From Dog Walkers to Butchers and Squash Players, there is always this subtle combination of leisure and raw commitment in Dave Imms’ projects. It’s all about ‘the things we do to get by’. Here we uncover the fragile nature of the human condition in these post-game portraits. These harsh, revealing images are strengthened by the dissection of the playing areana with the markings and the natural studio-esque appearance of the courts themselves.

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The Sketchbook Project collects thousands of artists’ sketchbooks from across the globe and exhibits them in cities all over the world. The crew just posted a sneak peek at some of the finished sketchbooks that have just arrived at Project HQ in Brooklyn.

Now open at Manchester’s creative community hangout, Common, is Kristian Jones‘ exhibition, Lost in Youth, which explores the distinct gap between the gentle nurture, the play of our early years and the wild, free flowing visions that occur during sleep. A limited edition print, I Feel Sick, has also been produced by Jones in collaboration with The Aesthetic Trust.

A little something for your inner child. Beards, arachnid looking things, giants and more (yes, there can be more). David Litchfield, UK illustrator. More, please.

This month sees the relaunch of Crabtree & Evelyn’s fine food range under a new packaging design by Smith and Milton. In response to a challenging brief to inject life and character back into the brand, Smith and Milton delved deep into the Crabtree & Evelyn archives and found generations of beautiful hand-drawn illustrations, reworking them into an opulent wrapping to deliver stunning results.

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UK-based designer Daniel J Diggle has some beautifully obsessive illustrative work on his site, with nice photos of the beginning sketches and process.

Street art has always been a place for creative freedom. Due to its very nature it’s also a maverick art, with the varying and diverse styles found being part of its appeal. From Shoreditch in London where works by the likes of Banksy, Invader and Sweet Toof live side-by-side – enlivening the streets with their subversive and eye catching design, to Berlin, where they’ve turned the notion of graffiti on its head by using jet sprays with stencils to clean parts of a dirty wall, producing a new piece of art. Being displayed on the streets that are so familiar to us, it often remains hidden, as our familiarity blinds us to it.

Continuing in the inventive tradition of street art and taking into account the fact that it often passes us by, Ford have produced an innovative new way to engage with and explore the streets around us. It’s a 3D mobile phone application, the first of its kind. Download the application to your phone, then take to the streets and point it at a special 3D marker. This reveals an image of a 3D Ka, an image that is so realistic you can walk around it and it will move as you do. From a particular angle it will reveal a URL which will continue the theme of looking beyond the obvious and discovering the concealed world that surrounds us.

Bath based Lucy Oldfield has just moved onto a Canal boat — a risky move for an illustrator whose art is based on delicate linework. Luckily it hasn’t affected her steady hand. Her work is beautifully constructed with a fine eye for feminine detailing. She’s currently working on greeting cards, having previously worked for the design company I Love Dust, with clients including Orange, Mini Cooper, Conde Nast, The Times and The Sunday Express.

Splitting her time between the UK and her native Poland, Beata Szczecinska works under the name of Cityabyss and creates illustrations that are heavily influenced by the world of fashion, graphic arts, photography, design and modern cityscapes. Her works has been featured in publications such as Varoom Magazine, Computer Arts Magazine, Illusive 2 Book, Katalogue, Web Design Index, Castle Magazine, and Carpal Tunell Magazine, among others. Recently, she started a partnership with Warsaw-based art buying and production house, Alabama. [see also the work of French illustrator Sophie Toulouse]

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