Marcos Chin’s colourful world

Another smokin’ hot New York illustrator

I met Caroline Thaw at Brooklyn’s Third Ward in one of the courses I taught. The first time I saw samples of her work, I was happily overwhelmed by her diversity of styles, her cute yet twisted characters, the radiant and infinite beauty in every piece she made, her delicate line, and her strong sense of style and scenographic space. Part of her work’s charm comes from her experience in theater design designing sets and custumes for productions that traveled around the world (she is from England, originally), and her tremendous love for kids.

Megan Russell’s patterned illos

Maryland’s MICA just seems to be cranking out the talent this year! Recent grad, Megan Russell, creates quite lovely, intricate, densely pattern-based illustrations. With a polished portfolio that runs the gamut from editorial to set design to fashion, she is clearly a versatile illustrator. Be sure to check out her Narrrative-Book section as there are some especially wonderful illustrations composed of multiple vignettes colliding all over the page to create quite lively narrative tapestries. Read more

The surreal artwork of Laura Bellmont

I’ve always been an enormous fan of the work of Laura Bellmont. She creates the most engagingly surreal, personal images. Though her work is constantly evolving in many directions, as of now, I’m feeling thoroughly engrossed by her expanding body of pop-ups and black and white drawings. Read more

FAIL! Man wears crack jacket to drug trafficking court date

From the ‘what were you thinking’ file comes this news report of a man in Fort Lauderdale accused of drug trafficking who turned up to court for his trial wearing a jacket with a cartoon recipe for cooking crack cocaine. Yes, smart indeed.

New Banksy artwork angers the Catholic Church

Banksy has struck again, this time offending the Catholic Church with a bold artwork that critiques their stance on ongoing child abuse scandals. Banksy has taken a replica of a bust of an eighteenth century member of the Catholic hierarchy and added multi-coloured tiles to the face — pixelating it — as a comment on what he considers to be the Church’s cover-up. ‘I’m never sure who deserves to be put on a pedestal or crushed under one’, Banksy noted. And who are we to disagree? Read more

Tattoo artist sued by ex-girlfriend for obscene design

Oh boy, this is so bizarre it could only be true. Apparently a Dayton, Ohio, tattoo artist has been slapped with a $100,000 lawsuit by his ex-girlfriend for tattooing an image of, erm, excrement with flies on her back rather than the scene from Narnia that she had requested. The reason? He’d recently found out that she had been cheating on him with one of his buddies. Damn! And here we were thinking this was the hot new look for trailer park trash crowd.