A new book out in stores, Fables Covers: The Art of James Jean Vol. 1. The author/artist has published two behind-the-scenes images of the making of the book cover.

Anything Can Happen is a 60 second video taking you on a hyper condensed journey through live action, 3D, animation and hand crafted sequences.

I attended the Lunch 2.0 event at Yahoo last week and met the ibeatyou.com gang. I was also turned on to more mobile goodness, check these out:
BrightKite.com - Location based twitter
Qik.com - Stream video from your phone
Tesla Test Drive - Jason Calacanis uses Qik to show off his new battery powered car.

More tech than art today, but it’s all creative.

Muto by Blu is a genius work of animation, graffiti, illustration, and conceptual art direction by the people of BLU, filmed in Buenos Aires and Baden this year. Please watch it with your eyes peeled and your ears and mind open–I fancy this piece to be the love child of Escher and Banksy.

A Picture’s Worth invites you to share a special photo and the story behind it.

I totally like the latest collection of illustrations by Alejandro Fuentes. Photographs with cartoons over it. WOW!

Addictive TV is the studio space of DJ-duo Tolly and Graham. They are known for remixing audio and images. Their latest work is Iron Man vs Addictive TV. On their site, you can click on “clips” and view a bunch of films including the Antonio Bandera dance film, now finger snapping “Take the Lead”. And here is an interview with Tolly and Graham.

In defiance of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous dictum, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” Don Martin of MAD magazine fame created a career expressing the spluuurch and splarch of the ineffable.

Pale Horse is the studio site of Chris Parks; specializing in apparel, action sports, entertainment, product and record label graphic design.

Mooncruise is a stylish online magazine for art, fashion, photography, and unique products. I like the Husque bowls, looks like the inverse of an M&M chocolate candy… beautiful and simple; a little pricey but it is an art piece.

The Price is Right bit is hilarious.

Vintage is a photography exhibition of male nudes. (Oops, I just realized that they changed the exhibit page. I now fixed the link, it goes to the Vintage show)

Karl Kwasny has some mad drawing skills. Tattoo styled illustrations, and custom typography.

Experimental, abstract art by Jay Meany.

Beautiful site and photography by Kristopher Grunert. His style is a combination of architectural/industrial and landscape photography. The way he captures light, colors, shapes… all creating a spacious environment… simply stunning!

History Flow is an interesting tool from IBM to create a visual graph of the history of collaborative documents like WikiPedia. They produce cool abstract shapes if nothing else.

Melbourne-based illustrator Justin Lee Williams lives and creates in a studio in the forest and his best friend is a wombat that visits him from time to time. His work includes drawings of people and animals, rendered on anything from an old receipt book to a Mahjong board.

Good friend Tim Girvin has created logos and branding for films such as The Matrix, all of the Mission: Impossibles, Lemony Snicket, Sahara, Indiana Jones, all the Star Treks, Transformers, Beowulf, and now, Iron Man. Check out his blog on The Branding of Iron Man | Exploring identity, logo evolutions and story in motion picture design.

Alex Ross is an amazing illustrator, having drawn Superman, Batman, X-Men, Captain Marvel, Spawn, and many more. Check out his great sense of perspective and proportion. He still does it the old-fashioned way, with pencils, pen and ink, paint, and air brush. (His mother and mine were classmates at the American Academy of Art in Chicago.)

Chic Today publishes a new issue entitled “The Enchanted World of James Jean”. We’ve featured James Jean at Scene 360 some years ago. He always has beautiful work! It is just amazing his consistent style and imagination.

Landscape photography by Johan Rydberg.

26 days left for you to enter our Rita Redshoes CD Give-Away. All you have to do is sign up with your name, email and address. The winner will be selected at random, two winners will receive autographed CD of “Golden Era”.

Musician Santogold is offering a free MP3 of the song “Your Voice”. Her music style is a fusion of new wave, dub, and psychobilly. Rolling Stone magazine stated a year ago that she is “Artist to Watch: Santogold”.

We recently featured illustrator/writer Josef Lee, he published a new story yesterday entitled “The Adventures of Yutaro“. Check it out.

Not only is Stuart Kolakovic’s artwork fantastically wonderful and whimsical, but the click and drag design of Never Been makes the story of a year in the life of a fictional village all the more tangible and tactile.

Knocking On Bricks is a project that includes artwork by 18 international artists–they sent out absurd proposals to well-known people and institutions. The kick is that these proposals would never get a chance, they were rejected on the get-go.

The Chopping Block has launched Chop Shop. They have a lot of nerdy tees with robots and aliens, and of course other goodies.

Singer David Fonseca launches a new video today, “Kiss me, Oh Kiss me“. Photography by Paulo Segadaes, post-production by Filipe Monteiro, and film direction by the singer himself.

Illustrations by Martha Rich.

I stumbled upon The Art of the Title Sequence, a blog about title sequences (you know, the introductory visuals where the names of the main actors, directors and producers are scrolled before the actual film, often setting the mood for the rest of the film). Many of my favorite opening sequences had been profiled here, as well as the designers who’d created them. A great resource.

For literary fanatics, admit2 launches a new issue today.

Mother Like No Other is an animated video created by Yves Geleyn, and music by The Bird and the Bee. I received and viewed the behind-the-scenes footage last week, and now the full film is launched for Mother’s day. It is pretty interesting to see textures used into character design.

Most paintings by Aaron Robinson have a crisp, hyper-realist look. They are beautiful close ups of people.

360 Update: An in-depth talk with Lucile Hadzihalilovic, the director of acclaimed film “Innocence” (2004); a story about an all-girls boarding school deep within the heart of a forest where pupils arrive in coffins.

New entries at The Art of Interpretion: Whistler’s Mother by James Whistler (1871) and Write To Congress by Vika Prokopaviciute (2007).

Read Best Interpretations: Go Ask Alice and Rolla.

360 Update - Five Video Selections:

• “Lip Dub” - Need You Tonight by INXS
• “Promises” by Badly Drawn Boy
• “136” by MIDival Punditz
• “One Day” by Remyyy
• ““Heart-Shaped Glasses” by Marilyn Manson

A special thanks to Mediatemple and Mailchimp, each providing us with love and care services. MT is our sponsor web host, already four years powering our editorial living space, and we haven’t seen a glitch on the server. They’re always prompt to reply to server/account questions, and last year we moved to the grid server and their system was so amazing that it saved all files and transferred for us.

Mailchimp, we’re totally stoked with the idea of using a third party service for newsletters. For years we’ve used our own custom coded setup, and although it was great and worked… as time moved on, the Web became more demanding with security. Spam and viruses have totally trashed some setups, and before that happened we decided to upgrade our newsletter system. We wanted to leave the security to people who work 24/7 on newsletter systems, and they do just that. We also love the friendly chimp that hangs around their site.

Came across this blog today, Karin Jurick’s A Painting Today. I love the series of paintings from museums, the strokes and colors are beautiful enough, but I like them all the more for their layered content — studying people studying works art.

The South By Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference & Festival announces “the call for entries for its 5th annual SXSWclick festival—a summertime, digital shorts event. Winners in each of the five categories will automatically be invited to screen at the next SXSW Film Festival, scheduled for March 13-21, 2009 in Austin, TX.”

Dreams In Colour by David Fonseca, this video is a remake created by Hugo Ferreira. Based on what I read, he sent the video the singer and it was featured in Fonseca’s blog. The illustrator states “It took me 2 weekends of social life. Like a monster closed in a dark room. Well there’s not much to say. Over 2000 photos were taken during this little and yet troublemaker stop-motion.”