dark and light

Anke Merzbach's photography is dark, elegant, and moody.

Her work is a glorious combination of antiquated fashion and photo techniques, desaturated color, dirty contrast, and models of non-traditional beauty, strength, and grace.



She uses, sometimes to the point of flamboyant excess, a lot of digital photo processing and manipulation, but despite the modern tools, the photos have an air of antique-ness, but of a past world that never really existed at all.



You can find her work on her website, or on her Flickr Stream.

it's been so long

Our apologies to you, Darkened Forest readers. We realize that it's been almost a month since our last post. Chris and I have both had a lot going on, between work, art shows, preparations for ComicCon, and home rennovations...that doesn't leave either of us nearly enough time for blogging.

But I'm going to try and make it up to you this week, while Chris is at Comic Con.

For my first trick, behold the art of Paul Toupet:


His fondness for rabbit masks, rotting fabric, and tattered cotton ticking has every ingredient to make me love it instantly.



His website is, admittedly, a bit of a pain - made in flash with load-times seemingly for no reason at all. But the work is great, taking inspiration from old tribal masks, baby dolls, and childhood toys from a forgotten age.

The work is ambitious, especially considering the fact that the artist is somewhere in the vicinity of 28 years old.

old is new

Continuing the theme of artificial artifacts and pickled cryptids, feast your peepers on the work of ALEX CF. He has quite a capable handle on creating authentic looking pieces that really seem to have history to them.
Before you go on your next vampire or werewolf hunt, I'd suggest consulting Alex for all your supply needs.

hoodwinked

A few years back, this guy showed up in a few headlines, mostly in England:

Supposedly, it was found in someone's garage, and they asked their friend, Allistair Mitchell to investigate it, and he speculated that German scientists could have attempted to hoax the English near the end of the 19th century, and that it was offerred to the Natural History Museum, but they dismissed it, and ordered it to be destroyed, and if it weren't for a museum porter (a distant relative of the guy who discovered it in his garage, of course), the entire thing would have been lost forever.

This article, published in January 2004, gives more information....while this article, published in March of the same year, reveals the entire thing to be a publicity stunt created by Mitchell to generate excitement for an upcoming novel of his.

I can't really say whether or not it worked for him, but it's pretty interesting that this approach was taken to sell some books. What is more interesting is all the forums and websites the dragon in a jar showed up on (just do a search for it), and all the people who were hoping it was real.

The dragon, by the way, was created by Crawley Creatures, a cinematic creature, robotics, and prosthetics company.

In the beginning....

I thought I would start this thing off with a bang.

Ron Pippin's work, to me, is the embodiment of aesthetic perfection and craftsmanship.

If you didn't know, now you know. More HERE.