Illustration Showcase: 5 Artists to Watch

Shapes, colors, textures, and a whole lotta lovable monsters.

We love illustration. We love innovation. And we love these 5 incredibly innovative illustrators.

TAD CARPENTER

Kansas City designer Tad Carpenter‘s character illustrations are what one would call “unique” — the bold colors, crisp lines and subtle 2D texture, combined with the expressive minimalism of the characters’ faces, make for a signature style you couldn’t mistake for another.

Tad’s work spans across posters, identity, installations, packaging, painting, and more. Between his day job at Design Ranch and his personal work, Tad also co-runs Vahalla Studios, a top-notch screen-printing shop.

Tad recently collaborated with a few other artists on a philanthropic project — after visiting 9 orphanages in Vietnam to help paint some murals, they got inspired by the kids’ drawings and paired each kid with one of the artists, who later did his own version of the kid’s drawing. (Remember Child Art for Grown-Ups?)

They then set up an auction for the work, benefiting, of course, the orphanages.

Check out Tad’s blog for more about his work, his inspiration, and his rather exciting artist life.

via grain edit

CHRISTOPHER LEE

Designer and motion graphics artist Christopher Lee, a.k.a. “The Best Is Back,” has some pretty impressive commercial gigs to his credit: Lucas Arts, TBWA, Disney Consumer Products, Vodafone and Honda, to name but a few.

In 2004, Christopher started a conceptual pet project dubbed The Urbanites — a friendly bunch of characters that are almost like the rest of us:

Populated together in that tight knit community you’ve grown to love and hate. Filled with best friends, mortal enemies, summer popsicles, freshly cut lawn, gossip, laughs and the obligatory robot factory.

Except they’re monsters.

Eventually, Christopher developed The Urbanites into lovable characters, each with a unique personality and back story.

In 2006, Christopher moved to Southern California to look for new inspiration. And we think he’s more than found it.

Christopher now lives in Sacramento and works as an Art Director at motion graphics get-up Buck.

MATTHEW WOODSON

Chicago-based artist Matthew Woodson is the kind of illustrator who doesn’t fall for the latest grunge or “2.0” or magna fad. His minimalistic traditionalism of simple, meticulous pen and brush work somehow creates rather powerfl, almost haunting images.

Something about his ghostly illustration seems to strike a chord with the cultural and commercial A-listers — from nonprofits like UNICEF, to for-as-much-as-possible-profits like American Express, to an impressive lineup of media powerhouses: BusinessWeek, ESPN Magazine, Glamour, Randomhouse, and Wired (which, as you probably know by now, we’re completely obsessed with.)

Check out Matthew’s blog for a glimpse into his creative process.

ALBERTO CERRITEÑO

Designer Alberto Cerriteño is an enviable master of texture, shape and color, whatever medium they dwell in.

His artwork creates nothing short of a whimsical alternate reality, sucking you in one lovable monster at a time.

Born in Mexico City, Alberto is now a Senior Art Director at a Portland-based design shop. His work spans nearly every frontier of design imaginable, from print to motion graphics to apparel and more.

Follow Alberto’s global adventures on his blog for some insight into the fuel of that incredibly imaginative mind.

WILMER MURILLO

Honduras-based freelance illustrator Wilmer Murillo‘s artwork is brimming with that rare blend of the bizarre, the delightful and the introspective, all tied with a bow of fantastic aesthetic execution.

His latest collection, The Messenger of Love Is Old and Tired, juxtaposes the endearing, almost cartoonish nature of the characters with the profound sadness of the conceptual message.

Wilmer is only 21, which absolutely floors us. Keep your eyes peeled for this guy as he takes the design world by storm in the next couple of years.

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The Art of the Doodle

Why pen and paper are not dead and what Aspirin has to do with Thom Yorke.

It’s a well-documented fact that creative people, whatever their craft, doodle. Documented mostly on napkins, sticky notes, torn off notebook pages, and other random scraps of paper. Doodling is a silver bullet for everything from fleshing out that big idea to relieving creative boredom, an art form so underappreciated yet so necessary for keeping the cogs of the creative world turning.

One brave blog is out to claim doodling the kind of status it deserves. Doodlage is a rich and diverse tribute to the art of doodling, spanning the entire spectrum of doodlers — from the professional illustrator to the everyday cubicle slave stuck on a long call with nothing but a pen and the back of a spreadsheet.

Granted, some of the stuff featured is the brilliant work of world-class artists, but that’s okay because Doodlage, not unlike us here, seems to be in the business of indiscriminate inspiration.

Doodlage scours the web for doodly goodness, whatever medium or shape it may take — from to fascinating notebook doodles (some of which remind us of a certain Thom Yorke album cover), and everything in between.

And since this is exactly the kind of stuff to make you seem all smart and thoughtful in the otherwise cheesy and cliché-driven ordeal of holiday gift-giving, be sure to check out the Doodlage Shop on Etsy.

Doodlage is the work of creative duo RaShell and LeO, both of whom you can follow on Twitter.

via AiBURN

History, Animated, Quick and Uneuphemistic

The moon hoax, why Nixon lost the debate, and what dinosaurs have to do with Gerald Ford and a chicken.

Despite our general dismissal of history as a boiling pot of mistakes that humanity never learned from, we have to admit it offers a great and telling tale or two. And the History Channel is out to prove it.

The Great and Telling Tales of History is a brilliant series of 1-minute films in which history’s walking encyclopedia, historian Timothy Dickinson, tells us, in a grandfatherly voice and an endearing British accent, little-known and fascinating facts about the history of politics, pop culture and the world at large.

But what makes the films truly marvelous is that we’re taken through the unexpected twists and turns of history by artist Benjamin Goldman‘s wonderful animation — dark and delightful at the same time, every bit as full of unexpected twists and turns as the stories themselves.

The talks aren’t just mere recaps of history, either. They’re full of Tim Dickinson’s own, often unapologetic and unorthodox, theories about the world — like the rather snarky short on drugs, in which he shares this uneuphemistically true sentiment about human nature:

The point is, we are fundamentally dissatisfied with our standard biological condition, and we’ll find one way or another of altering it.

Some of our favorites: Jimmy Carter vs. the Killer Rabbit,  The Brain, The Strange Case of Mary Toft, and Charles Darwin.

>> via Coudal

I Met The Walrus: Lennon’s Brain Animated

Truth, aged like a good whiskey, from the cellar of a cultural legend.

In 1969, a brave 14-year-old boy named Jerry Levitan armed with a tape-deck snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and charmed the legend into doing an interview about peace, music, the USA, life and the Bee Gees. Thirty-nine years later, Levitan offered the interview to the world.

Only he did it brilliantly.

I Met The Walrus is an animated short, in which Lennon’s original voiceover comes to life through wonderful pen animation by the tremendously talented James Braithwaite.

Listen to Lennon’s detached yet passionate musings on politics, human nature and marijuana. And appreciate the irony of how true some of what he said 39 years ago rings today.

It’s up to the people. You can’t blame it on the government and say, ‘Oh, they’re doing this, they’re doing that, oh, they’re gonna put is us into war.’ We put ’em there. We allow it. And we can change it. If we really wanna change it, we can change it.” ~ John Lennon

And as we throw a hopeful glance of relief towards the President Elect, we can’t help thinking, Amen.

*** UPDATE ***

Levitan’s once-in-a-lifetime Lennon adventure is now available in book form, as the wonderful I Met the Walrus: How One Day with John Lennon Changed My Life Forever — a priceless first-hand recollection of the unusual encounter. It features Jerry’s memorabilia from the day — notes from John and Yoko, the secret code to contact him, drawings, John’s doodles and more — as well as the animated film and the original audio interview. It is, as we certainly don’t need to point out, a cultural treasure and a Lennonphiliac must-have.

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