D*Face

D*Face also know as Dean Stockton is a London born graffiti artist, freelance illustrator and owner of his own gallery space. D*Face came to rise first as a sticker street artist in the early 2000's when he started creating characters while bored at his nine to five job, these weird characters that he created eventually moved from paper onto hand drawn vinyl stickers that he started to place around the areas of London he visited. D*Face is influenced by a love for graffiti, skateboarding graphics and cartoons in general. In 2006 D*Face had his first proper show called Death & Glory at a gallery space called Stolen Space Gallery, which is owned and curated by D*Face , it was a sell out success. He is best known for the re-prints he did of twenty pound notes, released into circulation, with the classic D*Face character instead of the Queen's head, or a series of bill boards he covered illegally with his own design. I like how D*Face characters dare really abstract for a long time he really only worked with a flying ball type character with wings and weird slits for eyes,but all of his characters have a abstract kind of mechanical feel to them .

Comica: Independent Comic Fair

Saturday 21 April 2012 saw the latest of Comica Comiket, and independent comic and graphic novel fair, at The Great Hall, Bishopsgate, a gathering of mainly independent artists and some comic book publishers selling their own comics and graphic novels. Its a really interesting way to see probably over 200 different graphic novels of all different types and often speak to the people who have drawn and write them, not to mention getting a pretty good discount compared to the shops and more importantly finding great art work that will never be in the shops. There were two rooms on the day, one large room with around 100 stools in it with up to three artists on each, each with probably at least two or three different graphic novels/comics each and individual one of prints or large framed illustration. some of the better known artists there were Tom Gauld, Simone Lia, Darryl Cunningham, Andi Watson, Mark Staffor, the secon room  was a lot smaller but just represented artist that were drawing for Nobrow, an independent illustration publication that tend to be wordless and full of all type of different illustrations from lots of different artist. One of the best parts of the event was the live drawing where they were showing some of the artists present drawing in actual time, usually about thirty minutes each.Seeing the different style and processes was really interesting and infomative.

Does

Does is an amazingly talented graffiti artist from the Netherlands. His use of colour and letter style have meant that he has risen to stardom in the graffiti world relatively quickly over the past 5 years or so. He has moved on to produce paintings, prints, commercial designs and murals and founded a group on international graffiti writers called "love letters' while also being a member of team Ironlak (an Australian paint producer). I love Does's colour choices when he paints and his attention to detail and finish on his work to be admired by any keen graffiti artist and all artists alike. He often has exhibitions across the world, mainly the Netherlands and Belgiu,m and has managed to easily and very successfully move his work onto canvases of a lot smaller size than original wall piece without losing any of the effect or feeling and been accepted into the wider art world that seems to still shun so many talented graffiti artists.

Paul Noble

Paul Noble is a British artist born in Northumberland in 1963. He recently had and exhibition called "welcome to Nobson" at the Gagosian Gallery in Kings Cross. For This show Noble had produced some huge hand drawn, typographical drawings some a a metre or so in diameter and some reaching right to the top of the gallery maybe six meters wide and the same tall. They were drawn as designs for a city the Noble ad created in his mind called Nobson. The about eight of ten plans mainly consisted of one building per piece and were meant as different parts of the city that were scattered around a seemingly arid landscape. Often the building in each drawings design was made up from letters, depicting the use of the building e.g. Public toilet, of Holiday Home. The Drawings were huge and drawn to a really high and consistent level. The detail in them was also really impressive, though some times the content was a little weird, basically lots of walking feces, but i didn't that the work as a whole either suffered or gained from this. The scale of these pictures was definitely the most impressive thing and how the seemed to be so smooth looking. When you knew that they had been drawn all separately by hand on pages probably on bigger the A1 the way that they seem to join seamlessly, and the larger pieces were so big that they were never put together until they were being hung for exhibition in the gallery. Though some of his content is a little weird and contemporary i was really impressed by Noble ability and all the work was definitely interesting.

David Earl Dixon

David Earl Dixon is a freelance illustrator and artist from Colchester, who runs his own skateboard design company. Some times known as Dist.one Dixon's content tends to be character either human or animal, and the relationships between them, Dixon often has them working together as would only happen in a fantasy world. Some times his style and content boarders on anime but there is a distinct western style to his drawing. Again when drawing characters for contemporary illustration or canvas work he uses a lot of thick black line often joining characters or a piece together with clouds of black, i really like this style and it helps bring out some of the colour that Dixon does use. Dixon has a varied style that encompasses lots of different looks for the content he chooses and works on canvas, straight to wall and in sketchbook.

Pal

Pal is a graffiti artist, illustrator, printmaker and graphic designer from Riga in Latvia, He started of his illustration career creating characters the faces he saw around the streets of Riga and from animals, he would would generally in ink or pencil drawing a whole group of characters on a page and linking them up using curves and waves of dark colour. This early style had a really fluidity about it with characters seemingly effortlessly joining up and is still evident in his more polished more professional works. Pal uses thick black line in a lot of work and always with this very fluid feel to it. More recently pal has produced some prints, that maybe digital or maybe screen printed and some applied arts onto t-hshirts or bags but these i don't think are as nice as the early stuff produced. The style loses something when it no longer looks hand drawn for me, but i don still like Pal's later projects.

Bo130

Bo130 is an Italian Street artist and freelance illustrator. He travels all over the globe doing wall murals, sticker collections and installations. I like how his drawn work has a real graffiti feel to it, i think that's because of the way he varies the thickness of his line when he draws and the way that he breaks the faces he draw up into very obvious sections. When he sketches he tends to work straight onto paper with biro and builds up the outlines and areas of the sketch before scanning them in an dropping colour in digitally, or when working on canvas adds layer are layer on paint to different sections creating a really nice feeling of depth and tone. I really like pattern and the way that Bo130 divides his faces up is really interesting and reminds me the kind of pattern and symmetry without being dull.  The way elongates his face also makes his style really recognisable and different.

V&A British Design

V&A, British design 1948-2012 innovation in the modern age, is running at the Victoria and Albert museum and celebrates British innovation and design from the 1948 "austerity" Olympics to the 2012 Olympics. The exhibition was split into three rooms with each room presenting designs from a certain period in time between 1948-2012 like a kinda of physical time line. The range of different designed products was pretty vast. In the first room, from the earlier dates, there was lots architecture, interior design, furniture, decorative print and textiles. Some of this was quite interesting, but especially some technical drawing from and architect the were of Milton Keynes, one and aerial view and another a view of a proposed shopping centre, those looked like any digital mock we would today with trees and shoppers walking around they were hand drawn and the detail was amazing considering done by hand. The second room had some very contemporary furniture/art installations and a lot of fashion design. This was mainly clothes designed for catwalk or famous pop stars of the 60's 70's and 80's. They were a bit disappointing to be honest as they especially the catwalk clothes seemed like anything you might find in a modern catwalk show, but very well made and some extremely detailed. There was some interesting photography in this room again of pop stars of the time and popular models, it seemed as this room and age was very concerned with mass celebrity, unlike the first room that had a much more hand made feel to it. The final room focused on modern design form things like Concorde, the Ipad/Iphone, computer graphic design and again some architecture. Some of the computer graphics stuff was interesting as they showed the change in graphics in one game that has had a series of editions over the years, watching the change in sharpness, colour, fluidity and detail was amazing. The final room had a bit of a clinical feel to it i guess this was done purposely as it was all white and glass surroundings, while the first room was furnished with lots of light coloured wood and the second being  lot darker and with fabric lining it. Over all i found the exhibition a little disappointing but still interesting to go and see, it made you realise how much design has changed and how the signs of the maker have seemed to disappear to be replaced by clean, smooth shapes.