mudlime

A few weeks ago, me and my class put on an exhibition displaying our work from the first semester of our first year, our book cover project! We held it at the ‘Edge of the Wedge’ here in Portsmouth, we also had live music from Just Lucy, Impossible Monsters and Hallen and stalls for people to sell their work. The night was great, I had lots of fun listening to the music, walking around and chatting whilst videoing and interviewing people for the documentation team.

We all did a lot in preparation for the exhibition night, with a select few of us split into different teams: Digital and Analogue image prep, promotion and documentation, which I was in!

The image team were responsible for organising all of the images that needed to be printed for the show, Promotion team needed to get the word out, online through the exhibition tumblr and instagram etc and the documentation team were responsible for taking pictures and videos on the night. I managed to get a lot of footage which I am still compiling into a video and will be uploaded soon!

In February me and my class took a trip down to the HotWalls Studios here in Portsmouth to check out other professional Illustrators and Artists and to see how they make their living.

HotWalls is a a collection of 15 cosy studios by the sea in Portsmouth where artists work and sell their art, which is open to the public daily. Although when we went down there not many of the studios where open, however we did get to speak to the artists who were and then meander round the pretty location. I spoke to an Artist called Kim Edith who specialised in fabric collage, Kim offered many interesting and personalised gifts, personalised textile memory books, fabric mood boards of different songs and little prints of her work on cards (which i bought one of).

She is also the creator of an embroidered book called ‘Into the woods’, which she uses to experiment with different textile techniques, she has now turned this into a printed book as it became so popular online last year.

You can see a flip through of this on her YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrhJXRY28dg

Kim told me that there were upsides and downsides to working in the hotwalls studio, that it was nice to have all her work in one place in such a lovely studio by the sea where she could also sell her work, however it was sometimes quite difficult to work and interact with customers at the same time. She also noted that part of making her living was much more than just working in the studio and selling her work there, she also offered workshops, online commissions and visiting fairs to sell her work there too.

Over time artist’s have had to use different platforms to promote their work, local, online, shops, word of mouth, business cards, but it’s easier to do it now than it ever has been before, mainly because of the internet.

Promoting your work is important, you can have great stuff but if you don’t put it out there, no one's gonna see it.  Life's too short to be embarrassed and everyone else and their dog wants to make money from their art so you might as well show everyone your little drawings.

Promoting your art is a good way to meet other artists and get advice on your work, help each other out, chat, make friends and hopefully make money so you can live off of doing something you enjoy.

Ines J is an illustrator that I like, their work is intimate and poetic. They use rich and pastel colours contrasting against each other, lots of primary colours which makes us think about our relationship between our body and our mind. Their lines are mysterious and fantastical because the creatures they draw usually have hollow or glowing eyes and horns, it’s not realism but it communicates something much realer and closer to the experience of emotion because as humans we often identify with animals or odd things as we feel that way on the inside much more than we can relate to our bodies. Regular visual themes include Girls, distortion, worms and severed body parts. Ines’ work seems to illustrate their outlook on their own emotional world, focusing on small things and feelings which create a much greater picture of what it is like to live as a human.

There’s a really nice interview with them here.

I found Ines through instagram (a.creature) but they also promote their work on Tumblr (art-creature), society6 (artcreature) and Flickr (artcreature). Usually it doesn’t take many platforms to successfully promote your art, Ines sticks to just a few and makes sure that they engage well on all of them, sometimes you can try put yourself on loads of different sites and it just gets complicated and you end up spreading your effort thin which is not helpful.

Another artist who has taught me a lot about promoting your work is Rhi Creator on YouTube, she’s been a professional artist for over 20 years, she has an entire playlist on how to promote yourself and businessy stuff, i’ll link it here.

Anyway obviously I’m nowhere near as successful as either of these artists but we all start somewhere and if you work hardddd u can do eet :0

makin some art about time and disassociation

“What kind of stuff do you draw?”

Is the most common question after introducing yourself as an artist, yet i’m never able to get out a confident response. Usually I end up saying “cute stuff” or “..people?” and i feel kind of let down that I can’t make myself sound anymore interesting and then I think maybe my art isn't that interesting? I’ve definitely not asked myself enough questions about what kind of artist I want to be. Do I want to constantly be asked “oh do you like Steven Universe then?”, not really, so I feel I also need to spend more time trying to develop my own “style”, there are lots of artists which inspire me, I know i just need to make more art and also keep in mind that I want to grow from where I am with it now.

I think i’ve just been expecting my art to change on it’s own out of laziness, but I know really that it takes a lot of effort to get to the stage of the artists that I look up to. My plan is to set aside time everyday to think about what kind of artist I want to be, what I want to say, what I want my art to look like, I also think that writing more blog posts would be a good idea just so I can get my ideas down in one place and show the journey that i’m on.

Thanks for reading,

Hello!!! I hope everyone's having a great boxing day, I accidentally deleted my introduction post the other day so time for another one :)

My names Oliver, I’m 19 and just started studying Illustration at the university of Portsmouth, this blog is to record my creative progress from now on :)

These posts will probably be a little robotic at first as I haven’t properly done this since 2014 when i had a blog dedicated to my chemical romance, so matt, bear with me lol.

I want to use this blog to vent and record my journey of attempting to make a career out of what i love to do, which as hard as it sounds, i know is possible with enough confidence, hard work and keeping at it.  

We were asked to think about what kind of illustrators we want to be and what kind of stuff we want to work towards making, I think i’d like to make narrative stuff, like little zines or short comics, I’ve also always really been interested in sculpture and stuff so maybe i should do more art like that?

I like cute stuff, laughing and fantasy that also relates to real life.

My inspirations are: Mika, Jillian Tamaki, Tina Yu, Joy San, Mini Pete, Hellen Jo, Julian Miholics, Harajuku, Dogs and Cats and birds, bright colours, PINK! And old things.

I think I should make a mood board of all their art together so I can work out what they all have in common, a lot of them are current artists who work in ways that I could possibly work now, a lot of them are japanese or inspired by japanese art, bright colours and all that.