Posts in Design
March's Featured Artist!

Meet Chemical Hex, a surrealistic illustrator based out of Southern California. Let’s learn more about her creative journey!

Welcome! Tell us about yourself, when did you start creating?

Hello my name is Sunny, I am an illustrator who likes to go under the alias of Chemical Hex. It’s the name I have chosen to represent my artwork and to separate it from myself. My artistic style involves surreal entities in the natural world with a grim twist. I began creating as soon as I was able to pick up a pencil. I have loved drawing ever since I can remember.

Read More
February's Featured Artist!

Welcome back to a new year of featured artists! Meet Regino, a graphic ink artist from Southern California. Let’s learn more about him and his journey.

Welcome, Regino, tell us about yourself, when did you start creating?

I’ve always been pretty good at traditional drawing, which is my main medium, but it wasn’t until I was in junior high that I started actively showing an interest in it. I’ve always enjoyed it, but middle school is when I started doodling on my school work and drawing in my free time. So I’d say at the age of 14.

Read More
December's Featured Artist!

Welcome to December’s Featured Artist! Meet Jessica Beatnik, a New Zealand software engineer and aspiring artist. Let’s learn about her creative journey!

Welcome, Jessica, tell us about yourself, when did you start creating?

Just your average modern artist, really. Equally tortured and narcissistic, Instagram feed packed with melancholy art and pictures of myself. I’m very drawn to the intersection of technology, the internet and social media personalities with self-expression and traditional art making, and I explore this through portraits and the process of sharing them online. My social media accounts and website are living galleries of the art I have made under my online alter-ego Jessica Beatnik.

In terms of style I work in an area between realism and cartoon, usually reaching for graphite, watercolor, black ink or a combination depending on the subject. Sometimes I work on digital projects, assisted by a background in digital design and software development.

Read More
November's Featured Artist!

Welcome to November’s Featured Artist! Meet Travis Usher, a local artist in Joshua Tree, California. Let’s learn about his creative background!

Welcome, Travis, tell us about yourself, when did you start creating?

I try to paint what I see the best I can. I think like most people I’ve been drawing as long as I can remember. Some of us become more obsessed with it than other’s but I drew on everything and luckily my parents encouraged it. I just recently saw one of my first signed finished pastel chalk painting that I can remember at my mom’s house, I was nine at the time. I started painting with acrylics a couple years later and finally found oil paint shortly after high school and fell in love with the process.

Read More
October's Featured Artist!

Welcome to October’s Featured Artist! Meet Hali, the artist behind Bone Thoughts. She creates a lot of horror movie inspired art, perfect for Halloween season (who else is ready for Halloween?! I know I am!). Let’s learn more about her creative journey.

Welcome, Hali, so tell us about yourself and your artistic style?

I think art is one of the most important things in existence. I spend a little bit of every day reading poetry and looking at artwork. I majored in psychology during undergrad and minored in art. I got my master’s in art therapy in 2015. When I’m not painting, I’m probably reading or watching a horror movie.

I would describe my style as vibrant, messy, moody, and fun.

Read More
September's Featured Artist!

Hello and welcome to September’s Featured Artist! Meet Megan, the artist behind MM Fine Art. She is a professional graphite artist and specializes in Pet Portraits! Let’s learn more about her creative journey.

Welcome, Megan, so tell us about yourself?

I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. I have always loved working with graphite ever since I was little. I’ve tried to draw as realistically as possible, and I would love to advance to hyper-realism one day. I’ve never had any formal training, so I’m completely self taught and have learned everything I know from trial and error. I currently specialize in pet portraits because I love the relationships people have with their pets. The love that an owner and pet share is very unique but also so strong, and I love to immortalize people’s pets (and my own) through my art.

Read More
August's Featured Artist!

Hello and welcome to August’s Featured Artist! Meet John Lauria, an artist who loves photographing precious family moments and land/seascapes. Let’s find out more about John’s background!

So John, tell us about yourself and your artistic style?

I am 59 years old and I have been making photographs since the age of 12. I started with a Kodak Instamatic in 1972, but after seeing my ability, my father gave me his old Zeiss Ikon 35mm.

Read More
July's Featured Artist!

Hello and welcome to July’s Featured Artist! Meet Dallas Anderson, an artist who loves drawing and painting popular characters from comics, TV, and movies. Let’s learn more about, Dallas!

So Dallas, tell us about yourself and your artistic style?

I have been drawing ever since I can remember. Even as a kid I was always drawing things from pop culture. Still to this day my favorite thing to draw are things from the early 90's, I guess it just reminds me of childhood, and everything I grew up in love with. My style is always changing. I try to adopt my style and grow with new techniques every day to keep becoming a better artist.

Definitely a great thing to keep in mind as an artist; improvement is almost always in small increments! What would you say is your favorite medium to work in and why?

Visual art, drawing, painting, etc is my favorite by far. This is something I feel I have complete control over. You start with the blank page, and create the world, character, or emotion you want to see. I also love photography, but I always want to get pictures of places, and haven't traveled for some time now.

Read More
June's Featured Artist!

In honor of my one year of writing about monthly featured artists, I wanted to go back to basics and keep this month’s featured artist as a traditional interview format. Meet Samara DiMouro! We were booth neighbors at ARTsea in Marina Del Rey and thought it would be fun to interview a local artist. Let’s learn what makes her so unique as an artist and writer.


Tell me about yourself and your artistic style


I've been creating for as long as my memory allows me to think back. As a kid I would draw and write stories and play my older sister's keyboard. Art, writing, and music are my little trinity of existence. I'm happiest when I get to do all three at the same time. That usually consists of listening to my favorite music while writing a poem and then matching the poem with a little sketch, often involving triangles and random lines. I discovered a little over a year ago that I have Synesthesia, a neurological trait that allows my brain to cross my senses. It's a little complicated, but the most basic way I can explain it is when I hear music I see shapes and textures in my mind and I often feel those textures and shapes as sensations on my skin or in my muscles. Poetry feels very similar to music for me and I think it's why words tie in so closely with my art. My synesthesia gives me a full and rich life and I'm so grateful for it, though it does make math, measuring, and quickly telling my left from my right challenging at times. All of this, I think, explains my artistic style. It's a bit diverse, I guess, in that my pieces don't necessarily match. I usually paint/draw what I feel or hear and that can change drastically by the day and/or music I'm listening to. Maybe that's breaking the rules, but I can't help it. It's how my art comes through and I don't dare try to tame it. 

Read More
May's Featured Artist!

This month’s featured artist began her creative journey at the age of five. Karen Robb was surrounded with art in her childhood and started creating still-lifes early on. Her aunt was an immense source of inspiration growing up and encouraged her to continue the creative path she was on. To this day, Karen loves to switch up her style based on how a piece is developing. By doing so, it allows her to hone in her skills as an artist.

Read More
April's Featured Artist!

This month’s featured artist is Rossella! She has been drawing since she was a child, but what really inspired her to follow her passion was when her father sent her a photo of Prague. She fell in love with the architecture and how beautiful the city is.

Rossella has always found inspiration in the world around her, but she gathered the most inspiration from her family. Her mother and brother are both artists and she spent her childhood admiring their work. More recently she gathers daily inspiration from photography, utilizing Pinterest and Instagram to find and admire works of other artists. She loves having the opportunity to see photos from people around the world – locations that she otherwise might not see without the internet.

Read More
March's Featured Artist!

Welcome to March’s Featured Artist! This is Katherine Crinklaw – a lover of the classics such as Michelangelo and a veteran artist, she has been a professional for 43 years, and recently opened Crinklaw Fine Art/Gallery in her home town of Gustine, CA. Her artistic style ranges from contemporary representational to abstract, to realism; these variations are dependent on the client, or how she would like to portray the subject. Katherine’s paintings are on a commission basis, however she does also have a line of textiles based on her original paintings. In addition to textiles she also has a line of stationery and new line of hand-painted ceramics and serving platters. All products are available in her Gallery as well as on her website (link below).

Read More
February's Featured Artist!

Welcome to February’s Featured Artist! This month we are focusing on Rabia Hasan. She is a self-taught doodle artist, photographer, and a calligrapher of 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional art. Her work consist of a mixture of floral sketches, geometric doodles and modern calligraphy. Rabia enjoys using pen, pencil and watercolor for mandalas, floral sketches and doodles; however she loves to use brush pens for calligraphy.

Read More
January's Featured Artist!

Happy New Year! This month’s Featured Artist is R Star! He was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and lived in Southern Florida, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Next month, he is making the move to Las Vegas, Nevada to begin yet another journey. R Star has been involved in many facets of the arts, from musician to writer, actor, stand-up, videographer; and most recently, photographer.

As a photographer R Star looks for ‘unposed’, candid moments, where a subject lets down their guard, allowing him to capture something real, raw and unexpected. He is inspired by human behavior and loves to capture their essence in one snap. R Star doesn’t see his work as a job, but as a chance to meet and get to know new people that want to share a moment in their life with him.

Read More
December's Featured Artist!

This month’s featured artist is Will Satcher! He graduated from UCSB with a Bachelor of Arts in Digital & Studio Art, and is an aspiring character / concept artist. Will specializes in fantasy design but is open to using a wide spectrum of media to explore different styles. He currently uses a 19” digital drawing tablet to create all of his designs however before he had a drawing tablet, many of his masterpieces began as a sketch in a college-ruled notebook. When he’s not designing, he loves to use his 3D pen and wire mesh to create miniatures, as well as practice creative writing in the form of short stories.

Read More
November's Featured Artist!

Meet Tori Gray, November’s Featured Artist! Tori loves to create acrylic paintings with a chiaroscuro style interplay of shadow and light. Chiaroscuro, meaning light-dark in Italian, is an artistic technique that uses bold contrasts of light to create depth within a painting. Tori developed her style in college and with the aid of her college professors, progressed more than she ever thought she could.

Read More
October's Featured Artist!

This month’s featured artist is a mother of two teenage boys, a housewife and a 2-Dimensional artist. Maria’s work is a mix of black and white florals, intricate pen and ink designs, as well as art journaling. She works on multiple journals at a time, each dedicated to a specific category. Maria gathers inspiration from nature, specifically flowers, leaves, trees, and patterns she finds in her surroundings. Her main focus is capturing what she observes and journaling her experiences. On her downtime, she enjoys reading, baking, drinking tea and taking photos of everyday life.

Read More
September's Featured Artist!

This month’s featured artist is based out of the United Kingdom! Tanja Hassel is a painter who loves to paint neat patterns in bright, colorful acrylics that are inspired by stained glass windows and mosaics. While her paintings may seem simple to the untrained eye, it requires multiple layers of strong opaque colors to create depth while still keeping the subject as a focal point. Her paintings are meant to bring joy and happiness to those who see them and into the homes of those who collect her work.

Read More
August's Featured Artist!

This month’s featured artist is Cecilia Serna, aka Mermaid Bonez! Based out of San Francisco, Cecilia paints surreal nature scenes and creatures not of this world. Her designs and paintings are inspired by nature, dreams and realms of her own imagination; as well as artists like Remedios Varo, Leonora Carrington, Mark Rodgers, and, Matt Gordon. She loves to explore different media and avenues to be creative, from graffiti art, to painting with oil and acrylic, to even tattooing. Currently she has a studio set up for both painting and tattooing in San Francisco, where she designs custom pieces or recreate some past designs. Cecilia plans on becoming a better painter and would love to take more figure drawing classes throughout her creative journey.

Read More
July's Featured Artist!

This month’s featured artist is a Patterson local! William Hoffknecht specializes in photography and décor prints. He sells digital access on Patreon, which is a business site where creators can get paid for their skills. He has also sold prints and home décor pieces at booths, festivals and participated in the Merced Art Hop. Recently, he has started a podcast called “I Love You, California” that brings the listeners into the beauty, history and uniqueness of California. Let’s learn more about William!

Read More