Archive for December, 2008

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:

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(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.

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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.

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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.

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