Category: Illustration

Darkness and Innocence in the Illustrations of Yuriko Shirou

Yuriko Shirou is a self-taught illustrator based in Mexico. He has worked in many different art styles—including manga, American comics, and figurative art—and has done projects for publishers around the world. His illustrations resemble morbid fairy tales, conflating innocence with darkness. The moth is a recurring symbol, channeling Mesoamerican beliefs surrounding death omens and the […]

Seungyea Park: Monsters are Everywhere

The art of Seungyea Park (aka, Spunky Zoe) is a meeting with “monstrousness”—that is, the product of our fear as it festers among us. Fear is necessary to social systems because it distinguishes the self from a monstrous Other—the enemy, the freak. “Monsters are everywhere,” Park writes, because we compulsively create them. To help herself […]

Dark Dream Characters in the Paintings of Bill Mayer

Bill Mayer is a well-known artist currently based in Decatur, Georgia, whose curious creatures have been widely featured on magazines, ads, stamps, posters, and more. Since an early age, Mayer has been attracted to things that are strange; this leaning towards oddity is evident in the selection of gouache paintings shown here, which include  anthropomorphic […]

Alone in a Dystopian Landscape: Concept Art by Simon Stalenhag

Working in the field of concept art, Simon Stalenhag has conceived a whole world. Using his homeland of Sweden as a backdrop (and more recently, California), Stalenhag merges reality with fantasy, turning coniferous forests and snow-shrouded fields into the sites of alien encounters, apocalypse scavenging, and bloody cyborgian crimes. He spent a lot of time […]

Shadow-Filled Serenity and Terror: Art & Tattoos by Suhwan Bak

Suhwan Bak is a Seoul-based artist telling his “goth-gloomy” tales on paper and skin. In a style that brings to mind Tim Burton’s lanky-limbed characters and the ghoulish terrors of Edo-Period ukiyo-e, his world is anything but ordinary; cadaver-faced women linger alone, dressed in black and partially obscured with shadows and chaotic fine lines that […]

Mimesis in New Anatomical Paintings by Nunzio Paci

Nunzio Paci is Bologna-based painter and illustrator known for his philosophic re-imaginings of anatomical studies. Themes of death, rebirth, and the undefinable boundaries of the body and spirit have followed him throughout his work. Whereas his older paintings (featured here) explored life as it bloomed from human cadavers, his newer works shift the focus to […]

Expressive Calligraphy by Dima AbraKadabra

Written words are arbitrary symbols, bearing no resemblance to the things they represent. However, the Saint Petersburg–based graphic designer/calligraphy artist known as Dima AbraKadabra is challenging this by shaping words to represent the signified action or feeling. Featured here is a series called “Integrate,” which consists of various adjectives and verbs that look as they […]

Old Architecture and Charming Darkness by El Nigro

El Nigro is the pseudonym of a tattoo artist currently working out of the Family Addiction Tattoo Shop in Naples, Italy. Specializing in blackwork, El Nigro gives rise to a moody gothic world; old architecture, dark-eyed women, and birds are central to his repertoire, bringing to mind the literary imaginations of Edgar Allan Poe and […]

The Weird and Endearing Darkheads of Agatha Schnip’s Tattoo Art

Agatha Schnips is a Berlin-based tattoo artist and the creator of “darkheads”: a creature she dreamt up about a year ago after being inspired by the atmospheres of horror- and dark-fantasy-based video games (“Dark Souls 3” and “Bloodborne” were cited as examples). Schnips told Scene360: “While being inspired with this weird but great beauty [of […]

Fusions of Body and Myth: Art by Stephanie Inagaki

Stephanie Inagaki is a Southern California–based fine artist and metalsmith. Her charcoal drawings are dark, poetic fusions of self and myth, drawing especially from Japanese folklore. The female subjects—which are often representations of herself—merge with crows and supernatural monsters, their bodies transmuting into uncanny hybrids inscribed with ageless mythologies. A particular emphasis is placed on […]