Harrods gives Guido a guiding hand

A strange-looking giraffe is just one of many equally bizarre animal images painted by a versatile and talented commercial artist, Guido Daniele, of Milan, Italy, to be displayed for sale at Harrods famous store in London from February 4 to March 30.

You can see the giraffe and some of his other weird hand paintings by clicking on this article from the London Daily Mail. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=510990&in_page_id=1770


Clever, aren't they? We were intrigued when we first saw an image of an eagle's head several years ago. It reminded us of those comical hand shadows of rabbits, cats and other animals that we used to project on to our children's bedroom walls at night. Those were illustrated in a book published back in 1859.

Daniele won fame in the early 1990s for his "body painting" illustrations for advertisements by several globally-known companies. To produce eye-catching ads for a chocolate maker, he covered the bodies of attractive models with the client's products.

Three years ago he successfully combined two traditional portrait techniques, photography and oil painting, to produce six enhanced "hand" images, which had to be seen to be believed. Don't just take our word for that. See them for yourself by visiting the Guido Daniele website(see link below).

We asked Guido about those marvellous hand paintings. Using a keyboard without the letter J (J, K, W, X and Y are not part of the standard Italian alphabet) he replied:

"Thank you very much for your appreciation; the hands-animals-painted were a Leo Burnett project in Milano ( Italy ), the art-director called me and asked me if whose possible for me to paint hands as a different animals ....i say 'of course', but not every animal...so I advise which whose best.

"We decide to start with a good photographer , a good model and every day I've paint different subyect just looking some photos printed on paper . Later , my yob whose retouched by computer just a little : as the elephant tooth.

"Cheers, Guido."

Just how he paints his eye-catching pictures is fully described in his website.

FOOTNOTE. While researching this story, we found a fascinating YouTube video of hand shadows by anothr type of artist, Raymond Crowe, "Australia's only unusualist," at Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas. It's well worth a visit.

LINKS
Guido Daniele's website http://www.guidodaniele.com/
Children's wall shadows http://mindbluff.com/shadow.htm
Raymond Crowe's video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW-3KwXpkkM

This story has been published by the South Korean citizen reporters' online journal OhmyNewsInternational: http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?no=381620&rel_no=1