An Interview with Dino Tomic

You may not know Dino Tomic by name but if you’re on social media at all I can almost guarantee that you’ve seen his work. Tomic is a Norwegian tattoo artist with quite a knack for experimental art. He has gone viral several times with his beautifully done and totally out of the box pieces of art and has amassed over 700,000 followers on Instagram.

Most of Tomic’s work is centered around popular culture and, as he puts it, just things that are going on that he likes. A talented illustrator, Tomic’s drawings alone are awesome to look at as he typically takes pop culture figures and alters them in some wacky way. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg with his work, his craziest stuff is done with glow in the dark paint, black light paint, heat sensitive paint, all things that might not regularly be found in art. A lot of these pieces have a base of seemingly nothing, for example his horror prints which are some of my personal favorite appear as just canvases with red handprints all over them in normal light but as a black light is shone over them these brilliant portraits of horror icons appear. Tomic regularly uses these sort of illusions to push his work even further and blow the mind of the viewer. But those are just experimental art materials that he uses, he’s also made work in gunpowder, salt, nutella, his own blood, and so much more! Some of these pieces are breathtakingly impermanent, like his salt works, these massive and beautiful pieces exists almost wholly through the making process and once he’s done they’re gone. But Tomic is dedicated to finding new ways to make art and make it great, even if that means the pieces only get to last a short while. 

Dino Tomic is of a new age of artists who are ditching the traditional art world path and building massive success just by sharing their work with the world on social media. Tomic’s following grows every day and we were so excited to get to interview him. Unfortunately as we were on opposite sides of the world, the connection wasn’t good enough to get his video going so we made a nice little animation of the interview for you all! It serves as a great listen as well. For more on Dino you can find him on Instagram @dinotomic, @dinotomic.art on Facebook, dinotomic.com, and right here on Plebeian! Enjoy!