Back in the late 90’s when I was still in school learning new skills and techniques, and trying things out I started coming up with these really minimal design pieces.
I was (and still am) fascinated by abstract art with bold colours and lines that leave their interpretation to the viewer’s imagination. It makes things super interesting, in my opinion.
With my first few attempts I used coloured pencils with dark gradients and shading. I only really made a couple to attempt to set a style for some larger pieces I had planned for the future. I later went on a simpler and minimalist style using black fineliner for solid outlines and solid colours, and later still went on to use a black marker and paints with thick outlines and bold solid colour blocks.
Sometime in ’97 I managed to get around to getting at least one of these in a larger canvas, in acrylics, if I recall correctly. I was very pleased with how it came out, and I still have it here somewhere.
So as a way to continue to experiment I recently sat down and whipped up a few more designs. I also plan to make more as time and inspiration allows; maybe I’ll put them up for sale at some point & see if there’s any interest.
For the first few new pieces, I employed the use of my trusty black Faber-Castell fineliners for the outlines, and Copic markers for the colours.
For this newest batch, I attempted to modernise and combine my digital & analogue techniques. I started by creating a number of custom marker brushes in Illustrator which I used to draw the outlines of my designs. I came up with 6 initial designs, and laid these out on an standard A4 page and printed them out. The lines came out thick and sharp, but maintained the organic feel of a handheld marker on textured paper, so I was super pleased with the result.
I plan to make some more functional pieces with these designs; bookmarks, stickers, postcards, maybe even playing cards at some stage.
Let me know what you think of these, and if you think making new useful designs is good idea, and if you’d be interested in purchasing any. Also if you have any other ideas, I’m always up for hearing new ideas.
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