Expect Resistance

For me print is an inherently political act. The automated nature of the practice removes the artists hand  allowing the work to speak about the world around us far more effectively then more classical artistic disciplines.

Paint and performative art are inherently gestural making it almost impossible to separate the artist from the subject matter. Picasso's piece Guernica may have been a direct response to the horror of the bombing of a town during the Spanish civil war yet the artist himself is often a central consideration when interpreting the paintings narrative. This might be down to the paintings imagery (the bull, often thought to represent the artist himself as well as a visual metaphor for the Spanish people) or even simply and for me far more likely, that you can see the artists hand within the work. Andy Warhol may have seemed like a hideous self publicist, but the automated nature of his own practice allowed him to stimulate a far more interesting conversation about the nature of celebrity the replacement of image over authenticity and the artist relationship to his own work then, in my opinion, Lichtenstein was able to in his paintings.

For my own piece entitled "Expect Resistance" I wanted to create a design that had it's roots in Art Nouveau and the hippy poster art of the 70's. Like my sticker design the piece had originally featured lettering and the illustration of a female soldier, but it felt far too obvious and heavy handed and for me the piece works far more effectively when stripped back to its original ornamental design. I wanted the design itself to invoke a sense of strength. Which I believe it does. The design does however lack refinement, the spacing within the piece needs tightening up and more consideration needed to be taken as to how the piece might look at different sizes as I feel that the work suffers particularly at smaller sizes where it becomes confused and unreadable.
Overall I'm reasonably pleased with the piece and I only wish I'd had more time to look into and develop the work and the ideas behind it further.

Colour test.

Image scanned from my sketchbook and painted in Illustrator. 

HaHaHa

Scanned from sketch book, Illustrator and Photoshop.

Classical Beauty

Images were scanned from  my sketch book and blah blah blah.

Staying inside the lines.

I've not really used colour much in my work so far. To be honest I've avoided it. Poor use of colour can make a perfectly good line drawing look like it was botched together by a child, but I decided that my work could only improve by facing up to my fear :)

 It's also a way to introduce more depth. I guess that's what you do, endlessly tinker with your approach.

Adding things, taking things away, finding the things that help you express yourself in a meaningful and, hopefully, satisfying way.

All images were scanned from my sketchbook and touched up in Illustrator and Photoshop.

This Low Life.

I wanted to try my hand at cover design and page layout. It's great to work with both imagery and text. I've used fairly common fonts, but at least it's not Comic Sans.
It seems to me that with a cover you want to try and sum up the story you're promoting.
Since this is a totally fictional story and a character who exists only in the sense that I've drawn him a couple of times(see Kapow!) I could have had him splitting the moon in two or romancing Batman but I decided he was going to slug some guy in what might be a completely unjustified attack.

Although this is a simple action to present and can easily be done in two frames (this is without the need for context or setting) I found the challenge more in finding an interesting way to layout my page.

I wanted to do away with panels as I found them restrictive and as it's a very simple narrative I didn't feel the need to restrict the reader.

Images were scanned from my sketch book text was added in Illustrator and the page was arranged and finalised in Photoshop.

Alien

After the disappointment that was Prometheus I got back in touch with the '79 movie and was reminded just how brilliant the original alien design was.

As always was scanned from my sketchbook and touched up in Illustrator and Photoshop.