Drawn Out

Artist Shannon Lee takes a look at some animated cartoon animals and gives an idea of what they might look like as cartoon humans. He even adds a couple of real animals in the same format. I found Rajah the tiger (#4) and Peg and Lady (#1) to be the most interesting drawings, although Timon (#8) and Pumba (#2) are pretty good too.

Sometimes the Internet is Worth Something, Part Much Smaller Number Than You'd Hope For

Ordinarily to view works at France's famed Louvre Museum one would have to travel there, and even then it's like most museums and circulates its collections. Not everything in it is on display all the time.

Plus if you get in a real exploratory mood you'll wind up being made to leave before closing time because there's so much to see.

But in one of those rare shining examples of the Internet doing something good and worthwhile, you can now look at any item the museum owns on your very own screen at home. As this article at Bored Panda outlines, a visit to collections.louvre.fr will get you started on the more than 480,000 paintings, sculptures and whatnot the museum owns. Upside: No closing hours, no chance of running into black-clad sneak thieves making off with rare jewelry or artwork. Downside: Dream of being a black-clad sneak thief making off with rare jewelry or artwork are dashed.

Photoshop Phun

In 1944's Anchors Aweigh, Gene Kelly danced with the cartoon mouse Jerry of Tom and Jerry fame, offering an intriguing first look at how animated images might blend with the real world. In 1988, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? took the concept a much greater distance by mixing animation and real-life actors throughout an entire movie.

Along the same lines, Jakarta-based artist Andhika Muksin puts Disney characters into real life scenes, sometimes blending the animated heads onto actual human bodies and sometimes just putting the entire character into a photo. Checking him out at these two Bored Panda pages is certainly more fun than the final presidential debate of the 2020 campaign, no matter who you intend to vote for.

Hmmm...

Writing at First Things, Leah Libresco outlines why bad art may not be the best thing for us. It's an interesting piece and one item stood out because it's an opinion I already held: The CGI Yoda from the Star Wars prequels, despite its ability to hop all over the place in a lightsaber duel, is not as good as the simple puppet voiced by Frank Oz in the original trilogy.

The rest of the article is good, too, and Libresco fortunately doesn't mention bad blogs.

Book a Film

Matt Stevens, a designer and illustrator, has a hobby whereby he reimagines contemporary movies as vintage book covers.

The cover art reflects a key feature of the movie (Fight Club's mirror-image boxer is probably a good example).  Stevens said the movies aren't necessarily ones he considers the best movies he's seen or which rate highly among critics, just ones he enjoys and gets an idea to illustrate. Which is probably why some of the imaginary book covers are better than the movies they represent.

Imagery

Most every famous painting has a model behind it, even if only sketched by the artist. As the painting was created, of course, the image of the model became the image in the painting. Since few of even the greatest artists painted what we would today call a "photorealistic" style, the image on canvas doesn't necessarily tell us what the person really looked like. They're probably close enough that we would recognize them if we met them, but there would still be differences because the painted image comes from the artist and is influenced by him or by her.

Comes now one Denis Shiryaev, an artist who used a neural network to examine the faces found in these paintings and create from them possible faces of the models used. Since the only evidence we have for what these people looked like are the paintings themselves, there's no guarantee that the images the network developed represent what those models "really" looked like. But the process produces images that look like photos of real people, and so we can see what kind of face might have inspired the artists' imaginations.

The network-developed images range from beautiful to ordinary, which helps us understand both the role that the inspiration and talent of the artist plays and the fact that sometimes the ordinary is a step on the way to the extraordinary.

Ze Zneaky Zwisz

Turns out that some Swiss cartographers have a sense of whimsy. Cartographers working for the Swiss Federal Office of Topography have inserted tiny drawings into the lines and whorls they put on maps.

Some of the drawings stayed hidden for decades. Unfortunately, Swisstopo removes them once found and the maps with the secret hidden illustrations gradually get replaced in circulation. It's left up to new wily cartographers to get even more clever in their hidden work.

Layered Portrait

Johannes Vermeer painted Girl With a Pearl Earring in the 1660s, probably around 1665. She's been mysterious ever since, with no records indicating who she might have been. In fact, most scholars thought she was an idealized subject, meaning Vermeer drew on no real person when he painted her. They cited several reasons -- the odd blue turban, the oversized pearl that lacks any kind of hook or connector to her earlobe, the lack of eyelashes and the featureless dark background.

But in 2018 the museum that houses the painting brought a team of scholars in to study it using X-rays and other advanced imaging techniques. Their findings, published recently, show that the background was not originally featureless but was a green curtain. Time has darkened the pigments so much it can't be easily distinguished by ye olde naked eye. They also found indicators the Vermeer did paint eyelashes although they too can no longer be easily seen.

These factors, head researcher Abbie Vandivere said, suggest that Vermeer might indeed have had a real model as he painted -- although there are still almost no clues as to who she was.

One of the things they did find is that Vermeer didn't skimp on his materials in creating the masterpiece. The girl wears a blue turban and a jacket with blue tones -- and the lapis lazuli which helped make the blue tint Vermeer used was imported from Afghanistan and at the time cost more, ounce for ounce, than gold.

Often we say that great art has layers of meaning that are uncovered as we study it and reflect on what we see. Sometimes, it turns out that figure of speech is even more literally true than we thought it was.