Tag Archives: art

An Immersion Course in the Language of Images

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A lot can happen inside a series of squares. An Oscar-winning actor might meet a basketball star, or your favorite song might intersect with the punny punchline of a joke. Gimmicky grid construction might reveal hidden gems! Gotham might be saved from the Riddler’s clutches! Calvin and Hobbes might sculpt an army of gruesome snowmen! Krazy Kat might introduce newspaper readers to gender fluidity! You might discover new facets of your own artistic voice!

There’s a good chance you already fill in creative arrangements of squares on a regular basis, enriching your brain’s language centers by solving crosswords. Why not take this ritual a step further? Lynda Barry’s Making Comics begins with the reminder, “There was a time when drawing and writing were not separated for you,” and she shows us that it is possible to return to such a time. By partaking in the book’s exercises, you can learn to reunite images and language in your mind, to “practice the language of the image world.”

If you feel like your language centers need a good jolt, comic-making might be a perfect new hobby, and Making Comics is the perfect introductory text for puzzle fans. As Barry explains, the book’s exercises “take advantage of a basic human inclination to find patterns and meaning in random information,” and who loves patterns more than puzzlers? For instance, one simple exercise she says that anyone can do is drawing a scribble and then figuring out how to turn it into a monster. It’s that simple.

Your blogger with the book in question.

Many of the pattern-finding exercises in Making Comics’ treasure trove are collaborative, depending on a classroom setting or simply a creative partnership among friends. Others, however, can be done in solitude, including the exercises I’m going to take you through below. To prepare: Barry recommends, when just starting out, working with black Flair pens, a composition notebook (preferably not made from recycled materials), index cards (blank on one side), and basic 8.5×11 printer paper. She describes the composition notebook as “a place rather than a thing,” and says that you should try to keep it by your side like a faithful dog. “Making comics involves the same daily practice that learning any language does,” so keeping your materials handy is crucial.

Do you have your materials? Great! Let’s dive into the Animal Diary and consequent Animal Ad Lib, instructions pictured below!

More of Barry’s comics wisdom can be found on her Tumblr and Instagram, or of course, if you’re hooked, you can always pick up a copy of the book. It’s a full immersion course in a new language, in a new way of seeing.

For more fun, daily forays into the world of language, there’s Daily POP!

You can find delightful deals on puzzles on the Home Screen for Daily POP Crosswords and Daily POP Word Search. Check them out!

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Paint By Number Sleuth: A Puzzly Hashtag Game!

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You may be familiar with the board game Schmovie or hashtag games on Twitter.

For years now, we’ve been collaborating on puzzle-themed hashtag games with our pals at Penny Dell Puzzles, and this month’s hook was #PennyDellPuzzleArt. Today’s entries all mash up Penny Dell puzzles with artists, famous pieces, techniques, styles, and more from the world of art!

Examples include: The First and Last Supper, O’Keeffeword, and Rows Avant-Garden.

So, without further ado, check out what the puzzlers at PuzzleNation and Penny Dell Puzzles came up with!

Puzzly Artists!

Vincent On-The-Van Gogh Word Seek

Christo Crosswords

Three-Toulouse-One

Paul Cezanneagrams

Picassudoku

Michel(Try-Angle)o

Eugene DelaCrostic

Henri Word-a-Matisse

Camille PissarRows Garden

Paul Klee-from-nine

Anagram Magritte Squares

Eileen Gray That Again

Paul GaugIn the Middle

Marc ChagAll Fours

Grand Tour Moses

Elizabeth Catlettgories

Thomas EakInsert-a-Word

Piet Mondriagain

Liubov Sergeievna Popoverlay

Alfred StieglIts Your Move

Frank Lloyd Right Angles

Man SunRays

Man Raylroad Ties

CrackerJackson Pollock

Joan Miro Image

Johannes Vermeer-or Image

Wassily KenKendinsky

Louise Burgeois Tiles

“Here I sit so broken hearted…”

You can Fill-In the rest!

#Fitting Description

Famous Puzzly Art Pieces, Styles, and Terminology!

“Still Life with Apples and Pairs in Rhyme” (Paul Cezanne)

“The Two (for One) Fridas” (Frida Kahlo)

Pen and In(k) the Middle

Crisscrosshatch

DADArtboard

RocoCodebreaker

Around the Baroque

Letter DrOP Art

Have you come up with any Penny Dell Puzzle Art entries of your own? Let us know! We’d love to see them!

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Making a Profit Through Puzzly Vandalism!

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[Image courtesy of Thoibao.today.]

Hey there, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers. Do you remember that post I did a month or two ago about the woman who defaced a piece of crossword-inspired art?

If you don’t recall, a 91-year-old woman was visiting the Neues Museum in Nuremberg with a senior citizens group when she found the piece, “Reading-work-piece” by artist Arthur Koepcke, and began filling in the empty grid, mistakenly thinking it was an interactive art work.

The museum was none too pleased with her efforts, and restored the piece to its original condition.

But as it turns out, that’s not the end of the story.

You see, the woman claims — in a seven-page rebuttal to the German police’s investigation of her vandalism — that she has not harmed the work, instead arguing that she has brought the work greater public attention thanks to her efforts, reinvigorating interest in the piece and increasing its value.

[Image courtesy of Bill Watterson.]

Amazingly, that is not all. According to Ars Technica UK:

Frau K.’s lawyer claimed that her additions meant that she now held the copyright of the combined artwork — and that, in theory, the private collector might sue the museum for destroying that new collaboration by restoring it to its original state.

Yes, they assert that the private collector who loaned the Koepcke work to the Neues Museum might not only approve of her defacement of the piece, but be angry with the museum for their efforts to ensure that the piece was returned to him in the same condition.

Well, that’s certainly doubling down on your hand. It takes a certain confidence and bombast to make a claim like that, but the woman believes she’s in the right artistically.

The argument is based around the spirit of Koepcke’s work, which was part of the Fluxus movement. They go on to explain that “Fluxus artists did not agree with the authority of museums to determine the value of art, nor did they believe that one must be educated to view and understand a piece of art.”

It will certainly be interesting to see where the case goes from here. Naturally, I can’t help but wonder. Heck, if Da Vinci had been a Fluxus devotee. I could’ve drawn a mustache on the Mona Lisa and made millions.

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A logic puzzle with an artistic twist!

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Puzzles are truly a worldwide phenomenon. So many different cultures and groups have created fantastic, long-lasting puzzle styles that continue to resonate across decades and even centuries.

In the past I’ve endeavored to make PuzzleNation Blog a bit more PuzzleInternational by sharing overseas puzzle flavors from German and Spanish puzzle books that’ve been passed to me by fellow puzzlers.

And I’m so excited that another friend of the blog has shared an absolute treasure trove of international puzzle books with me, ensuring that our puzzly world tour will continue!

So today, instead of examining a single puzzle book and getting a glimpse into a particular culture’s brand of puzzles, I’ve picked a particular type of puzzle and we’ll be exploring magazines from several different countries dedicated to that puzzle!

Let’s take a global look at Logic Art!

Logic Art puzzles (also known as Pixel Puzzles, Pic-a-Pix, Illust-Logic, Griddlers, Hanjie, and Picture Puzzles) are a wonderfully artistic take on deduction-style logic puzzles.

Essentially, you’re given an empty grid with numbers along the top and left-hand side. These numbers indicate black squares to color in and white squares to leave alone. By deducing where to place the black squares and white squares, a pixelated picture will emerge!

(For more complete rules and solving tips, check out this helpful guide from our friends at Penny/Dell Puzzles.)

So, the difficulty of the solve and creativity of the solution image are only limited by the puzzle constructor’s imagination and your own puzzle savvy.

Some magazines, like these German puzzle books, stick to the simple black square/white square mechanic…

… while others, like this Cyrillic magazine with several colors and this Hungarian magazine with splashes of red, encourage greater use of color in your Logic Artwork.

These smaller, digest-sized Cyrillic magazines offer multiple grids per page with simpler solution images.

But look at the level of detail some of the larger grids offer!

I must admit, though, I’m partial to these Japanese puzzle books, if only for this particular solution image:

Logic Art is obviously a puzzle with global appeal. Although not as universal as Sudoku (or as intuitively easy to solve), it clearly strikes a chord with solvers across the world.

It’s always a treat to explore puzzles from another culture’s perspective. Thanks for taking this journey with me today.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out the growing library of PuzzleNation apps and games!

It’s Follow-Up Friday: ABCs and Butterflies edition!

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Welcome to Follow-Up Friday!

For those new to PuzzleNation Blog, Follow-Up Friday is a chance for us to revisit the subjects of previous posts and update the PuzzleNation audience on how these projects are doing and what these people have been up to in the meantime.

And today I’d like to talk about patterns.

One of the key puzzly skills a solver should have is an ability to spot patterns. Whether it’s determining a pattern in a series of numbers or spotting irregularities in a pattern that are significant, this level of observation serves puzzlers well in all kinds of solving experiences, from word searches to Match-Up-style art puzzles.

The innate human ability to find patterns in nature has led to numerous scientific discoveries over the years, but it has also led to some wonderful artistic and visual discoveries as well. From shells that adhere to a Fibonacci sequence to patterns in flower petals, patterns (and our ability to uncover them) are everywhere.

Artist and photographer Kjell Bloch Sandved has applied his puzzly attention to detail to photographing moths and butterflies, and he’s developed his own patterns: alphabets hidden in wings.

These patterns come from dozens of different photos, and Sandved has not only created several butterfly alphabets, but he sells custom prints spelling out names and messages in butterfly letters.

Once again, puzzly skills reveal not just brilliance, but beauty in the world as well.

Thanks for visiting PuzzleNation Blog today! You can share your pictures with us on Instagram, friend us on Facebook, check us out on Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and be sure to check out our library of PuzzleNation apps and games!