Saturday, September 17, 2011

Art Picks: Big Bad Bunny Eater


"Big Bad Bunny Eater" by Bobby Chiu (imaginism)

What makes this picture work
This picture is a great example of intelligent humor.

Mimicry like this actually occurs in nature. The sort where the whole creature imitates another whole creature is more frequent, but creatures with "drawings" or "sculptures" made of a part of their body do exist. So we have believability; but the picture's real impact is hilarity. The realistic handling of textures and lighting gets combined with extremely stylized bunnies. Whimsical but entirely plausible details like the monster's fur mimicking a patch of grass or its ears getting co-opted into representing the fake "bunny"'s ones are next to the comically evil expression on its face. And then there is the whole premise of a huge monster pretending to be something tiny.

If the bunnies were realistic, we wouldn't believe that they could be fooled by the Eater's disguise. But if the whole picture were stylized, we wouldn't really see how bad the disguise really is. It's a perfect case of the realistic finish and well-grounded tidbits adding a lot of credibility to a very unrealistic and far-fetched situation, but it also makes the combination a major source of the humor, and that is rare.

What could be improved
The fur texture on the Eater's tail is a bit mechanical, and the regular clumping on it is out of place; I'd expect such clumping to happen under the throat or some other place where skin gets a lot of stretching.The greens could use more variety. The leaves on the forest floor are so bright that they suggest autumn, but all leaves still on the trees are green, and the vegetation seems tropical. All these things are technicalities and do not really detract anything big from the picture, though.



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