Portfolio Presentation

My visual identity/portfolio website can be found here

Discuss your inspiration or influences for one or more of your pieces of artwork from this class. What next? Look at the concepts and also techniques that inspired you and why. Discuss any artistic influences as well as what might be a next project-either based on similar influences, or something different.

One of my biggest influences as an artist is literature. I love reading and I’ve been an avid reader since I was in Grade 2. By the time I reached Grade 5 I was reading at a Grade 11 level. My love of books is definitely something that is prominent in my creativity, books influence the way I talk, what I’m interested in and quite frequently they give me ideas for art projects. 

The idea of conveying stories through art is really intriguing to me and it’s something I really like designing layouts for. 

My traditional art project “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” was a really heavily influenced by my racing at the time. When I started that project I’d just recently read Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and had a bunch of ideas for art with components from the story, especially the good/evil transformation concept. Then when I came across the sketchbook prompt for “Something in a state of change” my first thought was transformation which I connected immediately with Jekyll and Hyde. 

Literature and writing were also a big part of my Anthology of the Apocalypse image which I made to go along with a short story I wrote for my Writer’s Craft class. We weren’t required to, or even asked, to make a cover for our stories but I found that to really take writing to the next level you need to add something visual to the mix. It was a really enjoyable time to put the cover together, I didn’t have as much time as I would have liked to make all the components myself so instead I photo-manipulated a few pieces to try and convey my theme which I think was actually more creative than having drawn a cover myself from scratch because this way it was really important to consider each component and how it contributed to the piece as a whole. 

I still really love reading and writing, maybe even more than I enjoy art and so I want to continue to combine them in the future. 

One of my next projects that I have planned is a bit large and time consuming but I’m really excited to get started. I plan to redesign covers for some of my favourite books, I have over 20 in mind currently and many of them already have sketches in my notebook.

Which project created this year (or in the last two years) helped you learn the most about yourself as an artist/designer? Why? Explain. 

While I’m drawn to say the Lakeshore Open House poster was the most eye-opening project for me because I worked collaboratively and it was in my preferred field, I can’t actually cite it as the most important project to me when it comes to understand myself as an artist. While the poster was everything I was looking forward to with graphic design in CyberARTs, I already knew that’s what I was excited to do and that it was something I could do. 

Of all the projects we’ve done in the CyberARTs program I think the one that taught me most about myself as an artist was the the Movie Trailer Mashup project. Going into the CyberARTs program I wasn’t shy about admitting that I had absolutely NO animation or video editing skill/experience and I was very adamant about having little to no interest in either as well. While the Drama Promo Video was the bane of my existence for several weeks, the only enjoyable parts being the travel and interviews, and the GIF which was cool but I clearly struggled with the technical aspect of. The video scramble project was really fun and I enjoyed pulling it apart and putting it back together in a different way to change the whole feel. While I had no prior experience with the video editing process my video came out at least as good as the majority of the class. I never thought that I’d be able to finish a video project because of my inexperience and I never expected to enjoy it because of my lack of interest in videography. I love to watch movies put the process of assembling them never appealed to me. However when I was making my Sherlock Holmes video mashup I had a really good time learning about the program and trying out new things to try and make something that was entertaining to watch.