Discover Top Posts Tagged with #animated artwork

Olivia When: (Animation) Dog Thief

Olivia When is obsessed with dogs. Olivia is also from the South and went to school at the Maryland Institute College of Arts. She is an accomplished illustrator and animator with a long list of high profile clients and is currently making Google Doodles for a living. She is also obsessed with dogs. Did I say that already? Her adorably animated gifs capture that feeling many people get when encountering a super cute dog: They just want to have it. I don’t THINK she has ever actually stolen a dog, but she certainly has thought about it, and animated it, a lot. And in an adorably illustrated and cleverly animated way.

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Posted by David

#art #animated artwork #olivia when #google doodle #gif art #david-koblesky #Cross Connect Mag

Bill Tavis: One of the originals

For some reason Bill Tavis never made it onto my radar despite being one of what I would call one of the original gif artists. He has made over 500 since 2010 and if you look at art on the internet for about 15 minutes you will probably see one of his trippy fractal gifs. I recently posted some of his new gifs on Cross Connect (his 3rd time being featured there) and he generously answered my questions and had especially thoughtful responses about gifs as art.

Where are you located? Where are you from?

I'm currently living in Austin, TX and grew up in Albuquerque, NM and moved around a few places in between

Do you have formal art training of any sort?

I got a Bachelor's Degree in Animation, and I have taken other classes in painting and programming. A lot of what I do is self-taught though. Also, I believe that you can learn techniques from others but that's only half of the puzzle. The other half is the inspiration and expression and those are things that just have to be felt.

What do you do for a living?

I self-publish fractal posters (www.mandelmap.com), I paint murals, and I sell fine art prints and do commissions

When did you start making gifs, and why?

I first started doing my halftone style back in 2005. It was all done by hand with ink on paper. Someone mentioned that it looked like a computer filter and so I thought I should actually make a filter, even though I didn't know how at the time, and I didn't think of animating it yet. At some point I saw a GIF of moving black and white lines, and I thought "what if those lines were changing thickness as well?" When I finally knew enough programming, right away I designed my halftone software to make looping animations, even though halftones are usually supposed to be for printing purposes. I didn't care because I was obsessed with the way the moving lines looked. I made my first halftone GIFs in 2010 but I didn't know where to upload them in that form, and so I converted them to video to share online. I also only made a few because my code was clunky and naive. In 2013 I improved my halftone software to the point where I could finally get really creative with it, and I also found Tumblr which seemed to be a great place for GIFs. Once I started it was like a faucet was opened, and I have made and uploaded more than 500 by this point.

What keeps you coming back?

I feel like this is my purpose and I think I have some interesting things to say, so I want to take an active part in culture and that requires constant work. My GIF output has slowed down in the last year but I haven't gone away, I'm just exploring new avenues of halftone expression! And there's now a backlog of GIFs wanting to get out of my brain so you can count on seeing more at some point!

What do you think about gifs as an Art Form?

GIFs are perfectly suited for looping animations, and I think loops are very artistic in nature because they don't have a beginning or an end. It's an infinitely suspended moving moment, rather than a finite linear progression like a movie. The lack of sound contributes to this quality. Also, GIF compression relies upon a limited color palette, so it is the perfect format for my halftone style because I am breaking things down into lines of just a few colors. GIFs are also cool because they are actually image files, not video. For those three reasons, I think the GIF format will continue to be relevant, and it has unique aesthetic characteristics that I've never seen in another medium.

Are you making money on your gif artwork?

I have had a couple commissions, but for the most part I haven't made money directly from my GIFs. It's so ephemeral that it's hard to monetize, and making money with the GIFs has never been my focus anyways, I always just wanted to put them all out there for free. I have paid my way with commercial art for a long time, so I saw just how much money can influence expression, and I wanted my halftone work to not have that influence. However I'm not against making money from it and I do make other things with my art that people can buy if they want to support me. Since my style is based on halftones, I have been able to turn some of my work into screenprints, as well as nicer engraved pieces, that you can find on my website https://billtavis.com