Changing Way

Yet another artist to whom my attention has been Drawn! is Natalie Kocsis. Most of the work in her portfolio is less cute and more grotesque than Lucy here, as the example at Drawn! shows.

A nerdy aside: one of the ways in which the WordPress.com interface changed recently was in the way we can include images in posts. This thumbnail is generated by WordPress. It’s rather smaller than I like images in posts to be, but the medium size image generated is rather larger (400 rather than 128 rather than the just-right 240 of the small image size at Flickr).

This is one of the distinctive cityspaces by Hartwig Braun. Entrpreneur Isaac Lilos promotes Hartwig’s work through the artyglobe blog and web site, which I found via Drawn!

I’m very tempted by Take it Easy by Leia Bell. It’s cute. It reminds me of one of the bedtime stories I tell my daughter: The Three Little Chinese Pigs. And how can I resist a Panda print recommended by a Robot Walrus?

A few months ago, we bought some plates at Aunt Sadie’s in the South End. We loved the designs.

The artist, Jane Jenni, has just been featured at Drawn! That reminded me to post, and gave me a link to Jane’s site, and hence a source of images.

I don’t think that this is one of the designs we saw, and you may have noticed that it’s a cup rather than a plate, but you get the idea.

I love this print by Si Clark. Let’s not dwell on what that might say about me…

As multiple previous posts have shown, I like Gallery Nucleus. It exhibits work, and sells work, by wonderful artists such as Mari Inukai. Its web site allows a glimpse at this work for those of us who live a long way from the Nucleus store in southern California.

So I put Mari’s “Nippon Seifuku” in my art cart, which is a kind of wishlist of art I’d like for birthday, Christmas, etc. presents. But the link broke!

Gallery Nucleus has redesigned its site. That may be a good thing in some ways. But in that it broke existing links, it is a very bad thing. Given the time of year, the link-breakers may have been the grinches who stole a Mari print from me this Christmas, since I sent my family to the art cart for gift ideas.

I’ve since fixed the link on my art cart. I should add that the image included in this post is also available as a print…

Now here’s a rather wonderful idea. Lookybook allows you to look at picture books in their entirety.

It’s like a test drive track for kid’s books. I expect that many of the test drives will lead to purchases, and hence that the site will make money from its affiliate programs. I don’t think that it will be seen as providing a substitute for real books, and neither do the folks behind the Lookybook. “We know that nothing will replace the magic of reading a book with your child.”

I’ve started setting up my bookshelf. I would embed a book in this post, but WordPress.com restrictions prevent me using the widget that Lookybook provides. I like a lot of things about the site, including the fact that it refers to itself as a preview rather than a beta.

Things I’d like to see added include: a wishlist feature; tagging; a blog (Lookyblog?). And more books. There are currently a couple of hundred, with plans to get that above a thousand next year. I wish a prosperous holiday season to Lookybook, and to Drawn!, where I read about Lookybook.

I wish I could get to the show just opened at Gallery Nucleus. It’s a Mari Inukai solo show. There are some new prints, but the print most prominent in my birthday and christmas wishes is still Nippon Seifuku.

Every so often I find myself compelled to link to an artist or a work featured on Drawn! One such artist is Iker Ayestaran. Here’s a Halloween-appropriate sample of his work.

Also Halloween-appropriate is The Last Duet on Earth, an animated short by Graham Annable.