I love the illustrated work of Montreal-based illustrator Isabelle Arsenault. Her work is perfectly suited to book illustration, which is just the sort of thing she prefers. I think Arsenault’s bio puts it best, saying “Her style is infused with sensitivity and finesse. It attracts the attention of the young as much as that of older people, who can sometimes have a more in-depth understanding of it.”
Hong Kong-based illustrator Kathy Lam and her animal illustrations guarantee a good start to any day, especially a Monday. I love her free and loose-handed style and the funny phrases she often includes on her work. Here’s to a great week!
This week on Design Crush: Hoyz Rings are inspired by Jewish wedding rings.
Pretty colorful and graphic scarves for fall from No Ocean.
Take a peek at 10 September DIYs I can’t stop thinking about.
One spoon a day for a year, it’s happening in Daily Spoon!
Since starting the year off with my own 365 day project this year – 365 Quotes – I’ve become even more fascinated with the creativity and dedication involved with such an undertaking. While mine is about as simple as you can get, some projects go above and beyond with things that take hours out of every day.
Through Daily Spoon, Stian Korntved Ruud has been making a different spoon every day for the past year with the goal of exploring the organic qualities of wood and the addition of function through design.
“By repeating the production of a spoon every day for a longer period of time (365 days), the goal is to challenge and explore a spoons aesthetic and functional qualities. I make all the spoons in a traditional way with only hand tools. The point of this is to actively cooperate with the material, in this case wood. In a modern industrial production the machines overwrites the wooden structures and natural growth pattern. When using manual hand tools my hand collaborates with the wood structure during the forming process. This underpins all the spoons unique qualities.”
If you’d like to follow along on Stian’s journey, follow him on Instagram.
Joanna Hawley created Jojotastic as a place to spotlight everything from runway-fresh fashion to home interiors. Fellow animal hoarder and blogger, Joanna spends her spare time indulging in wanderlust, climbing rocks, and questing for the perfect apple pie.
Hailing from Detroit, Shinola is a long-time favorite for beautifully crafted leathergoods and watches. Recently, they partnered with photographer and animal-lover Bruce Weber on a collection of pet accessories. Like the rest of their pieces, the pet accessories are hand-made in America and made vegetable-tanned leather with brass hardware. Shinola also hopes to raise awareness with this collection for all rescue organizations, including the Michigan Humane Society and Best Friends.
Long-time golden retriever lover Bruce Weber also lent his photographic eye to the project. His strong belief that pets add meaning to our lives truly comes through in the photos, don’t you think?
Hi Everyone! I’m Billy from Wit & Vinegar and I’m helping out with a post while Kelly moves/buys a house. If it were me in that situation we’d play a game called how many margaritas can we drink before we stop packing boxes and cry uncontrollably in a corner.
Since I kind of dabble in food over on my site I thought I’d have some sort of food involvement in what I brought over here. It’s an Instagram account that I’ve been obsessed with ever since Kelly posted about it in a roundup a while back. I figured we could showcase the goodness!
Tommy Perez works with food, paper, and type to make all sorts of magic that he posts on Instagram and every time it happens I freak out a little bit and double tap as fast as I can.
Dane Horvath is an artist, illustrator, and designer living in Pittsburgh, PA. She is the founder of the popular blog Steeltown Anthem, which she launched in 2009 as a way to showcase the creative energy of Pittsburgh’s burgeoning arts scene through local design, architecture, craft, furniture, decor, and interiors. You can find her artwork and illustrations in her shop.
If you take a drive in or around Pittsburgh, hand-painted ghost signs are common to see on the sides of buildings or barns. The faded signs tell us what businesses or products once existed here and are a constant reminder of the city’s rich history, the way things have changed, yet, stayed the same. As a designer and artist, they are a huge inspiration to me. I try to step back and think of all the hard work and detail that went into painting them.
Hello! It’s Susan from House of Brinson stopping by Design Crush while Kelly completes her big move. I’ve been knee deep in renovating our 1850s historic home this summer, living in dust and piles of tools. For a visual person, this is hard, and sometimes depressing! I normally keep a neat home and living in a constant mess is really difficult. To keep me in a positive mood and focused on the end result I dream of what our finished space would look like, and look for color and interior design inspiration around every corner.
I discovered Eric Blum’s work online, and it has been an endless source of inspiration. First, his color palettes are soft, yet saturated. The inky blue and light pink color palette are so appealing. I love the combination and was inspired to use it in the interior design of our house. Eric’s use of texture feels so sophisticated to me, I could just get lost in the layers. He uses silk as a surface, applying ink and wax, which I’m sure in person is lovely.
If you have a moment, visit Eric’s site, this is a small sample of his large body of work, which includes drawings and prints. He also has an impressive list of galleries he’s appeared in.
As I drive out of Oklahoma City this morning on my way to the next chapter awaiting me in Pennsylvania, there really seems no more fitting post than a tribute to the city I’ve come to love beyond measure. Seamus Payne of The Coolist visited recently and put together this documentary – City Rising // Oklahoma City – that captures the city I know and have watched grow for the past decade. Our city is everything here and much, much more. So goodbye for now Oklahoma, you’ll always have a piece of my heart.
There was a time, not long ago, when cities like Austin and Portland didn’t exist as we see them today. Before these towns became great American cities, they were communities on the rise just waiting for their stories to be told. There are more like them, and one stands out. For every covered wagon or cowboy hat in Oklahoma City, there’s a tech startup and cultural story waiting to be discovered. I traveled to OKC to witness these stories firsthand. I trained with Olympic athletes, spoke to entrepreneurs and craftspeople about the businesses of tomorrow and even stood on the Chesapeake Arena’s center circle where NBA star Kevin Durant goes to work. I left intrigued and encouraged, having witnessed a city on the rise that is just waiting to be discovered. OKC will surprise you. (It surprised me.) It’s a rising beacon of tech, culture and sport in the center of the Great Plains. Join me as I experience Oklahoma City firsthand.
Four the past four years Melbourne-based artist Lisa Lapointe has been working exclusively with paper and colored pencils. That’s right, her work has zero digital manipulation involved. The fields of vibrant colors Lisa creates work alongside opposing shapes and manage to feel contemporary and timeless all in the same moment.
Coloured pencils are such a challenging medium – the drawing process is long and the works in turn become so honest, so revealing – in one work you have to contend with so many different mindsets – it’s a real effort to link them all together to make one coherent work…[a bit like life]… at the end of a work its like looking back at that section of my life in code – so raw and fragile and yet so potent and resilient – all wrapped up and hidden in a prismatic construction of composition and colour.
