I saw this animated film on an art blog and knew I had to commandeer it for my own blogging purposes.
It’s an older work by Seattle animator Tony White who posted it on youtube a few weeks ago: a life of Katsushika Hokusai – with convincing animations of a few of the great images of this 19th century woodblock print master.
I remember sitting in the Fine Arts Library at the University of Texas years ago, sketching, copying a Hokusai drawing for an assignment in Life Drawing class — and just marvelling and admiring.
White suggests that this always modern-seeming draftsman (who died in 1849) would have been an animator if he were alive today. I look at his work and think “children’s illustration.”
Of course you can’t invoke Hokusai without also mentioning that other print master of Edo (Tokyo) whose name also started with an “H.”
June is so yikes-hot in Austin, Texas. So enjoy this video of the wintery Agano Snow Scene by Utagawa (Ando) Hiroshige. He was influenced by Hokusai, who was just a few years ahead of him.
Hiroshige has an out-of-this-world-distinction as a graphic artist. A crater on the planet Mercury is named after him.
BTW, my ASK survey for my upcoming How to illustrate Children’s Books online course is winding down. However you can still get four free months of the class by going to
this link
and answering the question you see on the screen.
The class begins in just a couple of weeks. Your suggestion will be greatly appreciated.
Author-illustrator Mark G. Mitchell hosts “How to be a children’s book illustrator.”
Recently, Michel Le Querrec friended me on Flickr. I’m not sure why, maybe to extend the reach of the project he’s working on using the site, Photos Normandie. Apparently the National Archives of Canada (and the U.S.?) are uploading pictures from the Battle of Normandy, more than 2700 of them to date.
I found the photographs fascinating, even though the captions and descriptions are in French, so I friended the site back, and now every day I see a few of these amazing pictures mixed into my photostream. It’s very strange to see thumbnails of dogs, nature, friends, children, libraries, and then the Battle of Normandy, but I find it an interesting use of Flickr and the images usually force me to reflect on how lucky I am in this day and age. For some, it would be interesting to add in streams from Iraq, Kenya, and other places that would bring home the reality of the rest of the world, especially in a classroom setting.
All of which was broiling in the back of my mind when I saw this incredible announcement from the Library of Congress, an institution I have to say I never thought would take this step.
My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven
“If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me).
The project is beginning somewhat modestly, but we hope to learn a lot from it. Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.
The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.
We’re also very excited that, as part of this pilot, Flickr has created a new publication model for publicly held photographic collections called “The Commons.” Flickr hopes—as do we—that the project will eventually capture the imagination and involvement of other public institutions, as well.
From the Library’s perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and—most importantly—wisdom. One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it.” [Library of Congress Blog]
More info is available here, here, and here. Major kudos to LOC for seeing the opportunity and seizing it. Hopefully the community will respond and help tag the images for retrieval, but it will be an interesting experiment either way. I am very impressed with this effort and can’t wait to watch it grow.
archives images,
battle of normandy,
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history,
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photographs,
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