Kelly Smith

Jenny Morsell sharpens her pencils

We checked in with Swedish illustrator Jenny Mortsell recently and asked her whether her work space was strictly conducive to productivity, or inspiration, or both? ‘The biggest pro is that it is a method for me to get dressed before noon, as opposed to when I used to work from home. Even though it is one of the few privileges you have as a freelancer to get properly dressed whenever you want, it’s nice to look presentable to other people once in a while. It’s practical in the way that I have my scanner, printer, and cinema display, which I need for work, there, and inspiring in the sense that I share it with some fantastic people: Sara Teleman, Erica Jacobsson, Bo Lundberg, Otto Degerman, Jens Magnusson, Jan Cafourek, Johan Lindh and Sabina Wroblewski-Gustrin. Because of them, it is also a much more organized place than I could ever manage to maintain by myself, which helps if you want to get work done instead of cleaning up after your latest experiments’. Read more

Ken Taylor

Australian illustrator Ken Taylor has created imagery for some of rock n’ ’roll’s great purveyors of sound, from the Rolling Stones and Queens of the Stone Age, to Nine Inch Nails and the Mars Volta. He has an easily recognizable style that screams sharp edge cool. Bold and bawdy, Taylor’s pieces use vivid colour to create a cut-out-comic-like feel reminiscent of old movie posters from the 1930s and 40s.

Brandt Peters

Trapped in a time warp between then and now, the work of Brandt Peters combines an old school aesthetic with a modernity bordering on futuristic fantasy, with a touch of morbid fascination thrown in for good measure. In other words, he creates wonderful imagery combining cartoon-like pin-ups with sometimes freakish attributes (large skulled beings, for instance), and every now and then seems to throw in a nod to sci-fi — such as a mechanical glass jar — for good measure. Muted tones replace the bawdy colours often associated with such mediums, giving his pieces a whimsical, dream like quality. He must live in a delightfully wispy world.

The salacious creations of Tyson McAdoo

Tyson McAdoo is responsible for depicting these salacious bombshells, taking seemingly ordinary situations — like sitting on a couch, riding a motorbike or riding an invisible horse (things I am sure we’ve all done at some stage) — and adding some sassy young minx as the focal point, creating a playground for your eyeballs. Apparently McAdoo is imprisoned within his creative universe, or some dungeon according to his bio, accompanied only by ‘two pathetic ghetto rats, Squeezie and Pocket’, and forced to draw the Empress of Ink over and over each day so she dare not fade. You can pick up prints of his work online, and they are damn reasonably priced compared to what some prints go for these days.