TVSquad

"Too Art For TV, Too" is the second annual art exhibit in New York City featuring artwork from animators in both the TV and movie industries. The exhibit opens on May 4 and runs through May 25 at the Stay Gold Gallery and does not feature work created for the animators' respective TV shows and movies, but rather original art "free from television's corporate demands."

Over thirty-five artists will have work on display, including the Venture Bros' Jackson Publick, and animators for SpongeBob SquarePants, Celebrity Deathmatch, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Code Name: Kid's Next Door and Blue's Clues. That list of show's alone surely makes this worth checking out, which I would do if I actually lived in New York City. You can check out the site here, which has some small samples of the work to be displayed. Jason DiOrio's bony monkey creature is my favorite.

[via Jackson Publick]

BlueSky Studios, which is owned by Fox Film Filmed Entertainment and helped bring the movie Ice Age to the screen, has a weekly challenge for their staff in which artists, animators and others are given a subject and asked to draw their interpretation of it. The work is displayed on the BlueSky Studios Challenge blog, and it's worth checking out. Some of the subjects are things like movie robots or dinosaurs, but there are also a bunch of great drawings of television characters, such as the Muppets ( I love this humanized version of Bert) and SpongeBob SquarePants. Also take a look at the '80s cartoon characters challenge, which includes this film noir version of Inspector Gadget. I love seeing these characters completely re-imagined the same way I love it when a band covers another band's song and completely changes it, making it their own. I'd love to see whole animated programs re-imagined this way, which wouldn't be anything new since The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Mighty Mouse, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Beany and Cecil were all at one time brought back by different artists with a whole new design. Still, I'd love to see more of that.

[via Cartoon Brew]

John K wrote this on his blog recently: "The style of every scene in every cartoon I do depends on who is drawing the scene (both storyboard and layout), who painted the background and what the scene is about and how the artist and the characters are feeling at the moment."

Every animation studio seems to have its own unique style, whether it's Spumco, Disney, or Warner Brothers, but in reality, those cartoons are the work of several people who each bring their own unique style to the whole. Sixteen-year-old Thad K has set up a very cool blog dedicated to recognizing the styles of different animators. He already has two lengthy posts (including YouTube clips) dedicated to Tom and Jerry and Woody Woodpecker. Thad breaks the shorts down into segments, pointing out what each animator brought to the short. Perhaps going over these classic bits of animation with such a fine tooth comb extracts some of the fun from watching these cartoons, but I think it nicely reveals a depth these cartoons have which perhaps isn't as evident when viewing them casually.