CARMINE MAGAZINE

My friend Cassandra Warren just announced a show that she has work appearing in.

I’m sorry, I don’t remember what these are priced at, but the gallery will have that information. If you have any other questions about the pieces, you can ask ellO or feel free to comment here or email me: cassywarren@gmail.com.

For those of you in the area, the opening reception is tomorrow, January 2nd at ello gallery&shop, located at 110 State St. in Portsmouth, from 6-9pm.

The unicorn drawing itself is 8×10″. The frame adds probably 6″ to both the width & height. Pic of it framed.

The rabbit drawing is 5×7″, with probably an extra 2″ added to w&h due to the frame. Frame pic.

The rest of these pieces are UNframed.
The jay drawing (w/ the red ink) is around 5×8″. Ask the gallery for exact measurements.

The pieces on dictionary pages are about 6.75×9.75″.

Here are larger sized images of the pieces she has in the show:
Continue reading →

My friend Nikki (of Ink Smear) just announced that she has dropped the US shipping prices in her Etsy store. Her work is gorgeous, you really should check it out. Click on the banner ad to see her store.

Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
Molly Crabapple: I’ve been drawing since I was old enough to hold a crayon. I get ideas in my head- perverse, offensive, snot-nosed things- and art is a way to put them out there without getting soundly beaten. I’m inspired by performance, burlesque, money, ambition, New York, aging, artifice, hyper-femininity, hyper-masculinity, social climbing and caffeine.

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self taught? Do you think it has helped you or hindered you?
MC: My mother’s a professional artist, so she helped me growing up. In fact, we have very similar styles. I’m a proud art school dropout.

Continue reading →

Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
James “Jimbot” Demski: That’s kind of a hard one to answer. It’s not something that I can easily just put my finger on and say, “That’s it!” It’s more of a feeling, a drive, I guess. Haha.. a drive drives me to create. I guess maybe you can call it a fire in my belly. I just have to do it, it’s why I am here, I think. I need to spread the word of Jimbot! When I don’t do work for a while, I really feel it too, like a corked bottle, so I just have to keep on doing it. Maybe it’s also because my brain never shuts off. I am always thinking of something, even when I am working on other projects. Honestly, it’s just always been like this for me. I’ve always wanted to create.
As far as what inspires me, that is another hard question. There is SO much that inspires me these days–everything from ads, and shows on television, to comic books and toys, to nature and people, to other art and artists. I try to take it all in. It’s funny, I might see something while I am walking down the street, and that sparks an idea, which evolves into another idea, and so on, and so on, until I eventually come up with a painting, drawing, sculpture, or whatever. I will say, though, that there was a point where I was very burned out, and I was VERY un-inspired. It was right after I graduated from art school. I didn’t do anything for about 2-3 years. It might sound corny, but it took me meeting my (now) wife to re-inspire me. Now I can’t stop creating!!!! Maybe one passion can ignite another passion (or re-ignite in my case!), I guess.

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self-taught? Do you think it has
helped you or hindered you?
JD: Well, I did go through art school, so I guess I am considered formally trained. However, I didn’t REALLY develop my style and discover my voice until several years after art school. In retrospect, it is hard to say if it really did help me. Like I said before, I was completely burned out after school, and I didn’t want to do any more art. At that time, I even considered abandoning my art career completely and going into computer programming. Sure, art school did let me try a LOT of different things, but I’m not sure how much it really helped me in the long run, other than help me to build some hefty debt. Still though, I got to meet a LOT of great people, including some teachers who I still look up to even today! I guess I can say art school was an experience, that’s for sure!

Continue reading →

Artist Valerie Hegarty’s work has been quite popular around the web these days. Popping up on FFFFound!, BOOOOOOOM! & other sites of that nature. I’ve spent quite a while these past few weeks since first coming across her work trying to find more information on her and her work.

I was able to find this Guild & Greyshkul page (which is the closest to an official site I found for her) and this interview from her with Museo Magazine. Regardless of how much we know about her, the work is fascinating. Let’s take a look at some of my favorites:

Continue reading →

(Image © Mishkin)

This art news post is rather late and I do apologize for that. I am going to try and make this Art News post really count. Things have been very hectic here at Carmine Magazine headquarters what with the holiday season. (Not to mention I woke up this morning to the news that my black & blue 30GB Zune decided to commit suicide along with every other Zune of it’s kind all around the world. Read about that on Wired.com.) Look for an official welcome to 2009 post in the next few days here on Carmine Magazine featuring a poll (hopefully), a video (maybe) and news on the plans/ideas I have for the site in 2009. The image above would probably be more appropriate for that post, but it’s just too pretty not to share. Be sure to check out Amy Gwatkin’s and Anna Leader’s Mishkin project for more of their photography.

• NOTCOT.COM recently did a feature on the 1800 Tequila Limited Edition Artist Bottles. The bottles are gorgeous and Jean’s photos highlight their beauty quite well. Check out the feature here.
• Check out these beautiful glass skeletons from Melli-Ink.
• BibliOdyssey recently posted scans from some original Winnie the Pooh drawings. These are definitely worth checking out.
• One of my new favorite blogs, Environmental Graffiti recently posted a feature (the images on the post are now broken) on photographer Frank Relle. He specializes in taking pictures of the destruction that still plagues New Orleans, Louisiana years after Hurricane Katrina. Check out the haunting galleries.
• Logo Design Love interviewed Sol Sender, who led a design team for the Obama 08 logo, about some of the logos they tried out before settling on the final logo. It’s interesting to see the progression of the logo ideas. Read Obama logo ideas that weren’t chosen.
• Alan Valek posted 100 Cereal Box Covers. It’s really interesting to see how popular cereal brands have changed over the years.
• Green Upgrader shows us Solar Powered Sidewalk Art: The One Day Poem Pavilion.
• Looking for the perfect planner? Wish you could find a way to reuse some of your old papers? Green Upgrader shows you how to Make Your Own 2009 Planner from Trash.

Continue reading →

When I contacted Darren of DariusTwin to do an interview for CarmineMag.com (which you can read here) I just had to ask him to do a tutorial for us. Light painting is a very interesting medium. It looks amazing and impressive, but it’s also essentially an easy medium to try for yourself. Darren was kind enough to put together this 2 minute tutorial video for us on the subject. Please check out the video, grab yourself some flashlights, make some pictures and send them our way!

Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
DariusTwin: The strangeness in Life, fate, people, art, epiphanies.

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self taught? Do you think it has helped you or hindered you?
DT: I am self-taught with some formal inspiration. In my experience, it’s both helped and hindered me depending on what I was trying to do.. In a graphic sense it has helped bc growing up I saw a lot of skateboarding, surf and street art and that’s what I tried to create for a while.. it got me work. However, I see artists on display in places like the MOCA and MET and would like to start presenting my art on a much larger scale. I’m sure formal training wouldn’t hurt in that field.

Continue reading →

Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
Ink & Mess: Mine’s a kind of default drive to create caused by weird brain wiring. My brains are far too unconventional, too everywhere and too awkward to use them for anything other than a creative outspill of mess. The way I process the mess is with pens and whatever I find to draw on. The stuff that inspires me is old stuff, dead stuff, rickety, creepy crawly stuff, funny stuff and forgotten stuff. I like to mix all the stuffs up in my brain then use the hands at the end of my arms to draw all the things I have imagined. I spend hours pawing over things that other people don’t really want; broken automata, things found in shut down fairgrounds, old toys in dusty attics, mutations at the back of my grandmothers
larder. I like to take these things, things that aren’t always conventionally accessible and attractive and make them into weird and wonderful drawings.
The biggest drive is the end result: to create an illustration, or a scene with a narrative, you can communicate anything you want without ever having to say much at all. From the tiniest detail to the loudest expression, it can all be said in one go. What a powerful way of communicating!

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self taught? Do you think it
has helped you or hindered you?
IM: I used to sit in class at school drawing on a sketchbook on my lap hidden under
the table. I’d draw caricatures of all my other class mates and then hand them out at the end of the day. I didn’t really enjoy anything at school other than home time and art time. I hated being told what to do and
just couldn’t fathom the purpose of hierarchical school structure, all I wanted to do was to create and have fun. Quite a reasonable expectation in the mind of any primary school kid, I’m sure. Although I liked art lessons, I didn’t like working to a brief or class project, so again, even in the only class I liked it was sketchbook under the table time. And that pretty much led me to the conclusion that drawing was what I wanted to do, not painting or ceramics, because while I couldn’t smuggle a clandestine paintbrush or
potters wheel under the table, I could do a pen and sketchbook. That was all the formal training I had in art until I reached my twenties. Later on in life I decided I really needed some help and guidance from the people I had shunned in my more truculent days - teachers. I took two terms of Book Illustration at Chelsea Arts School and it helped me very much indeed. I had always thought that the purpose of tutors and the teaching system was to bash you about until you fit into the right shaped hole that they thought you belong in, but that wasn’t really the case. The reason I finally sought guidance from some formal training was not to get a good idea, but how to get that good idea seen and heard in a world that’s already brimming with good ideas. What art school did teach me about was what are necessary and unneccessary elements in my work, how to think progressively and work with the skills I have, and how to know when to stop and finish, or
perhaps rethink. Had I not been such an upstart as a youngster and stuck it through a formal education in illustration I suspect many more doors would have opened naturally for me. I sometimes feel like I have to go at those doors with a clawhammer, as for people outside of the umbrella of formal art school, locks appear on doors where there otherwise would be none.

Continue reading →

When Melody Pilotte contacted me about doing an interview a few weeks ago she mentioned that she does work with RAINN.org. I knew I had to do a second interview with her about this vastly important organization and the ways that we can all help to support their cause.

Carmine Magazine: For the readers that are not familiar with RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) can you describe what it is, what it does and why it’s such an important organization?
Melody Pilotte: RAINN is an amazing charity, that pledges itself to helping victims of incest and sexual violence. They have services dedicated to helping victims, their families and friends, with twenty-four-hour hotlines, online help, and resources. It’s just marvelous. It is beyond important: it is integral. Every two minutes, someone in the United State is the victim of sexual assault. One in six women and one in thirty-three men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime. That’s a disgusting amount of people. Most women know their assailants and these people don’t often spend the time they should be in prison. American Indian women are the most likely to be raped. RAINN is so unique in the work that it does. It’s so important because sexual assault, rape, incest, domestic violence–are such unseen crimes. They hurt everyone, not just the victims–their friends, their families, their teachers, co-workers-who love them and might not be able to help them, or even know what‘s wrong. Everyone is affected by it; it creates an intergenerational soul wound, trauma and self-hatred. The work that RAINN does is long overdue in the world and I am so happy a really wonderful group of people have dedicated their lives to doing it.
Continue reading →

Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
Jon Rosado: I feel a compulsion to create. I love to give life to the images of my imagination. My inspiration comes from everywhere. But usually from cartoons, graffiti, comics, film, and music.

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self taught? Do you think it has
helped you or hindered you?
JR: I feel like I was born to make art. My father is also an artist, so we collectively think it my be genetic. I went to laguardia high school for art then I went to the School Of Visual Arts and graduated with a BFA in Illustration. Going to school for art has helped. I learned a lot about art history, improving my own work and how to break free from the “B.S.” that usually hinders young artists.

Continue reading →

Our About page has been updated and slightly rewritten. I’ve added a couple of testimonials about Carmine Magazine to the about page as well. If you would like to supply a testimonial, please leave it in the comments. (The following is the text from the updated about page.)

carmine car·mine n.1. A strong to vivid red.2. A crimson pigment derived from cochineal.adj. Strong to vivid red.

CARMINE MAGAZINE is an online magazine run by artists, for artists.

Carmine Magazine is run by me, Jami Lee Rosa. I began doing artist interviews in January 2008 for the Livejournal community named AddMyArtJournal. My moleskine notebook full of ideas and I quickly outgrew the community. In May of 2008 I bought CarmineMag.com and began the arduous task of moving all of the interviews I had already done and creating new content.
Continue reading →

Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
Cindy Tomczyk: I feel like I just go about creating every day and there is not one day that goes by where I don’t create.
I am inspired by Eastern European folk art, Scandinavian design, living in a city, people I see and meet, personal experiences, and childhood memories.

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self taught? Do you think it has
helped you or hindered you?
CT: I’ve created art my entire life. In high school, I enrolled in art classes because I loved it and I really didn’t care for anything else. I’ve come from a supportive family and group of friends, so when I was applying to colleges I knew it was going to be an art school. I attending my first choice college, the Ringling College of Art + Design. I don’t think it hindered me at all. I was able to push myself harder and in the meantime met an amazing group of other artists. You not only learn about your craft going to an art school, but other majors too. I came out with an appreciation for interior design, computer animation, graphic design, and fine art. At the same time, I raised the bar due to the competition and came out of it a better artist with an amazing network of other creatives.
Continue reading →

When I was putting together the CarmineMag gift guides last month (Guys & Women) there was one item I really, really wanted to be able to include, but it wasn’t available at the time. However the wonderful people at Supermarket recently posted on their blog that these coasters are available again, so I had to share them with you.
Continue reading →

The 2009, Zodiac Battle Calendar, Illustrated by Alison Cardinale is up for sale!

Each page shows the struggle of the signs as they take their revenge on the ‘new guy’ coming into the month. The last page is a special treat, showing the ’stats’ of each sign so you can see how yours measures up against another! Flip to the back page to see the entire layout and follow the battle as it comes full circle. A Fabulous addition to your wall for the coming year or great gift for friends and family!

The Particulars:

• The Calendars are folded to an approximate size of 8.5”(H) x 11”(W) with full size when open at 17”(H) x 11”(W).
• Each Calendar is printed on a print-shop quality fiery printer . The cover is made of a Heavyweight ‘Kromekote plus’ cardstock while the interiors are a lighter 28lb, 100 brightness Hammermill paper.

Interested in ordering? Either click the image below to access my the paypal link, or follow the link to Etsy where you can purchase it there. If you’d like to send a check, email alison.cardinale@gmail.com for an address.
Continue reading →

Archive interview with Alison Cardinale:

Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
Alison Cardinale: The want to create stories and characters that show my sense of humor. (A butterfly can be hilarious if put into the right situation!) I also made it a personal quest to create art that is positive, thought provoking and has many hidden stories in the image since I think deep dark art and hot chicks with guns/sword/whatever is so easy to fall back on. No offense to the hot chicks art, I love to see it, but it’s for the most part just eye candy and most time slacks in any concept.
Everything! A few; Art Nouveau (Much a & Macintosh particularly), African sculptures & masks, fashion photography, other illustrators…

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self taught? Do you think it has helped you or hindered you?
AC: Both! I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember and still continue to draw on my own, so that would be the self taught side of it. I took many a art classes in high school (painting, sculpture, portfolio prep..) and for college I attended Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Drawing and working on your art will always be a benefit and I can’t imagine if I would have learned to take my art as seriously as I do if I hadn’t gone to Pratt. If nothing else, it helped to give me time to discover and experiment with materials, methods, ideas and really try to take apart what I want to say with my work. When I first went there all I knew was that I wanted to do art of some kind and by the time I left I *knew* what field I was meant to be in.
Continue reading →

Something you may not have seen recently if you read CarmineMag.com through an RSS feed is that I recently added a little bit of Etsy store promotion flare to our sidebar. Some of you will see your work on here, some of you won’t (though that’s mostly because I didn’t have the time to go through all of the interviews to see which of you have Etsy stores) and you will see a lot of great artists that we haven’t interviewed on here (yet). Please, if you have the opportunity to purchase something from any of these sellers take advantage of that opportunity. Supporting artists by buying directly from them is very, very important.

The full list of Carmine Magazine’s favorite Etsy listings.

The full list of Carmine Magazine’s favorite Etsy sellers.
Continue reading →

Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
Lindsay Podd: What drives me to create are my dreams and of course friends and family. I used to keep a dream journal for a while. I just come up with random beautiful images in my head and try to somehow make them work out on paper. I also combine my love for silent film, victorian gothic, and tattoo art into the mixture.

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self taught? Do you think it has
helped you or hindered you?
LP: I have always been interested in art as a small child. All through high school I was in advanced art classes and also took intensive summer courses at Parsons School of Design and Maryland Institute College of Art. In the end I decided to attend Parsons School of Design for college and majored in illustration. I am still trying to figure out where this will lead me.
Continue reading →

Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
Arabella Proffer-Vendetta: I’ve never been sure, but it is a combination of information overload and mild hyperactivity. I’ve been doing art or film or music since I was a wee little thing and I can’t turn it off. If I go too long without creating something I feel useless, that I could go crazy and die. That, and I’m not good at anything else. Well, except real estate speculation, and hitting a fast moving target with a bb gun.
I grew up around a lot of 1920s and 30s art and I’ve always loved mannerist portraits I would see in museums, so I’m sure that had an influence that has stayed with me in my work. I have sort of lived my life as a combination of high culture and low culture – I always draw on the two. I had a big white Mohawk and was always at punk shows in someone’s dirty basement, but I would also stay at 5 star hotels and watch classic b&w movies. I love tattoos and Adrian ball gowns; muscle cars and Dior perfume. So my inspiration comes from varied interests in décor, fashion and the lifestyles of aristocrats and socialites. Everything I do comes from some loose narrative in my head and it always turns to things related to counter-culture and the eccentricity of the wealthy.

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self-taught? Do you think it has helped you or hindered you?
APV: I attended Art Center College Of Design for a bit and then graduated from CalArts. I think I went to art school at the wrong time for what I was doing. Everything was about concept and installation art; figurative or any kind of art like that was frowned upon. I think I learned the most taking animation courses because you actually did the art instead of just talking about the concept. I made the best of it by mostly concentrating on animation and film to get my money’s worth. Sadly I think my painting and technique got better after I graduated, so in many ways I am self-taught.
Continue reading →

Carmine Magazine: What drives you to create? Also, what inspires you and your work?
R. Y. McWilliams: I am driven by a burning sensation in my stomach and a little voice screaming in my brain. Creating art makes them stop. I am inspired by a combination of the beauty of nature and the decay of man made things. Old buildings, obsolete broken down machinery, junkyards full of rusty cars and rotting shipwrecks inspire me just as much as walking through the forest in the spring or gazing upon the full moon.
I am also drawn to images of war, rioting and other insane human behavior.
I don’t necessarily seek to recreate these things in my art, but they compose much of the alternate universe that my art lives in.

CM: Were you formally trained in art or self taught? Do you think it has helped you or hindered you?
RYMW: I am 99% self taught. I have taken a few classes, but nothing on a regular basis. I feel lucky that there is a great museum district in Philadelphia. Besides the big art museum, there’s the Rodin Museum, the Franklin Institute and the Academy of Natural Sciences. There’s also the Mutter Museum which is a collection of medical oddities and dozens of skeletons and brains in jars and the like. So I have been able to soak all of this in as part of my self education process.
I think that being self taught helps in the sense that I feel like my style is pretty unique and I don’t feel bound by any rules or conventions. Sometimes I make horrible, amatureish mistakes that turn into something unexpectedly cool. And sometimes it hurts when it comes to certain techniques or materials or tools that I’m not aware of that could really push my art to a higher level.
Continue reading →