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My original goal in setting up the Project 300 website was to create an outlet to showcase the work of emerging Iranian artists (with a special focus on illustrators and comic artists), and to provide some unique coverage on exciting events happening in the Persian artist community.

To help update the site more often and keep it alive, I am looking for people who may be interested in contributing to this blog by submitting posts. If you think you may be interested, please leave me a comment or email me at submit@300themovie.info, and I will give you more details.

Some time in the past several months, this website quietly exploded! That's right, I'm talking about our little Google Bomb. Right now, if you search for "300 the movie", which was our target word, this site is the first result, higher than the official 300 movie site. Of course this was only possible with the massive support of the Persian blogosphere who linked to us (4,257 incoming links and counting). As you know, this project was triggered by the 300 movie, but has long since grown to something beyond a simple response to a single movie and is now a source of news and information about Persian art and artists, with an eye towards shedding some light on the History of Persia.

Over the past few days I have received some new submissions for the Project 300 gallery. Check out the gallery page as some of them are quite funny and clever.

Also, Nima Darabi sent me this autostereogram, which has an image of the tomb of Cyrus the great embedded in it. (I suck at reading autostereograms, but if you can see the image in there let us know :) )

Last week, several new pieces were submitted to the Project 300 Gallery. The first one is a lovely comic-style cg drawing of Darius (an Achaemenid king) by the great Hamid Bahrami.
There are also a couple of nice works by fantasy illustrator Maryam Gousheh Forgeot.

Among the first artists to submit their work for Project 300, was Hassan Nozadian. He sent me an email containing 16 pieces with little description other than wishing me luck for the project.
I was impressed with his sketches. They reminded me of old Iranian comic strips I used to read and had a retro feel to them. Since the submitted pieces were so many, I only selected a few to put up on the gallery page. I definitely feel that the other pieces deserve to be seen as well, especially since I couldn't find any online portfolio or gallery belonging to Hassan Nozadian. These sketches appear to be part of a comic strip about the Persian "Epic of Kings", in the same style as the old Persian comic strips I remember reading, with the text written in boxes below each image, instead of appearing in speech bubbles. Maybe Hassan can update us on the status of his project, if he's reading this =) .

Cyrus Swire - who was one of the first artists to submit his work for the Project 300 gallery - is a master of modern achaemenid art. He has created vibrant vector illustrations based on some of the most well-known and beautiful achaemenid insigna. He has recently sent in some new work, which I already added to the gallery. But I'm sure you will appreciate seeing all of this submitted work together here as well.

After spending two weekends on this, I finally finished my own submission for the Project 300 gallery. It's a Disney-esque seated King Xerxes.I did a lot of research for this; all the elements used in the throne and the accessories are based one real Persian artifacts remaining from that era. For the style, I was greatly inspired by Barbucci's Sky Doll.

Incidentally, Disney will be working the film adaptation of Ubisofts' Prince of Persia franchise, set to be released in summer of 2009. While I'm a huge fan of the games, I was always disappointed by the lack of any real "Persian" feel to the games. The settings were almost always some made-up generic place with the theme being much more Arabic than Persian. I'm sure the movie is going to be more or less the same, unless we establish contacts with Disney and ask them to make it more authentic, perhaps by sending them good references. By the way thanks to reader Fatso for reminding me of this.

Yas, one of the emerging Persian hip-hop artists has released a new track which is sort of a rebuttal against "300". I have added it to the playlist. From now on, I'm going to simply add to the playlist and bump the player up whenever I receive new music.

300themovie.info is an ongoing collaborative art project featuring art by artists using the theme of 'ancient Persia'. Driven by an admiration for arts, and united by a common concern about the barbaric and demonic portrayal of Persians in Frank Miller's graphic novel and the movie 300, we have come together to voice our objection in a uniquely artistic fashion. The call for art has just been released and we are still receiving the artworks.
If you are an artist and would like to participate, please send your art to submit at 300themovie dot info. You can join the growing list and link to us by copying the following line of code on your blog or website. According to technorati, 2,697 websites have already linked to our project page as of March 26, 2006.