I am currently in my second year studying fine art at Sunderland University; prior to this I received a BTEC national diploma in art and design at Shiney Row College.
At the beginning of this year I started taking photographs of friends and family in ways that best describe them and have continued to do so as time has progressed, each photograph I have selected I have either created a collage or a painting in a number of different media.
I started making smaller paintings and collages to begin with, I would paint in block colours to make up a painting, or hole punch magazines and newspapers to build up a detailed image of a face by sticking them onto card/paper, I have created several digitally manipulated images on the computer of friends where I would replace an object from the image with another. I have made most of the images pixilated so only I know what the images are. I have tried many techniques to do this such as using colour swatches from Dulux catalogues layered on top of each other with blu tack to make it 3D, to simplify an image, stained glass window effects on Photoshop and painting them on a large scale, circles/squares of magazines or newspaper cut out and quick splashes of paint onto paper to make up a simplified image.
The artists that I have looked at are Chuck Close, Vik Muniz and Sam Price as inspiration. I plan to extend this further by scanning in my paintings, collages and photographs and manipulating them on the computer and painting on a larger scale mixing collage and paint together.
