Handiedan makes wonderful mixed media artworks of pin-up girls. Why pin-up girls? They’re “a perfect combination of sexy, humor and style,” says the 29-year artist from Amsterdam. For Handiedan, her art is “one big personal experiment in how photographic images and drawings can interact together.” It’s safe to say there’s a lot of interacting going on as the collages contain paint, ink, sheet music, playing cards, money, stamps, wood, rusty metal, doodles and whatever else she can get her hands on to help give the work a lovely antiquated feel. Handiedan has a background in fashion and photography and she says this aids her with her compositions. But the desire to create started at an earlier age. “I’ve always drew since I was young and it runs in the family. I always said I wanted to become a designer, a photographer and a drawer.” And now she gets to be all three.

[www.handiedan.com]

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Really bad gig posters are the equivalent of projectile vomiting on the audience according to Christine Hale. And let’s face it, there is only a small minority of sick perverts out there who enjoy that. The illustrator, designer and musician with Montreal-based band, The Hoof & The Heel, hopes that instead, her surrealist, cartoon animations simply speak to people. “There are three kinds of gig posters: the ones that just speak, the ones that are visually stunning, but kind of mumble or speak their own language; and then the ones that can speak, but also be visually aesthetic, which is what I try to do with my posters.” If you’re a charity or non-profit, Christine may just pick up her pencil and make you a poster for free because that’s just the kind of nice gal that she is.

[www.posterswiththemosters.com]

Check out some more of her posters…
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Jeffry Lee is into Hard Drugs. Lines are his preferred method of execution. It is not clear whether he is under the influence when creating his predominantly hand-drawn graphics, but whatever the method involved, the product is kick-ass visual art rooted in punk rock. Early influences include iconic and slightly disturbing comic artist Raymond Pettibon and some gangsta cut-and-paste style promoters. “I remember this one promoter used to put Sub Pop or Epitaph logos in his collage gig posters just to sucker people into thinking that the bands playing were on those labels, when in actuality the label logos had nothing to do with the shows.” Be sure to check out his band Hard Drugs if you get the chance. They just moved back to Canada from Brooklyn and we couldn’t be more stoked.

[www.jeffrylee.ca]
[www.myspace.com/harddrugs]

Check some more out after the jump
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How do you score a gig as official artist with one of the greatest rock festivals under the 49th? According to EMEK, the artist responsible for the legendary posters behind Coachella, harassment is the key. “They said they were looking for years for an artist that was good enough for their event, that, and I was the only artist who slept in their doorway.” Crazed, psychotic stalker behaviour may be one way of hitting it big, but it’s hard to imagine that EMEK would have gained notoriety as one of the best living rock poster artists were his images not the intricately drawn psychedelic trips that they are. He also raised a hell of a lot of money (over 30k!) for Haiti. Talented and a do-gooder! Plus he has an art book coming out this year. If we didn’t like him so much, we’d hate his guts.

[www.emek.net]

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Check out the many amazing posters made for Ti West’s The House of The Devil.
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Pornographic content warnings are most commonly followed by a blizzard of flashing images of tits, ass and other forms of human flesh that us folk at ION Magazine are far too polite to mention (who are we kidding!). Kathryn Macnaughton’s tantalizing collages of mixed media need no such warning, despite their graphic content. In spite of their “filthy rautten” nature, this Tortonto based artist delivers a high class hybrid of poster art inspired by vintage porn. Nipples, check. Heaving chests, check. Girl on girl spanking, check. Yes, we can confirm it. Spanking can be high brow. Describingher work as playful, ironic and provocative, Kathryn strives to embody passion within her art: “I think it’s very important that a movie poster captures an emotion that best describes the movie. A movie poster should have a lot of depth and movement.”

[www.kathrynmacnaughton.com]

see more of Kathryn’s work after the jump
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Jeremy Shaw first gained notoriety for dosing his friends with the powerful hallucinogen DMT. He recorded the results for an eight-screen installation that was shown in galleries around the world. His most recent work is a poster campaign in Vancouver that started last March. Since then, 25 different designs have decorated the city’s lamp posts with iconic and infamous imagery from Expo 86. In the artist’s own words, “It was a project I decided to do in response to the upcoming Olympic Games—I saw a lot of parallels with the branding of the city and the creation of new architecture and monuments and wanted to comment/incite conversation around these issues. I also thought it would be a nice way to get a sort of recuperative glimpse of a city that has changed so drastically in 23 years.” Organized by The Presentation House Gallery, this poster campaign “was initially funded by VANOC’s Cultural Olympiad, although it’s now mysteriously missing from their listings online.” When asked point blank if he felt the Olympics were a good thing or a bad thing, he responds, “In the grand scheme of things, I don’t think I can really answer fairly, but as far as Vancouver is concerned, I think they’re very problematic. “

See the rest of them after the jump
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Looking at Jesjit Gill’s poster art, it should come as no surprise that his answer to the question “What makes a good poster?” is “Fluorescent screenprinting inks.” Jesjit learned how to create hypercolour screenprints in high school so that he could make, as he humbly puts it, “dumb t-shirts.” But he soon saw that there were people out there, like Michael DeForge and Seripop, working in a similar style and he decided to run with it. Jesit’s posters, which he describes as, “Somewhere between trying to experiment within the limits of screenprinting and exploring psychedelic and grotesque imagery,” can be seen on telephone poles in Toronto and art galleries across Canada.

jesjit.blogspot.com

It is often said around our office that anyone who does art inspired by John Carpenter films is an immediate and lifelong friend of this magazine. Well, Mr. Tyler Stout, welcome to the fold! You might already recognize Tyler’s style as he did the artwork for the Flight of the Conchords album. However, among print collectors, he’s better known for his awesome reimaginings of cult film posters for screenings at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. Tyler humbly describes his style as “derivative? I dunno. I rip off lots of old movie poster styles from the Sixties and Seventies.” Derivative or not, his designs have clearly struck a chord with some as there are loads of people who spend all day on his site, hitting the refresh button and waiting for him to release a limited edition screenprint of an awesome movie like Robocop, Total Recall, Inglourious Basterds or what you see pictured above.

www.tstout.com

Twenty-five-year-old Garret Egles’ posters are disgusting. Not Cannibal Corpse-disgusting, but pretty gross. This style may be considered pretty off-putting when it’s shoved in your face by a crackhead while in the undesirable quadrant of your city, but when it’s used to promote hands-up, wild parties, it proves effective. “Overall I would say it’s generally bloody as hell with some kind of gnarly cartoon gore,” Garret states about his style, “but with posters I try to do something a little different than what I normally like to draw while still keeping some sort of style continuity to them. I definitely take a lot of influence from old Eighties trash metal artwork, comic books and cartoons/movies I grew up watching.” His “bloody as hell” artwork can be enjoyed at:

www.garretegles.blogspot.com

Mike Davis is part of a graphic design/screenprinting collective (group? troupe? I dunno…) called Burlesque of North America, and is a self-proclaimed lover of Canada. BoNA are a neat-o assortment of young men who appear to rival the ION staff for the title of having the most fun at their jobs. Here’s the creation story from the mouth of Mike. “I was a freelance graphic designer living in St. Louis, Missouri, and knew Wes through graffiti and Life Sucks Die, a magazine he and some other graffiti writers from Minneapolis were working on. Around 2003, they were no longer working on the magazine but were doing graphic art for hire. St. Louis was getting pretty boring, so I packed up and moved up to the Twin Cities to start Burlesque with Wes and our incredibly talented friends George Thompson, Aaron Horkey, and Todd Bratrud. Wes had been screen-printing in his basement and his posters eventually started to catch on at local shows. I had designed fliers and posters, but never anything for screen-printing, so this was a great chance for me to learn as it was taking off. I’ve been into art my whole life, whether it was cartoons, video game art, action figures, packaging, album covers, graffiti, whatever.” The Twin Cities have Prince, Paul Westerberg, Soul Asylum, and now Burlesque of North America. Saint Paul is the new Berlin.

www.burlesquedesign.com

Gregg Gordon’s first poster was for Ozzfest, a make-money scheme created by Sharon Osbourne in which she actually charged bands thousands of dollars to open for a tired, water bucket-wielding version of her husband. Still, it’s not a bad project to get thrown your way when you begin making concert merchandise for Sony. As the years went by, Gregg decided to go solo, creating his company GIGART. Functioning as GIGART, Gregg was contacted by The Fillmore in San Francisco to design posters for their venue, and he’s had a stranglehold on the industry ever since. Gregg took a minute to describe his style. “I like that I have many different styles; if you were to look at my work, you might not think they were all created by the same person. I guess my illustration styles would range from really clean sharp line work to having a rough hand drawn feel. I also like to collage, using many different photos and illustrations and distressing them to get that worn, trashed feel. I am always trying different techniques. It keeps me interested and challenged.”

www.gigart.com

Robert Edmonds (aka Robe, a name accidentally bestowed upon him by a television salesman who couldn’t understand his Australian accent) is a partner in design company Evoke International Design and part owner of delicious and stylish Vancouver restaurant The Cascade Room. He started designing posters for the Melbourne garage/thrash bands he was a member of in the mid-Eighties, and for the last 10 years has made posters a consistent part of his work. Also, he survived a childhood kangaroo attack and “escaped with only minor scars!”
Here’s his story: “I had a childhood fascination with the psychedelic designs of Sixties artist Martin Sharp, and a love of album cover artwork. I had a desire to steal street posters that were more creative than the standard template format of band photo, name, date and venue. My posters always aim to be a reflection of, and relevant to, the band. A graphic simplicity, with a singular image and strong typography.”
Be sure to surf:
www.robe.ca
www.evoke.ca
www.boutiqueempire.com

Since 1999, Jeff Kleinsmith and Jesse LeDoux have had their fingers deep in the poster art pudding, and have been gobbling it all up with delicious intensity. These two have a great back-story and here it is in their own words. “We started Patent Pending while working together as art directors at Sub Pop Records. At the time, a lot of the artwork for Sub Pop’s releases were done by the bands. Although we had plenty of ideas, we rarely had the opportunity to use them. There weren’t many people doing rock posters at the time so we had a great outlet to work through our various ideas without having to wait for the right project to come along at Sub Pop. We frequently get compliments on our choice of colour, good type, and a strong central image. We strive for our work to be timeless and classy. On a couple occasions they’ve wound up pointless and assy.”

www.patentpendingindustries.com

Holy moly we’ve found such a gem in Lil Tuffy this issue. Montreal has a reputation (mostly due to Leonard Cohen stories) of being more stylish than the rest of the country and we will now solidify that idea. If there were a Billboard chart for poster artistry, Lil Tuffy would be the equivalent of Rumours. “My style is something that is constantly changing. I don’t want to make the same thing over and over again so I am constantly experimenting. But there are some common elements in the bulk of my work. A lot of my work focuses on what you can’t see by utilizing negative space and placing only a portion of an image on the poster. I usually work with a very limited palette.” Be certain to check out lil-tuffy.com for more graphic perfection.