REFINED PORTFOLIO
If you want a more refined look at what I do, here is a collection of what I consider my 12 best works to date across a range of mediums. Underneath each image I go slightly more in-depth about what I was aiming for with each image and what I feel I achieved.
A recent digital headshot. While the subject of this image is a simple study of a character I enjoy with little thought behind it, there are a few things I tried to achieve with it. Primarily, I aimed to push how I draw faces, pushing myself to spend more time mapping out my features to make it look distinctively like the character I was aiming to illustrate. On top of this, I put an advanced amount of time into the rendering process, attempting to create a much smoother and refined outcome in the final image than my usual work. While I'm unsure if I'll pursue this particular style further, I feel it was a strong exercise that helped push me in a more thought out direction in terms of the style I want to pursue with my digital works.
A digital illustration of one of my partner's characters, made as a Christmas gift. For a long time my personal work has felt stale to me in comparison with my work I do for school - I spend plenty of time during classes putting years of practise with more in-depth painting and rendering to use with my more realistic style, but when it comes to my free time sometimes it feels like I render my own projects very sparsely in comparison. While I still see a lot of places where I could improve in this artwork in terms of depth of tone and general shapes, I'm happy with the outcome and excited to treat this as a vaulting pole to push my digital rendering further, as I feel I excelled past my usual attempts with this work.
A commissioned piece from last September. For this work I designed the character, illustrated and rendered it, all to the specifications of the client. While I'm not a stranger to any of these concepts on their own, this piece was a learning point in many ways - It was an extra challenge to make sure the outcome of every element wasn't only appealing to me, but for the person I was working for, and it pushed me out of a lot of my comfort zones. On top of this, this was one of the direst times in recent years I've tackled a digital landscape, with the aim to play with textures in a fun way while at the same time creating a setting that didn't feel out of place with my much more developed character style. I'm not unhappy with it by any means, but I can see from this work that backgrounds are something I need to put time into, and it's given me valuable insight into the areas I need to improve on.
Surrounding myself with other creatives has always been important to me, I've always benefitted from having other people around me creating art, both in the classroom and outside of it, with the many online spaces that I inhabit. Since the beginning of lockdown and the retreat into our own homes I've had a lot more time to interact with the artists I meet regularly online, and I've fell in with a close knit friend group of people my age with a range of incredible styles and work, all of whom act as my constant inspirations. This challenge, completed last September, was a very eye opening way of exploring the range of my art style, and experimenting with many different methods of using line, colour, tone, shapes, and so on. Artist studies are common with my school art, but this was my first time attempting one with my personal illustrative work, and I found it a lot more enjoyable than expected.
As evident by the dates on the image, this piece is very ongoing. The 2014 iteration was perhaps the first art piece I ever completed that I ever sat down and decided to put actual time and effort into, past all the doodling I'd done since I was a kid. Being able to have a very clear cut timeline of my progress as an artist through the span of what's coming up to 7 years has been a huge help to the development of my style, and with each passing year I get more accurate with my depiction of the character, grow more in depth with my tone and shading, and obtain greater in my technical knowledge. That being said, these pieces are also key for working out my flaws - for the most recent piece, completed on Halloween, there's a lot of features such as the harsh colours and choppy linework that I like less than the prior year, which has helped me understand the slightly different direction I need to point my future developments in,
This was a design made to push my ability to string together concepts, as well as to push myself to do colour studies before moving onto a finalised colour set. I had friends randomly chose one animal and one random outfit and pushed myself to create a cohesive idea from that, so that I couldn't get hooked onto an idea for a design before I even put pen to paper, an issue I commonly face. I feel like when compared to my other designs, where I often find myself going with the first sketch way overcleaned, and the first colours that seem alright, doing multiple colour tests and refining the shapes of my sketch more resulted in a much more refined character design, that I'm considerably happier with than the first iteration.
Animation is a hurdle I've always been aiming to jump. With all the stories and characters I create, sometimes its difficult to get across a cohesive story in just one illustration - with animation under my belt I'd be able to freely express what I want to, with no limits to the flow or creativity. That being said, I've struggled. The choppy animation above is my best one to date, after a few years of very sporadic attempts - I'm proud of it, since it shows a lot of the progress I've made from early attempts, however there are so many areas I'd like to improve on - warping of the face, lack of impact, odd pacing, general lack of consistency, etc. My resolution for 2021 is to sink a lot more of my time into tackling the artform to understand movement in a more in-depth way.
An artist study of this artist, with developmental pages and a final piece. Part of my main school project on Conspiracy/Cryptozoology, this was the later end of the main body of work I completed during the early days of lockdown, as a result my ability to work on it was stunted from what it would have been in usual school, which makes me all the more proud to have created an outcome as thought out as this. Of course there's a lot of places now that, upon looking at this piece, I could have done better - more colour studies on the major painting first, more exploration of the slicing effects, and so on. But I also feel this is the best brush control I've ever shown, and working in this artists style helped me realise that I had a huge preference for gouache paint above all else. The character depicted is a monster design developed for my project as well, however those pages are inaccessible to me for this portfolio as a result of the coronavirus.
A group of studies based on photographs I took at the Horniman Museum in the middle of lockdown, which I then edited and cropped together in photoshop to form reference images for these pieces. Despite being relatively simple studies, I greatly enjoyed this spread, and it was incredibly refreshing to be able to just create something in all of the mediums I enjoy. This was done as a practise piece to figure out which style and medium I wanted to use going onwards in my project, so I went into it expecting to dislike a good handful of my options. That simply turned out not to be the case, and it reassured me a lot in my skills as an artist - I ended up choosing to go with my more refined gouache style moving onwards, as I think it was the one I was the most confident in my ability to render fur in, and the next stages of my project rely on a lot of animal based imagery.
An expressionistic piece created in the middle of 2019, created for an exhibition for Black History Month. In the gallery, it was displayed next to three partner pieces I also created, however unfortunately these are currently inaccessible due to covid. Despite the age and the messy and unrefined nature of this piece - which was made in response to the work of Frank Bowling - I really, really enjoy it. It's such a vast difference from the rest of my work stylistically speaking, and I always used to find I got very ridged while working with acrylic paint, resulting in an often untextured and plastic outcome. Being able to scrunch up the work, spread paint with my fingers and block in huge rough strokes across the page really helped me loosen up a lot, and since then I feel like both my painting work and my illustration have benefitted from being a lot looser and flowing.
As evident by the slightly wonky looking figures inside the main wolf, this is actually a piece from 2017, and yet to this day it's proudly hung up directly next to my bed, at eye level. This was the final cumulative piece at the end of my exam unit for GCSE art in Year 10, and as a result a lot of the creative decisions leading up to it - it was a project on movie posters - no longer appeal to me the way they used to, and I would have done many things a lot differently. Despite all of this, however, this is still my biggest (A1) and longest (It's completed in Prismacolor Pencil) piece I've made to date, and I feel like that especially shows in the pure amount of detail on the fur detailing. Working on this was the first time as an artist I was forced to be patient and focus so heavily on my reference image, and it was an incredible learning experience in terms of learning control, and even after all these years I still feel like it holds strong enough alone to be an accurate portrayal of me as an artist.
This... is a painting of an eye done in oil paints, in the last 20 minutes of class some time early 2019. Compared to the rest of the artworks on this page, it likely doesn't seem as in depth or special. And maybe it isn't. But for whatever reason, out of all my artwork I have, this is the piece I decided to put here. It's a little bit choppy, I didn't use a proper reference, and my signature on it is barely even readable. But I had genuine fun creating it, and I still really like the outcome considering it was the first and so far last time I'd ever used oils. For me, that's what my art is about - I like creating things that I enjoy, that primarily resonates with me, and then hopefully at least some others. I enjoy this eye, and therefore I feel like it's as good as any of my more technical pieces to represent me and my art, however typical and boring that it may be.