#tidyeye

The "I Hate Drunk Monkeys" team is welcoming our new artist this week, Ronnie Wreath, who impressed us with his ink and Crow quill abilities, yes you heard that right, so we've hired him to scratch out Rip's further escapades. Here's a bit about him.

Ronnie is an illustrator, designer, and visual artist and says that he's been "sketching my thoughts and ideas ever since I was a kid. I'd love to doodle and sketch with ball point pens in school notebooks.

I joined local art classes for a short time but my it wasn't for me so I left. 

At grad college I got bored by what I could see being forecast as just another treadmill life, so my interest and keenness blossomed into full time artist ambitions. There I embraced my own reflective nature, as should any artist, to explore the creative universe I was born with, instead of denying it.

My personal style came from this year and a half’s improvisational quest resulting with the method I established which I'm very comfortable with. I am a self taught artist who trained himself through exploration of other artist's work and via research of various art movements from the early 1300's to the late 1500's.

My mentors were artists like Alphonse Mucha, Albrecht Durer,William Morris, Gustav Klimt, Aubrey Beardsley and many more from the Art Nouveau period.

Modern day artists like John Dyer Baizley, Christina Mrozik, Aaron Horkey are also major inspirations. I love the amalgamation of the graphic comic book style with a dash of posterly fine art penmanship plus life drawings fused with my own twist. I try to imbue my illustrations with as much detail as possible still thus maintaining a graphic art like appeal.

I do both hand drawn traditional drawings with pen on paper or parchment and also digital artworks using my pen tablet. Being a realist I also keep a keen eye on  the art-selling process too.

That part of me is named "WREATH". I like to call it a creation for creation. This parlays into my teenager ambition to start an independent showcase collective, wherein I can do what I love plus take others to a higher level along the way."

Wreath engages in fulfilling all sorts of customer needs from Logo designing to Book illustration to Posters and many more. He is also working on a dedicated website and blog for Wreath works and exhibitions.

His creative process is very simple. Concepts and ideas either bounce off of almost anything or sometimes they are needed to be forced into existence but once they are ink and colour brings them to life.

"I like to give my art a realistic touch so I focus on minute details in the form of stipple, hatches, scribble or ink washes.

My tools for creation are pencil, pigment liner pens, rapidograph pens, crow quills, graphic ink, brushes, watercolour, markers, pastel colours, cartridge and aquarelles.

I start work right after breakfast till lunch followed by a siesta, then back to work till five when I break off for air and space, equally important to the creative process.

Before starting any new artwork or illustration, I try to gather as much information relating to the theme I'll be working on. After weeding out the chaff I put it down on the paper. I like to hunt down source references in the real world as well as the Internet.