Artist Statement

As an inspirational artist, my journey has developed from a young age. Since the beginning, I was exposed to art as a compulsory course in secondary school. I soon discovered my instant interest in fine art and often practiced at home where I kept a sketch book with all my creative ideas. I would often draw objects that I would find around my house, or I would draw family and friend's portraits. Art has helped me discover shading for in depth detail, as well as practice with scale for accurate proportioning. The techniques I have developed from art have helped contribute to my graphics work with designing fonts; we need to get the thickness right, especially if you’re enlarging a scale onto bigger paper. Also, shading in graphics is vital to make an image more realistic and dimensional.

 My past experiences in education have allowed my creative interest to prosper and develop. The combination of courses I have experienced has enabled me to combine my skills in illustration, photography and use of Adobe Photoshop to produce art in all mediums of digital and fine art. When selecting what course I wanted to take at degree level, I knew I wanted to enrol in a course that combines all my interests. Graphics was an obvious choice for me.

 

Okiema 420 x 297 mm

I often researched artists in my own time and have discovered a lot of artists who I have distinct interests in such as Max Gregor and Paul Reilly. Paul Reilly is an artist who has helped me immensely with my Photoshop skills. For my first assignment in college I was directed to explore the work of Reilly and how he portrays his illustrations. Influenced by his work, I was inspired to define and produce curved lines using pen tool in adobe Photoshop. I also discovered his urban inspired themes throughout his work, so I directed my model in the above image to portray an inappropriate gesture related to urban trends in posing.

 

J-Horror Magazine - 420 x 297 mm

In college I produced a magazine front cover. This was awarded best magazine of the year. This award gave me the confidence to believe in myself, to believe that I was good at Designing.

Dove - 297 x 210 mm This typography piece is a collage of wording such as ‘love’ to form a figure of a dove. I used different sizes of typeface and produced a smaller typeface to form a line to give an outline of the doves head, and larger ones to form the wings.

 

Rainbow - 297 x 210 mm

This was my first ever piece where I combined tracing and Photoshop together. I traced an image of my friend and photocopied it, using the piece as a montage I started to create shapes and numbering around. I was inspired by Paul Reilly collages.

 

Rhianna - 420 x 297 mm

Here is an illustration I did of 'Rhianna'. I used Photoshop using the tool 'Pen tool' to define the shape of the face, to get the smooth lines I stimulated the brush to avoid bold lines. In the face I used thinner lines to get an elegant feel and I also used different tones of shades, and blended them to give a realistic look.