How to Unleash Your Inner Cartoonist

We all draw as kids, yet most of us stop drawing somewhere around the fourth or fifth grade. Doodles seem unserious by then, and adulthood only makes us less likely to draw. Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice might be the way to rediscover, if not your “inner child,” perhaps your “inner cartoonist.” “This ‘classroom in a book,’” Brunetti (shown above) explains, “provides the aspiring cartoonist with a practical means for creative self-discovery and the exploration of complex ideas through the iconic visual language of comics.” Cartooning may be the medium, but self-discovery and self-exploration is the message. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How to Unleash Your Inner Cartoonist."

[Image: Ivan Brunetti (author photo featuring miniature desk). Photo credit: Kurt Lauer Photography.]

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with the image above and a review copy of Ivan Brunetti’s Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice.]

How Picasso and Braque Play Games With Your Eyes, and Now Your iPad

Georges Braque once said that he and Pablo Picasso were “roped together like mountain climbers” during the formative years of Cubism—1910 through 1912. Picasso and Braque scaled the mountain of Western art tradition and then turned the mountain upside down through their artistic gamesmanship that took every aspect of what we knew of art up to then and made it look like child’s play. Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912, which runs at the Kimbell Art Museum through August 21, 2011, studies the aesthetic chess match the two artists played in tandem for those two years and allows viewers today to play and experiment along on their iPads. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Picasso and Braque Play Games With Your Eyes, and Now Your iPad."

[Image: Screen shot from the iCubist app for the iPad designed and produced by Reza Ali for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum.]

[Many thanks to the Kimbell Art Museum for providing me with the image above and a review copy of the catalog to Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910–1912, which runs through August 21, 2011.]