I am your father – Star Wars Graffiti by Dolk

While this piece was not from Copenhagen, the other Dolk graffiti’s I posted about are, I thought it was quite funny and had to post on it.

It’s great when art communicates. Dolk’s ability to make a 2-dimensional black and white image communicate is pretty good.

Just like Banksy I think one day his stuff will be valued and people will be kicking themselves for having cleaned it off their walls.

See my other posts on Dolk’s graffiti here and here.

Arctic Monkeys track list … the Monkeys are really coming!

Here’s the listing for the new album, per my favourite Arctic Monkeys Site.

Entitled “Favourite Worst Nightmare” the tracklisting goes;

01. Brianstorm
02. Teddy Picker
03. D is for Dangerous
04. Balaclava
05. Fluorescent Adolescent
06. Only Ones Who Know
07. Do Me a Favour
08. This House Is a Circus
09. If You Were There, Beware
10. The Bad Thing
11. Old Yellow Bricks
12. 505

It will be released on Monday 23rd April with the first single “Brianstorm” hitting the shelves (or should it be download websites?) on Monday 16th April.

Another Dolk Stencil in Copenhagen

This is one of the shots of Dolk’s Stencil Graffiti he did in Copenhagen. Couldn’t find the image for week and just found it now.

Enjoy.

Ehm who’s that major skull stencil on top there?

Just heard a track from the new Arctic Monkeys Album

  This is the new cover of their upcoming album. Looks like nothing but actually there’s a whole story to this, but I’ll go into this shortly. I just heard one of the new tracks on radio this morning. Sounds pretty good. A little harder than their last album it seemed to me. But a single track on radio is a little early to judge the album. I am quite excited to get it when it’s out. I wonder if Cigarette Smoke will be on it. It’s a pretty cool demo track they gave out free on the fan site www.arctic-monkeys.com.

The rhythm’s pretty good in the Monkey’s work, similar to Bloc Party they have a great drummer who does a little more than keep the beat. There’s a great article on rhythm how it is an important factor in audience rapport and participation and a bunch more, By L. Ron Hubbard – you can see it here, it is at the bottom of the article.

Now back to the cover of the album. “Liverpool designers Juno, who also did the artwork for the first LP, spent a week gutting three unoccupied houses from the estate, before moving a team of spray artists to paint the interiors.” source www.gigwise.com.

The cover is a little dull – but looking at it from that aspect it’s a lot more interesting. It totally reminds me of that amazing graffitti covered building in New York or the Dolk stencils I’ve posted about.

Ok – well I can’t wait for the album to get released!  Whoever get’s the release date first drop me a comment.

More and more Dolk – and more again…

Dolk is undoubtedly one of the best stencil artists around. But he isn’t good because he’s good. He’s good because his stuff communicates.

Each one of his stencils have a message – but not some heavy political “revolution.” Yet you leave the image and the mind starts going. Every image has that little twist.

Check out the marathon runner crossing the police line? (picture courtesy of Wooster Collective)

Or “Che” – here’s the symbol of revolution – but rapping?

Or the boy remote controlling… a bird?

Or what about the Burger King?

It’s communication. And when you see one of these images, always look for that little (or big) extra.

Here are some “Dolk Resources” that I’ve found to be the best ones around.

Check them out.

First the “official” Dolk fans forum, you need a login but it’s full of amazing shots from around the world.

Find it on: www.DOLK.co.uk

Second the interview done by “Schhh” - it’s in English and Spanish.

Find it on: http://www.schhh.unmicroclima.com/blog/?p=151#englishdolk

Then this Wiki has a ton of photos and other info. Definitely worth checking out. This is hosted at TheGiant.org.

Find it on: http://thegiant.org/wiki/index.php?title=Dolk&redirect=no

(but don’t hotlink to his images he doesn’t like that)

And some additional pictures from Wooster Collective. They have some great stuff too.

Stencil Revolution has also got a good bunch of shots and additionally they have comments by Dolk and others on these. Very neat. Also has it categorized differently here.

Find it here: http://www.stencilrevolution.com/photopost/showgallery.php?cat=500&ppuser=1864

And then Stencil Archive has some stuff - mainly from Barcelona so update it if you have more.

Find it here: http://stencilarchive.org/index.php?set_albumName=album337&name=gallery&include=view_album.php

I know there was mention that some were on sale as Picturesonwalls or Banksy but I could not easily find them so voila. If you find it then post the link in the comments please.

But Seriously Dude… Where’s my Bike? (Some basics on color usage)

I took this shot of a bike in the snow the other day. Following my earlier post (Dude where’s my bike – a lesson in 3D font usage) I thought I would bring this sequel.

Just like the bikes can’t be found in the snow, so will your message if you don’t use your color harmony well. I found the following would be a good basic to start from.

What is color?

Technically we could explain color like some do in encyclopedias. Something like “physical phenomenon of light or vision associated with the various wavelengths in the visible portion of the electromagneticspectrum. As a sensation experienced by human beings and some animals, perception of colour is a complex neurophysiological process.” Per the Encarta Encyclopedia.

While this may serve a technical defition it doesn’t give us a better understanding of what color is and how to use it.

Color could be simply said to be a visible characteristic used to distinguish similarities and differences in an object, painting, picture etc.

Arguably more than half of the beauty in an object, painting, picture comes from the color. Think about a bouquet in black and white. It would be nice but it would just not quite be as nice as it could be.

But color can also turn a nice painting or object into something so repellent you just want to get rid of it fast. Imagine a room with beige walls with fine gold ornaments and a Bordeaux carpet and in the middle of that place the most expensive renaissance chair, a true piece of art, painted in bright green. Had your vision been in black and white you would still consider that a gorgeous room.

Almost everyone can somewhat figure out what fits and what doesn’t. But how can you be sure. And what do you do when you are told your Powerpoint presentation needs to feature the company logo which is bright green and simply doesn’t fit with any of the charts you made. Or after you found out at a recent seminar that the color that would best represent your company is red yet all your point of sale materials you have are green.

How can you know what other colors you can use or rather you must use to make the presentation attractive (and thus sell)?

Here is where the laws of color harmony come in. To understand color harmony you first need to understand the word harmony. Harmony is defined as a pleasing effect produced by an arrangement of things. It comes from the Greek word harmonia ‘agreement, concord’ which came from the word harmozein ‘to fit together’.

This is the secret of color using color; harmony. There are laws to color harmony, there are limits and boundaries and exceptions to these which are explained with the color wheel.

Let your bosses have at you, tell you that your presentation needs contain their favorite colors, let the marketing analysts present you their color surveys, no matter what color you are asked to include. With the color wheel you are never lost.

Just like any other field, there are laws to this game and knowing them and having the tools to use them replaces your rickety string ladder with granite steps of certainty.

There is no way around it. The color wheel is a basic to creation like a paint brush is to a painter. You can paint with your fingers but you won’t get a Monalisa.

The color wheel existed long before computers, but recently a company did a pretty neat little software called color-wheel-pro. You’ll find a link to it in my tools section on the right. Try it out – it works well the new version (2.0) fixed some points missng in prior edition. It’s soon perfect.

Old news? the Optimus 103 Keyboard – good news!

Art Lebedev studios are working on a project that is probably going to relieve thousands of people working on international relations… the Optimus 103 Keyboard.

Now the buys atEngadget (and I really love their blog) have been giving this one a hard time. But no matter all of that, this piece of kit will seriously work when it’s out.

A keyboard where every key is actually a little screen and depending on how you program it, it’ll show the characters needed. Switch between Russian, English, French, Japanese. Between lowercase and uppercase.

And better, you can set the keys so they have the icon of the tools you are using in Photoshop etc.

If you don’t get the importance of this announcemen, you just haven’t gone through the pain of multi-languages.

Now all we need to do is get the price down!