Defaced Studio, the working name of the UK-based artist Kane, makes illustration built around surreal world building, cartoonish characters, and otherworldly color palettes.,His more recent work incorporates puppets, live bands, stage performances, and practical effects.He began in graphic design, producing branding for Call of Duty streamers before taking on freelance work for clients including Apple and Namco.
Starman, a 3D character released as Starman on MakersPlace in 2020, became the starting point for Starmaker, an evolving worldbuilding project that has since taken in game development, video, and puppetry.In 2021 he minted Defaced 'N' Friends, a set of 100 one-of-one character portraits developed between 2019 and 2021, on OpenSea.Gurt, a character first conceived in 2022 as a VHS store employee, grew into Gotta Get Gurt, a 2023 tiered trading-card series on Manifold reduced through a burn mechanic to 812 pieces, and later into a short-lived talk show and a live show in Lisbon.At “The Gateway” in Miami in December 2022, Defaced Studio built the installation Shiftie's Rentals, where visitors could look through prints, interact with a puppet of Gurt, and take a VHS tape.
Behind The Curtain, a 2022 one-of-one work with an accompanying video piece, sold through Sotheby's.That year he also contributed The Duke and other pieces to It Became a Myth Land, a sale presented alongside the David Bowie Estate that took contributions from numerous invited digital artists and was released on OpenSea.In 2023, Dreams of the Fisherman sold through Christie's and Lost In The Supermarket sold on SuperRare.,In 2024 he took part in the AI art platform Genie's Derivatives collection, training a model on several hundred of his own works from around 2020 and minting the resulting generative pieces through Highlight.xyz. He described watching the model's output as “a weird feeling seeing something so closely mimic your work”.
