Andreas Hykade (born 1968 in Bavaria) is an animation director from Germany. From 1988 to 1990 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. He worked as an animator in London in 1991, then studied animation at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg until 1995. Since then he works as animation director, partly at “Studio Filmbilder” in Stuttgart, and as the Professor for Animation at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg.

Hykade’s trademark style is based on very simple characters which move in smooth animation. Sometimes, like in the two music videos for Gigi D’Agostino, there’s just a line over a flat color, much like the classical La Linea -character of Osvaldo Cavandoli (to which they are a loving homage). Often his characters feature single strokes as arms and legs, in this Hykade is similar to German comic artist OL.

At present, Hykade is working at his first feature-length film. During a live talk at the Bradford Animation Festival on November 17, 2006, he revealed that the film would revolve around the life of Jesus. Hykade did not reveal exactly how he would treat the project, but mentioned his admiration for the films Life of Brian, The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus Christ Superstar.

Since 2008 Hykade teaches animation at Harvard University.

We lived in Grass is a student film and Hykade’s first part of The Country Trilogy. The set of the film is a place that’s just two streets away from the end of the world. The film is told from the point of view of a little boy. “All women is whore and all men is soldier,” the father of the boy says. “So go into Grass and kill a tiger for the best tits you can find.” As the father gets testicular cancer, a journey into Grass for the young hero begins. We lived in Grass won numerous awards including the German short film Price. Ring of Fire is the second part of The Country Trilogy. It’s set in a bright and shining bazar of sexual desires. The film is describing an archaic Machomyth and the desire of two cowboys to break with this myth. Ring of Fire won countless awards including the Grand Price at the Ottawa Animation Festival. The Runt is Hykade’s third and final part of The Country Trilogy. The once dead father of We lived in Grass returns. “I give you the runt,” he says. “But you take care of it and you kill it next year.” With The Runt Hykade finished what he calls his early work.

Films

• “The King is Dead” (1990)
• “We Lived in Grass” (1995)
• “10 kleine Jägermeister” (1996, music video for German band Die Toten Hosen)
• “The Riddle” (2000, music video for Italian singer Gigi D’Agostino)
• “Bla, bla, bla” (2000, music video for Italian singer Gigi D’Agostino)
• “Ring of Fire” (2000)
• “Just a Gigolo” (2001, music video for Lou Bega)
• “Time” (2002, TV mini series)
• “Tom” (2003, TV series in Flash)
• “Walkampf” (2004, music video for German band Die Toten Hosen)
• “The Runt” (2006)

Trivia

Whilst creating “We Lived in Grass” (1995) at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg he met Philip Hunt. Hunt was employed as the animator in residence working on the award-winning short, “Ah Pook is Here”. Hunt enlisted the help of the entire Academy staff, all apart from Hykade who continued producing his graduation piece.

However, Hunt asserts that whilst Andreas escaped a role on the film, he was a motivational force in making AH POOK happen - if only for his good humour and support when the project was at its hardest. Hunt recently interviewed ‘Hugi’ on stage at the Bradford animation festival where a retrospective of Hykade’s work was shown.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Hykade)

Bradford Wayne Holland (born 1943) is an American illustrator, best known for his work for Playboy and Penthouse magazines.

Born in Fremont Ohio, he was the eldest of four brothers. The family moved to Arkansas. At 17, after receiving a rejection of employment application from Walt Disney, and upon graduating from high school, Holland moved to Chicago. He enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago, but he found the training too restrictive. He found work in a tattoo parlor and later with the John Dioszegi art studio. Holland found himself working long hours there, which left him leaving him little time for his own work. A decision in 1964 to take an eight-hour-a-day job at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City provided time after work to develop his own portfolio. His work consisted of black & white drawing/paintings, which were not “finished art” until after sent out to a service bureau where line negatives were made and sized to produce 8 X 10 prints that would fit into a manageable sized portfolio.

At Hallmark, Holland was promoted to designer in his first year, and quickly moved to bigger projects. Most of his work at Hallmark was illustration for pop-up books and holiday & inspirational publications. He was also supervisor of a new Designer Group - Humorous Illustrative. One member of this new “Group” was Wendell Minor, now a prominent book illustrator and one-time President of the New York Society of Illustrators].

In 1967 Holland moved to New York City. Armed with his portfolio but with no prospects of work he met Art Paul, art director of Playboy magazine. Though he is perhaps best known for his work at Playboy, through his career, he has worked completely as a freelance illustrator. His work has included Avant Garde magazine (1968-1971), and “underground” publications. In 1972 he became a prominent contributor to the New York Times Op-Ed page. In 1977 he published Human Sacandals, a social commentary using ink drawings.

Holland is co-founder of The Illustrators Partnership of America, and advocates the preservation of creative copyrights on intellectual property.

(Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Holland_(artist))

Kurt Halsey Frederiksen is an American artist who works with various media, including pencil, ink, and paint.

Kurt Halsey Frederiksen was born in Racine, Wisconsin in 1978.

He grew up an aspiring newspaper cartoonist, “obsessed with Jane’s Addiction and Calvin and Hobbes.”After exploring sculpture in college, later switched to painting. “I grew up on comic strips, wanting to be a cartoonist. So the idea of black ink on white paper, something so simple and effective, is very appealing to me. So paint on canvas- you can never go wrong with that. It has history and staying power”.

He currently resides in Portland, Oregon .

“Influenced by my hopeless romantic and super sensitive mindset, I pay far too much attention to the little things in life and in the relationship between two people. In constant need of reassurance, explanation, closure, and attention, my paintings are made.” - Kurt Halsey.

After spending a single semester at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in the Fall of 1996, Halsey transferred to and graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2000.

Halsey’s art has been featured at exhibitions in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Detroit, Toronto, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Baltimore.

Reproductions of his work are sold at Urban Outfitters . His work has recently been featured in a limited edition embroidery pattern from Sublime Stitching. He has done the covers for Herbivore Magazine, ISM Quarterly, and has been featured in Hi-Fructose Magazine.

(Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Halsey)

Seonna Hong is a contemporary Los Angeles-based artist working in the genre known as lowbrow or alternatively, pop surrealism.

Her work as a background painter has appeared in animation for television and motion pictures, most notably in the Nickelodeon (TV channel) series, My Life as a Teenage Robot, for which she was awarded an Emmy Award in 2003.

Her paintings have appeared in exhibitions in Los Angeles, New York, the Pacific Northwest, and Tokyo, Japan. Hong’s artwork was also featured in the opening show of Chelsea’s Jonathan LeVine Gallery, entitled “Pop Pluralism.”

Her first book Animus was published by Baby Tattoo Books in 2006. She is currently working on The Mighty B! as an Art Director & Background Painter.

(Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seonna_Hong)

Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (February 16, 1834 — August 9, 1919), also written von Haeckel, was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including phylum, phylogeny, ecology and the kingdom Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularized Charles Darwin’s work in Germany and developed the controversial recapitulation theory (”ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”) claiming that an individual organism’s biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species’ entire evolutionary development, or phylogeny.

The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures (see: Kunstformen der Natur, “Artforms of Nature”). As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote Die Welträthsel (1895-1899, in English, The Riddle of the Universe, 1901), the genesis for the term “world riddle” (Welträthsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching to support teaching evolution.

In the United States, Mount Haeckel, a 13,418 ft (4,090 m) summit in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, overlooking the Evolution Basin, is named in his honor, as are another Mount Haeckel, a 2,941 m (9,650 ft) summit in New Zealand; and the asteroid 12323 Häckel.

The Ernst Haeckel house (”Villa Medusa”) in Jena, Germany contains a historic library.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Haeckel)