In this art blog, I document my progress as an artist as I pursue a degree in illustration and animation at the St. Joost School of Art and Design in the Netherlands. I update the blog weekly with the work I've done.

Introduction and Week 1

The week of 28 August was dedicated to an introduction to the study programme. The very first thing we were tasked with was to pair up with a classmate and draw a persona for each other. The character I designed is pictured below.

It was kinda scary to have to make an impromptu drawing that everyone would see; showing my unfiltered art feels like opening up a personal part of myself for the world to see, but it's good to get into the habit right from the beginning.

After this first assignment, we were given an introduction to what we were going to be doing this semester. We were shown around the school, touring each of the workplaces. This covered a wide variety of media, ranging from, for instance, metalworking all the way to digital art.

The introduction week concluded with a one-day group project. We had to depict something we find absurd about the world in an art installation. My group, consisting of students from different specialisations, decided on showing the enormity of the endless list of societal issues we deal with daily. Not all of us interpreted the final artwork in the same way, which kind of surprised me.

With the introduction week behind us, classes started for real. Our first class was about Adobe Illustrator. In groups, we designed logos and drew them in Illustrator. To get the hang of the software, I decided to make a logo for my website (yet to be fully implemented).

My second class was on drawing still lifes, and turned out to be surprisingly exhausting (perhaps in part due to the heat that day). This was done in gradually increasing time intervals. pictures to be added!!!

A selection of 10 illustrators

For the research class we were asked to select ten illustrators which interest us from a given list. Below is a rundown of my selection in which I highlight a few visual aspects of the artists' work.

Anny Crane

This artist makes illustrations using a variety of tools, including most prominently embroidery. This gives parts of her work a distinct texture, which heightens certain elements to be the centre of attention. The inking on some of her work has a kind of sickly feeling to it, effectively communicating a sombre atmosphere. Adding to this aspect of Crane's work is the often chaotic composition. What also draws me to her work is the use of colour, which helps evoke a certain atmosphere, whether it be nostalgic, ominous or something else.

Katarina Pridavkova

Pridavkova's works which most appeal to me are her dioramas, especially the one pictured above. It shows a row of run-down houses, full of character and detail. The antennae on the roofs of the houses in particular jump out to me; their haphazard placement and varying pointy designs perfectly set the tone for the piece, while at the same time signifying that these houses are very much lived in. The whole piece has a beige, desaturated colour palette, reminiscent of Spanish suburbs (Pridavkova in fact cites Spain as a significant inspiration). Consequently, it has (at least to me) a homely air about it.

Zaou Vaughan

Vaughan is a stop-motion animator who works with many different materials. She makes her characters out of soft materials, giving her work a cutesy feeling. Her backgrounds also tend to look quite cosy due to the use of saturated colours and the maquette-like look of many stop-motion films.

Iris Lam

Lam's style of illustration is in part characterised by the goofy way she draws faces, and the use of photobashing. Her lines are pretty wobbly (something I'm a big fan of) and her style has distinct lack of sharp corners and straight lines. The colouring brings it all together to create a childlike aesthetic through the use of a crayon-like texture.

Jorge Roa

All of Roa's art prominently features a texture reminiscent of the random noise on telescope images, making some of it look like old black-and-white photographs. This look is further helped by his blotchy strokes, emulating the blurriness caused by long exposure times. Still, his illustrations are stylised by the use of mostly (piecewise) straight lines.

Elly MacKay

MacKay is a children's books illustrator with a pretty calm style. Throughout her work, she uses textures reminiscent of watercolour and layered paper. A returning technique in her work is the depiction of bright sunlight, which gives it a certain openness.

Friederike Hantel

Hantel uses clean, thin lines and sharp transitions between colours which emulate the style of manga and anime. At the same time, she draws certain facial features, esp. eyes and ears, as often done in charicatures. This creates a slightly uncanny, grotesque look for her characters.

Gregory Euclide

Katharine Morling

Morling makes sculptures with an impressive hand-drawn look to them, due to the shaky lines with varying thickness. Adding to this style are the flat colours; Hantel only uses black colouring on white porcelain, letting the lighting do the bulk of the work.

Jelle van Meerendonk

In his art, Van Meerendonk makes full use of the space available, often filling it with elongated limbs.