mariaartportfolio

[mariaartportfolio]

Hi welcome to my art portfolio! I like making art that’s really colourful and sometimes surreal/fantastical. I’m inspired mainly by books, music and music lyrics, as well as lots of artists on social media and bigger artists like Polly Nor, Tillie Walden and David Hockney, and also by my own life and people around me. I work traditionally with acrylic ink, coloured pencils and gouache mostly, but sometimes I do digital art. Here are some examples of recent independent art I’ve made that I hope show my general style, colour choices and areas of interest

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This is a very short film I made over half term in October of 2020. The assignment was to make a short film centred around an old piece of technology. I chose a broken Walkman and included footage, editing and stop-motion into my project.

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Sketchbook and development pages - deconstructing and reconstructing things that already exist, and some cropped photography. These were made as part of a project for my foundation course during the second covid lockdown.

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Bookbinding - I hadn’t done this before and we got taught different methods of bookbinding and then we independently made books and experimented with the form.

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Sketchbook research pages on Rome, New York and Delhi for an illustration project on Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. 

Ideas, thumbnail sketches, colour and pattern planning for final drawing

Final illustration (this is the one that was on the wall in a cafe on the Royal Mile)

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These are sketchbook pages for a project on themes of nostalgia, memory, romanticisation (of places, people, the past and memories), especially in terms of friendship and boarding school becuase boarding school is something that is very romanticised in media but there are many many issues surrounding it in reality. I looked at artists like the photographer Mark Draisey, painter Robbie Bushe, and other pieces of media like The Secret History by Donna Tartt, various movies, and a TV show called This Country. There is some observational drawing and drawing from memory in here. 

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a bookbinding project - the result of the research and development on memory, nostalgia, friendship, school, romanticisation etc. Each page has a little interactive/fold-out piece or lots of little fold-out pieces, and the last page contains a book of photographs.

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These are sketchbook pages brainstorming a project to do with books and conversations, called “Blue”. I was inspired by storytelling and writing and books, and by artists like the photographer Hannah La Follette Ryan and the illustrator Eli Baum, as well as music and lyrics from musicians like Beach House, Bob Dylan, Hugh and Blossoms. 

The first two pages are pen drawings of a typewriter in a bookshop in Edinburgh called Typewronger Books, which is a place full of stories and writing. The second is a story/journey I made up showing the journey a character takes to get from one book/story to another - it’s inspired by fantasy and magical realism, and imagery of doors, journeys, seas and stars in The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern. The other pages are mostly visual research and gathering inspiration and information on my themes, and the last one is notes on the project I was starting to develop. 

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These are sketchbook pages showing some development for “Blue”, a narrative illustrated fold-out book using a few song lyrics to tell a loose story, themes of conversation, opening up. 

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This is the final piece of “Blue”. It went through a lot of different book-formats before I chose this one. It uses a quote and image from the film Dead Poets Society at the start, and lyrics by Blossoms, Beach House and Hugh, as well as a few of my own words.

[mariaartportfolio]

This is a link to:

Research and development for the final project of the foundation course, “Squish”, including photography, artist research and prototype/mock-ups of the final piece. There are notes and annotations there. 

Process portfolio -  a required part of my IB course in sixth form, showing lots of different processes and mediums I tried out and artists I took inspiration from. 

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This is the final piece of my last project of the foundation course, “Squish”. Each piece is 60cm tall and 42cm across, and made from layering ink and watercolour and using coloured pencils for details (except for Maternal, third down on the right, which doesn’t have pencil). There was a 14th but it was sold. 

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Observational drawing

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Drawings done in a life drawing class at the start of sixth form

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This is an animation I made on the foundation course, the first time I have tried animation that isn’t stop-motion with objects. It’s drawn using pencil, coloured pencil and ink, and it has 109 frames. The music is from the movie Eighth Grade, composed by Anna Meredith. 

These are pages from my sketchbook where I planned out the important frames