A new set of edgy art was just released by London based artist Byroglyphics (aka Russ Mills). We’ve written about Russ Mills before, how his messy art draws us in and captivates our attention. He calls his style “kitchen sink surrealism.” Mills uses bold splashes of color to create movement and you can tell he’s been influenced by Japanese pop culture just by the way his (Photoshop) brush strokes fall. As he’s stated, “I love the way that every piece of popular culture from the recent past is smashed together into a garish soup and regurgitated into real life with absolutely no boundaries.” You’d be surprised to find that Mills starts his work by using a simple Bic pen. In fact, Mills describes his process in a very candid way. “My illustrations are not too scientific, they begin life as sketches in ink, the tool of choice is the Bic ‘fine’ because it gives me a lot more mileage than more expensive, snootier fine liners that break if you give them too much stick. The sketch is transported into my ageing mac and then abused in photoshop (you may have heard of it) i use this because of the joy of multiple undo’s plus its the closest I can get to painting without painting. The next stage in byroglyphics’ life is to turn these illustrations into big canvases, it’s taken me many attempts to get to a stage where i’m confident enough to attack canvas and leave the relative safety of the computer, as with everything else it’s a constant learning curve, sometimes a downward one.”
Sadly, these Byroglyphics prints sold out in one day but you can join his mailing list to get an early bird notification next time. [email protected]. Byroglyphics website