The usual suspects

Are you familiar with law enforcement composite sketch software? You know, the software the police uses to create portraits of suspects based on eye-witness descriptions? Well, Brian Joseph Davis had the brilliant idea of using such software with literary descriptions of book characters. Some of the most iconic protagonists are there, from Jesus to Humbert Humbert, and from Jane Eyre to Holly Golightly.

Daisy Buchanan, The Great Gatsby

A casting director’s dream, right?

Captain Ahab, Moby Dick

Unfortunately The Composites tumblr is closing down (but a book is coming out). Just my luck to discover something fun once it is about to end…

via freeweird

See also:

• Fictitious dishes from classic novels
• In their own words
• In literature / hidden haikus I have found / unexpectedly
• What should I read?

Dot by dot

A portrait made entirely of dots. Following the great tradition of pointillism of Georges Seurat, Paul Signac and other notable painters, Miguel Endara created Hero, a portrait of his father, using 3.2 million dots.

Watch the amazing making-of video.

via Laughing Squid

See also:

• Made of crayons
• Ceci n’est pas une post
• The quest of an artist
• The Man in the Black Coat

Etsy finds: retrowhale’s indie portraits (and more)

Who’s your favorite writer? Your favorite movie director? Your favorite band? Animal? Chances are that retrowhale has already created a quirky drawing of them in a wood panel. The discovery that lead me to this shop was this portrait series of writers: Hunter S Thompson, Charles Bukowski, Silvia Plath and Jack Kerouac. Amazing, huh?

Or you can go all nouvelle vague and get a set of french directors:

And if this sounds a tad pretentious to you, there is lots of pop culture to choose from, too. For example this series of (mainly John Hughes) 80’s teen movies:

Or choose your favorite music band out of these almost infographic illustrations:

The rest you have to discover by yourselves!

In their own words

If you were a writer and you were about to make your self-portrait, how would you draw yourself? Would you choose to depict an extract from your literary work perhaps? Artist and author John Sokol creates drawings of literary figures, whose outline of the face is crafted from the very words of their own works.

Jorge-Luis Borges and the Secret Miracle

See more portraits after the jump

10 + 1 ways to visualize lyrics

Really good songs have usually really good lyrics. And good lyrics stay with you. When we were at school we doodled them on our books and carved them into the desks. What do the digital natives do? Here are the best ideas (and, incidentally, really good songs for the most part) we found around the web:

1. Pick a photo, apply a vintage effect and write the lyrics in helvetica

Paris by the Friendly Fires (the Aeroplane version featuring Au Revoir Simone  kicks major ass, too)
(visual first seen at letlooselove, our title inspired by this)

2. Make a flowchart*

Should I Stay or Should I Go by The Clash
(visual first seen at Urlesque)
*but be careful not to be trapped on an infinite loop

See 9 more ways after the jump

Read it elsewhere

A bitter-sweet mix of links:

• Too close for comfort? Portraits by Martin Schoeller – live journal
• Love is like an app store – diesel sweeties
• The facebook you vs the real you – comical concept
• Civilization has something similar: a video of all the major historical events (according to Wikipedia) in 100 seconds – ragtag
• In the same vein, an infograph of every person who has ever lived – la femme belletrist
• Nuclear boy suffers from gas (video) – youtube
• David Lynch’s hair compared to art masterpieces – world of wonder
• The answer to the burning question: “what is better, a facebook like or a tweet?” – mashable
• Meet the world’s busiest extra who’s credits include tv shows like , glee, curb your enthousiasm, arrested development, and movies like the social network, catch me if you can and spiderman (video) – vulture
• Despite recent criticism, more designers have created art inspired but the recent disaster in Japan – design for japan tumblr
• But none as strong as these radioactive cherry blossoms on the cover of New Yorker – kottke

Hiding in front of the camera

What you’re looking for is often right in front of your eyes. And the best way to hide is to become one with the background.

Liu Bolin’s case is like that, but also totally different. He started painting himself as an act of resistance after the Chinese government shut down his business. Having lost his job, income and social status, he uses these magnificent camouflage portraits as a means to restore his strength and protect himself.

Liu Bolin paints himself and his clothes according to the chosen backdrop and then spends even 10 hours with his two assistants positioning himself in the right stance, until he becomes (virtually) invisible.

See more camouflage art after the jump

I love Cash

When I hear that trumpet sound/I’m gonna rise out of the ground.

I do not know if we are going to meet Johnny Cash down the river road, but we sure are going to meet all of his fans. Cash’s final studio recording “Ain’t No Grave“ is being revived in the Johnny Cash project.

The Johnny Cash project is a post-mortem tribute to the Man In Black, an online, interactive project, where participants from all over the web can create their unique and personal portraits of Johnny, using a custom drawing tool, in a single template. All these different drawings, compiled by director Chris Milk, responsible also for the mind-blowing  Wilderness Downtown, are integrated in a collective music video. Actually not only one video but different, ever-changing, randomly generated videos.

Each drawing constitutes a different frame of the music video, and all of them are combined in different versions of the song. Thus, you can choose to see, among others, the most-brushstrokes-per-frame version, or the one with-the-most-realistic frames.

See more after the jump.

The portrait of a blogger

What is your idea of blogging and of bloggers, in particular? Do you often imagine them in small and dark rooms, where they just sit and write their posts? Well, perhaps you are right, but you should definitively check Gabriella Herman‘s series of photographs,  Bloggers. She has managed to capture the moment of creation, where the only light of inspiration is the one that comes from the computer screen.

More portraits after the jump

We sure are cute for two ugly people*

I am considering commissioning a portrait. Before you ring the vanity alarm, check this:

Digital art team ollibird creates these amazing commissioned sketch portraits.  We just love their indie vibe!

The process is easy.  You send a photo of yourself, they sketch it by hand, they scan it, color it digitally and they send you a digital copy in high-resolution so that you can print it yourself. Ollibird have even created a gallery of commissioned digital portraits.