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      Whimsical Illustrations and Motifs Dyed with a Traditional Wax-Resist Method Cover Caroline Södergren’s Eggshells

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      Art
      Craft
      Illustration

      #animals
      #eggs
      #insects
      #wax

      June 22, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      All images © Caroline Södergren, shared with permission
      Formally trained in glassblowing, Stockholm-based artist Caroline Södergren transfers her experience working with a delicate, fragile material to an ornately illustrated collection of eggshells. She adapts the traditional Ukrainian craft called pysanky, a wax-resist method that involves drawing a design on a clean, empty chicken, turkey, goose, or ostrich egg with hot beeswax. The shell is then dipped in multiple baths of dye and the seal washed away with oil to reveal the colorful, layered design—you can watch the entire process in the video below.
      The technique often is combined with folk art, although Södergren illustrates her own botanical motifs, beetles, and mythical creatures that stray from traditional designs. “You have to think before you start a pattern as the different color layers must come in the right order,” she says. “If you make a mistake with the wax, it is not possible to change, and a written line is where it is. A constant challenge that makes it so fun to work with!”
      Konsthantverkets Vänner, an organization dedicated to supporting Swedish arts and crafts, just awarded Södergren a scholarship for her batik designs. Browse available eggs in her shop, and find a larger collection on Instagram. (via Lustik)

      

      #animals
      #eggs
      #insects
      #wax

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      Minimal Lines and Colorful Geometric Shapes Compose Luciano Cian’s Portraits

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      Art
      Illustration

      #digital
      #portraits
      #posters and prints

      June 21, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      All images © Luciano Cian, shared with permission
      Rio de Janeiro-based artist Luciano Cian (previously) has an affinity for the bold blocks of color that compose his minimal portraits. Although he recently expanded his practice to include acrylic paintings and collage, Cian works primarily digitally, rendering anonymous figures with thin lines and vibrant, geometric shapes like in his MAGNA series. “It has this name because it is big, both in dimensions and in purpose,” he tells Colossal. “I always work with images that allude to ethnicity. This series, like the others, talks about the miscegenation of races and peoples, with diversity as the central focus.”
      Cian teamed up with the nonprofit Prints Against Poverty to sell a collection of 15 works, and you can purchase more of his available pieces on Saatchi Art and Artsper. Find an extensive archive of his portraits on Behance and Instagram.

      #digital
      #portraits
      #posters and prints

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      An Annual Exhibition Features Over 1,000 Illustrated Coasters at Nucleus Portland

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      Art
      Food
      Illustration

      #coasters
      #home

      June 14, 2021
      Christopher Jobson

      Top left: By Kelly Louise Judd. Top right: By Lydia Nichols. Bottom left: By Mariya Pilipenko. Bottom right: By Molly Egan. All images via Nucleus Portland
      Each year Nucleus Portland tasks hundreds of artists with creating original works on a miniature canvas usually reserved for dewy beverages. Salut! harnesses the friendly camaraderie associated with the word and gathers more than 1,000 coasters illustrated in an expansive variety of styles, including minimal color-blocked toucans, trippy starscapes, and dreamy, candid portraits. See some of Colossal’s favorite 4×4-inch pieces below, and browse the entire exhibition and available works, which are up online and in-person through July 5, on Nucelus’s site.

      Top left: By Zoe Persico. Top right: By Sam Kalda. Bottom left: By Shinyeon Moon. Bottom right: By Vin Ganapathy
      Left: By Megan Wood. Right: By Catherine Ho
      Top left: By Juliette Toma. Top right: Chris Uphues. Bottom left: By Jennifer Davis. Bottom right: By Jialun Deng
      Left: By Edward Cao. Right: By Hayley Powers

      #coasters
      #home

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    • 188 Shares129 Views

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      Sentrock Captures the Sights of Chicago’s Pilsen Neighborhood in a New Series About Mental Health

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      Art
      Illustration

      #birds
      #Chicago
      #health

      June 3, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      All images © Sentrock, shared with permission
      In honor of Mental Health Month this May, Chicago artist Joseph Perez, who works as Sentrock, created an illustrated series celebrating the people and scenes around his studio in the city’s Pilsen neighborhood. “I started doing it just for myself, to take an hour or two and share my thoughts or reflections for that day or the day prior,” he tells Colossal.
      Lively, expressive, and deeply empathetic, the resulting illustrations draw on Sentrock’s background as a graffiti artist and his connection to those around him. They tell a story about the neighborhood that’s historically been rich with Latinx culture and portray the sights and experiences shared by the community through a distinctly personal lens. The artist explains:
      I started allowing myself to reflect on the past, present, the current situations I found myself in. I allowed myself to reflect on my everyday life, whether boring, exciting, or just my imagination of the moment. I started to capture the people outside my studio, whether friends or strangers. My purpose for this was to initiate a connection with the people around me, the community.
      Sentrock began with reference photos of friends, family, and community members before reinterpreting them in bright, vivid renditions of his signature bird character. Usually depicted as a beaked mask, the recurring image is Sentrock’s analogy “to humanity: a person who is able to find or escape to their freedom by placing them in a different reality.” In the new works, the character travels from person to person, sometimes worn by kids skateboarding down 18th Street and others by the artist himself, like in the moving portrait of him and his mother.
      Head to Instagram to see the full series and original images, and if you’re in Chicago, keep an eye out for the designs, which Sentrock plans to wheat paste around the city.

      Portrait of the artist with his mother

      Self-portrait

      #birds
      #Chicago
      #health

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    • 150 Shares179 Views

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      Surreal Watercolor Illustrations Shake Back and Forth in Marija Tiurina’s Chaotic Stereograms

      by

      
      Animation
      Art
      Illustration

      #painting
      #surreal
      #video
      #watercolor

      May 27, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      All image © Marija Tiurina, shared with permission
      Longtime Colossal readers will recognize the surreal, fictionalized scenes illustrated by Marija Tiurina (previously). Whether a bizarre mishmash of thoughts from quarantine or a crowded parallel universe in North London, Tiurina’s works are a seemingly endless exploration of mystery, delight, and general chaos, themes the London-based illustrator continues in her new series Stereogramos—the title is a portmanteau blending the “Spanish world for a bouquet (of endless objects and limbs, in my case) and ‘-os’ ending that is typical to the worlds of plural female form in Lithuanian language,” she says.
      Comprised of three jiggling gifs and a longer, scrolling animation, the works deviate from Tiurina’s static paintings and build a playful, peculiar setting around three central characters in her signature style. The female figures exude an air of cool disinterest and are surrounded by objects defining their unqiue personalities, including greasy slices of pizza, cracked vinyl, and even a disturbingly severed limb.
      To create the dizzying works, Tiurina began by drawing and painting the individual elements with watercolor, and after cutting each out, she layered them into rich, abstracted scenes with a single central character. Her stereograms, or two-dimensional renderings that give the illusion of greater depth, diverge from historical stereoscopic images that positioned two photos side-by-side on a flat plane viewed with binocular vision. Instead, the illustrator merges the two into one glitching visual that appears in three dimensions.
      Tiurina recorded her entire process for Stereogramos, which you can see in the video below, and you can find more of her packed, sprawling illustrations and similarly looping Droste Effect watercolor on Behance and Instagram. She also sells originals, prints, and books on her site, and if you’re in Reykjavík, stop by SIM Residency to see her work as part of a group show that’s open through May 29, 2021.

      

      #painting
      #surreal
      #video
      #watercolor

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      Cross A Bridge: A Typewriter Illustration Backdrops a Meditative Trip to Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art

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      Art
      Illustration

      #ink
      #travel
      #typewriters
      #video

      May 26, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      [embedded content]
      Lenka Clayton takes viewers on a short road trip to the Carnegie Museum of Art in a tiny and unusual vehicle. A 1957 Smith Corona Skyriter chugs along sparsely illustrated streets constructed with angled letters and punctuation previously typed on a single sheet of paper in her 2018 work “Cross A Bridge.” Commissioned by the Pittsburgh institution, the video project follows Clayton’s type guide as it steadily inches along the city’s roadways and passes by landmarks like the Fort Pitt Tunnel, Fort Pitt Bridge, and Monongahela River before coming to a stop at the museum’s entrance.
      Find dozens of Clayton’s inky illustrations, along with a similar 2016 project about going home, on her site and Instagram. (via The Kids Should See This)

      #ink
      #travel
      #typewriters
      #video

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    • 213 Shares169 Views

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      ‘Banksy Graffitied Walls and Wasn’t Sorry’ Is a Cleverly Illustrated Book Introducing Kids to the Elusive Artist

      by

      
      Art
      Illustration

      #books
      #kids
      #street art

      May 21, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      All images courtesy of Phaidon
      Banksy Graffitied Walls and Wasn’t Sorry introduces the life and work of the anonymous street artist to some of the youngest readers. The 48-page book is cleverly written as a plainspoken autobiography, detailing both Banksy’s aesthetic sensibilities and surveying his decades-long career, including references to Dismaland, his “Better Out Than In” residency in New York, signature rats, and the subversive, overtly political messages of his pieces and antics. Illustrated in Fausto Gilberti’s whimsical style, the largely black-and-white drawings are playful and humorous and contextualize Banky’s profound impact and mysterious, unapologetic reputation in a manner fit for kids.
      Published by Phaidon, Banksy Graffitied Walls and Wasn’t Sorry is Gilberti’s fourth in a series exploring the legacies of some of the most well-known artists, including Yayoi Kusama, Jackson Pollock, and Yves Klein. Shop the complete collection on Bookshop. (via Kottke)

      #books
      #kids
      #street art

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    • 200 Shares199 Views

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      David Shrigley Designs a Collection of Phone Cases and Tech Accessories with His Signature Witty Illustrations

      by

      
      Art
      Design
      Illustration

      #humor
      #satire
      #technology

      May 14, 2021
      Grace Ebert

      All images courtesy of Casetify
      David Shrigley’s famously dry sense of humor and satirical quips grace a new collection of phone cases and other accessories. The British artist (previously) is collaborating with Casetify on a forthcoming line—it includes a dozen iPhone cases, plus Apple Watch bands, AirPods covers, stands, chargers, in addition to sleek laptop sleeves and bags—featuring his signature bold drawings alongside reminders to “be nice” and “work hard, play hard, eat a huge pizza.” One illustration, the pastel wolf, is even designed to howl a custom phrase.
      As part of the collaboration, 100 limited-edition black mirror cases printed with a multi-color “There are no rules” will be released through a lottery, which you can enter starting next week on Casetify’s site. The rest of the designs go on sale on May 25. (via It’s Nice That)

      #humor
      #satire
      #technology

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