Manifesto - Illustration

Once upon a time I wanted to be a great painter - a famous artist like Picasso. So after my schooling I went to art school thinking that it would 'get me a job as an artist' somewhere and somehow. How naive I was.

I did gain discipline in my craft however and I certainly matured as a creative person - through many valuable experiences including film studies, photography, life drawing, colour theory, and art history. Of course I'd still like to be that famous artist one day.

While at art school my interests in popular culture were almost discouraged and I often encountered the derogatory criticism of being "too illustrative," when percieved as having a predisposition for visual narrative and depicting realism. But what I didn't realise at the time was that my passion for cartooning, caricature, comicbooks and fantasy art could not be denied - that was the kind of art that I really wanted to do all along.

So I became an illustrator!

At least today I'm accountable for my expression, even if only in a commercial sense.

After broadening my design repertoire with multimedia and web design, I was then able to transfer my illustration from paper and inks into digital media. The combination of the two is where my illustration is today and I have a number of different techniques and styles.

Principally, I still always begin with pencils, and enjoy refining them with inks, or building upon them with marker, designer watercolours, guoache, mixed media and collage. While the surviving fine artist in me still enjoys a singular and unique finished paperwork to frame or archive, at this point it may not necessarily be the final product - as I still may take this original and transfer it to Photoshop or Painter to heighten even more. A digitally generated print may eventuate as the completed artwork after all. Or alternatively I will take the pencils straight into Photoshop or Flash and work them up completely on the monitor so no hardcopy of the original may even ever exist.

My styles range from tight realism through to simple and loose cartoon, depending on the techniques employed to render them. By hand I have various painterly and inked line approaches, while on the machine I also employ the more artifical filters, soft gradients and solid paintbucket fills of 2D art, or the 'smooth wet plastic' look of 3D.

I still paint on canvas too of course, but for pleasure.... so art school was good for me.