Have you visited Utah? I have never been there but after watching their adverting (see below) I am very interested and would love to go there one day. Through researching I learned that tourism is a major industry in Utha with year-round outdoor recreational activities and many other attractions. Having five national parks, Utah has the third most national parks in any states after Alaska and California. There are also seven national monuments, two national recreation areas, six national forests, and various state parks and monuments.

The attractions I would like to go and see are Mount Timponogos,  La Sal Mountains and Monument Valley. For now I can only share with you about those places with the research materials.

Mount Timpanogos is one of Utah’s most popular hiking and climbing destinations and is climbed year round. It should be noted, however, that the mountain in winter requires advanced mountaineering ability. In  spring, undercutting of deeply-drifted snow by streams creates a hazard that has proven fatal on more than one occasion. Climbers can fall through the undermined snow fifty feet or more into the icy stream underneath.

Mount Timpanogos resembles the profile of a sleeping woman. Various legends are told of an Indian maiden who died of grief after her lover was killed, with one version the basis for a ballet, but there is no evidence that any of these are actual Native American myths. It is most likely the romantic story was created in the early 1900s by Eugene Lusk Roberts, a Mormon resident who initiated an annual hike and pageant intended to “sell Timpanogos to the world.”

The La Sal Mountains are Utah’s second highest mountain range. They rise impressively above the red rock canyon country of southeastern Utah. Covered with thick aspen and fir forests and dotted with mountain lakes, the La Sals are a cool oasis within the often difficult environment of the surrounding desert. Numerous trails in the La Sals provide good hiking, biking and horseback riding routes from late spring to mid-autumn. In winter, the same trails are put to use by cross-country skiers and snowmobilers. The beauty of the La Sals can also be enjoyed by simply driving along the La Sal Mountain Scenic Route.

The Monument Valley in Utah is considered by many as one of the natural wonders of the world. The beauty of the enormous monuments of stone make this vaste landscape a favorite destination for tourism. The landscape overwhelms, not just by its beauty but also by its size. The fragile pinnacles of rock are surrounded by miles of mesas and buttes, shrubs, trees and windblown sand, all comprising the magnificent colors of the valley. All of this harmoniously combines to make Monument Valley a truly wondrous experience. This land belongs to the Navajo Indians and their park has been open to tourists for age. Probably because of the many western movies that have been filmed in the Monument Valley.

Utah, where what’s next is completely up to you…

To promote it’s Creative Suite 4 software package, Adobe generously funded the making of ‘The Seed’, a well crafted short stop motion animation directed by Johnny Kelly from London, England in the UK. The Seed is about the tribulations of a humble apple seed. The two minutes animated movie will take us along the journey of an apple seed through its natural life cycle. The stop motion animation was made using a mixture of stop motion papercraft and 2D drawn animation. Brilliant work!

Of course after watching the short movie, we all would wonder and ask: How did they do that? The answers are in the video below with a collection of video clips, storyboards and images taken during the making of the short animated movie.

Kevin’s next challenging project was to  sculpt the Chinese Imperial Water Dragon. For almost 2 yrs, Keven has been working hard 7 days a week and has just completed the final touches on what he feels will be one of the greatest stainless steel sculptures to ever be unveiled anywhere in the world! As quoted “Kevin has produced exquisite world class sculpture with unsurpassed details and on a scale and size of incredible proportions, weighing 6000 lbs and standing 12 ft high, 14 ft wide, 35 ft long with 2 large coils in the body. Stretched out Kevin’s sculpture would be over 85 ft long!”

The Open House and public unveiling of the “Water Dragon” is on Saturday April 25th at 2pm at Metalanimation Studio Inc. 8501 Upper Prairie Road. Map available on contacts page at metalanimation.com.

In Chinese mythology there are five types of dragon:

1. Those guarding the gods and emperors
2. Those controlling the wind and rain
3. Earthly dragons which deepened the rivers and seas
4. Guardians of hidden treasure
5. The first dragon

The First dragon appeared to the mythical emperor Fu-hsi, and filled the hole in the sky made by the monster Kung Kung. Its waking, sleeping and breathing determined day and night. Season and weather.
There are many differences between the classical dragon and the Chinese dragon, these include the ability to fly even without wings, shape-shifting abilities, and of course the general benevolent behaviour to the populace.
The Chinese dragon is made up of nine entities. The head of camel, the eyes of a demon, the ears of a cow, the horns of a stag, the neck & body of a snake, It’s claws that of an eagle, while the soles of his feet are that of a tiger, and the scales that cover it’s body are that of a carp.
The Chinese dragon has four claws as standard, but the Imperial dragon has five, this is to identify it above the lesser classes. Anyone other than the emperor using the 5 claw motif was put to death.

The Chinese dragon (Lung) was a divine bringer of rain, necessary for the good of the people. Throughout Chinese history the dragon has been equated with weather. It is said that some of the worst floodings were caused when a mortal has upset a dragon. The dragon was also a symbol of the emperor whose wisdom and divine power assured the well-being of his subjects. Many legends draw connections between the dragon and the emperor. Some emperors claimed to have descended from the dragon.
Chinese dragons of myth could make themselves as large as the universe or as small as a silkworm. They could also change color and disappear in a flash. They rise to the skies in the spring and plunge into the waters in the autumn.
Ancient China Dragon occupies a very important position in Chinese mythology. It shows up in arts, literature, poetry, architecture, songs, and many aspects of the Chinese conscience. The origin of Chinese dragons is unknown, but certainly pre-dates the written history.

Ryan’s  goal is to improve his drawing skills as he complete his videos. Most of his drawings were unpolished and incomplete before he started videoing himself.  The drawing of Albert Einstein took him about an hour to do. Very impressive!

You can see more of his work on Youtube.

Nikon used this strategy to announce the COOLPIX S60 with their new improved Face-priority Auto Focus which can detect up to 12 faces anywhere and in any environment. The Nikon COOLPIX S60 is an advanced and stylish 10-megapixel compact digital camera. The S60 has the same touch screen feature as the iPhone and iPod Touch allowing users to scroll through images, zoom, and move within an image with a swipe or tap of the fingers. The camera also offers advanced features such as Scene Auto Selector, enhanced Face Recognition, Smile Timer with blink detection, time-lapse movies, in-camera retouch and HDMi output. The 10 effective megapixels offer high-resolution and high-quality images while the use of Nikon’s exclusive EXPEED image-processing system (originally designed for its award-winning professional D-SLRs) ensures the data obtained from the image sensor are processed at high speed and with the greatest precision. Mark Pekelharing, Product Manager at Nikon Europe commented: “The COOLPIX S60 is the perfect marriage between technology and style. Nikon has introduced a host of features to make this camera easy to use and packed it with superb innovations derived from our professional D-SLR line for optimal imaging. We are confident that the numerous colour options will appeal to those looking for the combination of quality and good looks in a single package.”

Nikon’s advertising campaign, managed by Euro RSCG Singapore, focused on the camera’s main feature, Face-priority Auto Focus , with three posters below showing various entertaining ways of getting the face detection point across. What a fun and creative execution in each poster! Let’s see if our two eyes can detect faces faster than the COOLPIX S60!

Who created all these sketches and where do they come from? The answer is simple, they all come from SketchSwap.com which is an amusing and addictive online drawing tool. It is a flash based site. There are no complex tools to draw or sketch. All you get is a simple, marginally thick brown color sketch pen like thingy. Just like  as if you we drawing something normally with a pencil or a paintbrush. No coloring or anything else can be done.

When you complete the drawing, you click on “Submit Drawing”. Now your drawing is swapped for another drawing by somebody else. Not only that, you get to see exactly how the other user came up with the drawing; the way all the lines were drawn, how it started and how it arrived to the end product. It is something like a video capture of the drawing in action by the person. The same applies to your drawing as well.

Philipp Lenssen said, “Today we open our new site which features over 250,000 drawings for sharing, remixing and more! You can also embed an animation of every image as it’s being drawn. The Creative Commons license also includes certain forms of commercial sharing, e.g. if you’d want to sell a book with cartoons from Sketchory (for up to 1000 sketches). Also, we hope that everyone can help tagging the pictures so that the exploration features and search will improve over time.”

Below are some of the sketches which I liked, thus selected to share with everyone. If you like to see more, then check out their website.

Another thing I like about the artists is that they love to share their work with others. Just ask and they will more than happy to talk about their work. This is exactly what I did with Ricardo Fernandes, a sculptor from Sao Paulo, Brazil. His Predator sculpture has attracted much of my attention. Before going into the details about the Predator, I would like to give a quick intro about Ricardo. He is known by his students and clients as Rick Fernandes. Rick is a freelance sculptor focusing on the creation of characters like the Predator below from the movie Predator featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger. At one point in his career he was assisting one of the great art teachers in Brazil, Alex Oliver. Rick has been working with sculptures and traditional drawings for seven years and recently as a professional for the last three years. He is currently teaching character creation at Meslies,  school of 3D cinema and animation. His  students must be  very proud to have such  a talented teacher! He consider himself as an autodidact (a self-taught person) being educated in a non-traditionally ways most of  the time. Being humble he doesn’t consider himself as a prowess. Rick enjoy studying  the work of many inspirational artists  like  Rick Baker, Stan Winston, Ray Harryhausen, Dick Smith, Alex Oliver, Miles Teves, Carlos Huante, Alan Lee, John Howe and many other artists.

Rick’s Predator sculpture which you can see the detailed pictures below took him 26 hours to sculpt, divided in 5 days. The sculpture was inspired by the Predator movie. In the movie, the Predator is an alien humanoid with advanced technology and a penchant for hunting difficult preys. The creature descends on Earth interested in hunting exotic species, the humans. The sculpture is in a 1:4 scale and it was used as a study for a 1:1 scale piece. Materials used for this sculpture was plastilin, a non hardening material. Some wire tools and dentist tweezers were also used to design the fine details of the sculpture. For the finishing touch, water and solvent were used. This work is being dedicated to Rick’s wife who gave him the motivation and strength to complete the project.

Thank you Rick for sharing and keep up the good creative work!

Prepare to be amazed as you walk toward the Mode-Gakuen school located in Nagoya City, Japan. The  stunning green building named the Mode-Gakuen Spiral Towers  is located in the busiest Main Street of the city. Its spiral towers are designed for three schools; Nagoya Mode Gakuen, HAL Nagoya and Nagoya Isen representing the school of fashion design, computer programming and medical support. The concept of the towers are derived from the enthusiasm of students from the three schools, twining and rising up to the sky then departing to the real world.

The Mode-Gakuen Spiral Towers was designed by architectural group Nikken Sekkei and built by Mitsui Real Estate. Opened in March 26th, 2008 the building have 36 stories and measure 170 meter tall. The three buildings of class rooms around the spiral core are called “Wings”. You will be able to see  it’s organic curve as the towers rises and changes the rotation axis.  When viewed from different angles, the Spiral Towers appears to change shape slightly giving an elegant yet dynamic impression. The strong inner truss tube is visible through gaps between the three wings, highlighting the bold design and structure while demonstrating the overall consistency.

Keeping the environment in mind, the towers were build with many ecological features, such as a double-glassed air flow window system and a natural air ventilation system. And of course, safety factor is a must in any architectural building in Japan. That’s why the central core of the building is a highly rigid cylindrical structure. Like the central pillar in a house, this structure securely protects the building against twisting and earthquakes. This is wonderful when we know that the Japanese archipelago is located in an area where several continental and oceanic plates meet causing frequent earthquakes and hydrothermal activities such as volcanoes and hot springs.

Don’t you wish you could attend this school and eat sushi every day?

Aside from the U.S, the game was broadcast all around the world. An international feed featured Bob Papa and Sterling Sharpe was seen in 230 countries (including Antarctica) over 61 networks and 34 languages. ESPN Latin America also broadcasted across Latin America. Well hope you all have enjoyed watching the collection of Super Bowl XLIII commercials.

The weak economy didn’t stop some companies from spending ‘ big’ on advertising this year at the Super Bowl XLIII game. SoBe and DreamWorks Animation aired a 3-D trailer for the upcoming film Monsters vs. Aliens, along with a 3-D ad for Sobe Life Water. To make their ad campaign more effective, they also gave away about 150 million “ColorCode 3-D” glasses at grocery stores across the country for the ad. With the Big Three US automakers passed up on buying air time, Hyundai took advantage of the opportunity to advertise their new Genesis Coupe in two 30-second commercials.

YouTube’s top five in “Ad Blitz 2009″ saw the two Doritos ads finish first and fifth. The middle three featured E*Trade’s Singing Baby ad, CareerBuilder.com’s “The Official 2009 Super Bowl Commercial” and Pepsi Max’s “I’m Good” finish second through fourth respectively. Now sit back, relax and enjoy the Part III of the Super Bowl XLIII commercials.

Step 2: Now go to the Layers tab, then right click on the picture layer and choose Duplicate Layer…

Step 3: On the duplicated layer of the picture, set the layer mode to “Screen”.

Step 4: There are so many ways to make your picture brighter, but this is one of the easiest way. Look at the result …much brighter!

But that doesn’t stop other companies from taking the opportunity to promote their products. Check out their commercials below.

A side from the the exciting actions from the game, of course there must also be the highly budgeted TV commercials (in the millions) for just a 30-second air time. If you have missed all the commercials or just want to see it again, then you are in the right place. I have compiled a collection of almost all the commercials (with the exception of two which is only allowed for viewing in the US) in a five-part series which will get published daily this week for your enjoyment. So stay tuned for the next four parts…to be continued.

By the way the song that is playing is in French which translated to English entitled “Ensemble” by Coeur de Pirate. Indeed a great piece of precious moments ensemble!