50+ Beautiful Colorful and Funny Toy Design Collection

By Dibakar Jana | January 31, 2010 | Posted in Inspiration, Laboratory

Most young mammals have been observed to play with whatever they can find, turning such things as pinecones, rocks, and food into toys. Toys and games have been unearthed from the sites of ancient civilizations. They have been written about in some of our oldest literature. Toys excavated from the Indus valley civilization (3000-1500 BCE) include small carts, whistles shaped like birds, and toy monkeys which could slide down a string.

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Water Painting History and Artist Collections

By Dibakar Jana | January 22, 2010 | Posted in Graphics, Inspiration, Laboratory

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Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface (support base). In art, the term describes both the act and the result, which is called a painting. Paintings may have for their support such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, clay or concrete. Paintings may be decorated with gold leaf, and some modern paintings incorporate other materials including sand, clay, and scraps of paper.
Painting is a mode of expression, and the forms are numerous. Drawing, composition or abstraction and other aesthetics may serve to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner. Paintings can be naturalistic and representational (as in a still life or landscape painting), photographic, abstract, be loaded with narrative content, symbolism, emotion or be political in nature.
A portion of the history of painting in both Eastern and Western art is dominated by spiritual motifs and ideas; examples of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to Biblical scenes rendered on the interior walls and ceiling of The Sistine Chapel, to scenes from the life of Buddha or other scenes of eastern religious origin.

History of Animation Media – Innovation and Experimentation

By Dibakar Jana | January 15, 2010 | Posted in Inspiration, Laboratory

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Precursors to Animation

Evidence of artistic interest in depicting figures in motion can be seen as early as the still drawings of Palaeolithic cave paintings, where animals are depicted with multiple sets of legs in superimposed positions, clearly attempting to convey the perception of motion. Other examples include a 5,200-year old earthen bowl found in Iran in Shahr-i Sokhta and an ancient Egyptian mural. The Persian bowl has five images painted along the sides, showing phases of a goat leaping up to nip at a tree. The Egyptian mural, approximately 4000 years old, shows wrestlers in action.

Seven drawings by Leonardo da Vinci (ca. 1510) extending over two folios in the Windsor Collection, Anatomical Studies of the Muscles of the Neck, Shoulder, Chest, and Arm, show detailed drawings of the upper body (with a less-detailed facial image), illustrating the changes as the torso turns from profile to frontal position and the forearm extends.
Even though all these early examples may appear similar to a series of animation drawings, the lack of equipment to show the images in motion means that these image series are precursors to animation and cannot be called animation in the modern sense. They do, however, indicate the artists’ intentions and interests in depicting motion.

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