Frozen 2 animation

As many of us rush to the cinema for Frozen 2, I want to look more closely as the animation work that has gone behind the production. The animators modified and refined the hairstyles from the first movie – using a technique called the “rollercoaster test”, animators put characters through a rollercoaster and fix any…

The Tempestry Project

I visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art for a workshop with the Tempestry Project. The artists had assigned different colors of threads to different ranges of temperature, then they weave the threads together according to the temperature for a certain period of time. The first ever tempestry was created in 2016, but the artists Emily…

Data on the paintings by Bob Ross

Data points in paintings are intriguing indicators of what the artist’s style and intentions are. Bob Ross, the famous TV persona who runs the show “The Joy of Painting” on PBS, certainly followed a pattern when sharing techniques with his audience. Of the 381 pieces he’d done on PBS, trees, clouds, lakes and other elements…

Art at Burning Man

Burning Man, the annual festival held in Nevada that congregates artists to dance, play, and create fantastical installations, has seen many new public arts this year. My favourite is “Mammoth”, produced by a 16 year old girl Tahoe Mack who was frustrated with the piling wastes near her home in Las Vegas and decided to…

Interactive art in Magic Garden

Vidas Suspendidas (Suspended Lives) is a exhibit temporarily displayed in Magic Garden, a historical hotspot for tourists in Philadelphia. The installation has 9 self-portraits created by Latinx artists who had immigrated to the United States. Each statue has a QR code, which can be scanned by visitors to hear a recording of each artist’s journey…

Using CAPS for Beauty & The Beast

Disney uses the pixar-developed Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) system for digital ink and paint. The Beauty & The Beast ballroom dance sequences exemplifies for the use of computer graphics system for animation, where digital features were built on top of hand-drawn animations. The animators at the time still relied on hand-drawing, blueprinting the ball-room…

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s soft focus towards architecture photography

The Japanese photographer has visited and critiqued hundreds of buildings and museums around the world. His photographic style is to capture one part of the building, blur and soften the geometric lines, and caption the photograph with only the name of the building without the date, the location, the name of the architect or other…

Rumors of War – Statue that stands up for African American

Kehinde Wiley, the painter of Obama’s portrait, created a new public statue that was debuted at Time Square this month. The statue challenges long standing figures such as J.E.B. Stuart, Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson and other Confederate leaders who defended the right to enslavement. Contrastively, Kehinde’s artwork, Rumors of War, portrays an African American…

CupClub sustainable design

Designed by Safia Qureshi from Studio [D] Tale, CupClub aims to increase the number of times a paper cup can be used before it needs to be recycled. The UK innovation in package and drop-off station incentivize consumers to throw their cups in these bright yellow bins, which collects all the used cups to be…

Fisher Fine Arts Library

I chose Fisher Fine Arts library because I want to appreciate the everyday art in our lives at Penn. Dedicated in 1891, the Fisher Fine Arts Library was designed by Victorian architect Frank Furness with red sandstone and terracotta bricks for durability. The building features arches, stone columns, grotesque forms as well as gargoyles that…