Tablet Time!

This week, the new intuos 5 tablets arrived! They're honestly the coolest things ever, and are massively better than the older ones. Because I somehow got ahead on my work last week, I spent this week drawing a new portfolio piece from scratch on the new tablet! I haven't finished it, but if I can get some challenges figured out, I think it can be some of my better drawing work!

Tutorial Piece

This week, I followed a really cool grunge poster tutorial to make a really cool grunge poster! Instead of using the images, fonts, and text they provided, I decided to use my own photography, a different font, and my own text, as well as creating my own "grunge texture". All in all, this has been a very productive experience.  This is the first tutorial I've done in a long time, and even though I'm much more proficient at Photoshop and design in general than I was last time I did a tutorial, I still find that I learn something every time I follow a tutorial. This one refreshed my knowledge of masks, and gave me some ideas of how to better use them to improve my work, as well as helping me hone my design skills, and think out of the box and create my own elements rather than using those created by others.

Portfolio Piece I: Alcoa Band Shirt Design

This week, I worked on the first of my portfolio pieces for the quarter. At the start of the week, I discovered a very very cool band, Alcoa. It is the very folky side project of the singer for the hardcore band Defeater, however, sonically, it couldn't be more different. In fact, the only thing the two bands have in common are well written lyrics and music. Being a relatively unknown band, there aren't very many t-shirt/ poster designs for them, so I decided to make one of my own. This piece is the result.

The Multiple Exposure Art of Dan Mountford

Last week, I posted about five digital artists who made very strong surrealist art. After viewing the work of these artists, as well as 30 others that were chosen by my classmates, I have decided to create surreal artwork in the style of my personal favorite of these artists, Dan Mountford.
Dan Mountford creates stunning multiple-exposure artwork that makes for a powerful surrealist experience. He does much of the work in-camera, with some post processing in photoshop and other image manipulation tools for most pieces.

My favorite of his pieces takes the face of a woman and overlays a building scene and a vector drawing over her face. It's overall a very strong piece, in that it creates emotion, but I don't quite understand why it does, which is perhaps what makes it that much better than a lot of other works of art.

I like this piece a lot too. It is a much simpler piece, however, it is still powerful. The texture of the cigarettes seems to have depth, rather than being flat, which makes for a much better piece.

I really like this piece because it shows many different subjects overlaid over what appears to be some sort of dog/bear creature, yet does not feel cluttered. Often, with this many subjects, a piece will appear cluttered or messy and detract from the overall feel of the piece, however, in this case, its the many animals overlaid over the dog/bear that make the piece so strong.

Though this piece is simpler than many of his other pieces, I find that this one still has the same careful, deliberate composition and the same ability to create thought and emotion in the viewer in such a subtle manner you may not even notice it right away.  The way I understand this piece, the girl is thinking about the beach scene, as if a fading, but fond memory of days past.

As with the previous image, this image is relatively simple, yet potent. For me, the way the overlapped fingers seem to make sense in context with the outline of the hand upon first glance, and then it becomes apparent that there are far too many fingers for that one hand, makes for a strong surreal vibe that this piece gives off. The various skin textures are also help to distract the mind from the fact that there are extra fingers until you realize that it's from a different hand.

Surreal Artists

Dan Mountford
Brighton, UK
http://www.behance.net/gallery/DOUBLE-EXPOSURE-PORTRAITS/863461

 Dan Mountford is a very talented artist from Brighton, United Kingdom. His work with double exposure, though it could be considered more photographic than digital, is most definitely surreal. By purposefully double exposing carefully composed photographs, he is able to create images that evoke feeling and transcend reality. I’ve seen a lot of similar pieces involving double exposure techniques, but none of them come close to the work of Dan Mountford.

George Munteanu
Bucharest, Romania
http://www.behance.net/GeorgeMunteanu

 George Munteanu has a very diverse portfolio of digital art, much of it rooted in surrealism. Some of his images are more fantasy than surreal, and others lean towards more science fiction. I find his pieces that seem to be based in reality but a stretched reality, a departure from certain normalities while others remain. This gives the pieces a very surreal, dreamy characteristic that I wish to emulate in my work.

 Andreea Niculae
Worchester, United Kingdom
http://www.behance.net/and1a

 Andreea Niculae’s portfolio of digital art ranges from digital drawings/paintings, to tattoo related design to some very unique posters. In the various areas that her art covers, she uses unique stylistic notions and out of the box thinking to draw the viewer in and create interest. I find her work inspiring and I would like to use a similar poster design technique, and really artistic technique in general, in my upcoming pieces.

 Daniel González

Santiago, Chile

http://www.behance.net/mgxv21

 Daniel Gonzalez’s digital art is very cool. Mostly vector based, several of his surrealist pieces take normal objects, and put them into a distorted, digital world. For example, one of his pieces is a bicycle, but it appears as if it was split into the wavelengths of light that make up the image we would ordinarily see. He has a very clean style of vector based graphics that I hope to learn from and apply to my own work.

Sebastian Feraut

Paris, France

http://www.behance.net/Niark1

 Out of the five artists I found, Sebastian Feraut’s work is the most “out there”. Both his paintings and his digital art have a otherworldly, dreamlike, but not entirely realistic quality. This surreal quality is very appealing to me, and his extensive use of colors and curves makes for very visually appealing pieces. Upon further inspection, not only are they visually appealing because of the bright colors, but also very detailed. I really like his extensive use of monsters and creatures in his pieces, and perhaps I could learn to incorporate more life into my pieces, whether or not they are real lifeforms, thats a different story!

Back to School!

Summer is over, and school is back in session. This year I'm  taking the Honors Graphic Design course, and even at this early point, it's quite clear that the expectations and workload is higher, but so is the reward. Our first piece is surrealism, which I'm still trying to figure out what I would like to do for it. I can't wait to get back into making art!

THE YEAR IN REVIEW

I hope I get everything in, I'm trying to showcase the entire year of work.