Struan Shields

For an IB Art assignment, we had to do a piece in the style of another artist. I choose the famous American quasi-pop artist Alex Katz. While Katz is a painter his simple style is pretty similar to my vector style so it was a natural choice. For the portrait I took at snapshot of a friend and then worked on it in Adobe Illustrator CS3 for a couple hours. I kept it pretty simple because I have to do three more people for the assignment. You can expect those soon.

King of Nothing

Keeping in line with Emilio's post, I too had the same assignment. This 24"x36" piece is comprised of 5 layers, it took a long time to get the right picture of me for it, but in the end I am really satisfied. The idea for the wallpaper background came from 2 artists, Kehinde Wiley, and Orticanoodles. So far I am really satisfied with the piece, this picture however doesn't do justice to the actual black, which is actually black, but you can imagine.

I'll leave the interpretation up to you.

Grid Self-Portrait

This is a self portrait that I did for IBH Art. The assignment was to do a piece in the same vein as one of your favorite self portrait. I choose Chuck Close's 'Self-Portrait.' I've always wanted to do something based around pixelation and this was my opportunity.

I took an emotive self portrait using a point and shoot. Took it into Photoshop CS3 where I shrunk it to 17x30 pixels. Then I blew it back up again and printed it. I was left with a highly pixelated grid of 510 boxes. I recreated this then on a piece of paper and armed with a wide variety of pencils: 6B, 2B, B, H, F, 2H that i can remember I got to work. 4 hours later I had this.

Metro Mk. II

When I first created the Metro Map design shirt earlier , I realized that it would be really difficult to put that design onto a silkscreen. This iteration of the design addresses this issue by adding a pleasing gradient to the end of each line. This will eventually be available for purchase on a shirt.

Nicholson Two Lower Football Club

This is a design concept for the crest of my brother's college intramural soccer team. This design is based mostly off of the crests of English soccer clubs. This took me like two seconds in Inkscape.

When Boarding, Please Move to the Center of the Car

This is the latest idea I've had for the t-shirts i'm thinking about selling, although this would be a pretty complex silk screen job... It's the DC Metro subway system map without all of the stop labeled and everything. I really like the concept of the shirt and hopefully someday it will find its way onto something. It was done in about two hours in Inkscape.

The Invasion of Paris

This summer, my family and I went to Europe for a vacation. We spent a week in London and then took a train to Paris. While I was in Paris, I was able to find some of Invader's work scattered around the city. Invader is a street artist whose work consists of tiles glued to the sides of buildings and other fixtures in public areas in cities. The tiles are arranged to represent pixels and form characters from various vintage video games. They're usually from Space Invaders, hence his name. I was able to find three although there are many many more in many more cities.

Quai d'Orléans

Le Louvre

Rue de l'Opera