Celeste Prevost

After a stint in Colorado where she earned recognition for a clean, often humorous body of work now detailed on her newly redesigned site Designisfine, designer/illustrator Celeste Prevost has landed her creative talents in Minneapolis. In addition to working in-house at marketing firm Zeus Jones she takes on freelance projects that inspire her creatively. Here Celeste describes her career path, shows us the mood boards she creates for inspiration, and let’s us have a look at her design space at Zeus Jones where she and husband (Rob Angermuller of www.lifterbaron.com and designer for ARTCRANK) spend their weekends being creative at their adjacent desks. Celeste is interviewed here by Emily Goligoski.

NoD: You sometimes make your designs available for little or no payment. What are your thoughts around arguments for creative and media work being shared for free online?

Celeste Prevost: A typeface I created and posted for free download, Hand of God, is kind of gimmicky and I made it to be used publicly. I’m not a professional typographer, but I was happy when a small Boulder company called Humanoid Wake approached me obout using it on one of their wakeboards soon. It will stay free for them.

Hand of God Typeface by Celeste Prevost.

I love to share my work and give back — sharing in our community is very important as long as it’s not abused. It’s empowering Read the rest of this entry »

Indigo Painting with a Stencil

Shallom Johnson is an urban artist, dancer, and fashion/arts writer currently based in Vancouver who has been painting under the alias Indigo since 2008. She paints beautiful, layered, and emotional pieces using meticulously cut stencils, spray paint and house paint. She’s moving fast, literally and figuratively, making her mark in the art world in just 1.5 years of professional painting. Consider that she just left a live painting event in Brooklyn, is now painting with C215 in Paris, then is off to Brittany to paint with artist Liliwenn and then more events and collaborations in Berlin, Moscow, Dresden, London, New York City again (in late November), LA, and then home to Vancouver. And despite this frenetic schedule, when you speak with her you sense the patience and quiet that is required to create the works that you can view below. I met her in Brooklyn, and we have since had an interesting email exchange over the past three days:

NoD: Where are you from?

Indigo: I’m currently based in Vancouver (have been living there for 10 years now) but I grew up in a log house in the middle of a forest in Northern BC.

NoD:You just painted at Mark Batty Publishing’s Urban Arts Festival in Brooklyn. How did that come about? How did it go for you?

Indigo: My involvement with MBP came about via facebook. I was going to be in NYC anyways, because it is so much cheaper to fly to Europe from there than it is if you go straight from Vancouver. I saw the event listing online, noticed that they hadn’t announced all the artists yet, and messaged Adri (one of the festival’s directors) to ask if they had space for me to get involved.

Indigo painting after the rain stopped (Photo by Vincent Cornelli.)

It went really well, on all fronts – but during the days leading up to it, it seemed like everything that could go wrong, went wrong! First the paint shipment from MTN never showed up, then they got a little bit of paint but it was the wrong kind for me to use with stencils…finally got to the venue the day before to get my background done, and the space I was given was up on a narrow ledge with no available ladder to reach the top…then someone ran over two gallons of my housepaint with his car Read the rest of this entry »