Happy Owls and Burlesque Vixens: Our first Car Art Submission Winners

A month ago Infectious launched its Open Submissions so that any talented artist, regardless of who they are, had the opportunity to join the Infectious family. Today we’re launching the first winners into our catalog.

Andy J Miller's design Happy Hippy Clouds and Owls was inspired by tribal patterns and children’s book illustrations. On the message boards it elicited responses such as "dreamy", "heartbreakingly pretty" and "...looks like a Shel Silverstein illustration". We agree - we "love, love it" too and so we nominated Andy's uplifting art our favorite submission of the month.

Devin Lawson's Car-tini Car Art will also be joining the catalog with its homage to Dita Von Teese's infamous martini glass striptease act. Check out his drunken fez monkey and evil pimiento of doom here and see if he can tempt you into adding a little lounge style into your life.

Think you can dream up some Car Art? We'd love to see your vision of art on a car too. Check out our submission guidelines here: http://www.infectious.com/submissions/overview and maybe it will be you that we're inviting into our catalog next month...

Go Tell Mama We're For Obama: CRO teams up with Infectious

CRO (aka graphic designer Ray Noland) was inspired to create his Obama campaign (www.gotellmama.org) after a serious bike accident in 2006. His six week recovery period in hospital inspired him to re-evaluate what he wanted to do with his life. He realized that his goal was to support Barack Obama. Ray felt that "on the road to the White House, this atypical candidate would require a fresh approach". When he got home, he took a TIME magazine cover as inspiration and created a portrait of Obama above the words "The Dream". The response from his friends was unanimously positive, and it wasn't long until he started printing them up by the thousands. With a little help from a wheat paste recipe on his website, his guerrilla street propaganda has taken on a life of its own, and Ray's unofficial Obama campaign can now be seen in cities all across the US.

Check out his Obama Car Art for Infectious, and see why he got a cease and desist letter from The Harlem Globetrotters when he first unveiled his design ;)

Love and Rockets: Tara McPherson joins Infectious

California native Tara McPherson has a thing about space. She was the Vice President of the astronomy club at school and even started studying for an astrophysics degree, but luckily (for us) she chose instead to follow her artistic talents. But even now she illustrates her characters under starry skies, on alien planets or wearing spaceman-like helmets. One of her most iconic images, a female figure with a heart-shaped void in her torso, is called Orion. A recent series of paintings is based on a gravitationally lensed quasar called Einstein's Cross. And for her Infectious Car Art she envisioned intergalactic bunny Ion Z zooming down your car in his rocket ship. Tara is now based in Williamsburg, New York, where as well as pursuing her otherworldy themes, she has also created critically-acclaimed gig posters for the likes of Beck, The Strokes and Depeche Mode.

Check out her stellar and heartbreaking artwork on our website.

Feel like making love?

In the immortal words of Bad Company.... We feel like making love. Making love to all the Infectious artist submissions that is.


We just launched the gallery, voting and commenting functionality for Infectious submissions. We've got some great initial pieces of art already. The submissions area also includes the very exciting design LOVE-O-METER.


So go ahead and make some love to our artist submissions. We don't mind. And maybe add a comment while you are at it.

The Obama Car Art Contest

We've been proud and excited to see artists all across America rise up and channel their support for Obama through their art. We want to take it one step further - by blowing up the political bumper sticker into something big and beautiful.

Join us in taking all that collective Obama passion to the streets - literally. The average car is seen 3000 times a day... Imagine a car with beautiful Obama art all over it - each car could touch the lives of up to 400,000 people in the run up to the election.

Guest Judges Include:
CRO from GoTellMama
Jon Reiss, the director of Bomb-It

100% of all profits from the Obama Art we sell, will be used to print up more Obama Art that we'll distribute for free.

Winning designs get:

• $500
• 5% of net sales
• Bomb It DVD and Poster designed by Shepard Fairey.
• A signed Obama poster from CRO
  

"Come make some Obama Car Art with Infectious..."

Yumiko Goes Wild

Today we warmly welcome artist Yumiko Kayukawa as the newest member of the Infectious family.


Yumiko's first ever drawing aged four was of a hyena devouring a zebra, while a vulture looked on. Her obsession with wild animals hasn't abated - her Infectious Car Art is populated by pandas, octopi and tropical fish - but her style has changed up a bit. Nowadays Yumi's animal kingdom shares the spotlight with her pretty and punky Japanese girls and they're both intertwined with traditional Japanese imagery and an American pop art style.

Yumi's art has hung on museum walls around the world and even been collected by a few rock stars. But she says "I'd rather my paintings hang next to rock star pin-ups than on museum walls. Ultimately I want to connect with people all over the world on that level." What better way than on the blank canvas of a car?

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note: we're a somewhat mixed group of cultures here at Infectious (American, British, Ukranian, etc) with our artists coming from an even more diverse set of cultures. So language can be an interesting thing at times. This original blog post was written using the word Oriental. It was quickly brought to our attention, that used to describe people, Oriental is often considered an ethnic slur. Whoa! As you can imagine.... we had no such intent. So instead of just deleting it in the dark of the night, we thought we'd post the learning.

Big hugs to Yumi especially... no offense intended, we promise.

The Devil made us do it

We are overjoyed to announce our latest artist to join the crew: hotrod artist Coop. Coop has produced two Car Art series with us - his Iconic Devil Art and a newer character called Lil' Mort. Coop's infamous smoking devil motif has appeared on zippo lighters, clothing, condoms, and more ... not to mention the cover of his book "Devil's Advocate: The Art of Coop" and as tattoos on the bodies of his most die-hard fans.. And now you can get Satan and his gorgeous succubi on your car. Coop himself will be one of the first customers: he's installing his art on his car "Triple D" (pictured below - pre Car Art), which he's racing in the La Carrera Panamericana in October.