How the have effected me.

Kozyndan's main influence on me is not in the art I draw since Kozue's amazingly intricate illustartion skills and dans photoshop/illustration skills such as soft cell shading, combined with their immence imagination far surpass my own.

What Kozyndan have done for me though is inspire me to be more liberal and imaginative with my web based designs. My web design skills to date have been limited to either very corprate or minimalistic designs, in the future (after a fair amount of practice with drawing and photoshop) i hope to be able to incorperate some more artistic and graphicaly beautiful work into my portfolio. I do also enjoy drawing as a hobby in the same sort of Asain-Western styles as they use so i hope to be a bit more random and imaginative with these drawings and be able to effectivly transfer what i see in my head onto paper.

So...why have i chosen them?

Kozyndan's artwork is completely universal, they seem to cross genres with the greatest of ease creating fine art out of cartoon like illustrations which seems to be nearly impossible. They also seem to be able to mix fantasy scenarios with almost photo realistic landscapes.

Another thing is that you can really see the personality of the artists clearly in the art they make all of their work is consistantly funny, cute and slightly disturbing.

They also tend to place hidden messages in their art usually to do with current events or social subcultures for instance:

A matter of PRIDE: The Battle on the River-Tyne (click for larger image)

In this panorama there are a few hidden messages or observations.

1. The two battling robots represent the old ship building industry which made Newcastle what it is today and the new robot represents the modern side of Newcastle trying to replace the old in favour of somthing cleaner and more refined.
2. The angel of the north flying in the sky is Kozyndan's twisted representation of the heightened security at airports, the theory is that if everyone on the planes were naked we wouldn't have any trouble. I think they call it Naked Angel Airlines or something like that.
3. If you look in the lower left there is a political message in the form of Tony Blair and George Bush playing with toy soldiers. They are saying that they don't seem to treat these soldiers like they are real people and are instead playing pointless war games.
4. They make a mockery of the "chav" and drinking sub-cultures in Newcastle (the horses heads on the people are just for fun they took them off the emblem for Newcastle).
5. The last detail I'd like to point out is that you can actually see Kozy and Dan themselves (Kozy is trying to look under Dan's kilt in the middle of the painting).

These secret hidden messages, playful imagery, tiny detail in a real surrounding are what I like about all of Kozyndan's work its so unique and interesting to look at that even your average Joe can look over it multiple times and still find it entertaining in a way.

A little background

Kozue and Dan Kitchens originally met in California State University studying illustration graduating in 2002. The husband and wife team (known as Kozyndan when signing artwork) are now both very successful L.A. based illustrators, with a large portfolio across a wide range of media such as CD covers and t-shirts, not to mention the merchandise produced from Japanese style fans to flip-flops.

Kozyndan didn't start working together from the offset, the first piece they ever did together (which kind of set the tone for their major artworks) was simply the apartment they were living in at that time. Kozy was just sitting there one day with a long piece of paper drawing the apartment while Dan was on the computer, when she was done she showed it to Dan who loved the piece so much that he decided to colour it in in photoshop and so the pairs first panoramic was born.


Kozyndan's career started when they introduced themselves to Eric Nakamura publisher and editor of an L.A. based magazine Giant Robot which was initially about Asian-America and general pop culture. Eric liked the artwork so much that the magazine arranged a small art show (though its not clear what other artists were involved). After the art show Kozyndan never really needed another normal job there art was so unique that the art and design community embraced it and they havent been short of work since.