Dimitri Maksimov (1987), illustrator and photographer. From the cold lands of Russia, city of Moscow, comes this artist that seems to be higly influenced by Hayao Miyazaki's animations. His pictures are often populated by amorphous sprites, blobby monsters, human-shaped fairies that merge the imaginary with the real, reminding the feeling of most of the work of Master Miyazaki, like Totoro, Mononoke Hime, Sen to Chihiro, or Nausicäa. 

Ben Frost (1979),  visual and performing artist. Original from Sydney, Australia. If by any chances Andy Warhol and Roy Liechtenstein had a kid and raised him together, that kid would now be Ben Frost.

Ben Frost is most well known for his confronting and often controversial Pop Art paintings. Using a ‘collage’ style of unlikely juxtapositions, his dynamic paintings are complex mash-ups of popular culture that savagely critique our media and advertising obsessed society.



Ben’s work has appeared in countless magazines and newspapers including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Australian Art Collector, Empty, Monster Children, and the Sydney Morning Herald and was a contributing illustrator for over 3 years to Black + White Magazine.





Revitalized pop art used as a critique to mass produced media, concepts and behaviour. I've been studying pop art for my BD's and Ben's work is an objective reflection of all the idealism from this particular movement. The usage of comics, disney and anime commercial characters, the naive pornography, the advertisement thing like logos, everything about his paintings provoke a certain feel of anxiety and a moral itch.

And I perfectly love to scratch moral itches.

Paul Robertson (1979), pixel artist. Couldn't find much info on him around the internet, but as far as I got to know, he lives and studies in Melbourne, Australia. His work is a mix of superflatness post modernity completely adept of manga and anime drawing style. Most works depict a colorful world populated by superdeformed (SD) characters, being only apart of the works that depict videogame-ish action screens, even though the character styles are the same.



The joyful mess he provides us with is somewhat closely familiar. Well, at least for me. I feel inspired by his works as I am also a creation of the gamer stereotype from the eighties. The lo-tech stuff he produces touches me nostalgically as I remember my childhood and those difficult days where the hardest thing on earth was to come from school and try one more time to get through the forest stage of Alexx Kid. The color combinations and the animated GIFs are amazingly well thought, and I feel like I can almost laugh at every new file I see.



Plus, there's an obvious japan touch to it. Being so close to the land of the rising sun must have something to do with that. Most of the games he shows, like Disgaea and Persona 3, are the ones I'm currently playing or feel interested for. And these games are all J-designed, meaning they have that anime style universe as art direction, wich is wonderfully flat and nonsense and inspires Paul so much.

The nonsense in fact seems to be a recurring theme. animated GIFs of cats with exploding heads, the cuteness factor in characterized bricks or other common objects, clompletely loose game screens with animation feel. The interesting thing here is that Paul shows a great diversion of characters in odd situations. I'm not really sure if most of them are original creations or else. He has also made a few animations wich I cannot watch at the moment, as I'm writing from work.



Paul usually posts his stuff to his livejournal page, but he also contributes to The Mecha Fetus Visual Blog, a visual art design blog made to share "beautiful imagery with the beautiful world".

Gaston Caba (1978), freelance illustrator. Currently lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His work features worldwide in many exhibitions, websites, international magazines, plus some books like “Pictoplasma - The Character Encyclopedia” (Pictoplasma Publishing), “Pictoplasma 2“ & “Tres Logos” (Die Gestalten Verlag), “Illustration Now 2′ (Taschen), “The big book of illustration ideas I & II” (Harper Collins), “Football Heroes“ (Herzglut Verlag) & the cover for the fresh “Latex for fun” book (Die Gestalten Verlag).

He was a member of Grupo Sorna, an eclectic bunch of writers & designers, where he developed a flash animation series named “Mundo Juanca“ Juanca´s characters design has been the main beloved characters in Gaston´s work.



In 2005 he made up the “Ping-Pong Remix“ project, a big collaborative project in which he invited +70 of the best illustrators/designers around the world to remix his ping-pong characters into original artworks. Soon he´ll launch his own fashion brand named “Gaston Custom” based on Hong Kong and distributed worldwide. He´s also a composer/singer for Flavia & the Motonets & part of the online-radio show “El Monte Análogo”.



With a simplistic design style, Gastón captured my attention for character designing and general illustrations. His site is full of beautiful artwork that can inspire mascot creation for marketing (as for Adidas, see image at the beginning of the post) purposes, clothing design (as he has done for Diesel) and digital art for clients that are a little more open to creative post-modern flat stuff.