Urban Landscape Project

 I made these paintings as part of my experimentation towards final piece in my 'Urban Landscape' project. 

 This first image was made using the 'wet on wet' technique where I purposefully used an excess of water while painting to create the marbled effect you see in the field in front of the building here.

This piece was made by painting a background using some bright coloured water-colour paints and then sticking different shaped cut outs from magazines to look like buildings. I like the uniqueness this gave the picture, particularly because of the unusual objects that I used.








This piece was made by painting a multicoloured background using water-colour paints before adding chalk pastel in different colours to represent buildings. I then drew different shapes along the buildings in the foreground to look like windows, but left the buildings in the background empty because they are far away.
I then outlined and gave detail using a fine liner pen.






I painted this without the use of a paintbrush, by scraping paint along some card, using alternate sized pieces of card for different sized shapes in the paint or for different coloured paint.
This painting technique is called impasto.

This piece was made by placing down different shaped pieces of card before painting over them and the background, then peeling off the card to reveal the sharp white colour of the paper surrounded by the colour that was painted over the card. I really liked this effect, particularly because the image looks quite similar in reverse.






This painting was made using paper collage. I cut out different pieces of newspaper into the shapes that I wanted and stuck them to my background before painting them in different colours and then splashing paint across the page in blue, to look like rain pouring from the clouds.
This is my favourite image that I made out of these 6 experimental pieces, and I have decided to use this technique for my final piece.

Twerk Chicken Stop Frame Animation

This is my first attempt at stop frame animation. Its not to be taken seriously as it is only meant for experimental purposes, but I find it entertaining so I thought I would share it on here. The object I used for this animation was actually a real chicken skeleton that we had lying around the flash room for whatever reason; so me and a few friends I was working with decided that it would be PERFECT, for experimenting with. We tied some fishing wire to the body parts that we wanted to animate and carefully pulled at different angles and took photos, before putting them all together as separate frames at high speed, to deceive the eye into believing that the chicken skeleton is actually dancing to this music. I hope you enjoy this animation.
To view this video please follow this link, here.

Evil Rabbit

This is a sketch I made in my spare time. Its possibly one of the creepiest things I've drawn in my life, even more so than the Alex Pardee work I did..
I used watercolor paints and fineliner pen to create this illustration.

More 'Destroy' project photos

 For these 3 photos I used double exposure as my advantage and took separate photos of an empty scene and a scene containing some volunteers, before merging them together, to create a ghostly effect.

 For these 3 photos I took close up pictures of some individual volunteers, before editing them on Photoshop to remove their noses! I loved this particular set of photos because they are quite funny. 

The Destroy Project

 Destroying an image could mean anything that makes it different from its original form. I decided to take an illustrative twist to the project, using traditional methods by painting over the image rather than editing using digital methods. 

I used watercolor paints and fineliner pen to manipulate the photo and giving it a more imaginative and story like feel.

With this next photo, I cut out the part that I wanted and stuck it onto an A3 piece of paper, before drawing a new scene behind it. I figured I would stick with the same theme of an imaginative nature, by replacing my own body with that of a fairy instead and placing over-sized objects on the table to give the impression that I was no longer adult sized.

Sea Life Sign

This was a project I had to complete in college. My target audience for this sign are people who cannot read English and families with small children. I aimed to include objects in each of the octopus' tentacles such as a teacup for the cafe and a ticket for the ticket booth for those who could not read the words on the sign. This was my first ceramic project. I took the time to pay attention to small details by molding and shaping every inch of this sign, including the suction cups on the tentacles and the pattern upon its body to make it look as realistic as possible.

Short Flash Animation

Please feel free to view my recent flash animation 'Selma'
This animation was created as an assignment for college using Macromedia Flash.
The assignment was to create a short advertisement or music video. I chose to do an advertisement for a film. Obviously, the film doesn't actually exist.
I hope you enjoy this animation by following this link, here.
Also, keep your eye on my YouTube channel for more flash animations, which are currently waiting to be uploaded and should be available tomorrow!

Photoshop Editing

 These images were created from photographs on my camera which were then merged into a background and made to deceive the viewer into believing they were somewhere else.
I edited these photos using Photoshop.

Textiles Sketchbook

 This sketchbook was made from scratch using scaps of materials in the textiles workshop. I used cardboard for the cover wrapped in faux fur and then attached beads to the rim of the book. I did this because I felt it reminded me slightly of the monster book of monsters from Harry Potter, so the beads were there to look like teeth. I then created a makeshift lock for the book by finding two beads, sewing them into place and using cord to string them together and keep the book closed. I sew old music sheets into the book for its pages because I felt it looked really unique and mysterious. I liked the effect it gave to my sketchbook as well.

This is a page out of my sketchbook featuring a stamp (right) I made during a print making lesson. To the left on the first page is my favorite work, featuring bird cages along music paper. I thought they fitted well with each other because the birdcage symbolizes a bird and it's song, or melody, and the music paper symbolizes music and song.


Here is a larger picture of my bird cage print.

 This is a set of prints that I made using a stamp, also made by me, featuring the Triforce from the well known nintendo game 'Legends of Zelda'.








This is an experimental piece I made, practicing different techniques such as batik and embroidery.

Evelyn

Illustration of my daughter, Evelyn. This is being used in one of my projects for the 'Evelyn' series.

Man-Made v.s Organic Finale

This was the painting I made for my final piece. I used watercolor paints, chalk pastels, indian inks and charcoal pencil. I decided to go with the organic theme for my final piece in this project because my favorite piece to work on were the skull and bones. I used the same skull from my observational drawing to help me draw the skull on my final piece. I felt that this image had a strong surrealist feel to it, which I feel, is an art movement that I am drawn towards.
This piece features a huge skull, sat upon a cliff top under the moonlight, looking down upon a wasteland.

Observational drawing of gardening shears

 This are two more observational drawings from the 'man made v.s. organic' project that I was working on in college.
They are both the same man made object known as gardening shears.
The first drawing was made using just a graphite pencil.
The second drawing was drawn using a normal pencil and then painted using the monochrome method where only one colour is used. Practicing colour layering and how much the paint is diluted. The concentration of the paint would signify how dark the shade was, so a higher concentration would make for a darker shade and a highly diluted paint would make for a lighter shade.

Skull and Bone Observation

 These observational studies were made as part of a project for college. The project was called 'Organic v.s Man-Made'
These two studies were both organic studies. I drew a cows skull and jaw bone.
The skull (right) was drawn using the contour method, where the drawer refrains from lifting their pencil off the paper and the image is made up of one line. After I had drawn it using this method, I used black Indian inks to give it depth and shade.

The Jawbone was drawn normally and then the same techniques were used with the indian inks however the aim for this drawing was to show the light on the bones, so instead of adding more layers of ink, I used white pastel chalk to highlight the lighter parts of the bone, such as the teeth.
The skull is my favorite of the two pieces as it is more detailed and has both dark and light elements.

Observational study of a kettle

This is an observational study of a stainless steel kettle. I drew this as part of a project called 'Organic v.s Man Made'. This was one of my man made observational drawings. It was a very light colour and reflected a lot of light, I used wax resist techniques with watercolor paints.

Observational drawing of a moth

These two drawings were made during a bug project as part of a study towards a final piece in 3D art at college. As you can see here, I was observing a moth, which was donated to the college from Bolton museum.
It was important to study this moth, so that I could get a better perspective on the its fine detail and form. The coloured illustration on the right is from an aerial perspective, whereas the picture below was drawn while looking at the moth from the front.

Tim Burton work

Hopefully, most of you will have heard of Tim Burton, well known for his films and animations, such as The Corpse Bride, A Nightmare Before Christmas and the recent Alice in Wonderland. These illustrations are characters from Tim Burton's work. I drew them all mostly in fine liner pen or a regular HB size pencil. To view more of Tim Burton's work, you can visit his website, here.

This last piece I'd seen somewhere on the internet a while ago and decided to draw it for myself. I cant seem to find who drew it originally, so for anyone reading this who recognizes the drawing, please help me find the artist so that I can credit them. Thanks in advance.

Merida

 

You'll probably recognise this character as Merida from the Disney film, Brave.

Well that movie is pretty popular in our household from time to time so I decided to paint Merida, paying particular attention to her wild red hair. It was so fun to paint this one, I think I might do another in the near future.
I used watercolor paints before outlining with fineliner pen

Owls

This illustration was made by me using watercolor paints before being outlined with fineliner pen. It was a gift to my daughter and is currently hung in her bedroom to go with her owl theme.

Portrait Work

These are mostly portraits of my daughter when she was very young.
I used a normal pencil, size HB. As you can see in some of the pictures, my daughter has a distinguishing birth mark on her forehead and right eyelid.
The last image in this post was made using watercolor paints.