First Exhibition.

Last night the North West Regional College held its first student exhibition. Last night. With one of my pieces in it, and i'm very pleased to say it went very well. Here's just a wee picture of me with my piece for all of you who don't live close enough to come and see the show.

The piece was based on Lucian Freud's self portrait however as I was working on the piece I explored Freud's painting method using my biro, paying particular attention to how the contours of the face were indicated by the direction of the brushstrokes, then I simply translated that information into a pen drawing. The whole thing used about 3 pens and took about 30 hours. The piece is on sale for £130 from the Roe Valley Arts and Cultural Centre.




(Images of the show can currently be found by googling the Limavady arts & cultural Centre).

Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n Roll

The new project is based on creating festival advertisements, focusing on Sonisphere, and especially for the project I recently purchased the book "Gig Posters - Rock Show Art of the 21st century" (which I highly recommend by the way). The poster design below is just a simple photoshopped collage, but very effective I reckon. Here it is, my first gig poster (minus text which will be added as I create the screen print based on this design) entitled "Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n Roll".

It's a basic collage of imagery from the internet, the body, hands, records and face are all seperate elements, which although most are subtle, give the image a surreal quality I think. Then I experimented with the hue/saturation for each individual piece until I was happy, used halftones and posterization for the woman and added the repeat pattern background (which seems to be a recurring element in my work at the minute).

If you have no idea what i'm talking about I suggest you invest in photoshop (even just a trial) and teach yourself how to use it from photoshop blogs, which is what I did to get myself started. Photoshop really is a very valuable tool and can add a lot to a very simple piece of work.

Alice in Wonderland Wallpapers

These are the photoshopped images which i'm going to use as backgrounds for each page in my Alice in Wonderland book. Now that the images are composed i'll be producing screen prints directly onto the paper for a more professional look. In case you're wondering I was looking at Victorian styled wallpapers with thick patterns and repeat patterns for inspiration. Have a wee google at William Morris for more. Sorry for the atrocious photos, i'll upload the finished products in a couple of weeks. First exhibition on Thursday argh!

Print Experimentation

My last project brief was to find a 2oth century artist, research their work and incorporate it into my own. I focused on Lucian Freud, the painter, a little surprisingly I suppose as I don't usually focus on fine art (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucian_Freud). I'll post some of my contemporary versions of his art work soon, but for now here's a few pieces of print experimentation based on imagery from Alice in Wonderland. The theme for my eperimental final piece.

"The Queen of Hearts has lost her tarts..."


"Why is a Raven like a Writing Desk?"...


The experimentation with the fading repeat prints was to creating a visual representation of the tarts being eaten and the image at the bottom was based on some victorian wallpapers I saw, i'm focusing on this idea for now to create backgrounds for my Alice in Wonderland book concept. I'll post more on that soon.

An Introduction

I'm an 18 year old art student, currently studying a foundation course and hopefully heading off across the waters to bigger and better things next year to study illustration. I decided recently that it was about time I began to launch my artwork into the open, to show interested individuals how I work and what i'm all about. I'll also be posting all those little links to artists pages which i've found and who've blown my little mind. Updates are likely to be weekly and feel free to comment.

Cheers.
FARMER.