Exquisite Beast project

Hi folks. I wanted to bring your attention to an art project that I started following last year that wrapped up earlier this month. The Exquisite Beast is a project started by two Brooklyn based artists, Evan Dahm of RiceBoy and Yuko Ota of Johnny Wander, where they started with a 'beast' and mapped out a theoretical evolutionary path for that creature, taking turns at seeing where they could take the evolution. The reasons for any changes to the beast are given in the description of each picture. They decided to wrap up the blog at 100 beasts and it's fantastic to look at in its completed state, where you can follow the evolutionary story of these creatures.

I love these two artists and seeing them work on a project together was exciting, especially since they both seem to have a talent for creating weird creatures. And I really liked the idea that the creatures had to be an evolved state of the previous one. Even early on in the project there was an intriguing progression between each beast, the moments where there was quite a jump in a beasts appearance and the reasoning's why. It was something that I found really enjoyable to watch unfold. I remember seeing other artists from tumblr take beasts that they liked and progressed them in their own way, I even tried it once myself but I wasn't terribly pleased with the result. Now that the project's finished I've cycled through the blog a couple of times and watched as these things grow, and twist, and get crazier over a series of pictures.

The first beast is here. I thought it'd be a good idea to link to the very start of the blog, even though just jumping in doesn't really spoil anything, the beast changes quite a lot. Please go and check it out, if you like the art or just get curious about the artists I'd suggest checking out their comics as well. If you did like it, let me know either in the comments section below or through my twitter, and if you didn't like it and you think I should be looking at other things, feel free to tell me that too. I hope you guys like the blog and, as always, thanks for reading!