The A’ Design Awards has just unveiled the annual results of their “World Design Rankings,” showing the number of medals received per nation in the last decade. United States has been in #1 position for consecutive years (i.e. with the most artists and designers awarded in this prestigious competition), yet there has been a shift: […]
Category: Makeup Art
We Die to Become: Interview with The Ljilja
“Everyone carries a Shadow. And the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” These are the wise words of the Ljilja, a mysterious Switzerland-based artist. She is referring to Carl Jung’s conception of the Shadow: the unconscious “dark side” of the personality driven by our more unenlightened […]
Armour: Empowering Hairstyle Imagery by Luke Nugent and Lisa Farrall
Featured here are works of incredible hair art, photographed by Luke Nugent, a London-based photographer who specializes in portraiture, fashion, and hair & beauty. The stylist is Lisa Farrall, an award-winning hair session stylist and the beauty editor of Noctis Magazine. Titled “Armour,” this series about “embracing women and empowering women.” Combining abstract hairstyles with […]
Minimalist Creature Portraits by Delphine Cencig
Delphine Cencig is a French photographer who discovered her passion for photography after working in various fields, such as cosmetics and visual communication. This diverse background shapes her current work, which is best described as vivid and eclectic; through a combination of photography, fashion, makeup, and digital manipulation, she turns models into dolls, beasts, and […]
Fantasy Meets Strange Fashion in Ilona D. Veresk’s Photography
Ilona D. Veresk describes her work as “romantic and strange,” full of “infantile curiosity” in her portrayal of limitless fantasies. Born in Izhevsk (a small city in Russia) in 1993, Veresk began her artistic career as a painter before transitioning to freelance photography about three years ago. She now lives in Moscow, where she works […]
I Must Be Dead: Vibrant and Surreal Portrait Photography
I Must Be Dead (McKay Jaffe) is a Phoenix-based photographer creating mind-blowing portraits of unusual characters. Using body paint and makeup, he and the subjects construct scenes of fantasy and nightmare, invoking conflicting feelings of sensuality, intrigue, and unease. Subversive by nature—for example, Jaffe views being human as a “program,” wherein people are “designed to […]
Animals Being Human: Photography by Darren Holmes
In “Animals Being Human,” photographer Darren Holmes captures people in the liminal space between rationality and physicality—that is, between humanity and animality. The sets resemble something from a child’s room, with messily painted props and a general state of disarray, and the models—their bodies painted or cardboard-clad—embody an ambiguous playfulness that is both innocent and […]
Vivid Fantasy Imagery with a Dark Twist by Ransom & Mitchell
Ransom & Mitchell is an artistic duo based out of San Francisco, comprised of Stacey Ransom (designer, digital artist) and Jason Mitchell (director, photographer). Together, they produce vivid, story-filled fantasy images. Their process starts from the ground up, combining set design, costuming, and prop construction with computer graphics. Drawing influence from the “Italian and Dutch […]
Otherness: Unguarded, Expressive Portraits by Andres Marti
You can see hints of Baroque and Romanticism in the latest photographic series by Andres Marti. Titled “Otredad” (Otherness), the work relates to days that one is understood as a whole and other days that that whole is fragmented. “The human is filled and empty in a cycle that I do not understand,” comments Marti; […]
Hideous, Terrible, Magical Body: An Interview with Olivier de Sagazan
In the middle of the movie “Samsara” (2011), a nicely dressed man appears behind a desk. He quickly begins plastering his face with clay and paint, building thick layers with feverish intensity. Within two minutes, his head is transformed into a grotesque death mask, which he impales and tears open, only to rebuild and destroy […]