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Discover the work of Lauren Humphrey, Cartoon Brew's Artist of the Day!

A musician created a track first, not knowing what imagery was to go with it. Then, animators turned in GIFs not knowing what would happen.

Looking at the work of Emma Louthan, Cartoon Brew's Artist of the Day!

Skip Dolphin Hursh works as a designer and animator for Nickelodeon in New York. Skip uses his free time to create personal work that includes handsomely designed looping animated GIFs that invoke thoughts of toy machinery and strange cellular activity. He explains more about how he arrived at this ongoing project in an interview with Giphy.

Nick Edwards is a prolific cartoonist working in the UK who creates comics for print and online distribution, including his regular Thursday strip, Cave Shrine and his debut comic book Dinopopolous published by Blank Slate.

Nick fills his sketchbooks with densely packed pages of characters and comics. You can find some of these on his Tumblr. On his blog, Nick experiments with animated comics using looping GIF files. An example is IVAN in which Nick explores the pains of being creative.

Two web presences cannot seemingly contain Nick’s output, and you can dig into older work on his DeviantArt and LiveJournal accounts.

Video editor Trevor Carmick is receiving all sorts of attention for his new side project called Beer Labels in Motion, a collection of beer labels cleverly animated in GIF format.

Carmick was inspired by a set of cinemagraphs that documented a brew session with Dogfish Head. Originally published by The New York Times in 2011, these animated GIFs set a new bar across the Internet. “It’s so hard to look at them and not lose track of time,” said Carmick in an interview with Cartoon Brew. But Carmick’s GIFs do more than cinemagraphs—they imagine unrealized movement, bringing a whole new dimension to a flat graphic.

Carmick’s process usually begins in a location familiar to many animation artists—the beer aisle—where a certain label will catch his eye. He then separates the beer label in Photoshop and fills in behind elements that move, a process he was first exposed to while working on Forgotten War: The Struggle for North America for Mountain Lake PBS.

Carmick is actually surprised no one had thought of animating beer labels before. “It seems like such an obvious thing to do,” he said. “I just thought it would be so cool if these labels came to life.”

To see more examples of Carmicks animated beer labels, visit his site.

Alec Mackenzie is an artist who creates corrupted, grotesque and funny loops of low-end 3D animation and presents them as animated GIFs.

You can find Alec’s archive of these on his Tumblr BadBlueprints.tumblr.com.

Towards the earlier part of his blog, you can also see some kinetic wall installations that Alec created using black lines (possibly made of tape or painted to look blocky and computer generated). The lines animate directly on the wall with small motors and a scroll of paper.

Reza Iman is a recent graduate of the animation program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

He produces small loops out of animation tests and posts them on his blog, alongside other drawings and character design studies, often rendered with non-traditional graphic ideas.

Reza also has a portfolio blog here and a recent reel on Vimeo.

Andrew Ohlmann draws and animates often with digital tools. Andrew sometimes uses filters, software functions and programs to partially generate the visual patterns, mirrored drawings and degenerated lines in his work.

In the following animated loop titled “bad party”, Andrew successfully captures the spinning that often immediately precedes a vomiting session:

More drawings and animated loops can be found on Andrew’s blog and website.

Stephen Vuillemin is an artist who graduated from Gobelins in 2008 and lives in London.

You can see Stephen’s portfolio and blog here which includes his GIF animated comics.

Stephen has elevated the art of the animated GIF by producing work specifically for that format, and subsequently, has been commissioned by art directors to create animated GIFs to run in online publications. When the same publications run static print versions of the GIF illustrations, Stephen’s work flops the paradigm: the print version is the modified, adapted, and even inferior version when compared to the animated online version–but only because it lacks the motion. Stephen’s static illustrations are equally strange, humorous and appealing to view.

When Jace Cooke and Alex Chung founded Giphy, they simply wanted a convenient platform for sharing and searching GIFs. But now, Giphy, which launched in Febrary, is reaching beyond its search engine origins and aims to serve as a tool to empower artists and animators.

The first round of features to roll out on Giphy over the coming month are built to serve GIF makers rather than consumers. Artists will have dedicated URLs, making their work easily accessible for fans. When embedded on another blog, each GIF will include a coded block that shows the creator’s name. That’s right, no more stumbling onto a great GIF on Tumblr and wondering who created it. “I want Giphy to be what Vimeo is for videographers or Soundcloud is for musicians,” co-founder Jace Cooke told Cartoon Brew.

Cooke invited several notable GIF makers to launch artist pages, including  animator Frank Macchia (see GIF below) and wildly popular Tumblr GIF artist Matthew DiVito (aka mr. div). The next step will be providing GIF makers with uncapped uploads—Tumblr, for example, has a maximum upload of 1 MB per GIF. Eventually, artists will have personalized dashboard with analytics for tracking where their GIFs are being shared. “I want to lend more credence to GIFs, give them a wider audience and open up the possibility of monetization for artists,” adds Cooke.

For Cooke there are two major questions going forward: For GIF makers, how can Giphy adapt to best serve their needs? For everyone else, how can Giphy encourage more people to try creating GIFs? Cook is turning to the animation community to find answers to these questions, particularly the latter. Many creative people who work in CGI are interested in GIFs, but they haven’t yet given it a shot. “There’s a learning curve,” Cooke says . “They understand the value and they’re excited about it, but they’re a little apprehensive.” Ultimately, Cooke hopes to see more animators embrace GIFs, which he describes as “animated trading cards.”

Even though there are many GIF repositories and search engines like GIFSoup, Tumblr, and Google’s new animated image search, Giphy is the first coherent attempt to elevate GIFs as an artform. “There is something really powerful about an art that is halfway between a photo and a video,” says Cooke. “GIFs are a legit medium, a form of expression that’s only going to grow.”

Charles Huettner is a Pennsylvania-based artist and animator. He’s a founding member of the Late Night Work Club that will be premiering their initial anthology of shorts sometime in the near future.

Charles draws funny little characters and carries the same design sensibilities over into 3D space where he experiments with short, strange pieces that are collected on his “3D On The Side” Vimeo account.

Charles’s most frequently asked question is also a short by the same name, “What program do you use to animate?”

Some of his experiments become animated GIFs instead of videos.

See more of Charles’s work on his blog.

Alex Grigg is an Australian artist working in London. He posts work on his portfolio and blog.

Alex creates 2D and 3D animation commercially and for personal projects. He has refined a workable method of animating in Photoshop that allows him access to the varied brushes and mark-making tools in the program. This is a video guide on his methods.

These are his “Idiots” loops for the monthly LoopdeLoop animation challenge:

And this is an animated GIF from the project Alex and Jason Pamment are working on for the Late Night Work Club:

Opinions on animated GIFs range from pure hatred to unabashed overuse. “Hide your eyes,” wrote one reporter on CNET. Meanwhile, Tumblr, which is the undisputed platform for animated GIF enthusiasts, announced it has reached over 100 million blogs. Now that Google has released a new search tool for these dynamic images, some wonder if we’ve reached peak GIF.

We may be experiencing the second incarnation of animated GIFs, a 25-year-old medium, but it feels totally different this time. More than just dancing babies and glittery hearts, animated GIFs now have the potential to evoke a whole new narrative depth. They can be distractingly anarchic or subtly creepy. They can also strike a balance between these two, offering a small, yet thoughtful charge of emotion. Alastair Macaulay’s homage to the State of Liberty in The New York Times was illustrated with three animated GIFs, each with calming, subtle looping movement—the rolling waves of the New York Harbor, a bird soaring past Lady Liberty, and the swaying branches of the trees on Ellis Island. Why aren’t all newspaper articles illustrated so dynamically?

Whether or not the revival of the animated GIF is a fleeting trend, they present an opportunity for animators and the community-at-large. Vine, which is Twitter’s answer to the animated GIF, is quickly becoming a teachable moment. “Vine is a wonderful thing,” wrote Daniel Stuckey on Motherboard. “It’s teaching the mainstream how to loop.”

On an obvious level, animated GIFs are a simple, lo-fi educational tool for teaching loop cycles. But I think they could yield far greater potential; animated GIFs could be to up-and-coming animators as ACEOs are to illustrators, painters and print makers— highly collectible miniature works of art that are traded and sold. I could also see an increase in animators taking commissions to create customized GIFs for avid fans.

Now that apps and software have foolproofed the GIF-making process, many have begun to experiment in wholly refreshing ways. Animators like Polly Dedman are creating animated GIFs unlike any I’ve seen before (see above). Major events, such as elections and award ceremonies, are being live GIFfed. Even Hollywood is exploring how animated GIFs can effectively promote feature length films by making them available as collectible downloads. The GIF is here to stay. So how can the animation community stake its claim in this rapidly evolving narrative medium?

I got a load of laughs out of viewing the collected work of Geoffrey Lillemon, mostly from the new multimedia project that he produced for the spring/summer 2013 Bernhard Willhelm women’s fashion collection. CGI heads were modelled and fused with photographs of models for a taste of the future fashion that we’ll all be sporting this summer. There is some making-of information and photos also available at that same section of Geoffrey’s website.

Take a look at Geoffrey’s website and 2012 showreel here for more work:

If you don’t mind wiggling eight-inch nipples and filthy sexual metaphors read to you in a computer voice, then certainly try a NSFW viewing of The Dance of the Sheast Nip for an absurdist, humorous dance video. (Another version of this is featured as the front page the Bernhard Willhelm website.)

Another project, a collaboration with Evan Roth, is Image of Edessa, an interactive website and related video that explores the animated GIF image as personal identity on the web.

Worth noting is the freedom in which Geoffrey plays with CGI tools and 3D objects. This complete disregard for the high-end production methods and photo-real standards that commercial artists tend to strive for allows for experimental work that revels in its computer-generated roughness. This, however, doesn’t suggest that Geoffrey’s work is that of an outsider artist or amateur hobbyist either. Besides creating personal work, he works for commercial clients who want to see him apply his weird vision and execution to their brands. The CGI methods that he uses are just some of the tools in his overall creative toolbox to create original, freaky videos.

The work of Russian artist Uno Moralez is an awesome curiosity. On his website you will find animated loops, illustrations and sequential stories, all drawn in pixel-exact lines and presented as limited color gifs. All the images posted here (besides the kitty city) had to be cropped horizontally to avoid the moire patterns that result when they are reduced to fit this column, so you’ll have to click over to Uno’s links to see the full versions. You’ll find that there is ‘Not Safe For Work’ material on all of Uno’s links.

Uno’s work is mysterious. Every single image is a short story that deserves contemplation, and because of this, it is extremely entertaining. Reading over his wordless sequential pieces such as this one, it is possible to be caught off-guard by being gripped with a real sense of dread.

For those of us that grew up playing early graphical/text games on computers that supported a maximum of 256 colors, these pixel art pieces may connect in a deeper way too. It is as if a late-Eighties techno-thriller is writing itself in my head while looking at Uno’s work: A couple kids sporting Jams, bowl-cuts, and Air Jordans load up the new game they found in the Dumpster behind the Babbages at the strip-mall. But the images that appear on the computer screen are especially sinister and violent; the images strangely seem to stare right at them. Then, the text prompt addresses them directly by name, and… well, you can write the rest–you’ve probably seen a few versions of that movie.

Uno is an impressive draftsman which naturally increases the effectiveness of his work. It’s the combination of his mysterious ideas and direction, strange pixelated presentation, and expert drawing that make his work unique and exciting.

Sean T. Collins recently conducted an interview with Uno over at The Comics Journal, which provides a lot more information and context about Uno’s work.

Above is an example of his sketching phase and finished animated image. Check out Uno’s Tumblr for more of his work including some process pieces or pieces presented in different ways than on his website. Uno also has an impressive “abandoned” animation project which you can see development work for here and here.

Dive deeper into Uno’s mind by exploring his strange LiveJournal which houses some art and sketches along with bizarre image dumps, again, NSFW.

The loop is a friend to animators everywhere, but Neil Sanders is a loop fanatic. He is one of the organizers of the monthly animation challenge, Loop de Loop, to which he regularly submits his own creations. The group screens the accepted micro-shorts regularly in Melbourne.

Neil’s sketchbook drawings, illustrations and design work can be found on his website. More recent work can be found on his blog and Vimeo account, where the serious loop connoisseur can get comfortable, right click on the loop videos and set them to loop forever.

anthonyholden:

It’s almost the weekend! Get out your best outfit and strut your stuff!

-Anthony Holden

Oh yes I am reblogging this.

Jen Lee is doing something very special with her newly launched on-line comic Thunderpaw: In the Ashes of Fire Mountain. The comic, which is updated weekly, makes extensive use of animated GIFs, which in itself is not a new idea. However, the way that Lee incorporates animation into her narrative is as original as I’ve seen. She’s just getting started and I can’t wait to see where she takes the idea.

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Animated GIF, Jen Lee, Photoshop, Thunderpaw

French comic artist Boulet (aka Gilles Roussel) animated the seven deadly sins as GIFs. It’s hard to pick, but greed was my favorite in the bunch. Boulet’s Tumblr is also worth a visit.

Greed

This way for more sinful animation.

Wrath

Pride

Lust

Sloth

Gluttony

Envy

(via Chris Arrant)

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Animated GIF, Boulet, France

VCU Brandcenter student Kevin J. Weir finds public domain images on the Library of Congress Flickr stream and turns them into entertaining animated GIFs. The technique is a throwback to the work of Stan Vanderbeek and Terry Gilliam, but Kevin’s ideas are plenty fresh.

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: Animated GIF, Kevin Weir

I love animated GIFs and the seemingly infinite variations on the form. Comic book artist Kerry Callen has come up with a new twist: animating vintage comic book covers and he pulls it off quite well.

(via Mark Evanier)

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Animated GIF

“Animated GIFs are the web’s vinyl records,” wrote Jamie Zawinski on Twitter a few months ago. It’s a sly but accurate observation. In the face of Flash and streaming video, the animated GIF, which has been around since the 1990s, has refused to fade away. It remains a ubiquitous part of Web culture and inspires countless memes among a new generation of Web users. While the underlying technology of the animated GIF hasn’t changed, artists continue to explore new approaches to the form, such as cinemagraphs and the recent animated GIF comics trend.

There are many reasons for the extended reign of the animated GIF, prime among them the form’s emphasis on cycles (or loops). Rhythmic repetition was a staple animation technique of theatrical animation during the 1920s and 1930s before being cast aside in favor of more realistic approaches to movement. The inherent beauty of cycled movement, which was cheapened by limited TV animation in the 1960s, has enjoyed a creative rebirth with the advent of the animated GIF. The animated GIF is also a remarkably potent form, and combined with good timing, it can deliver a surprising punchline as funny as any comedian’s joke. The British animator Cyriak has perfected this type of animated GIF. Perhaps the biggest underpinning reason for the endurance of the animated GIF is its utter simplicity: it has no sound, generally last less than 10 seconds, and require no technical knowledge to create, thanks in large part to the abundance of web apps.

This brings us around to the latest development in animated GIFs: a new iPhone app (also iPad/iPhone Touch compatible) called Gif Shop. Created by Daniel Savage and Matthew Archer, the app, which costs $1.99, streamlines the GIF making process on the iPhone, and makes it easier than ever for anybody to create their own animation. While it’s possible to make any kind of animation using Gif Shop, because of the app’s integration with the iPhone camera, it lends itself particularly to the pixilation stop-motion technique.

Here’s a quick demo of how it works:

Daniel Savage, the app’s co-creator, foresees a social media component to Gif Shop as well, and believes it can become to animation what Instagram is to photos. “The concept of simply creating animated GIFs,” he writes, “evolved into a service that enables our users to share animated GIFS across their networks with no concern for hosting and file size limitations other services may impose. Since the initial concept, Gif Shop is no longer the first of its kind, but we think there is one key factor the others have missed: simplicity. It is extremely important to us that we take the tedious act of making a GIF and make it as fun and intuitive as possible.”

It’s exciting to see the emergence of easy-to-use animation software for smartphones. These apps have the potential to make the act of animating as second-nature to the general public as taking a photograph. That’s a revolutionary concept, especially when one considers that fifty years ago, there were at best a few thousand people in the entire world who could animate. Most of the people using the Gif Shop app aren’t professional animators, but then again,

My first attempt at animating some of my characters. So, animated gifs are not the most perfect way to go about it, but it kind of works, eh?

Today gifs, tomorrow Flash. Sheesh, this could get addicting.

Oh, and this might be an imperfect fit for the Illustration Friday theme, but hey, that never stopped me before.