Erin Kendig

As with Ian, I met Erin Kendig in September. She is very intelligent, knows exactly how to ask the right questions, and uses words like viscus. Yet she is refreshingly quirky. Her art is stylized and tightly focused – her mark as an artist is clear in each piece.

“Hello,” she says on the front page of her website, “I like making things. Thank you for looking at them.”

See the rest of her work at littleredgirl.com and flickr.com.

Si Scott, Master of Line Art

I love Si Scott. Just feast your eyes on this work for a few moments, and you will understand.

“I always start by picking a font I feel fits the brief or works with what I am trying to achieve the piece and then will play around with different page layouts for a while. The next phase is to just bring the piece to life,” he says.

“I think I came to make this kind of work through my love of drawing, type and design and trying to do something that encompasses all them together.”

“Most of my inspiration comes from music,” he adds. “I am constantly listening to music while I work and the lyrics especially. I’m really into words.”

He sites his favorite fonts to work with as Helvetica, Akzidenze Grotesk, and Pagan Poetry. See his entire portfolio at siscottstudio.com and art-dept.com.

Let the inspiration flow.

Wilkintie

Letterpress is a dying art. 

That’s why we love Wilkintie, the project by Carly Hargreaves and Niels Oeltjen, a couple living in Melbourne, Australia. Every month you can buy a gorgeous letterpress print by a well-known illustrator with a theme based around childhood, or subscribe to receive a broadside every month for a year via mail. 

Prints from Klaus Haapaniemi, Gwénola Carrère, and Merijn Hos will appear in the next few months at wilkintie.com.

Also, be on the lookout for a feature on Tacoma’s letterpress duo,Beautiful Angle, right here.

Peace.

Redecorate Your iPhone

Lilies, quiet forests, pebbles on the bottom of a crystal clear pond.

You know them too well. They’re the standard wallpapers that Apple seems to think are acceptable to pre-load onto our iPhones and iPod Touches. On the Zune, it’s graffiti and geometric tessellation. How dreary. We say it’s time to redecorate.

Say hello to Poolga.

Poolga is an art website, yes, but a brilliant one, offering the most beautiful iPhone and iPod Touch wallpapers you will ever set your eyes on. Created by designers and illustrators around the world, new sets are added every day.

And, and, they’re free.

Simply navigate to Poolga, click the art to download, sync to your gadget as a photo, and shazam! Stunning art at your fingertips. Literally.

Dan Black

I recently re-discovered a crop of artists that do their work by hand, and it is incredible stuff. Their design pieces show the mark of the artist, which makes each one a glimpse into the process of design, rather than the sleek, seamless finished product. Mistakes abound. The mayhem is apparent.

All this said, you may have noticed my mention of Daniel Black in my post about Hand Job, but I thought he deserved an entire post.

Mr. Black runs a mini-firm with Jessica Seamans and Matt Zaun called Landland, through which he produces some amazing album and poster art. “We are a small collective of graphic designers,” he says, “illustrators, screenprinters, relatively decent advice-givers…”

“…semi-amateur sink and wall constructors, art makers, big talkers, ex-9-to-fivers, listmakers and clean fighters, among many other things too innumerable to mention.”

“We make these things,” he adds, “with computers and scanners and photocopiers and drawings and fun printing techniques and whatever we need to use to get the job done.”

What now, you ask?

Since you are newly familiar with Landland and Dan Black, I imagine the question on the tip of your tongue is “Where can I buy this stuff?” It’s a good one. Here’s a quick list, just in time to miss Christmas:

Posters — allthosetwos.com
CDs & Records — stay-and-stay-said.com
More CDs & Records — myspace.com/treehouserecords

Art prints run at $30, posters from $8 to $20, and albums a mere $4 to $12.