The 'Inspiration'

I have to say out of all the research I've done, Lou Beach's work is what has inspired me most for the second Chimera we have to do. I like his wit and sense of humour about his digital montages and aim to incorporate these traits into my own work for this 'Chimera' project. I am thinking that I'll most likely add an element of hand rendered illustration to my finished piece at the moment though.Here is a link to Lou's site  if you wanna take a look http://www.loubeach.com/work.html

Pet projects

I quite like drawing zombies in my spare time.

A Lover Sings

These drawings are all for a current project in which we basically were asked to illustrate a song of our choice then make an album cover/sleeve booklet out of our drawings. I chose Billy Bragg's 'A Lover Sings'.

Wasser ist Leben

These are my final designs for the Water is Life/Wasser ist Leben. They're alright, I'm a bit of a perfectionist so I'm probably as happy as I'm going to be with them to be honest. I drew the illustrations I used myself then just scanned them into Illustrator. My influence for the majority of the posters was a quote by Albert Camus(pretentious I know) 'A rebel is a man who says no'. I incorporated this quote in my posters in relation to the relevance of the human rights issue with not having access to clean drinking water.  The other is a playful nod to the famous Dadaist painting 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe', as I'm sure is obvious anyway.

The Jekyll and Hyde effect

When thinking of a chimera, I always think of two separate composite parts. Hence why the idea of superheroes appeal to me in trying to abstractly define a chimera. The way they always have this dual personality, one being their plain, normal (perhaps a bit dull) selves and the other being this fantastical creature with super human abilities and powers. The same goes for the idea of superheroes and villains, Good vs. Evil, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde etc. All would be nothing interesting without their balancing counterpart.

Illustrator Assignment for Digital Media

This is the end product of the first Adobe Illustrator brief that we were assigned, I created it using the Blob Brush tool and coloured it by using varying gradients. In hindsight I should have used a much smaller stroke for the outline but overall it's not too bad for a first attempt.

Collage is key

Collage work and the idea of a chimera are intrinsically linked and I was lucky enough to stumble upon the works of a great artist that uses the medium to create amazing pieces. The artist's name is Lou Beach and in fact many of his collage pieces could easily be defined as chimeras themselves. My personal favourite work of his is his series of animal heads photoshopped onto human bodies, very surrealistic. The other images are just of my own musings of how to make my own photomontage.

Homages to ...

In trying to stay away from the literal meaning of chimera, I went to several mixed media blogs to salvage what I could from them in terms of relevant and interesting research. In doing so, I found all these various pictures of shrines made from different found objects and decorated with illustrations. The diverse range of materials and sizes (some of these 'shrines' are made from matchboxes believe it or not)relate directly to the brief because of the nature of their random construction.  I especially like the 'Man's Ruin' one because of the use of the tacky plastic dolls and dice, it has a real rockabilly feel.