ARTS THREAD: Tell us a little about yourself
Mitchell Nelson: I am a freelance illustrator and designer based in Wiltshire. After taking part in the 2012 New Designers show I decided to set up my own solo, multidisciplinary, design studio MJN ARTS. MJN ARTS specialises in illustrative design for advertising, branding and editorial industries. In the 9 months that I have been running professionally I have been fortunate enough to have worked with clients as Samsung, Andersen Press and Sami Garam, who is an internationally renowned chef. Since setting up I have not looked back and I continue to expand my business.

AT: What will you be showing at One Year On? 
MN: I will be presenting a selection of exclusive designs for the One Year On show, showing examples of my illustrative advertising and branding which mainly feature my hybrid of both pencil drawings and bold, vivid graphic design. I will also include a selection of limited edition T-Shirt designs from my side project MJN Apparel.

AT: Can you tell us the inspiration behind the work?
MN: I love to mix traditional and digital elements to create complex illustrations. So I would say process acts as a huge inspiration to me. Seeing how various tools and media can blend to achieve different finishes really excites me. I am also very drawn to patterns, especially ones featured in Asian artwork which heavily flows throughout my work. Any Kimono pattern or ancient Thai artwork really catches my attention. Other influences include anything shiny, bright and hyper realistic.

AT: What are you looking forward to most at OYO?
MN: I’m really excited to meet the other designers at the show and to see what work they have brought along. One Year On is a fantastic opportunity to meet like minded people who can open your eyes to new and innovative approaches which you might not have considered before. I am looking forward to making contact with like minded people.

AT: What do you hope to gain by exhibiting at OYO? 
MN: I would like to expand my client base and open doors to new opportunities with agencies and potential clients for MJN ARTS. Also to increase my exposure in the design world and to receive useful feedback from my peers.
You can see Mitchell’s work on Day 2 of One Year On. For more Q&As with this year’s One Year On exhibitors, follow the New Designers thread.

The competition, developed by Arts University Bournemouth (AUB), gives artists aged 14-19 the opportunity to have their work seen by a nation-wide audience by creating a poster that expresses who they feel they are in the world today.

Winning artworks included photographic pieces, such as Stephen French’s high resolution image of an eye to Mimi Collins’ playful images of rag dolls in different scenarios and Abbie Mattingley’s gritty black and white photography.

Themes of feeling different cropped in in many entries, including winning pieces by Joe Slatter and Jenny Benson. Jenny’s naive-style illustration shows the young artist trapped in a box with comic-style hand-rendered typography stating ‘I don’t exactly fit in.’ Joe meanwhile, conveys that he’s not your average..well..Joe, in his self portrait.

Graphic and illustrative work was also chosen, such as Rosie Grant’s confusing collage of a train station and Naomi Kratz’ pattern-rich illustration filled with global landmarks, stars, stripes, musical notes and typography.

Winners were selected by notable judges including photographer Rankin and artist Stuart Semple. Other winners were selected via a public vote on social media.

To view all the winning entries visit the AUB facebook page.

Diversity in fashion campaigners All Walks have selected a shortlist of entries for its 2013 Diversity NOW! competition. All the entries were uploaded exclusively onto ARTS THREAD’s portfolio platform. In this post, we look at the finalists in the Illustration category.

Students from 33 schools across the UK, specialising in illustration, journalism, photography, magazines and fashion design were selected for the final. Category winners, along with an overall winner, are currently being selected by a judging panel full of industry heavy hitters including William Tempest, Deborah Milner and blogger DisneyRollerGirl.

University of the West of England, Bristol student Nicole McCartney has been selected for her illustrative work celebrating the beauty of amputees and people with physical differences.

Georgia Fowler-Evans (Nottingham Trent University) created a series of illustrations called Outsize Rightsize, which focus on plus size models in the fashion industry while Megan Clinch (Northumbria University) explores race and questions the industry’s Westernised ideal of beauty.

Lasha Demetrashvili (London College of Fashion) interprets the aesthetics of the Qajar woman in contemporary society,  Benjamin Sherwood (Liverpool John Moores University), meanwhile, celebrates Beth Ditto as a fashion icon and a positive role model.

Aimee Beagrie (Northumbria Univesity) creates illustrations that depict the changing ideals of beauty within the fashion industry and  Hannah Wallace (New College Nottingham) explores the way African and Caribbean women are portrayed in fashion.

Diversity NOW! is brought to you in association with i-D Magazine and supported by ARTS THREAD, Graduate Fashion Week, Own Label and sponsored by Succeed Foundation.

All of the illustration finalists have a portfolio on ARTS THREAD. Why not create a portfolio of your own? Sign up here.

Follow ARTS THREAD’s Illustration Tag for more posts.

Reykjavik - DesignMarch starts this Thursday in Reykjavik, the annual design event to show off what’s happening in Iceland. ARTS THREAD takes a peek at some of the highlights.

We will be bringing you a special post on the visual identity of the festival, this year conceived by graphic designer duo Jónas Valtysson and Ármann Agnarsson. It portrays the festival as an empty canvas for Icelandic designers through a real 475 x 350 x 45 cm wooden grid spelling out HönnunarMars – DesignMarch.

One of our favourite items on the programme is the 13th Annual FÍT Awards celebrating the best Icelandic graphic design. The Award winning projects will be on show at the Reykjavik Art Museum.

Nordic Design today is an exhibition on display at the Museum of Design and Applied Art and showcases six key designers from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden – Front, Harri Koskinen, Henrik Vibskov, Sigurd Bronger, Sigurður Gústafsson and Steinunn Sigurdardóttir.

While at the museum, look out for A Glimpse of Glit, a celebration of the ceramic artworks by the Icelandic pottery company between 1958-1973. Glit was a strong advocate of using Icelandic clay and ground minerals in its production during its first ten years, especially hardened lava.

Suopunki is an exhibition of 19 designers from Lapland, Finland and includes graduate projects from the University of Lapland, including the re/news lampshade is made of recycled aluminium by our Equip’Hotel competition winner Annika Heikkinen.

Iceland Post – Stamps is an exhibition of postage stamp design featuring stamps from the Icelandic Contemporary Design IV series, including new stamps designed by Siggi Odds, Ragnar Freyr, Rán Flygenring and Siggi Eggertsson that will be issued on March 14, the opening day of the festival.

Graphic design duo Guðmundur Ingi Úlfarsson and Mads Freund Brunse launch their online type foundry Or with an exhibition at Þoka gallery. The new ortype.is website will allow visitors to try out typefaces while communicating in real time. More on this soon!

The Dýrindi store presents work by Elín Hrund Þorgeirsdóttir who creates slow design handbags, purses and cushions made from recycled materials sourced in Iceland.

And finally-we are looking forward to visiting Spark Design Space to see the Something fishy modelmaking kit by Róshildur Jónsdóttir, which uses the waste products of fish producers to create a new educational toy.

DesignMarch runs March 14-17 2013.

Cape Town – The annual Design Indaba Expo was an overwhelming collection of the best design in South Africa. One of the most exciting sections was decidedly the ‘Emerging Creatives’, filled with recent graduates gathered to showcase their best work. ARTS THREAD highlights some of the most outstanding young designers.

Milkshed, presented a moving story, which, as founder Blaire Rieger says, is pretty simple: “We take reclaimed wood and transform it into extraordinary works of arts, and then we donate ALL the profits made”. Besides her unbelievably generous and transformational approach to furniture design, the designs speak for themselves through their practical beauty and ingenuity.

The Jasper Eales Original stand drew in the crowds with his adorable, quirky RAWBOTS made using reclaimed wood and upcycled materials. His eco-conscious products and furniture pieces stood out due to their simple functionality, clever adaptability and honest quality, which lie at the core of his brand.

More innovative and sustainable furniture design was presented by Nawaaz Saldulker, whose creative, reclaimed ‘Chairman’ (cross between a chair and an ottoman) was featured in Li Edelkort’s Totenism stand. His fresh designs are all about storytelling, which – according to him – all good design should include.

Design with a conscious was a resonating theme at the Expo. A very young fashion label, The Joinery, presented their organic, environmentally and ethically mindful range. Sisters Kim and Natalie Ellis strongly believe in fair trade and supporting local crafters, as well as using sustainable fabrics in creating their beautiful casual clothing.

‘Ondier’ (translated as weird creature from Afrikaans) is the latest project by Simone le Roux, (AKA Mona Pants). After graduating as a graphic designer, Simone decided to explore the medium of soft sculpture to illustrate her intriguing character designs.

The hand-painted porcelain works with a modern twist by Farah Hernandez captivated everyone’s attention. Farah sees herself as a visual artist, using the medium of porcelain as a canvas for her spontaneous doodles, which become usable art.

Another talented young graphic designer, illustrator and artist who goes by the alias Skullboy, showcased his ‘You & Me’ project, centered around the question of how “I lost my virginity”. He left papers with the question in public toilets around Cape Town and illustrated 100 of his chosen answers. The result – a catalogue book filled with illustrations which are as provoking as they are entertaining.

Inspired by a tribal, African influences, Katherine-Mary Pichulik creates contemporary jewellery pieces that make a bold statement using neutrals with brights with braids, yarn wrapping and accents of metallic detailing.

For more information on Design Indaba Expo

Cape Town: We are looking forward to this year’s line up at the Design Indaba Conference that runs over three days from 27 February to March 01 2013. ARTS THREAD brings you some speaker highlights.

Over the three days, the conference will be packed with talks from the world’s most exciting creative minds, with speakers such as architect David Adjaye, advertising guru John Hegarty and John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Day 1 kicks off with graphic designer Paula Scher, a partner at Pentagram. In addition to the commercial side, Paula’s teaching career includes over twenty years at the School of Visual Arts, alongside roles at the Cooper Union, Yale University and the Tyler School of Art. For may years Paula has been painting her versions of world cartography and in 2011 the collection was brought together as a book, entitled, it had to be.. MAPS.

The afternoon sees a Pecha Kucha session with eight graduate designers. Look out for Royal College of Art graduate Marguerite Humeau, whom we featured in ARTS THREAD magazine Issue 5, as part of our trend Sound Story for her exploration of the sounds made by extinct animals, such as the Mammoth Imperator. Pieter-Jan Pieters, a recent graduate from Design Academy Eindhoven, will talk about his Sound on Intuition project in which five instruments translate people’s movement into sound.

Finally, Day 1 finishes with John Maeda, artist, graphic designer, computer scientist and president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). John’s key project at RISD, is to add art and design into the tight coterie of STEM education in the US (to create STEAM). STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This talk should be of particular interest to the UK’s design industry who have recently been fighting the government on its dismissal of the importance of art and design in pre-university education.

Day 2 sees South African artist Nicholas Hlobo speaking about his work. Based in Johannesburg, Nicholas’s installations have a hazy voluptuousness and blend male and female elements using materials such as rubber inner tubes, ribbon, organza and lace.

In the afternoon we are looking forward to hearing from Catalan designer Martí Guixé. Working across a broad spectrum of product design, from food to interiors, Martí has an unconventional hands-on approach to his work. Recent projects include Still Life with Light for Vienna Design Week last year, in which Martí questioned the continued use of the glass bottle as the vessel of choice for wine and created the Painted Rug using a drip-painting technique using motifs reminiscent of Eastern European tapestry techniques.

On the final day we are keen to see more of the work of New York illustrator Christoph Niemann. Since 2008 Christoph has been the author, or rather the illustrator of, a visual blog, entitled Abstract City for the New York Times. 16 of the posts have been turned into a book, alongside a new exclusively-created chapter.

We applaud the Design Indaba quote: ‘Championing creativity that enhances every aspect of the world around us, Design Indaba recognises graphic design, advertising, film, music, fashion design, industrial design, architecture, craft, visual art, new media, publishing, broadcasting and performing arts shoulder-to-shoulder.’ Hurrah!

Design Indaba Conference runs February 27 to March 01 2013 at Cape Town International Convention Centre.

At ARTS THREAD we’re adoring fans of Icelandic illustrator Kristjana S Williams, whose brilliant solo show at Outline Editions followed an interactive installation in the Clore Study Room at the V&A for last year’s LDF.

As part of this year’s festival, Williams teamed up with Mayfair bookshop Shapero Rare Books, for Anachroquarianism: Kristjana S Williams vs the Victorian Engravers. The exhibition was inspired by 19th century natural history illustration, an art form which is seeing a resurgence of interest in the design world, and has informed Kristjana’s work for many years.

The show saw Kristjana’s vibrant collages of imagined and adapted creatures featured amongst work by the Victorian masters of this craft – John Gould, Joseph Wolf, Jacques Barraband and Edward Lear – in one of London’s best antiquarian bookshops.

It is these historic images of the natural world which Kristjana has avidly collected, manipulated and celebrated through her work, injecting her signature dose of luminous colour – a direct reaction to growing up in the grey landscapes of Iceland which brings this traditional art form right into the 21st Century.

Emma Kelly 'Blue Monday' / Tweet-a-Brief by Handsome Frank

In a bid to prove that good things really do come in small packages, ARTS THREAD dug out a gem of an exhibition at the Church of London’s new bite-sized gallery space on Leonard Street, Shoreditch, last weekend.

‘Tweet-a-Brief’ was conceived and curated by illustration agency Handsome Frank, which represents 25 illustrators of fantastic variety. Jon Cockley, one of the agency’s founders, told us: “We wanted to create a brief for our illustrators, with the idea of hosting our first exhibition. When we decided to turn to our Twitter followers for ideas, we realised the concept was staring us straight in the face.”

And so, ‘Tweet-a-Brief’ was born, with Twitter followers being asked to suggest a brief in less than 140 characters for each of the Handsome Frank illustrators to choose and interpret in their own style. 25 suggestions were eventually chosen from around 200 entries, including a request from ex-Charlatans singer Tim Burgess, who asked for an illustration of his favourite single – Blue Monday by New Order. Emma Kelly took on the challenge, producing a beautifully uncomplicated pen and ink drawing of the 12″ vinyl release.

Stephen Cheetham '140 Characters' / Helen Musselwhite ‘Wallpaper coming to life in a dolls house’

A firm favourite in the show has to be the brief ’140 characters’ which was interpreted by Stephen Cheetham. It features 140 vector-based characters from popular culture, including such loveable icons as Marge Simpson, Mr Tickle, Gandalf and Mary Poppins.

Helen Musselwhite’s intricate paperwork response to ‘wallpaper coming to life in a doll’s house’ is illustrative of the breadth of talent and technique on the Handsome Frank books. Its presentation inside a glass box, positioned as a centrepiece within the gallery space, just added to the sense of magic surrounding it.

Matt Saunders 'A ghost who sees herself as a wolf’ / Alexandra Bruel 'The inside of Stanley Kubrick's mind'

We also discovered what the ‘inside of Stanley Kubrick’s mind’ looks like, thanks to Alexandra Bruel’s surreal construction in modelling clay, and enjoyed a spot of narrative escapism with Matt Saunders’ mural, ‘a ghost who sees herself as a wolf’. As always, Stuart Whitton managed extraordinary things in pencil, offering a tempting depiction of ‘the perfect cup of tea’. We were pleased to see examples of more traditional illustration too, such as Jonathan Burton’s interpretation of a Twitter follower’s dream, in which his ‘friend was eaten by a crocodile’.

Stuart Whitton 'The perfect cup of tea' / Jonathan Burton 'I dreamt my friend was eaten by a crocodile'

The exhibition runs until July 22^nd and is open to the public Monday-Friday and Sunday, free entry (11-5pm). It’s being held at The Church of London’s 71a Gallery, located at 71a Leonard Street, London, EC2A.

It might be small, but this body of work really packs a punch, and serves as a positive reminder of the commercial scope for visual artists and illustrators. For more information check out the Handsome Frank website here.

Stuart White/ Minjae Huh

Spanning across several floors of the Stevens Building, the Royal College of Art’s 2012 Visual Communication graduates showcased the fruits of their labour. From web-based GIFs to unconventional storytelling, ARTS THREAD chooses a few of the best projects on show.

Waiting for Google by Stuart White is an ongoing project inspired by the time we waste while waiting for content to load on the internet, presented in the form of a series of animated gifs.

Minjae Huh created a campaign highlighting the government’s recent announcement of the closure of the Post Study Work visa that allows non-EU students to work in the UK for two years. The campaign, titled Future Without PSW, featured a display typeface, postcards, posters and other propaganda.

Byung-hak Ahn/ Jiyeun Sung

Byung-hak Ahn presented Images of Spectacle, a project that explores the themes of capitalism and material culture while fellow student Jiyeun Sung made us giggle with a humorous series of illustrations highlighting the difficulties of learning English.

Deshna Mehta/Marta Długołęcka

Deshna Mehta’s To Observe Is To Change is a really engaging installation in which members of the public are summoned into a dark booth where, using inks, chalks and other materials, are invited to draw the shadow of the hand they are drawing with. See ARTS THREAD’s online editor Calum Ross’ dismal attempt above!

Marta Długołęcka had loads of great work on show but out favourite was her her book The Recyclables. Using photography and digital manipulation, Długołęcka has created a unique world where discarded packaging and unwanted household objects come to life.

Burn Kim

Burn Kim explored new ways of storytelling with Epinodes, a tag-based narrative system that allows the reader to rearrange elements of the story via keywords.

Blanche de Lasa and Stina Gromark

Visually expressing sounds is a subject that many designers have approached in the past. Blanche de Lasa and Stina Gromark collaborated with one another to create a new, more expressive, variation of the Arial typeface. The pair also presented a hefty amount of research on the rhythm, sound and volume of the spoken voice in the form of a website.

Veronica Settinieri, Swansea Metropolitan University

ARTS THREAD takes a look at some highlights from visual communication designers to be found at New Designers this week.

Veronica Settinieri, a graduate in Graphic Design from Swansea Metropolitan University, has designed a thoughtful project challenging the idea of all Sicilians being pro-mafia. She conducted thorough research by interviewing a range of Sicilians about their view on the mafia and how it feels to have this stereotype pointed at them so much when most are against the mafia.

Veronica then created a poster to portray Sicilians being proud of who they are and little postcards about each interview with that person. It is very intriguing and thought provoking and the colour conveys the seriousness of her convictions.

Mark Head, South Devon College

Christie Doyle, Swansea Metropolitan University