Cool Cover Art

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Reading this week's New Yorker, I also came across some very cool cover art.

Jorge Colombo's iphone sketch, conducted "using Brushes, an application for the iPhone, while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square" is quite an impressive piece of techno-finger painting.

Watch the video of his work-in-progress here.

Karen Klassen

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Karen Klassen is a local Calgary illustrator represented by Colagene in Montreal. She does beautiful work, as you can see in this spring image project for Market Mall and the Shisomiso ad that she made for issue #1 of UPPERCASE magazine. Visit Karen's blog to see some of her process for the Market Mall project.

Karen is one of the artists that we profiled in Work/Life: the UPPERCASE directory of Canadian Illustrators & Photographers. Work/Life is a great resource for art directors as well as aspiring creatives. Through interviews, studio images, sketchbook pages and personal mementos, you really get to know the artists. Click the image below to see it larger and to read the article.

Announcing the Suitcase Series: Camilla Engman

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The Suitcase Series Volume 1:
Camilla Engman

Artist Camilla Engman may live in Gothenburg, Sweden, but her appeal is international. A professional illustrator and exhibiting artist, her images are whimsical, poignant, humourous and insightful. With her keen eye for finding the extraordinary in the everyday, Camilla documents her inspirations and artwork on her popular blog. Nearly 2000 fans visit her site on a daily basis (with three quarters being from North America) to get a glimpse into Camilla’s creative life.

UPPERCASE is proud to have been the first gallery outside of Sweden to feature her work, in our 2005 exhibition “Best in Show”. We are excited to be collaborating on a book of Camilla’s art and life, the first volume in our “Suitcase Series”, to be released in the fall of 2009. I am looking forward to travelling to Sweden next month and meeting Camilla (and her cute dog, Morran) at long last.

The Suitcase Series presents in glorious detail the lives of select artists and designers. The books are image-based, full of artwork, sketchbook pages, beautiful photographs and artifacts from where the artists live and work. Interviews with the artist are included in both their native language and English. The books’ size will be small and intimate, like a diary/sketchbook and each book in the series would have a special treasure added: perhaps a small limited-edition art print, a vellum envelope filled with foreign paper scraps for collage, fabric swatches, etc. The book becomes a precious souvenir of a creative journey shared between the reader and the artist.

For our book and magazine subscribers, you will be receiving the Jen11 and Camilla books as part of your subscription. If you'd like to preorder Camilla's book by itself, click here. All pre-orders will include a unique keepsake of the project.

{ PHOTO: Elisabeth Dunker }

This, that, and also, etc.

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Over the last couple weeks we have been receiving a lot of introductions and suggestions from readers of our online journal. It is really great to get to know you, so keep the suggestions coming.

The imagery above is the work of Dan Shepelavy. Dan impressed us with a lengthy and informative message, outlining his interests and providing links to recent work and his blog. We look forward to following his blog (love this Rexall Cold Cream tin for obvious design reasons) and hope to collaborate on future projects.

Really Arty Posters

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Have you see Flight of the Conchords? I'm a new fan of the show (for their ode to love and stationery supplies, click here.) They recently hosted a "Really Arty Poster Contest" and the submissions are quite outstanding. It seems that many talented people entered the contest because I browsed through all 375 entries and the majority of them were good-quality poster designs. (Here's the winner.) Is there something about the show that particularly appeals to designers and illustrators? Might it Brett's animal t-shirts?