You may have noticed that our cover is a little darker and more morbid than usual this week. Since September, we've been holding the Cover Us contest, looking to Fanshawe's many talented students to design the cover of the Interrobang's annual Art issue.

Contest winner Josh Douwes, a third-year Fine Arts student, took the inspiration for his cover design from class. "My class is trying to get a catalogue idea right now. One of the ideas we had was almost like a 2012 apocalypse kind of thing — the end of the world, everyone's kind of talking about that."

He took the idea and ran with it. "I took different pieces of art, little details out of famous art pieces, and just collaborated them. I did a couple of sketches to get it all together to get a scene."

As he described when he submitted his entry, he used "various pieces of famous art to create a dramatic, chaotic scene involving Michelangelo's Judgement Day detail in the top left, a volcanic eruption from a mountain painted by the Group of Seven, in the middle I have Edvard Munch's The Scream right above the 2012 made of earth." The bottom part of the image depicts a Mayan with the Mayan calendar, as people from Picasso's Guernica look on in shock.

To create the image, Dowes said he used pencils, pens and Photoshop, adding that he inked almost all the images, save for the Mayan calendar, himself.

The falcon skull in the bottom right corner of the cover is a big part of what he is creating in his other artwork right now, he said. "I figured that's kind of what I do in art — I draw skulls and animal skulls. I figured that would tie in Fanshawe a little bit, with the falcon."

His current work focuses on skulls and plastic bags. "I Photoshop plastic bags and start doing drawings of them with the really rough lines and it gives me abstract shapes. I layer those with vellum paper (a translucent paper often used in tracing) over the drawings that I do of skulls — it ties it in to make it a nice, abstract visual. I like to take real subjects and distort them to make them abstract."

In his spare time, Douwes said he likes to tattoo his friends and himself, and he has done over 45 tattoos in the last year. Between his parttime job at the Oasis on campus and tattooing, he said he had a very busy January.

Douwes is originally from Wyoming, Ontario, and said he chose Fanshawe because many of his friends are students here. "I've had a lot of recommendations (to come here). I went to a bunch of the Fine Art meetings, and that's what I wanted to do."

"I love Fanshawe," he said. "I've met a lot of interesting people. Pretty much everything I do now … (was through people) I've met at Fanshawe. It's opened a lot of doors for me, for sure."

After graduation, he said he is thinking he might pursue tattooing as a full-time career. Another avenue he is looking into is creating a pawn broker business with a friend. "He's more of a pawn broker, and I help out with fixing guitars and stuff like that."

"There are lots of (career) paths," he laughed.

To check out Douwe's fine art, tattooing and Flash artwork, Like his Facebook page at tinyurl.com/JDArtfb.