“We start with Ronnie, a young, passionate and talented squire learning the ropes - what better way to start a series than looking at the tough but important stage of being an apprentice?
INK STORIES is a series of short documentaries about tattoo artists and those inspired by the aesthetic. New episodes coming soon. Stay tuned.”
Who says playing video game is bad for you? Artwork by PaperBeatsScissors
The collaborative group going by the name, The Weird, got together to paint the following wall in Vienna. Each artist painted a distinctly different character drinking at a long smokey bar, with plenty of entertaining details. Artists who participated on this wall were Oren, Cone, Nychos, Frau Isa, Rookie, and Dxtr. Bigger view here.
The Weird Crew joined together at Stroke Artfair in Munich! It was one of the rare moments when the whole crew met on one place featuring Frau Isa, Rookie, Low Bros, Herr von Bias, Vidam & Look of Peachbeach, Dxtr, Cone and Nychos!
Mutabor created a wonderful campaign for the professional drawing instruments by rotring. McBess is one of four illustrators who were portrayed in the “Create Reality” short-documentaries. Learn more about it here.
“McBess, aka Matthieu Bessudo, was born in Cannes in 1984 and is an illustrator and director living in London. Until 2006, the Frenchman studied 3D animation in Arles, before moving to the British capital where he began working at The Mill, the award-winning company specialising in post production and visual effects. The focus of McBess’ own work is black and white illustrations and animations. He also plays guitar in his band The Dead Pirates.” - via Design You Trust
Unstoppable entrepreneur and visionary Johnny Cupcakes took some time with Maker Music at his Melrose shop to talk his brand, his touring days with his band, and magic tricks.
38-39˚c gives us the blueprint of a relationship between a father and son inside the dream the protagonist experiences while under the spell of the elevated temperatures of a bathhouse. Thick sheets of paper in exquisite arrangement represent the two men who are linked by their identical birthmarks, yet cannot seem to look at each other.
WILL is a beautiful, touching and heartbreaking short animation by Lee Eusong about the relationship between a father and daughter that came to an abrupt end on 9/11…
“This age-old problem of people living in big cities and not so: whether to give way topublic transport, women, pensioners, disabled and passengers with children? Byunwritten rules of social etiquette, all seats in buses, trolleybuses, trams, subways, etc.designed for children, the elderly and the disabled. Probably most readers of this magazine deemed it necessary, however, and some have their reservations.”
“developed by international ad agency I&S BBDO for the umino seaweed shop, ‘design nori’ is a series of intricately laser-cut seaweed for rolling sushi. each sheet of five designs— ‘sakura’ (‘cherry blossoms’), ‘mizutama’ (‘water drops’), ‘asanoha’ (‘hemp’), ‘kikkou’ (‘turtle shell’), and ‘kumikkou’ (‘tortoise shell’)— is based on an element of japanese history or symbology, meant to bring beauty, good fortune, growth, happiness, and longevity.
because of the precision required in the cutting process, the seaweed itself is a thicker variety from the sanriku region of miyagi. umino plans to use the leftover clippings to sell as furikake topping or recompile into other sheets.
the project was commissioned to respark the sale of nori following the tsunami in japan of 2011, at a time when umino director hiroyuki umino notes that japanese are eating less seaweed than in the past.
‘design nori’ s on exhibition through may 27th, 2012, at ‘katagami style’ of 19th century japanese stencil artwork, at the mitsubishi ichigokan museum in tokyo. the pieces themselves are available for sale only through the retail locationin ibaraki prefacture and at the exhibition, currently for the price of 840 yen (approx. 10 USD) each. in the future, umino hopes to produce the nori on a larger scale and at lower cost.” - via designboom
What happens if you add the instrumentals of Steve Aoki, Travis Barker’s crazy beats and the vocals of Kid Cudi? “Cudi The Kid” is the name of the new song of Steve Aoki ft. Kid Cudi and Travis Barker. Even so, the attention grabbing aspect is not represented by the song, but by the visuals.
Crisp images, well implemented effects that add depth to the story, an original perspective and Steve Aoki in a indian headdress. These sums up the reasons why I like this video, and to blame is Jam Sutton. From shooting to post production, Jam is fully hands-on and in control of every artistic aspect, creating his bold recognisable style.
His work spans various mediums, harnessing the power and creativity of cutting edge techniques through photography and video. And yet, there where two more things that needed clarification: what is the idea behind the visuals and what was the source of inspiration. For this I approached Jam for answers:
“The video explores childhood nightmares and fears, following the young Kid Cudi as his nightmares begin to fuse with reality. There is a lot of surrealist symbolism in the video exposing deeper issues.”
“I’m very inspired by the subconscious and dream analysis, a lot of this was used in creating the nightmare scenes (clowns and car crashes etc).” - via wabbaly
The initial few hundred bucks we ever scrapped together from our personal bank accounts, Ben and I put towards screenprinting our first t-shirts. We asked an acquaintance of ours to help us out; he had a small 2-color press in his backyard, so we dropped off a CD of art files and a boxful of blanks. It was 2003 and we were off to a bright future in apparel.
Or so we thought. Weeks went by. Then months. Nothing. Excuses turned into straight-to-voicemail, turned into frustration. We had lost almost an entire summer waiting for our tees, our first accounts had been promised deliveries that were weeks late, and our precious blanks were held hostage in some woodshed in the Valley.
So we showed up on our friend’s doorstep, unannounced, and demanded to see our product. One by one, he pulled each crumpled t-shirt from the floor mess. The first tee’s graphic was a little too high in placement. He shrugged, “It’s not so bad,” and picked up another. This time the print was upside down. A little flustered, he tossed it aside and grabbed the next shirt. The print was on the wrong side. “There’s always a margin of error,” he justified, “you have to expect a few fuck-ups.”
“Then how do you explain this?,” Ben asked, as he reached down and handed our friend a completely blank t-shirt. No print anywhere.
And that was that. 15 minutes later we were sitting in the car, doors flung open, staring at the roof with the sun glinting in our eyes. “Our company’s over before we even started,” we wailed in self-pity. That was everything, all our cash that had gone into the blanks — right down the drain with the ink washed from the screens.
We pulled ourselves together and somehow managed to peddle off a fraction of the t-shirts that were somewhat presentable. With that money, we faced our next dilemma. Time to find a new silkscreen printshop.
A friend of Ben’s referred us to a shop she had once used for a project, also deep in the Valley, in fact not too far from the Screenprinting Shop of Horrors that crushed our dreams just a month prior. We walked into that office on a blind whim with a photocopied linesheet of our next season of offerings. We thought we were sitting on Streetwear gold, but the guys who ran this shop could barely suppress their snickers looking at these misguided 23-year-olds with big dreams and shallow pockets. ”How many t-shirts are you guys trying to produce?” they entertained us, as the stale cigarette smoke hung in the air. The sticky carpeted floors caked in soot and old paint, the abused pool table re-appropriated into a makeshift worktable, and the counter actually an old bar top, the “office” was built-out to mimic a dingy watering hole. “I dunno,” we responded, “maybe like a hundred shirts?” That was about all we could afford to print, and furthermore, about as much as we thought we could sell.
They laughed. This time out loud. ”Guys, do you know how many kids come in here trying to start a t-shirt line? We don’t have the charity for that. Do you know what ‘minimums’ are? We do million-t-shirt orders for the State of California. We don’t have the time to separate your artwork, burn the screens, and run the machines for 100 t-shirts. Go somewhere else.”
But we weren’t going anywhere. I mean, what did we have to lose? Remember, our company had failed before it had even gotten off the ground. We had nothing to our name except a few t-shirt sales sprinkled around Los Angeles, mainly to friends of ours anyways. So we fought for it. We negotiated a deal that the screenprinters couldn’t refuse (In the end, I think they caved because they either felt sorry for us or wanted to get us out of the way of the baseball game). So when we were back at that bartop a month later with a re-order, they were amused.
And when we were back again after a few weeks with a brand new catalog of fresh designs, they groaned, but capitulated. Hell, why not? It was the slow season. So it went, for months, then years, bickering back and forth about measly sample runs and odd-placement hits, 4-color pocket prints and reds that weren’t quite the right red.. until one day our screenprinters called us and requested a meeting.
As they sat in our conference room, the first time we had seen some of them outside that french-fry-laden bar, they cut to the chase. It simply did not make sense for us to pay the middleman anymore. The print shop had gone from tolerating The Hundreds’ trivial jobs to dedicating the vast majority of their business to our odd-placement t-shirts with red prints on colorful pockets. From a financial perspective, it made way more dollars and sense to take all the machines, screens, ink, and labor and just do the printing ourselves. ”Buy us out,” they flatly suggested. It didn’t take much convincing once we considered the quality control benefits, the ability to monitor our work more closely, run extremely limited numbers of t-shirts without having to meet minimums, and best of all, always being on time.
And so we did. We bought the print shop.
The Hundreds has owned and operated its own screenprinting shop for years now. Aside from ourselves, we actually do a number of private jobs for friends’ labels (yes, competitors) within our industry, although you’d never guess who. Equipped with a 16-color press, a 12-color, a couple of 10s, and sample stations, it’s like Willy Wonka’s factory but for t-shirt creations. We’ve always prided ourselves on having the best concepts and artwork, but the key ingredient to our graphic tees is the printing.
Every t-shirt of ours comes with a story. That’s how we’ve built The Hundreds since day one.
But this is the story where our t-shirts come from. By Bobbyhundreds- via TheHundredsBlog
Nychos, Rookie, Cone, and Dxtr, aka The Weird doing what seems to be The Four Horsemen of Apocalypse, totally sick shit!
“This April I was invited by the “Collectivo Tomate” to paint a mural on a recovery project Xanenetla neighborhood, a neighborhood with lots of history to Mexico in the city of Puebla. It was a good opportunity to return to Mexico.
”Elotl” in pre-Hispanic Nahuatl language, corn (maize cob) is the staple food of this nation, I wanted to join the idea of how strong the family is here, making each grain a person or animal, as a unit of a set. For some time I kept this idea to represent Mexico.
This mural I want to dedicate to all neighbors of Xanenetla and especially my grandmother and my friend Raul (Carcomedhi) who are going through difficult times.
To thank Paola, collective Tomato, all members of the Collective, Laura Youth Institute of Puebla, Puebla Bauhaus school, all the artists who participated in the project and all the neighbors of someso are contributors to this mural and many others who were in the neighborhood. Gracias!”
See more by Liqen. - via unurth
