On blogs and homepages animators and designers from all corners of the globe are touting the latest release of Pictoplasma Publishing, The Character Encyclopaedia. Announcing “a new era of global character appeal,” the leather-bound, 396-page tome is a veritable universe of sympathetic monsters, suspiciously innocent-looking wide-eyed kids, sexy heroines, fuzzy friends, beefy robots and an uncountable array of other unique personalities. The first encyclopedia of figurative design ever, the volume is much more than a reference work. For those in the business of following the trends of anthropomorphic image-making, the book is an exhaustive overview of global developments among a culturally and geographically diverse selection of over 250 artists, including Gary Baseman, Tim Biskup, Shoboshobo, eBoy, Doma and Friends with You. For the uninitiated, it is a world of independent life forms waiting to be discovered.
For those who don’t know the name Pictoplasma, the Berlin-based initiative of Peter Thaler and Lars Denicke has been a major force in promoting character design—at least since its first wildly successful conference in 2004. This fall the boys were at it again with a second conference dedicated to characters gone live, i.e. costumes and performance. Their dedication to characters goes far beyond purely commercial contexts. The drive behind Pictoplasma’s ambitious program of publications, animation festivals and events is rooted in the conviction that characters are “a true core stimulus of today’s visual world”—a universal language that transcends cultural boundaries. While Pictoplasma certainly does have a knack for uniting normally disparate scenes from street art to design, sculpture, costume design, painting and animation, above all it has a talent for bringing together the best. The Character Encyclopaedia is a richly populated seedbed of ideas and inspiration—a handbook of the strange and wonderful for those lucky enough to crack its pages.
INMYX tip:
Take a look at the online image archive from the Pictoplasma Conference 2006 to get a glimpse of some of character design’s most beloved creatures in the flesh.
Link:
http://www.pictoplasma.com
Touch and Be Touched: Pictoplasma’s Character Ride
