San Jose-based graffiti artist David Choe will be feeling pretty good, he’s now worth $200 million after Facebook went public on Wednesday.

In 2005, Choe who first thought of Facebook as “ridiculous and pointless” was approached by Mark Zuckerberg to paint graffiti on the walls of Facebook’s first office in Palo Alto, California.

Choe was however, paid in shares instead of cash and those shares are now worth $200 million.

According to Choe, “they cut the walls out of all [his] paintings and sent them to all the Facebook offices around the world.”

Source: Design Taxi

The Toronto-based graffiti artist Elicser has an upcoming book launch on February 10th, 2012 at LE Gallery in Toronto. The launch of the book “KNOW LOVE” is a pre-Valentines day celebration that starts at 7pm and runs till 10pm. This will be the one night to purchase the book.

For this week’s Freight Friday we have a large painting of a female on a boxcar done by the graffiti writer Jarus.

Photo By: WeAreAllOne.

Tomorrow, Friday February 3rd, 2012 the illustrator Skinner has a new art book being released online at ZeroFriends.com. On Saturday, Skinner will be at the Zero Friends store in Oakland the book in person on Saturday from 2-3PM for the official release and signing of the book. If you purchase the book in person at the Zero Friends store you will be eligible for a FREE “BUTCHER KINGS” Zine in addition to the free 8″x 10″.

Check out TheArtOfSkinner.com for more details.

The new pair of MOLOTOW protective gloves are waterproof, breathable and offers Grip dots for gripping power in the wet, the perfect support to paint outdoors these days.

Episode II of Crack the Surface takes a look at a collection of explorers from across Canada and the United States, focusing on their participation and experiences within their local and global exploring community.

It was filmed over six weeks resulting in over 1.5TB of raw footage from locations such as New York, Indianapolis, Chicago, Las Vegas, Minneapolis and Montreal.

Here’s a video of the graffiti artist El Mac in Viet Nam.

Here’s a new video put together by the good folks at VNTWT in Saigon, VietNam. It’s based on footage and interviews from when I painted there in 2010. I don’t think I was as eloquent as I could have been, but other than that I think it’s a great video and hopefully gives a little bit of an insight into how/why I paint what I do. I really found a lot of inspiration in VietNam and look forward to going back to paint there some more, and hopefully visit some other parts of SE Asia as well.

Also, I have a bunch of other updates to put up, but I’ve been locked away in the studio preparing for upcoming gallery shows & mural projects, but I’ll be adding some more stuff soon..

El Mac

Here’s a video teaser from Kweenz Destroy for their upcoming launch of the brand.

Normally cubicles aren’t known for being an inspirational space but North Carolina-based data manager Bill Taylor has transformed that notion. He’s transformed the cubical whiteboard into remakes of famous paintings.

Pablo Picasso – Guernica

Banksy – Stop and Search

Vincent Van Gogh – Starry Night

Hokusai – The Great Wave off Kanagawa

Edward Hopper – Nighthawks

Claude Monet – La Promenade

MC Escher – Relativity

Jack Vettriano – The Singing Butler

Paul Cezanne – The Cardplayers

Source: Flavorwire

The Polish artist Sylwia who goes by the name of “Scooterek” on DeviantArt has created illustrations of how the Angry Birds look like after their destructive battles against the pigs.

Source: Rampaged Reality