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Hi welcome to the St James Theatre where we're having an annual exhibition of illustration students from The Learning Connexion.
In this show I've got 6 works; 4 portraits and 2 illustrations.
On average it takes about between 30 and 50 hours to finish a work to frame and selling quality.
I use ink and alcohol markers through to watercolor all the way up to airbrush and automotive paint.
I'm looking in the future to start to do reproductions of the works and selling prints.
I'm looking to take my illustration skills a bit more into automotive side of airbrushing
and stylised skateboard designs as well.
I suppose I'd describe the style of my work as sort of stylised realism
in some sense almost comical like.
This one for example I created digitally in photoshop.
This one here, after going to a 2D Concept Design workshop run by a couple of guys from WETA
I learnt how to free up and get a bit faster.
I'd originally envisioned this one to be actually A3 which is why I put it at 300 dpi rather than higher
but it scaled up to A2 quite nicely so it didn't matter about that too much.
Oh yeah the detail's good. Nice.
Yeah I am quite happy with the end result, yeah. It came out quite nicely.
4 of my pieces are New Zealand native birds.
Well 3 of them are New Zealand native birds and one is from America; the tri-colour heron.
All those works are done in watercolour and gouache.
For the preparation I've been working through that throughout the term.
We had to think about what colours we wanted the mat boards and how to present them.
It will just be awesome to get lots of people to see it and seeing what they have to say.
Yeah it would be really cool to get my work out there more and more.
I quite liked doing quite graphic work because I do screen printing so that becomes quite simplified and stylised sort of work.
And then with my etchings I really like highly detailed and quite realistic, with my birds and flowers and stuff.
So yeah, it depends on what I'm doing the piece for.
I've been focusing on New Zealand birds and New Zealand flora and fauna because I really like drawing that kind of thing
and I like to reflect my surroundings and the country I live in
so that's been a really strong theme and lately I've been moving in to illustrating old fables
like The Cat and The Fiddle, and The Owl and The *** Cat.
That's just been really fun to go into that total fantastical world and just make it all up from scratch is quite good.
My style is quite varied at the moment I think
because I've been trying to learn new skills and I've practised doing different styles that I'm not used to.
A lot of these are from a graphic story book that I've been illustrating called The Third Eye
and most of the work for that is done digitally.
all the concepts or ideas are done by hand and I do the rest digitally.
There's a couple of pieces related to album cover artwork, commercial illustration and photographic manipulation, things like that.
My creative process is pretty much doing art, drawings, music 24/7.
It's not productivity that's a problem it's too much productivity.
But that's good, right?
Illustration has the advantage of condensing a massive amount of written or verbal information into one image
that can be layered and layered and a person can look at it and gain layers and layers of information all at once.
It's basically efficient information sharing.