From the editor’s letters:

Jay Byrnes is a designer and artist from Chicago. He’s recently redesigned his website and added a bunch of new, diverse wor that’s really inspiring to look through. Enjoy!

Here’s a project from my art classes that you might like to try in your own studio. It was inspired by Mark Todd’s Junk Zines and Souther Salazar’s Scrap Books.

At the beginning of the school year, I invited my students to contribute to my Collection of Beautiful Trash. I promised to use it for an end of the year surprise. Over the course of the year, they got really excited about the quality of their trash. As soon as the school year ended, I browsed through the detritus, selected the most compelling items, and bound the beautiful trash into these three volumes.

Although you can’t see it in these photographs, the titles “Mr. Hughes’s Book of Beautiful Trash” are embossed onto the covers. The books will be added to the art room library so that, next year, the students can peruse them for inspiration and, hopefully, learn a thing or two about the beauty of imperfection. A few of the spreads can be seen below.

Read more here.

The Museum of Bad Art was inevitable, I think. Not a fine art museum. Not a visionary art museum. Not an ignorant art museum. This collection conserves, critiques, celebrates, and humiliates bad artwork. In their own words:

The pieces in the MOBA collection range from the work of talented artists that have gone awry to works of exuberant, although crude, execution by artists barely in control of the brush. What they all have in common is a special quality that sets them apart in one way or another from the merely incompetent.

I hear the building itself was built from hardened bricks of refried beans.

Artist and teacher, Chuck Dillon, has gone through the trouble of categorizing and caricaturing all the types of art student that he has encountered. Can a Facebook quiz be far behind?

For the record, I couldn’t figure out which of the students I was most like (since my love of comics was on hiatus through most of art school) but I’m sharing Chuck’s comic book student above because he is the most like the students I have now.

Hi everyone,

this is just a quick note to say (1) thank you so much for your contributions to my school’s art auction and (2) it was an enormous success. The pictures above are a sample of the “check” that each student received before the auction and the catalog of items that they could bid on. Students worked all year to collect their art money. So, the most helpful and hardest working students had a small advantage over their classmates. Prints, wallets, and original artwork were the big ticket items but everyone went home with a little something.

Finally, to those of you who contributed prints to the auction, would you please contact me again with your addresses? I intended to send you a thank you note and a little more info about the event but, during the end of school shuffle, I misplaced the envelope in which I kept your contact information. I’m sorry but I will thank you again!

Do yourself a favor and check out illustrator Jamey Christoph’s amazing work on Flickr! Beautiful textures, stylish designs and loads of charm in each of his illustrations. His Cleveland Inspired set is a favorite of mine!

Perrin Renaud