Thanks to everyone that came to The People VS The Machine on Saturday 3rd November. It was a really great way to end Flip Festival for another year. Over three hours all five artists created some brilliant computer generated and live illustration art. Here’s a video, featuring music from Silhouettes who also played on the night:
And some photos of each artists’ work
The first issue of Dirty Bristow is out now and features a part-glitch illustration by me.
For the theme of this issue, Birth, I was asked to illustrate an article by up-and-coming funny man Harry Vale that goes on to detail his experience of doing stand-up comedy for the first time:
It’s a torrid tale about losing my virginity, punctuated by the revelation that it was brutally robbed from me by my own father. There are gasps, groans, and then finally laughs. Worry not, dear reader, my anal virginity is still intact (and available for a modest fee); it was just the truly awful and hackneyed opening joke of my first ever stand-up comedy gig.
One of the most common questions I, and possibly any other digital artist gets when they present their work is how they do it. I occasionally reveal some of my methods in my tutorials but otherwise I like to show screenshots taken at various stages. I came across this build up script a few months back and have now finally got it to work! Here’s my previous family portrait being reconstructed:
This script isn’t a true reflection of how I drew it but gives a good idea about the amount of detail I go into with my work. The reason I didn’t finish it is that I had already had the script running for ten hours and it was only half finished! Luckily there’s options to resume, but at this rate I’ll be doing it until February!
After seeing some of my recent work I was asked to do a family portrait. The last time I did a portrait on such a large scale was in 2007 in Adobe Illustrator and the last time I did a realistic portrait was probably back in 2006 of an old photographer buddy. I’ve been using Inkscape for just over a year now and whilst I’ve been doing little bits and pieces I haven’t actually done a major illustration.
Haven’t done a portrait in a while, let alone a self-portrait.
Just a work in progress. To be completed sometime soon
For this week’s Illustration Friday topic I wanted to highlight that cliques are a group of similar people but that they’re also unique. I also wanted to improve my skills in Inkscape. I’m getting a lot better at using blending modes on layers instead of objects and the Spiro function works really well!
I thought I’d take a break from getting to grips with Inkscape to try my hand at this weeks IllustrationFriday topic, Island. For this I just wanted to create a simple representation of the word. At the moment I’m not quite getting the same depth as I would with my older work, but that’ll come with time.
Some more new abstract work. Check out my portfolio for more
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Some new vector artwork from me. It’s one of a series of abstract pieces revolving around the use of letter-like symbols and very vibrant colours. Some more portraits coming soon. Check my portfolio for more. Ya heard!
Completed this a few days ago
It was originally going to include text, but I couldn’t get them to work in harmony. Oh well, another challenge for me!
Completed this one recently
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I’m liking the way this style is going, but I want to incorporate people and other objects into it, rather than just abstract objects and text. It’s proving challenging to make the two work together, but it’ll happen with more practice ;-)
Artwork and visualisers created for Abandon Reality by Echo Juliet.
Abandon Reality is the debut EP from Echo Juliet, a producer, percussionist, activist and DJ based in Birmingham, UK. She crafts warm, percussion-filled electronica to help her escape to a more positive space, often inspired by nature.
Early support has come from BBC 6Music tastemakers Tom Ravenscroft & Deb Grant, Steve Lamacq, Cerys Matthews and Unclassified on BBC Radio 3.
Artwork and visualisers for the Basic Waveforms EP by Charles Celeste Hutchins.
Sound artist and researcher Amit Dinesh Patel aka Dushume started working in the field of music technology in 2000. In 2021, he began a research project addressing the distinctive lack of visibility for Black and Brown artists within the field of experimental music and sound: “Exploring Cultural Diversity in Experimental Sound”, hosted at the Sound/Image Research Centre, University of Greenwich.
Disruptive Frequencies is one output of this research. Patel, together with five other Black and South Asian experimental and electronic artists recorded new music to release as part of this compilation:
Artwork and visualisers for Echo Juliet’s latest EP, Lift Your Face to the Sun