Some inspiration and techniques/mediums for my artwork comes from Japanese anime and manga, I even bought some Copic Markers which are used for manga and anime illustrations to do some art with. I used the Copic Markers with these sketches and so far I really like using them, they’re similar to watercolours but are solid and are stronger in pigmentation. When I was researching anime and manga I noticed that they base a lot of their stories on their folk lore which made for interesting types of characters and spiritual beings, so I played around with this and created these characters. You will notice that the couples are male and that’s just simply because personally I love Japanese boy-love manga.

This was again the summer being, I wanted to do another painting of her because I enjoyed painting her and using such warm colours. In terms of the colour with acrylic paint I think this one looks better, it was because I used coloured paper instead of plain white and because I tried really hard to blend the colours together. With this painting I also challenged myself a little bit after getting fed up with my brushes not creating the marks I wanted so the majority of this painting is done using my fingers which worked out well for the petals on the sunflowers.

*Seasonal – Paintings

Returning to one of my previous posts with a few sketches, these are some of the results of those sketches and ideas. They’re based on the seasonal figures: winter and summer. They’re done in simple acrylic on medium-sized canvases as I didnt want them to be too big as I felt they didn’t need to, it was just a way of experimenting. I’m a bit stuck on the 1st painting, winter, as I’m trying to think of ways to fully develop it so currently its still a work in progress. Summer however is complete, the idea I had to use 3D plastic flowers I think really made the painting and I think it really adds to it. I guess the only thing I can say that I dislike about these paintings is the paint choice, I do love the vibrancy of acrylic paints but I think they go too much into the neon colours so I think I will try other types of paint in future. Also paint personally at the moment is not my favourite medium to use, I’m loving the effects I get with coloured pens and pencils at the moment instead.

Masks

I decided to do actual Masks, and these ones are the ones that my sketches are wearing. I think they turned out ok despite being very difficult to draw on and cut to shape, next time I might use different pens and maybe a better cutter.

Seasonal

Often in folk tales a being or spirit is half-human looking and half-animal or plant, working with this in mind I had the idea for these sketches. These are very experimental with a lot of ideas mixed into them, I just wanted to get them all down. The most prominent idea I realised though, was having the two contrasting seasons of winter and summer as the ‘element’ of each of the figures, which then led me to think of them as a future painting, I thought about colours I would use, for example for winter I would use blues, pale colours – cold colours basically. And for summer I would use reds, oranges – warm colours.
The last sketch with the tree and the figure is based on a specific idea I had which goes with the masks idea, I was thinking about a tree that is ‘living’ somewhat and rather than growing fruit it grows masks with different expressions and these masks are collected by a spiritual being that has no face and uses the masks to show their expression. The different meanings behind this one piece are many and go fairly deep and personal, which is something I only found out after getting all these ideas down.

Ayakashi!

These are sketches of some of the types of ‘Ayakashi’ you can find in Japanese folk stories. I really love these kind of fantasy beings/creatures.

More pattern! – Kimono pattern

-Going back to my love for Japanese art and folk art.
Some of the patterns that I found in the adult colouring book reminded me of Kimono patterns and I wanted to incorporate that into a few drawings which is how these came to be. The first one is my favourite because I just love how it turned out and how much of an impact it has. The other two kind of combine everything plus with the addition of my love for Japanese boy-love manga; love in general is a beautiful thing and its one of things I like depicting, the addition of the pattern kind of adds to it. You will notice that two of the pictures feature one of the males with horns, this was because I was exploring Japanese folk-art and there is a few stories about supernatural beings that have horns. As a collective name, these kind of strange beings are called ‘Ayakashi’ in Japanese, which literally translates to ‘strange, odd, spiritual, spirit, creature’ and so on. This is something Im very interested in because they are weird and dark sometimes, and alot of the time nature is mixed in with them so it fits perfectly with where Im trying to go with my work.

Patterns!

I love the effect of patterns so I did more work on them and for these I decided to mix my masks idea and put them with pattern. The finished effect is quite dream-like and surreal which I like so these were a success.

Reworking

I decided to use some old drawings and mix them with some new ideas, I really like the results of these and did a few more. I was using an adult’s colouring book for the pattern background, as I was thinking back on the patterning I used on the weird drawings I did a while back. I’ve also been doing a bit of stencilling aswell so I took that idea for the middle one and was just experimenting a bit.

Result

So, these came from the mark making in my previous post. I also remembered a printing technique (mono-printing) from my college years and started to use it, these were the result, the marks came out really to give some very nice effects.