. Just doodle on a Post-It note, share on twitter or instagram and tag #penandpostit .
Images via Flow Magazine
Images via Amazon
