Blade Runner: Aquarelle Edition

Blade Runner, a chilling film of the near future, was based upon a short story Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick.

Blade Runner Rachel

Anders Ramsell has created his own version of Blade Runner, an animation of 12,597 water colour paintings.

Aquarelle is a French term for watercolour that refers specifically to paintings made with a transparent wash. You can’t fix an aquarelle by retouching or painting over a mistake. You have to get it right the first time.

Swedish artist Anders Ramsell painted each frame as a 1.5 x 3cm work of art. All 12,597 of them.

The effect is like listening to a short wave radio with the broadcast fading in and out, or one of the early TVs, where you had to keep moving the antenna, or watching through a silk curtain rippling in the breeze, or watching events unfold sitting on the bed of a stream with the current and a slight breeze rippling the surface.

The images have a surreal post-impressionist strip cartoon feel to them as they flicker past.

Anders Ramsell calls it ‘a 35 minute long paraphrase on the motion picture Blade Runner’.

Tags: art, Blade Runner, Blade Runner: Aquarelle Edition, water colours