GOOD Worldwide: 25 Female Designers and Illustrators We Love

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Te Wei's The Buffalo Boy and his Flute

"A young boy who likes to play the flute dreams that he has lost his water buffalo."

(IMDb)

Te Wei's Feelings of Mountains and Waters

"Shan shui qing ('Feelings of Mountains and Waters') finished production in 1988. This water/ink animation was Te Wei's [特伟] fourth and final major production, and is in many ways fittingly so. 'Feelings of Mountains and Waters' is a masterpiece. The film runs slightly under twenty minutes, moving the viewer through an emotional journey cleanly articulated by deep and vivid imagery, wrought with incredible artistic purity.

The film's subject is a young girl, whom ferrying an aging man across a river, generously nurses him to better health after witnessing him collapse on the shoreline. In 'Feelings of Mountains and Waters,' Te Wei uses earthy watercolors and craggy puffs of ink to maneuver hillsides, paths, valleys, and waterfalls. He uses the high-values where the ink ends and the paper begins not as an artifact of the landscape, but as the landscape itself. The watercolor paintings move and flourish, the water and ink are the animation; and the rosy-cheeked girl, through muted conversation with the humble old man, learns to play a plucked, string instrument under the quiet and almost sentient backdrop of the mountainous milieu.

Te Wei served as general director for 'Feelings of Mountains and Waters,' and retired after its completion, at the time well into his seventies. The film deservedly earned multiple awards, including high honors from international film festivals in Montreal and Shanghai. In 1995, the global professional animation community ASIFA honored Te Wei with a Lifetime Achievement Award."

(Aaron H. Bynum, 12th February 2010, p.3, Animation Insider)

Pencil drawn evolution by Spanish production house Boolab

"boolab is a production house dedicated to motion graphics, animation (2D and 3D) and the development of other visual techniques, both traditional and cutting or bleeding edge. It came into being in 2004 within the framework of Booker, an advertising production house in the field of live-action, founded in 1996. Initially, boolab was envisaged as an in-house lab for research into new audiovisual languages, but it soon set its sights beyond the company walls. Success was not long in coming, and it rapidly developed into what it is today - a production house that is a benchmark in audiovisual innovation throughout Spain and Europe."

(Boolab)

Fig.1 Pilot: 'Evolution' - boolab, uploaded by boolab Plus 1 year ago.

Wacom Inkling: a digital drawing pen for artists

"Wacom's Inkling pen has caused quite a buzz in the creative community. A ballpoint pen with a tracker in it that records your strokes to a small box you can carry with you, it's been described as the ideal digital tool for artists who prefer real pens to digital substitutes. ...

One key thing to be said about the Inkling is that it's not a replacement for traditional drawing pens. The captured digital files are not a full-quality representation of a drawing. But then Wacom have stated clearly that the Inkling is for sketching -- even if that has been drowned out a little by the overstretching enthusiasm from some online commentators.

'The line was certainly not as crisp as it was hand-drawn,' [illustrator Lizzie Mary Cullen] notes. 'The layer function is amazing but when uploaded some of the layers appeared to have moved ever so slightly. The line simply isn't as true as a scan, and that is exactly why it's for brainstorming, sketching and rough drawings as opposed to polished artworks."

(Neil Bennett, 08 September 2011, Digital Arts)