Zen Pencils is a blog with a pretty simple premise: take inspirational quotes and set them to comics. It's only a few months old but there are already a bunch of greats within: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Albert Einstein, and more in the archives.
posted by mathowie on May 2, 2012 - 33 comments

User-submitted inspiration for comics and art: Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines (prev), and more refined comics from "normal" text spam text. Cartoons drawn from titles sent to one Sam Brown (pseudonym of Adam Culbert). Artists send artwork, someone else adds the text. Submit a video game title and description and get the box art made for you, courtesy of MeFi's own cheap paper [via mefi projects].
posted by filthy light thief on May 26, 2010 - 21 comments

The picture of a boat approaching a wooded island held a strange sway over the early twentieth century imagination. Strindberg closes The Ghost Sonata with the image; Rachmaninoff brought forth a symphonic poem from it; Freud, Lenin, and Clemenceau all owned prints, while Hitler hung one of the original five paintings on his wall. The work's creator, a Swiss Symbolist painter named Arnold Böcklin, never cared to give it a name. It was an art dealer who first called it Die Toteninsel — "The Isle of the Dead."
posted by Iridic on Oct 31, 2008 - 27 comments

Oxford Muse - "a foundation to stimulate courage and invention in personal, professional and cultural life". Browse the self-potraits (autobiographies), participate in projects, go universal, or just learn what the Muse is.
posted by divabat on May 6, 2008 - 5 comments

Use your library. Make more GIF files. Trust the process. Make art - it's good for your heart. from advice to sink in slowly.
posted by divabat on Jan 24, 2008 - 8 comments

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is so called because it asserts that what makes up a city is not so much its physical structure but the impression it imparts upon its visitors, the way its inhabitants move within, something unseen that hums between the cracks. This, however, has in no way dissuaded people from attempting to give form to his works. One such example is the Hotel Tressants, a building in Menorca, Spain containing 8 rooms named after and inspired by various cities from the novel. Meanwhile, artists offer illustrations^1,2,3, installations ^1,2,3,4,5, music^1,2,3,4,5,6 and dance, hypertexts^1,2, computer programs and animations, even View-Master slides, while intellectuals offer readings and commentary^1,2, lectures^1,2, and critical texts^1,2,3 sparked by the man and his writings. It has been dubbed "The Calvino Effect". Do you know of any more?
posted by Lush on May 20, 2005 - 37 comments

Text messaging is inspiring artists to new areas of creativity from theatre to sculpture, says the Guardian.
posted by jhiggy on Apr 20, 2001 - 4 comments