For Love and Money

I picked up 'for love and money' in the library, and i really like it. There are some unique illustrators that use the human form to visually communicate, as well as some wonderfully composed art work with great use of colour.

This is the work of Ricardo Fumanal, I love the intricate detail used, especially the hair. Although they aren't busy compositions, they are beautiful in a simplistic way

Mario Hugo: I like this image because it combines the use of simple shapes and complex drawings. These elements work together to effectively communicate a story.

Zach Johnsen's work takes the ordinary and adds playful twists. In the image below, I think it's nice how the suited man is created using charcoal, quite grey and mundane, which contrasts abruptly with the explosion of pink water colour paint.

The use of colour in these images by Anne- Pauline Mabire makes them stand out to me. I love the combination of traditional medias to create different textures.

There is great composition in these images, as well as a wide variety of mark making. It seems to be quite chaotic, but each element is beautifully crafted. The eye is guided through the colours and each face, telling a story as it goes.

Visiting Lecturers

We've had the privilege to hear from a lot of professional Illustrators, including Mr Bingo, Michael Kirkham, Ralph Steadman, Jim Stoten, Ben Newman and  Kristyna Baczynski.

They have all been inspirational, it's great to hear their stories of how they have got to the points that they are at as professionals. There have been a lot of interesting things to learn about their professional practices too

Mr Bingo 

Michael Kirkham,

Jim Stoten 

Ralph Steadman

Ben Newman

Kristyna Baczynski  

They all vary in talent but I suppose they show that illustrators each have their own unique voices.

I don't really feel like i'm similar to any of them - I feel that i'll never be able to achieve work like that. This could be good as it means I don't wish to try and imitate what I think is great work, but this means it's hard to feel like an illustrator, I feel very different and therefore like it would be hard to be successful. For example character design is something I've never even considered and yet it seems like a consistent thing in illustration too. It's never interested me either, i'm scared. 

I find it hard to ignore, too, that they all seem to say how hard it is to get work. I never expected success to be easy, but i've always thought that working hard was the solution to getting what you want. With illustration it seems to be said that being recognized comes from a large amount of luck, persistence and patience, everyone seems to start off with other jobs that aren't even related to illustration just to be able to live - despite just going through a degree programme that's meant to prevent this. It's what makes me anxious because it all seems so uncertain. And it's on top of all the confidence issues I have already. I've been finding it hard to enjoy this course with all the worries i have about it - Maybe being unreasonable, i'm not sure. 

Despite all this, at least I know I am working as hard as I can - and that this could pay off

There are a lot of amazing illustrators out there.

Discovery of digital work

Upon looking up artists for inspiration, I came across a few digital artists that I really like. These included people like Kyle Lambert, Alice X Zhang, Vlad Rodriguez, David Chen
They all work digitally to create amazing illustrations.


 
Alice X Zhang Creates unique images of film and television stars, these would be able to work as posters, I think she sells prints. I really like the use of colours and texture, they make the work stand out as unique and add depth. There is a high amount of contrast between the light and dark used in her images and the composition is inspiring - i'd like to be able to tell a story through composition in the way she does.

Vlad Rodriguez uses similar subject matter in his work. The images he makes are also like posters but are composed in a more traditional way - similar to film posters (Including all the characters in one image, the main character at the center / largest. He uses a more dark and realistic style, I appreciate the detail and texture.


Kyle Lambert paints digitally, sometimes producing photo realistic paintings on an Ipad.
I think it's crazy?
It inspired me to work digitally on my ipad, and has helped me with a few briefs. Thanks to Lambert, i downloaded adobe ideas to create work on, and absolutely love it.
The subjects, like Rodriguez and Zhang, are recognizable to the general public.


The final digital worker that I found at the beginning is David Chen - his images are more based on narrative than the others and this is why I really like it. The way i'm used to working with figure and portrait is very different to Chen's work (I find mine is boring) - He creates a narrative by using figure, which is something I'd really like to do.
 


Some of my work from recent briefs that have been inspired by these artists:

I really like working digitally because it's fast and easy - my work involves heavy use of painting rather than drawing and line work, so this is a practical process. (The hassle of paint mixing and drying time is eliminated) I really want to improve this basic knowledge in digital work, but at the same time keeping my analogue methods - they have been successful for me in the past and people that do not understand the digital process can still appreciate my technical competence (Some people have said that artists could 'cheat' on the computer by making photos appear to be painted, I wouldn't want people to consider that)

What I think is rubbish about the world today

When discussing my previous work in my last post, I mentioned about celebrity identity and mis- representation of people in the media. It's something that I feel strongly about as I believe that media has became a huge part of life, social media and television being largely available to each of us. I think that it's the main way of communicating nowadays, and so I follow it a lot.
  I disagree with some ways of western culture and therefore content of the media that I like to address in my work. It is something we will be part of as illustrators so I think it's important.
  Everyone listens to tv and the internet and rely on what they get from it as valuable information - so anything can taken too seriously.
 When we got the 'that's pants' Brief, I pitched this as an idea - about media being a bad influence. We discussed the issues of bad celebrity role models, obsessions with celebs, obsession with appearance etc, and I liked this because I got to communicate what I think is pants (from these ideas we came up with a campaign to stop children from growing up too fast which I think is relevant to what i'm saying)

Reflection on my own practice

My most successful work to date came from my foundation course. For our major 12 week project I chose to do two large scale oil paintings of celebrity singers Nicki Minaj and Jessie J - a close up of their faces.

The idea behind them came from my research into Identity and the use of close ups for portraits. Because I already found this interesting, and have previously used celebrity subjects (that people always love because they can identify the person) I began to search celebrity close- ups and the results were very enjoyable. There were hundreds of snaps of faces of famous people, more importantly, they were very different to those that we are used to seeing in the media - magazines, album covers, promotions, posters, television etc. We always see 'perfect' looking celebrities, and believe them to be so much better and more attractive than us regular people. But this search exposed them for who they really are! HUMANS! (shock, horror) many times had these celebrities been captured whilst unaware - with and without makeup, what I saw was a mixture of oily, hairy, spotty skin. I printed some of these and the people i showed said they felt so much better about themselves.

My unflattering oil paintings were exhibited at our end of year show, and someone took a picture of my Jessie J painting on their phone. They uploaded it to instagram and tagged the star in it.

The next morning on the 3rd July 2013 a lot of my friends were contacting me, Jessie J had posted the picture to her Instagram (which also posted it to facebook and twitter) praising the painting and it ended up getting around 35,000 'likes'

From this, I was front page news in my town, and I also had a telephone interview with free radio, which was aired in the news. I also got asked by Heart FM to go in for an interview at their studio in Birmingham on the 4th July.

As well as this, I was nominated by my tutor for a WJEC Foundation Excellence Exhibition and Awards 2013 - in Cardiff on the 8th November. Unfortunately I didn't win but it was good to attend and have my work exhibited in Cardiff for the following week.

I've put this onto my PPP blog because I find this worrying, it was a good experience at the time, but I haven't gained anything apart from a small amount of confidence and the knowledge that some celebrities have a crazy amount of obsessive fans. I didn't really know what to do when this happened, but it makes me think, what has to happen in order to be successful? How can I earn money from this? The reason I did this course is to find out, but i'm not sure if I know that yet.