Allan: Last minute samples

“I never played Mario.” That sounds like something you’d tell a priest, shamefully, in a walk-in closet. But I’m not religious, so I’m telling you. Games are probably fun and all, but they’d be eating into precious drawing time and, to be honest, I can’t be bothered.

Still, it’s hard to resist the LEGO-ish charm of an 8-bit Mario, hardly recognisable as a human figure (I could take a stab at the staccato MIDI sound loops hardly being music either, but I’m probably in enough trouble as it is). The crude graphics of the first Super Mario games is a challenge worth taking, as I did in the very soon-to-be-delivered C’est Bon Anthology vol. 13.

With the Panorama pictures I have worked with pencil to wring Mario out of the digital realm and make him a part of my world. Like an ancient occultist invoking a demon manifest itself, but in another spectrum. RGB magic.

The pictures show the same journey for Mario. In the first picture he finds himself in a new world with different rules, every instant captured in a comic book frame. In picture two he floats out of the comic book, and the raster that makes up that world goes along. Picture three finds Mario and his friends in a messy situation as 2D characters in a three-dimensional world.

All that might be a bit hard to pick up from the thumbnail excerpts above. I guess you’ll have to come to tomorrow’s opening and see the actual pictures on show :)

Sofia: Adventure Details

Jumping Shy Guys

Peach is hungry for adventures

Focusing on the playing itself, the jumping puzzle, and sheer happiness of gaming, I made my three pictures for this Panorama into one adventure. Above are a few details.

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Sofia: Anders loves Mario

Before posting any thoughts about my Panorama-works, I’d like to show something from the vaults. This is a guest strip I had the honour to do for the insanely skilled Rene Engström’s web comic Anders loves Maria. If you haven’t read ALM yet, you are in for a treat. It’s beautiful and funny and melancholic. With a lot of winks to Mario and his gang.

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Jamil: Potato Potato!

Super Mario might be digital, but boy is he retro! And I wanted be equally retro in my three pieces for this third installment of the C’est Bon Panorama exhibitions… So for artistic technique, I’ve gone all out potato.

First I bought a bunch of the largest pieces of potato I could find in the supermarket. I was lucky, since it seems that the season has generated some pretty big ones. And you need potato excess, since you’re gonna be cutting away without much precision. Chop chop. Then I went to the art store and bought some nice ink colors in the Super Mario palette. You know, screen type colors. Finally I scrambled together knives, boxcutters and a few special cutting tools that I had up my sleeve. The material was assembled, and I was all set.

Then I went medieval on Mario’s ass, so to speak. I chopped out the little guy in the potatoes, gave him an ink bath and let him work his Mario Magic on paper. Turns out he’s just as charming in reality as in virtuality.

But hey! Isn’t the Mushroom supposed to make Mario grow big? Isn’t the star supposed to make him glow and run like greased lightning? And isn’t the Fire Flower supposed to give Mario the power to throw fire balls?

Here’s a few images of the process. Enjoy.

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A Word from the Kidney

Jamil: “Part as Part of the Whole” – teasers

I’ve been working hard to finish my images, and now I’m there. They’re here.

The titles of the three pieces are:

“Part as Part of the Whole I: Interior”
“Part as Part of the Whole II: Exterior”
“Part as Part of the Whole III: Interior”

Here are teasers from all three images:

What the teasers are part of – and what the pieces are about – you’ll find at the opening. It’s at Gallery Spegeln in Malmö on Friday Oct 30th from 18.00 to 21.00 hrs.

Welcome.

Allan: Procrastinating & shooting down concepts

You know, we should probably call it quits. The whole thing was done 70 years ago, down to the color scheme (almost) for the Swedish poster for “Son of Frankenstein”…

We will be the new mainstream, indeed ;)

The poster was found on http://frankensteinia.blogspot.com/, along with loads of other Frankenstein and Karloff goodies.

Jamil: Interiors

I’m working on my third Panorma image and studying furniture and interiors from the beginning of the 19th century.

This is what my drawing table looks like right now:

And this is how I left my flat this morning:

So messy.

Sofia: First Thoughts

These were my first thoughts after reading the book (sorry, all text in Swedish). They circled around the female creature Frankenstein starts creating as company for his Monster, and around the Uncanny Valley-theory (as Frankenstein realizes what horror he has created only when the Monster opens his eyes).

I had some trouble going from here though, and these ideas will not be used. At least not for this project. Now I’m working from the theme Muscle Memory, and the sketches feel very good, more about them another day.

First sketch of the Monster:

Jamil: Ideas for the Poster

I had the idea early on to create a poster that visually represents seven different interpretations of the subject Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s novel is one of the world’s most, if not THE most, interpreted and re-interpreted stories.

In the  first Panorama exhibition we chose to work with the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood. These works are both stories that just about everybody is familiar with in some way. But do we know these stories from their original form or from one of the many interpretations out there? We in CBK are fascinated by the interpretation itself, the very process, and that fascination is one of the core ideas of these exhibitions.

This is what the first small sketch for the Frankenstein poster looked like:

At first, we were supposed to be six artists working on the project. Three of the current CBK crew, and three that have been working with us in the past. Each artist would get one body part: right arm, left arm, right leg, left leg, torso and head.

But then we were happy to have Sofia Falkenhem join the CBK crew and we wanted her in on this project as well. We were now seven.

Since cutting the human body into seven parts wasn’t as convenient, I came up with the idea of just using the head. And this particular head is easy to recognize! So this is what the next sketch looked like:

I used an image of Boris Karlof’s Frankenstein – a film which we’ll be screening together with several shorts on nov 1st – and cut it into seven pieces. I numbered the pieces and had someone draw a number to assign the pieces to each and everyone of us. I scanned the pieces on a grid so it would be easy to see how they were shaped.

Then we all drew/painted/designed our separate pieces. What they look like pieced back together, is what you see below. Voilà.