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Tag: illustration

  • No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation – One Useful Thing

    Yet it is clear that what has happened to text will happen to images, and eventually video and 3D environments. These multimodal systems are reshaping the landscape of visual creation, offering powerful new capabilities while raising legitimate questions about creative ownership and authenticity. The line between human and AI creation will continue to blur, pushing us to reconsider what constitutes originality in a world where anyone can generate sophisticated visuals with a few prompts. Some creative professions will adapt; others may be unchanged, and still others may transform entirely. As with any significant technological shift, we’ll need well-considered frameworks to navigate the complex terrain ahead. The question isn’t whether these tools will change visual media, but whether we’ll be thoughtful enough to shape that change intentionally.

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  • Martin Frobenius Ledermüller’s microscopic delights (1759–63) – The Public Domain Review

    For all of their scientific verisimilitude, microscopes were first and foremost instruments of wonder, and Ledermüller (1718–1769) — a German polymath, physician, and keeper of the Margrave of Brandenburg’s natural history collection — extolls their virtues in illustrating the marvels of God’s Creation and also as pure entertainment. Along with the vermin, Ledermüller gave state-of-the-art descriptions of plant, animal, and human organs, fungi, plankton, and crystals that accompany more than 150 attractive colored plates, produced by Nuremberg publisher, artist, and engraver Adam Wolfgang Winterschmidt.

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  • Give it a Polish! Classic film posters with a twist – The Guardian

    This exhibition unveils how Polish artists interpreted US and UK films such as The Shining and Return of the Jedi while navigating the harsh realities of communist and post-Soviet Poland, at a time when censorship, propaganda and surveillance were omnipresent. … Blending raw intensity with haunting beauty, these posters reflect the psychological landscape of a society shaped by repression.

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  • The singular wit of one of the New Yorker’s first women cartoonists – Hyperallergic

    Born in San Francisco in 1899, Shermund moved to New York in 1924 to make her way as an artist. Her early cartoons centered on the character of the flapper — fashionably dressed, outspoken, and sexually liberated — whose comic interactions with other character types painted a picture of life in 1920s New York. Rendered in lines as crisp as the finest etching, and a sense of flapper style and posture drawn from life, Shermund’s young women gossiped in delis and on the subway; they smoked cigarettes and danced late into the night with married men; they woke up, horribly hungover. And while Shermund may have lampooned her flappers, her sharp social commentary took relationships between young women seriously, recognizing the true, even subversive solidarity between them. There’s a knowing wink under all that eyeshadow — each gossipy comment is a whispered secret.

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  • “Relaxations for the Impotent”: Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare and the contradictions of American smut – Public Domain Review

    Perhaps one of the reasons Fantazius Mallare failed was that it did not seem to deliver on its transgressive mission. Among the few who agreed to review the book was D. H. Lawrence, himself no stranger to courting controversy and running afoul of censorship laws. But Lawrence found the novel to be utterly lacking. “I’m sorry”, he wrote, “it didn’t thrill me a bit, neither the pictures nor the text. It all seems to me so would-be. . . . And really, Fantasius, with his head full of copulation and committing mental fornication and sodomy every minute, is just as much a bore as any other tedious modern individual with a dominant idea.” Dismissive of the whole enterprise, Lawrence offered an improved subtitle for the book: “Relaxations for the Impotent”.

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  • Find awe and inspiration in thousands of public domain artworks – Hyperallergic

    “Around this time last year I had the idea to gather all the images in the Public Domain Review into a separate archive, in a way freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation,” Adam Green, PDR’s editor-in-chief, told Hyperallergic.

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