Category: Design

Featured below is a list of brilliant last-minute budget-friendly gift ideas by John Atkinson. I hope some of these will save your Christmas!

John Atkinson lives in Ottawa, Canada. His work can be seen in numerous print and online publications worldwide.

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The artist who goes by the name Beast Flaps on Instagram decided to draw one grumpy animal each day this year, and 2020 has given us plenty of reasons to be grumpy, so we can relate.

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” It was only the first week of the new year, and I was already fed up and grumpy. I had a pile of paperwork to sort through, a backlog of work to get done and more than a few bills to pay. I was asked to stop everything and urgently draw a cute greeting card for a friend (as a favour… of course) and before I knew it I had drawn an angry duckling saying QUACK F***ING QUACK. It made me laugh out loud and I shared it online. It quickly became apparent that it was making a few other people smile too, and so a promise was made. No matter what else life would bring in 2020, I would set aside enough time each day to draw and post a daily grumpy animal. This book is the unstoppable force of 100 days of grumpy animal drawings.”

According to an artist Linda Bouderbala (previously): “I have already shared with you some of my work showing what famous characters would buy at the supermarket—check out my post here. Here come a bunch of new customers with their own needs!

I’ve always loved pop culture characters and I find them to be an endless source of inspiration. I love to draw them, but I like to find ideas around them even more. The advantage of fanart is that since these characters are already known to everyone, we can go further and find ideas that are offbeat in relation to their personality and their shortcomings.”

More: Linda Bouderbala, Instagram h/t: boredpanda

American comics first came to Glasgow as ships’ ballast. In the sixties it seemed every other corner shop had a stash of these glossy-covered comics displayed on carousels or placed beside their tamer British counterparts like Beano, Topper, or Dandy. With comics like Thor, Hulk, Superman and co. it was difficult to keep collecting consecutive numbers as it was pot luck as to what arrived in the shop every month.

h/t: flashbak

The clues were in the comic-book adverts for X-Ray specks, with which you could see the bones beneath your skin, or what was hidden under a layer of clothing; Sea Monkeys you could train who would entertain for hours; a mini-Polaris Nuclear Submarine with which to patrol local waterways; Aurora movie monster kits; and reinvent yourself like Charles Atlas or Arnold Schwarzenegger so no-one would kick sand in your face.

There’s a mystery in each of these intriguing paintings, pulling you into their depths. The figure of Anubis seems to be an outsider waiting to participate in each painting’s story – like yourself as an observer of the image.

There’s an entire narrative waiting for the viewer in every picture, and the strangeness of each scene provokes questions in your mind as to what is (or could be) unfolding. You will want to step into each painting and discover its secrets.

More: Joanna Karpowicz, Instagram, Facebook, Book

Anubis is the Greek name of the god of death, mummification, embalming, the afterlife, cemeteries, tombs, and the Underworld, in ancient Egyptian religion, usually depicted as a canine or a man with a canine head. Archeologists have identified Anubis’s sacred animal as an Egyptian canid, the African golden wolf. The African wolf was formerly called the “African golden jackal”, until a 2015 genetic analysis updated the taxonomy and the common name for the species. As a result, Anubis is often referred to as having a “jackal” head, but this “jackal” is now more properly called a “wolf”.

A painter, creator of comic art and illustrator, Joanna Karpowicz is a graduate of the State Secondary School of Visual Arts in Kraków, as well as the Faculty of Painting at the Jan Matejko Academy of Fine Arts, where she received her diploma in the studio of Prof. Leszek Misiak in 2001. She lives and works in Kraków.

Illustrator and concept artist Piper Thibodeau has been creating what she calls a “daily painting” every day since November 2012. With this series, Thibodeau is going for the whimsical: friendly-looking creatures and puns, and the illustrations are as surprising as they’re cute!

“I really enjoy focusing on optimism in my work, particularly during these hard times, and if my work manages to add a little ounce of sunshine into the viewer’s day, I consider that a win!” the artist told Bored Panda.

Whether it’s a USBee or a bowl of SEALreal, continue scrolling and check out Piper’s clever and wholesome pictures.

More: Piper Thibodeau, Instagram, Facebook, Patreon h/t: boredpanda

Guy Newman Smith (born 21 November, 1939, Hopwas, Staffordshire) is an English writer best known for his pulp fiction-style horror, though he has also written non-fiction, softcore, and children’s literature.

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Smith’s father was a bank manager, his mother a pre-war historical novelist (E. M. Weale). His mother always encouraged his writing and he was first published at the age of 12 in The Tettenhall Observer, a local newspaper. Shooting (hunting) has always been an interest of Smith’s, and he would have liked an apprenticeship in the gun trade. Not acceptable to his father, Smith’s first job was in banking. In 1961 he designed and made a 12-bore shotgun, and during 1960-67 operated a small shotgun cartridge loading business.

In the late 1960s and into the early 1970s Smith’s writing focused mainly on shooting and he wrote regularly for many sporting magazines of the day. In 1972 he launched a second hand bookselling business that would eventually become Black Hill Books. Smith’s intention had been to concentrate on this business and hopefully leave banking. It would ultimately be his writing that would do this.

Smith wrote his first horror book, Werewolf by Moonlight, in 1974. It spawned two direct sequels. However, he states it was Night of the Crabs published in 1976 that really launched him as a writer. Spawning seven sequels, the latest of which was published in 2019, the series chronicles invasions by giant man-eating crabs of various areas of British coastline. Smith claims that the 1981 film Island Claws, which told a similar story about giant crabs on the coast of Florida, was an adaptation of his work though neither Smith nor his novel were credited on the film.

To date, Smith has had over a thousand short stories and magazine articles published. He has written a series of children’s books under the pseudonym Jonathon Guy, two thrillers under the name Gavin Newman, and a dozen non-fiction books on various countryside matters. However, he is best known for his 70 or so horror books. The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural considers Smith’s horror novels “endearing, imbued with lively storytelling and the tacky brilliance of the horror and science fiction cinema of the 1950s”. On the other hand, the horror critic R.S. Hadji included Smith’s novel The Sucking Pit on his list of the worst horror novels ever written.

Smith’s most recent original novel The Reaper was published in 2019.

Behind the flashing lights and its constant bustling rhythm, Tokyo has an undeniable, almost mystic charm that takes a special talent to appreciate. One person who’s gifted with the ability to appreciate the day-to-day charms of Tokyo on another level is Japanese illustrator Akane Malbeni.

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Self-described as an artist who “finds stranger things in ordinary apartments”, her work dares you to look at everyday things with a sense of mystery. We got to talk to her about her work and how she creates art that tells the stories of fantasy-filled scenes happening right in the heart of Japan.

“I really love our radiant city of Tokyo,” Akane shares. Originally from Okinawa, she moved to Tokyo for university and has been using sceneries of the Japanese metropolis as her muse since then. “It masks a multitude of fantasies and myths under the facade of advancing technology.”

Contrary to what you might expect, Akane doesn’t look at the bright, shiny distractions in Tokyo when she picks up a pen to draw. Instead, she’s most inspired by the ordinary, and the “bland, old apartment buildings” scattered across the city.

“Tokyo has huge housing complexes called danchi (団地),” she explains. “I love drawing those places because they feel like ruins in the present era. They contain both the reality of everyday life and the mystery of time past.”

Danchis trace their history to 1950s Japan. This was a time of economic growth for Japan, and it saw workers flocking en masse to the more urban parts of the country. However, at the time, cities didn’t have enough structures in place to accommodate everybody.

This left the Japanese government with a housing problem, and building blocky apartment buildings that were several stories high was the solution they saw to address the issue. This gave way to a surge in construction of these apartment complexes starting in the 1960s.

However, about a decade later, the Japanese government declared the housing crisis over and residents of danchis gradually started moving out and moving on. Some of the complexes ended up being demolished over the years, but in crowded cities like Tokyo in particular, you can still spot them in certain areas where they’re being used for cheap housing to this day.

Akane’s work often features the straightforward characteristics of not just danchi, but other things that are very “ordinary Tokyo” as well. Some of the illustrations that best exemplify this include one with an apartment balcony at the background of a “post-apocalyptic sea bathing” scene, or one with a utility pole set as the stage for a girl and her crow friends.