Ink Deep

Orla Kiely is am Irish designer, living and working in London.  Born in 1963, she attended the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, before going on to achieve a Masters at the Royal College of Art in London.  Since graduating, she has achieved commercial success and popularity, with many of her designs being mass produced and replicated, and sold to the masses at a reasonable price.  As a result, her designs crop up in day to day life rather often, and most of us will have someone we know who has some household item featuring one of her designs. Kiely's designs are wonderfully simple, featuring easily identifiable and natural shapes that have been simplified into an appealing and clean image.  Her colour choices are (in my opinion) quite bizarre.  I find them quite hard to describe.  They're not overly bright, but are quite saturated despite their darker tones.  The colours used are almost retro, and for me scream 'Seventies'.  I'...

Digital media covers a wide array of styles and techniques, which makes it both incredibly interesting and diverse, but also sometimes confusing to decipher or understand.  Most of the artists I have looked at so far are heavily focused on the commercial aspects of their work.  Work that has been requested or designed exclusively to fit a particular commercial purpose.  I have never enjoyed looking at art from a commercial perspective.  My approach has always been to try and create interesting art, and then look for ways to commercialise it.  This most likely comes from my background trying to make comics and such.  Ultimately, for me, the best and purest examples of digital art come from digital illustrations. As a result of this, it was important that I look in depth at (at least) one digital illustrator (which did not have an immediately evident commercial use).  Aaron Campbell is a Canadian artist who I have been aware of for some time....

Alice Rebecca Potter is a young British artist that we as a class have looked at.  Based in London, Potter works freelance, selling her illustrations to design companies.  She also makes some products herself which can be purchased through her own website, or through some third party websites who help her manufacture her items.  These products vary from greeting cards to mugs to clothing (most commonly children's clothing).  Her style is brightly coloured (often with a limited palette) and simplistic in it's form and composition.  Some of her designs can be repeated to create patterns and textures.  Potter has also experimented with typography in her work. Aside from looking at her commercial work, we also looked at how she creates her work.  Potter has talked about her process in depth, giving us a great insight to her creative process.  She explained how she starts by simply taking a walk and observing nature, or other elements of our surro...

Digital Media is a method of work that can really cover a great deal of work, styles and methods.  Digital work can mean that the piece of work is created entirely digitally, or even that digital methods were used in the works conception, realisation, distribution or display.  This can mean that understanding and narrowing down what digital media is exactly can be difficult.  To help assist in our understanding of this expansive medium, we were asked to look into and explore a number of artists. Matt Herring , an example of his work above, started as a London based commercial illustrator.  He is known most widely for creating magazine covers and illustrations, most of which have a striking (collage-type) style to them.  He mixes photography with computer generated elements and composites them in a colourful and pleasing manner.  Herring's work is a considerable commercial success. Harold Cohen (1928 - 2016) was a British artist who made waves in b...