Botanical Art

Botanical art is the art of drawing plant life. Often the subjet is a flower or leaves. It may sound a bit scientific, but it's actually mainly about aesthetics. It's somewhat modelled after illustrations from scientific journals, although it does not focus on the anatomy or functions of the plants in question.

Gorillaz: Humanz

The band Gorillaz is a collaboration of visual artist Jamie Hewlett and musician Damon Albarn. It is a fictional band that cinsists of four main animated characters, Murdoc, Russel, 2D, and Noodle.

They were created in 1998 and have released many animated music videos and four albums, with a fifth on the way. There was Gorillaz in 2001, Demon days in 2005, Plastic Beach in 2010, and The Fall in Fall in 2011. Their newest album will be coming out in 2017 and is entitled Humanz.

Their music videos are incredible and are known for being both very intricate and very weird. They usually include their characters animated traditionally with CGI here and there, although one of their albums included all of the characters as being CG animated. Some of the new videos for Humanz were recently released online. In Humanz the characters have gone back to two dimensions, although he videos include some heavy CGI. The CG used is designed specifically to look dated, so it looks very uncanny and is really fun and creepy. The plot of one of the videos, Saturnz Barz, is that the four of the band members are looking at an old house that is messy and creepy and they split up to take a look a la horror movie tropes.

They each find a room and of course strange things begin to happen. This is when a lot of the CGI comes in, in the form of two monsters attacking Russel and Noodle respectively and the haunted fridge with haunted food that attacks 2D. However, what happens to Murdoc is far stranger, as he had stripped naked to bath and found himself somehow in space. This is pretty normal fair for a Gorillaz music video.

 The videos Saturnz Barz was very well executed with some excellent visuals, as we have come to expect from Gorillaz. It moved the characters forward as usual, as in each album they age up more. It was fun, weird and definitely made me want to watch the other videos.