Man the christmas shopping comes back every year doesn’t it. It’s hard to budget for everything around this time of year but … hold on … you’re a creative kind of guy right? Why don’t you just design up a lovely christmas card and get it sent round to a thousand people this christmas, and whats more pocket a nice little christmas wad while you’re at it. Just think how happy Granny will be when she gets her Xbox with Modern Warfare 3 and an extra controller! *yoink*.
Runners up also receive Stack annual subscriptions – which we raved about here. Well worth picking up a pencil for.
The Agents of Change are a loose group of street artists based all over the UK and beyond. This video from last year has been criminally underwatched for such a fascinating little insight into not only their working paractices but also a strange little corner of Britain, a deserted Scottish 1970′s village built to house workers for an oil rig that was never built.
Check out a profile on them as one of several Honda Cultural Engineers here.
Here’s another fine young illustrator to have a look at – lovely line work and a strange sense of humour in the work of Amee Christian – who is seemingly incredibly prolific for someone so young, having illustrated for quite a few magazines and clients despite still being a student.
This is the way to do it, work your shit off, even if it’s for free while you can afford it. You end up with an impressive body of work, which I’m sure will see Amee in good stead for the future.
A couple of weeks ago we held a zine workshop with Alex Zamora from FEVERZINE - have a watch of this video to see what we got up to. We’ll be putting up photos of some of the zines shortly (the video barely scratches the surface of the body of work produced), but until then be content with pausing the HD footage and salivating/giggling over it.
We absolutely loved this workshop, there’s nothing better than getting people to stretch their creative muscles in new ways and producing a magazine in 3 hours is definitely a good way to do it.
Some insanely detailed stitching from Peter Crawley has gone into this Wallpaper logo, accumulating a staggering 70 hours of needle-time for the metre-squared piece which involved 12,000 hand-pierced holes and 250m of cotton. It was exhibited as part of the Wallpaper exhibition at Brioni House in Milan.
Andrew describes himself as an English illustrator from France (?) and lists his influences as Hergé, Ben Nicholson and Giotto. Regardless he brings a certain rustic charm to the oft-overused papercraft style of illustration utilising good use of shape, colour and composition. Lovely stuff. Visit his site here.
Watch this doc about 12 East London ‘shirt-done-up-all-the-way-to-the-top’s who have formed a kick-ass collective called This is it. There will be dozens of these things happening around the east end, what with all the squats and hipsters, but these guys are different in that they’re really creative. A video they made to celebrate their new working space went a likkle bit viral and led to a show in Jaguar shoes and the above edgy Vice mini doc about their work.
Now where can I get my hands on that hammer costume?
Textured built up paint and bold strokes creates some really visceral work by French artist Peggy Viallat-Langlois. Apparently even more incredible up close and personal should you fancy a trip to Paris where she is currently exhibiting… (It’s valentines day coming up chaps, go take the missus to see some huge naked violent portraits why don’t you. Culture innit.)
The London Art Fair features a boat-load of modern British and contemporary art and is on til Sunday at the Business Design Centre in Islington. I went along earlier today and was swamped by the amount and diversity of the artwork being displayed by galleries from around the world. One of the exhibits featured work from the Catlin Guide (above), which is an annual, independently-curated book of the 40 most promising art graduates from all over the UK (it’s very nicely presented and smells great in case you were wondering). According to Justin Hammond, the editor of the guide, it is really tough for new artists to get exposure or gallery space, particularly if they aren’t based in London. He added that many graduates leave university ill-equipped for challenges such as pricing and promoting their work. A familiar story for many of you design grads!
One of my favourite exhibits from the whole show was the rapidly ripening Bananaboat (below), by Jacob Dahlstrup Jensen, graduate of Glasgow School of Art, which was the centre-piece of the Catlin Guide collection. I’ve put a few of my other favourite works from the fair up here. Get down to Islington and see for yourself if you get the chance – some very famous artists featured (such as Magritte, Mattisse, Paolozzi, Hirst), and the people-watching is tremendous!
Yes, that’s blood. At our Liverpool VS event, Stockport student Ashley attached 35 clothes pegs to his face in order to win a copy of Vice magazine’s new book (reviewed below). We didn’t suggest he put them up his nose, and even a basic knowledge of challenges of this kind would have allowed him to attach them to folds of skin, but Ashley was having none of it.
We were very happy to thrust one of our two GIVEAWAY COPIES of this brilliant book into his bloody mitt, however we have one further unsoiled copy to give away at our London event. So without further ado, here’s the challenge. If a man, woman or child (not child, it’s over 18s) can match or better this total at our London VS on the 7th of December he or she will win the other copy. Blood optional, humiliation essential.
Photomontage is a term now more commonly associated with digital photo manipulation (as in ‘hey LOL I photomontaged ur face wid this pic of a pornstar/lolcat), a mould that Scottish illustrator Lola Depré breaks completely by using real paper, scissors and glue to shatter and reform her subjects into caricatures of themselves or different creatures altogether. Some really funny and creepy work on her bulging website, most of which is for sale. We hope to see much more of her work in the future.
Well this is a bit of an indulgence (that’s some serious scrolly real-estate right there) but while sifting through some old emails I happened upon the colourful blobs of Jill Tovey‘s work, so bright (at 1am anyway) that they are now seared into the backs of my eyeballs.
When she’s not caring for her Basset hound Hugo or running a PR agency Jill uses a mixture of paint, textures and digital media (Corel Painter FTW) to create these eyecatching pieces. Luverly.
Mike Diver and Pedro Aguilar from DMB have painstakingly recreated some of Caravaggio’s most famous paintings in a set of rich, lustrous photos for the Italian Moda Magazine. They seem to have hired a motley bunch of roadies and bike couriers to add extra menace to the pictures.
