Jane Perkins, an artist based in the UK, brings a new element of fun and life to her artwork by incorporating found material, beads and buttons of bright colours to recreate artwork by masters of the past. Perkins asserts on her website that she enjoys art which is fun and unexpected, and that is certainly what her artwork conveys. 

My personal favourite is her recreation of Gustav Klimt's The Kiss and Monet's waterlilies.

There are so many more on her website so check it out!

The truth about beauty ads

Anna Hill, 24, is an art student studying at East Carolina University. For a project she undertook in class, Anna investigated how women are being fooled by advertising corporations into buying their products by stimulating desire for what we haven't got (and what is impossible to obtain), and simultaneously creating anxieties about the features we were born with and we live with. 

Using photoshop, Anna has created a selection of 'mockvertisements' - that is, a bunch of adverts created as a parody to the ones we see everyday in so called 'glossies', a term coined by feminist theorist Imelda Whelehan to describe magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour that promise an attractive and shiny lifestyle within their pages. Anna picks up on the fact that advertisers use Photoshop way too much and the women displayed to promote the products are not real and buying the product will not make you look like that. 

Anna describes her unexpected reaction to the images:

"One thing I noticed when I was doing these that when I suddenly went back to the unedited [image], it looked so wrong and kinda gross," Hill said. "It made me extra aware of how skewed my perception was after looking at the edited ones for a while."

So there we go, despite Anna knowing that the images she created were completely fake, she still felt increased anxieties after looking back to the natural shots, replicating what women all over the modern world feel at looking at what is advertised as the desirable woman, when really she doesn't exist at all.

Read more on the Huffington Post

Mica Angela Hendricks - Collaborating with a 4 year old

Hello everyone! Sorry I haven't been on here for a while. Summer has been very busy, I went away with my parents to Greece, and then shortly after went with a couple of friends to Thailand for 3 weeks, then almost as soon as I came back started an internship at a Financial PR company called Abchurch which has been going really well.

But I just had to blog about this latest craze which is sweeping the likes of Reddit, Tumblr and the general social media sphere. Mica Angela Hendrick, a graphic artist (check out her blog here), on the 27th August updated her blog with her latest collection of artworks to share with her followers. These were slightly different to previous works of hers because they are not entirely her own, she collaborated with her 4 year old daughter. 

Hendricks explains the collaboration delightfully, describing how she received a brand new, squeaky clean sketchbook in the post and she started sketching an old movie still (she claims are her favourite photos to draw). Her daughter came up to her and insisted on finishing the drawing. Hendricks thought to herself that she'd just let this drawing go, but by the time her daughter had finished she'd fallen in love with the finished piece. 

Hendricks draws the head from 20s, classical Hollywood movie stills, and then her daughter completes the drawing by adding the body and the background. The finished figure could be anything from a dinosaur to a stick insect. Hendricks and her daughter also both jointly add colour, her daughter being a little more free with her markers, and Hendricks a bit more tidy with acrylic paint. 

The pictures are quite lovely! Combining old traditional style with the young, free imagination!

www.busymockingbird.com

Alana Dee Haynes

Alana - who calls herself Dee - combines photography with drawing, creating beautiful images. The majority of Dee's work concentrates on human flesh, and she adds her personal touches through drawing, almost like tattoos, to the print. The effect is really quite impressive.

Check out more of Dee's artwork

Huang Zheng

Huang Zheng, a Chinese artist, paints hyper realistic portraits up close of women's faces.

Art Slant

Picasso's Blue Period

In the spring of 1901, Picasso learnt about the suicide of friend and fellow painter Carlos Casagemas, and fell into deep depression. These blue paintings are a representation of Picasso's melancholy and sombre mood throughout the years 1901-4, his mood dominating his paintings. Picasso's Blue Period was followed in 1904 by his Rose Period, when his mood improved and this reflected in the pink, red tones of his paintings.

La Vie (1903)

Casagemas in his Coffin (1901)

Portrait of Jamie Sabartes (1901)

The Old Guitarist (1903)

The Rose Period (The Actor - 1901)

Kiss

Some beautiful watercolours such as the one above can be found on fhgalland.tumblr.com

Tom Fruin - Watertower on Brooklyn skyline

Artist Tom Fruin is going to build another stain glass water tower in New York after his first one last summer, this one is due to start installation on the 10th May.

Here are some pictures of Watertower I, a beautiful addition to the Brooklyn skyline. Built out of over 1000 pieces of plexiglass and steel, it sits on top of a water station.

I will update you in about a week of the new installation!
www.tomfruin.com

College for Creative Studies

The clever marketing team at the College for Creative Studies have put together this set of humourous advertisements

Le Carnet Noir

Nacho Ormaechea is a Spanish artist who resides in Paris. He says about places which motivate him the most:

'I'm mostly comfortable with cities which I see as perfect theaters full of inspiring yet anonymous characters.'

The people in his series 'Le Carnet Noir' are anonymous characters, a snapshot of a fleeting moment in their day, and taken away from this landscape and replaced with a contrasting image. These characters are the ones which inspire Ormaechea the most, anonymous people who, although they are unknown to most, are involved with and in the day to day running of the city.

lecarnetnoir.com