lukathompsonportfolio

[lukathompsonportfolio]

This is a collection of images and ideas for my current A-Level exam topic. I'm studying 'Biomorphic forms', which at first seemed quite niche and specific, but I've realised it has links to surrealism, sculptures, creatures, and even body horror: all of which I'm excited to research in this exam topic.

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These pieces were made on a weekend long residential workshop I attended. I studied space and depth through the medium of cartography, and how art can be inspired by maps. The left image is a final piece, and the right shows some experimentation and writing on what I made.

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This is the final piece I made after studying the Spider-Verse films. The character's movements in this comic are direct references of my movements in the storyboard. Coloured pieces of paper, sticky notes and alcohol markers make up most of the colour in this piece. I also imitated some of the techniques used in the film: Onomatopoeia, Ben Day/halftone dots, chromatic abberation and a faux smear frame. (Mixed media on paper)

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This is the beginnings of a personal response to my Spider-Verse research. I went to a park with my friend and took pictures of us running and jumping at certain spots. I then edited the pictures to make us look like we're doing superhuman stunts, and arranged them like a storyboard on the page. This is similar to what animators would do; act out a scene in real life for an accurate reference when animating it.

[lukathompsonportfolio]

This is a research page, not of an individual artist, but of the Spider-Verse film series. These films were incredibly pivotal for the animation industry (and myself), because of their unique style and comic book influences. I was particularly interested in the character 'Spider-Punk' for his 70s punk art influences. I also examined particular animation and illustration techniques the team used in the film (seen along the centre of the pages), such as smear frames, animating on twos, and chromatic abberation.

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This is a watercolour painting I made for a friend, of a scene from an anime. I used a white gel pen to outline the character and chair to make them stand out from the dark background. (Watercolour and fineliner on paper) Reference: https://i.sstatic.net/ScRR6m.jpg

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This ink painting (ink and fineliner on paper) is of musician Colin Greenwood. (Reference image: https://pin.it/4cAtKzJ1c). After sketching out the basic features of the face, I located the highlights on the reference image, and spread masking fluid over those areas on the sketch. Then after painting the features with coloured ink, I peeled off the masking fluid, and drew the linework. This creates white spaces in the highlighted areas. This was a really fun experiment with an unfamiliar material. If I could redo this piece, I would use a more restrictive palette to exaggerate the contrast between colours better.

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This is a sketch of a 'clicker' that I drew after watching the TV series The Last of Us. My only reference for this drawing was an image of the traditional clicker head design. This sketch was extremely fun to draw, and I made it as an exercise in drawing clothes on a posed figure. This drawing tells a story; a regular guy who becomes infected, and is wearing the same clothes as he was when he was 'alive', albeit ripped and dirtied after a long time.

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This is a pencil drawing of an original character of mine. My intention is for him to appear in a comic or manga series that I will write and illustrate. In short, he's a cargo pilot that crash-lands in the Amazon rainforest, and gains a symbiotic relationship with the foliage around him, as his limbs have decayed from being in a coma on the jungle floor for years.

[lukathompsonportfolio]

These are two sketches I made at separate times, both in my free time. The first is a simple sketch of a lady. I tried to be as accurate to the picture as possible, with maybe some slight exaggeration. The second picture is of Willem Dafoe and Alfred Molina as their characters in the Spider-Man franchise. I stylised their portraits by using jagged lines and more cartoonish features.

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This was the final piece I made in my 10 hour GCSE exam, for my 'Layers' topic. Tony Swain's influence is definitely visible in this work, especially in the lower-left corner, with the aquamarine on beige being reminiscent of a shoreline. Newspaper was used as a base for some parts as well. The dark stairway in the upper-left came to me on a whim during the exam, and I think it worked quite well, providing an abstract mystery to part of the piece. I 'cropped' part of the painting out by marking it with masking tape, similar to the unorderly shapes of Swain's work. Mixed media on canvas.

[lukathompsonportfolio]

This piece was made in response to my research on Tony Swain. I tried to imitate some of the abstract 'structures' - like the house and "driftwood" - that appear in his work (primarily from the paintings on the right page). The greatest aspect of Swain's work I took forward was his use of newspaper scraps as a base layer, seen in the scraps of maps I used in this piece.

[lukathompsonportfolio]

This artist research is of Tony Swain, a Northern Irish abstract landscape painter. This was for my GCSE topic 'Layers'. I tried to emulate his seemingly haphazard style of painting, and use of newspaper scraps as parts of the background/canvas to paint over.

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This research page is of the first artist I studied in my 'Science in Art' topic. I find Goodsell's colourful, playful, yet perfectly accurate depictions of cells and molecules very fun, and wanted to imitate his style in the layout of this research page.

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This portrait of musician Dave Grohl (A2 posterboard) is the final piece of my GCSE portraiture topic. I used the app Fx Stencil to process the original photo and split it into black and white sections. Then printed and cut them out, stuck them to the green painted background, and spray-painted in the corresponding colours to create the portrait. This piece was Inspired by Banksy's stencil work.

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These are two portraits, done in pencil, of actor Paul Rudd and musician Thom Yorke. These were made in the early stages of my GCSE coursework. Whilst not my favourite genre of art, I do find portraiture drawing very fun, and definitely important to study for designing characters.