If I were to call some of Boris Artzybasheff’s illustrations “biomechanical” I’d probably be right - but you’d end up expecting something more like H. R. Giger, and less like the interesting blend of Virgil Finlay and Stanislav Szukalski that we find in his body of work.
Artzybasheff, a Russian immigrant, was a mainstream illustrator and so not all of his work for magazines and ads reflects what looks like his special interest in anthropomorphizing machines and projecting our human nature onto our machinations. Or is it the opposite?
But there’s plenty of that, especially in the drawings for his own books (like “As I See”) - and in fact his other work is pretty interesting, too.
I just fell over this entertaining post at Brain Handles; it’s the transcript of a technical support call for Acme’s Giant Death Ray, which the customer bought from Amazon. I do hope he got the free shipping.
Great stuff, especially if you’ve ever fielded a tech support call yourself - I used to get them from time to time even though they weren’t for me.
Example: “Look sonny, I typed up my first plan for world conquest using Paperclip on a Commodore 64. I’ve been asked “did you reboot” more times than you’ve been laid.”
I’ve just posted the latest Incredibly Occasional Newsletterat Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design; because of the several new ventures I’ve kicked off this year, it’s also got updates for Saga Shirts, The Retropolis Transit Authority, and even Hot Wax Tees. Because this is the time of year when you need to be jolly and generous, and when I get to try to shake all the change out of your pockets. Um… that’s YO Ho Ho, to you.
By day, he creates concept art for computer games; by night, he dons his surrealistic cape and ventures out to paint weirdness and wonder. Roland Tamayo’s surreal acrylic paintings and drawings dip into the inkwell of his recurring motifs and recombine them in new and unexpected arrangements. That’s traditional - Magritte, de Chirico and Dali all used their own icons in much the same way.
Here we’ve got whales, tortoises and squids coexisting with televisions, buildings, microphones and trees. It’s wonderful stuff to look at, by which I mean: you ought to.
Much is left unsaid about this conversion of an Epson C88 printer into a do it yourself, direct to garment T-Shirt printing machine (for example, what the heck sort of inks or dyes are being used here?) and although it’s unlikely to be much of a production solution, even on light colored shirts…. isn’t it just damned interesting?
The creator says it’s a $150 project, and that plans will be sold in the future as the diyTs T-Shirt Printer. You can see that there’s a custom built carriage, but you can’t tell much else about it. And why is the image being printed sideways? If it were printing the image vertically there’d be no real limit to the height of the design. Apart from the length of the shirt, of course.
If I were to call some of Boris Artzybasheff’s illustrations “biomechanical” I’d probably be right - but you’d end up expecting something more like H. R. Giger, and less like the interesting blend of Virgil Finlay and Stanislav Szukalski that we find in his body of work.
