Programs like Sketchup have allowed amateur artists and architects to sculpt and design in three dimensions for years, but this app facilitates far more informal works that really look like sketches in 3D.

Mental Canvas is part of a suite of software for Microsoft Surface that takes more conventional sketched forms and allows users to navigate and expand them in three-dimensional space, retaining the character of rough drawings.

The infinite-depth approach of this digital canvas software lets users zoom in and rotate their view, adding layers along the way and inspecting their work from various angles. The effect is remarkable as these illustrations show.

From its creators: CAD modelling “comes at a cost. The cost is that one, you have to have a fully resolved three-dimensional model, even if it’s just a cube; second it’s very hard to edit a CAD model, it’s not fast and fluid like a sketch. At any given moment when you’re sketching, the designer or artist has full control over everything in that representation, but with a CAD model, that’s defined by the computer.”

This clever approach liberates an artist from the ordinary constraints of a physical page or even a drawing tablet, letting them shape worlds that maintain the character of a sketch but can be used to tell and frame stories in new ways.

As with programs like Sketchup, a bookmarking tool allows users to save and store various views then retrace their steps, creating potential for 3D storytelling. It also lets a user pick the perfect shot, navigating three-dimensional space to select an ideal perspective. A dynamic dial tool, meanwhile, lets the artist rotate between colors and line qualities without backing out of the drawing.

As any good architect knows, an unfinished-looking drawing can be an asset: “A sketch has a quality when it’s unfinished; there’s so much possibility, there’s so much room for interpretation, and [Mental Canvas] expands the idea of a sketch. It makes it less flat. In architecture you always want that “Wow” design that gets everyone excited in the room, and [Mental Canvas] enhances it.”

One can see a lot of similarities here between Mental Canvas and tools being developed for augmented and virtual reality platforms. In a way, this program closes the gap, allowing users with more ordinary tools, devices and interfaces to accomplish something wonderful in 3D space.

Scribbled sketches seem to leap off the page and hover in mid-air, filling out in three dimensions, in this impressive series of sculptures made from bent wire. Artist David Oliveira captures the essence of his subjects, whether they’re people or mountain lions, by studying their anatomy and translating their sense of vitality and movement into minimalist life-sized forms.

Oliveira sees his works as existing on some other plane, like an abstracted echo of the physical bodies that exist in our reality. Twisting, looping and curving black wires, he sketches in air, and the resulting sculptures look as if they’ve been peeled off a piece of paper, enlarged and skewed like skeletons that were hidden inside each subject all along.

As viewers, we look at these gestural impressions of living creatures and our minds fill in the blanks, suggesting to us what the real-life subjects must have looked like, how they must have moved. The sculptures are particularly effective when they’re hung from the ceiling in transparent thread, seeming to float.

Using a handheld stylus and tablet set combined with an existing augmented reality headset, this invention allows users to sketch in three dimensions and see the results of their work unfold in realtime.

Created by a group of students from the Royal College of Art, the interface is made to be as intuitive as a sketchpad or 2D drawing tablet – anyone should be able to pick it up and simply start doodling. It can be connected to various visualization devices, including the virtual reality simulator Oculcus Rift.

Per Dezeen, “As the user draws above the clear acrylic sketchpad, radio signals are used to track the movements of the stylus from coordinates on the pad. These are sent to an Arduino board – an open source prototyping device containing a micro controller – which is contained in a black panel that forms one edge of the pad.”

A combination of gestures and buttons allows users to tilt their drawings to work on them from various angles and shift the planes being worked on as well. Critically, though, the basic tool set is familiar in its function and thus user-friendly – a pad and pen, essentially, with expanded functionality.

A great deal of physical modeling and prototyping went into the design of the device including physical stands that allowed Gravity’s creators to simulate the kinds of conditions they sought to replicate in digital space. In turn, the three-dimensional drawings created via the device can be input into 3D printers, completing the circuit.

Abstract art developed around the turn of the last century as cameras began to take painting and illustration’s place as the primary means of portraiture. But just because technology and the art world had moved beyond portraits doesn’t mean people stopped drawing realistic pictures of each other. The art of realistic portraits is alive and well today and is represented here with a selection of wonderful artists.

Sketches

(image via: Keturah Bobo)

(image via: David Yoon)

(image via: Keturah Bobo)

(image via: Sam Kwon)

(image via: Andy Leung)

(image via: Kieran Harris)

(image via: Ashley Hicks)

(image via: Raul Esparza)

From high school art classes to street art fairs to a police precinct, sketching portraits is a widely practiced art form. There’s a reason for that (outside of, in the case of the police, they need to catch a criminal): there’s something incredibly thrilling about an artist setting a single instrument, be it a pen or pencil, to paper and whipping up, with just his or her hands, an incredibly realistic depiction of what they see.

Paintings

(images via Salena B.)

(image via: Saya)

(images via: Talisa Almonte)

(images via: David Jackson)

(image via: Michael Jocelyn)

(images via: Salena B.)

Painting portraits takes much more time, skill and patience than sketching. While not as visceral an art form in the DOING, colorful depictions of people strike an emotional chord within us that sketches just can’t.

There’s something thrillingly vintage about a painted portrait. Cameras aren’t special–there’s one in every phone, computer and, if we’re counting security video cameras, just about on every corner of every block in most major cities. The photographed image isn’t special anymore. But there’s no insta-matic painting machine attached to your Blackberry. And sure, there’s a painting app on the iPhone, but it still requires skill and plenty of time.

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
-Oscar Wilde