Is there anything nicer to draw than a human face? There's just something about two eyes, a nose and a mouth (and a bit of human flesh) that can lull an HB into sweet, happy, auto-pilot. I like that every hand-drawn face, no matter how similar, is never the same. The slightest twitch of a wrist can make a frown into a seductive smirk, or a wink into a lazy-eye.

I reckon Laura Gee shares my affection for doodling faces! She's an illustrator/set-maker living in London, and this is a peek into her hand-drawn facial records. See more drawings on her (kinda-new) blog Lone Drawings.

No man's an island. We are made up of the random faces that crowd us on the street, the flirtatious faces that populate our dreams, and the familiar, comforting faces that inhabit our memories. Those faces—the faces of others—make up our life experience. Could you capture them all? Guilherme Kramer of Sao Paulo spent a year doing just that. He covered a wall with the people he sees in the crowd--each painted face seemingly eager to tell his own story. Take some time and hang out with them.

This lady has been sitting pretty in my blogroll for a few years now, serving-up cute faces and colours that go pop. She's the illustrator who spoke-up about "chronic bitchface" (pictured below) and her fashion illustrations are my ticket into a world of lavender-tipped ponytails, and art that hangs on shoulders rather than walls.



Her sketchbooks are so freakin' lovely! Oh, and she goes by the name Kris Atomic.

I drew the image above almost seven months ago, but it feels more fitting today than it did then. In the last week, Instagram went from being just a popular iPhone photo app to becoming the most popular photo sharing tool the world has ever seen.

A few days ago they released an Android phone version and just yesterday Facebook bought them for one billion dollars. They boast well over 30 million users and now with Facebook on their side, I expect that number will quickly double.

Like any huge network that hosts people sharing things, you get a lot of crap. A lot of garbage that finds its way onto the "popular" page too. If that's your objective, follow the steps above and you'll get there sooner rather than later. But if you ache for the creative and the inspired, I've been putting a list together of some really cool artists that hang out and share what they're working on.







It's a good resource if you're just joining the community and I expect to be adding more along the way (feel free to share it with others). You can find parts one, two and three here and while on Instagram, stay in touch, follow me by searching OKAT or DOODLERS.

I only recently came to know Andrew Orlando. He stopped by our studio to drop off a drawn Doodle Addict Postcard and with him was a bright green tote bag. When I looked inside, dozens of faces stared back at me. I immediately lit up, the bag was filled with toilet paper rolls that he covered with bright and bold colors of paint and marker. Eyes, teeth, scribbled hair and so many expressions formed these comical characters. Over 30 rolls in hand and he told me he had tons more back home, I believe he said his goal was to reach one-thousand.

Sometimes you stumble upon work that's so mesmerizing it's difficult to explain. Benjamin Edmiston's pieces are that kind of work. And as I struggled to find the correct adjectives to describe them, I succumbed to the eloquent way as to which the artist did so himself.

Bejamin explains: "My compositions feature unusual or fantastical settings inhabited by ominous characters depicted in a flat and decorative style. My bold, and often symmetrical, drawings offer a plane of floating heads, half-skinned snakes, and bodiless arms. Building a personal vocabulary with such imagery recalls for me the tension of an early, crude Mickey Mouse cartoon, or a misplaced folk sculpture standing eerily on a dusty shelf. The creation of a familiar but askew world — the sensation of the unheimlich is what fuels my work."

Illustrator extraordinaire Fernanda Guedes from São Paulo, Brazil has a flickr feed filled to the brim with eye candy, including our favorite series of hers, "People and Their Invented Histories."

In this set, she chooses a picture from Facehunter or The Sartorialist and fictionalizes a profile for the stranger in the photograph. The drawings and characters she develops seem to be fascinating people and it leaves me wondering if by some supernatural occurrence, the made-up story could have ever mirrored that person's reality.