Posts by Sara Barnes

Sara Barnes

Sara Barnes is a Staff Editor at My Modern Met, Manager of My Modern Met Store, and co-host of the My Modern Met Top Artist Podcast. As an illustrator and writer living in Seattle, she chronicles illustration, embroidery, and beyond through her blog Brown Paper Bag and Instagram @brwnpaperbag. She wrote a book about embroidery artist Sarah K. Benning titled "Embroidered Life" that was published by Chronicle Books in 2019. Sara is a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art. She earned her BFA in Illustration in 2008 and MFA in Illustration Practice in 2013.
Art
March 31, 2015

Mind-Bending 3D Tattoo Appears to Turn Man’s Arm into a Machine

Tony Booth, a tattoo artist and owner of Dabs Tattoo in Southport, England, has successfully made a man appear as if he's an android. On his arm, at least. This incredible tattoo looks as though it's carved from the skin, and what's beneath it is another layer of hex geometric patterning. It's unlike any tattoo we've seen before. The entire thing took 18 months and multiple tattooing sessions to complete.

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Art
March 23, 2015

Gorgeously Surreal Sculptures Intricately Fuse Animals with Nature

Artist Ellen Jewett fuses plants, animals, and man-made devices to create fantastical portraits of animals. These hand-crafted hybrids, which she refers to as “natural history surrealist sculpture,” mimic the bodies of the creatures, but they deviate from the norm in usual ways. A rabbit's fur is replaced by twisted branches and vines, and accentuated by tiny butterflies. And while three crows have some semblance of feathers, Jewett attached small trees that rise above their forms.

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Art
March 10, 2015

Traditional Rugs Recreated with Technological Glitches by Faig Ahmed

Baku-based artist Faig Ahmed combines the beauty of traditional Azerbaijani rugs with technological glitches in his on-going series of contemporary carpets. Using the artistic qualities of these tapestries, he disassembles their conventional structure to rearrange and fragment it. The result often resembles a rug that doubles as a fascinating modern sculpture. Many of Ahmed's carpets have “flaws” in their designs that create the illusion of a printing or rendering error.

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Sculpture
March 4, 2015

Stunningly Life-Like Figures Hand Carved from Wood by Peter Demetz

Italian artist Peter Demetz brings ordinary wood to life with his incredible, hand-carved figures. The sculptures, which vary in size from about 20 inches to nearly 50 inches tall, feature men, women, and children standing still against a plain, sometimes-colored background. Demetz's attention to detail is awe-inspiring. He's able to shape tiny folds in clothing, reproduce loose strands of hair, and define the human anatomy so well that you'd think these figures really exist.

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My Modern Met

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