I’d love to see some students who are doing things like this with iPhones or iPod touches. Be sure to check out the video down below.
Jorge Colombo drew this week’s cover using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.
“I got a phone in the beginning of February, and I immediately got the program so I could entertain myself,” says Colombo, who first published his drawings in The New Yorker in 1994. Colombo has been drawing since he was seven, but he discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” (When the sun is up, it’s a bit harder, “because of the glare on the phone,” he says.) It also allows him to draw without being noticed; most pedestrians assume he’s checking his e-mail.
There’s a companion application, Brushes Viewer, that makes a video recapitulating each step of how Colombo composed the picture. Colombo leans heavily on the Undo feature: “It looks like I draw everything with supernatural assurance and very fast—it gets rid of all the hesitations.”
Colombo’s phone drawing is very much in the tradition of a certain kind of New Yorker cover, and he doesn’t see the fact that it’s a virtual finger painting as such a big deal. “Imagine twenty years ago, writing about these people who are sending these letters on their computer.” But watching the video playback has made him aware that how he draws a picture can tell a story, and he’s hoping to build suspense as he builds up layers of color and shape.
The online visualisation system of the highest definition photograph ever in the world (16 billion pixels) will in fact let viewers enlarge and observe any portion of the painting, giving them a clear view of sections down to as little as one millimetre square.
The project started at the beginning of 2007, as a result of the meeting between the Ministry of Cultural Assets and Activities – Milan Landscape and Architectural Assets Office, De Agostini and HAL9000, a worldwide leader in the high-definition photography sector. This photographic technique has two benefits: on one hand, it is a unique instrument of its kind for “monitoring” the state of the painting and, on the other hand, it allows anyone on the Internet, from any part of the world, to observe all the parts and details of the work. Thanks to this technology, HAL9000 can also create large high-quality fine art prints of The Last Supper which offer an overall and detailed visual perception never possible before.
The photograph of The Last Supper, one of the most delicate and protected works in the world, is the result of many months of work and research, during which specific lighting and photography techniques were developed. The protection of the painting was, right from the start, the main concern of the HAL9000 technicians and the Architectural Assets Office; the photography system designed and implemented by HAL9000 was subject to technical inspection at the Environmental Control and Physics Laboratory at the Central Restoration Institute in Rome, which decided the system was totally suitable in accordance with current standards for the safeguarding of artistic works.
I recently started reading “The Da Vinci Code,” and Leonardo has always been one of my favorite people from history.
The illegitimate son of a 25-year-old notary, Ser Piero, and a peasant girl, Caterina, Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in Vinci, Italy, just outside Florence. His father took custody of the little fellow shortly after his birth, while his mother married someone else and moved to a neighboring town. They kept on having kids, although not with each other, and they eventually supplied him with a total of 17 half sisters and brothers.
Hidden behind the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile are millions of invisible dots, according to research presented this week at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
Revealed at the exhibition “The mind of Leonardo — The universal genius at work,” which runs at the gallery until January 2007, the Mona Lisa code consists of countless of dot layers applied with a technique of micro-divided brushstrokes.
Jacques Franck, a consultant at the Armand Hammer Centre for Da Vinci Studies at the University of California, reported that the technique is somewhat similar to pointillism used by the French Neo-Impressionists in the late 19th century.
On the left is a recreation of Mona Lisa’s eye with dots and brushstrokes. On the right, the eye appears in 3-D when the last layer of dots is applied.
