My own art practice.
My design practice involves me experimenting with vibrant colours, juxtaposing compositions and most importantly enjoying the process. Favouriting illustration as my best skill, I have selected a mix of work I feel best represents me as a designer. Firstly, I will refer to two publications I have created from 2018-19. My colour palettes always have a base of 5 colours, because I have so much fun with mixing and matching. Something I have become fond of in the last year is texture, and such artists are Louis Lockhart and Tess Smith Roberts have been major influences on me. Lockhart lives and works in an old cotton mill where she creates designs from paper cut outs and line drawings.Roberts is a London based illustrator and print maker. Both Lockhart (Paper Doll, Up My Street, Valentines Prints1) and Roberts (Street Scene, Telegraph2)artworks ecomaps my favourite thing… Colour! And lots of it. Their attention to detail really strikes me as what I look for in my own art practice. I feel as though it is important for a designer to be one with their work, so personal touches are always really important.
Tess Smith Roberts 
Tess Smith Roberts
Louis Lockhart 
Louis Lockhart 
Louis Lockhart
Jenny Lewis and Margaret Bruce reflected on something that connects really strongly with me “Because designers are inevitably subject to the ideas and influences of their social context, their designs must reflect their values.3” My value as a designer is to respect myself and the context which I depict. Gender equality and sexual status are things I strongly support, so wherever I can use my practice as a way to define that, I would consider successful. My illustrations tend to have people and figures as I love drawing people. Personalities and styles are great to work with, and I can accompany this with expression through colour. Victor Margolin states “Artworks, no matter what form they take, are primarily discursive.4” I love this idea, that being discursive means they can wander. They can be anything I want them to be, and so can the audience who look at it. Like Roberts and Lockhart, I put my work on platforms where I can be seen- a way to be totally free, with so many personalities appreciating my art. This year, I even began to apply my illustration style to handmade clay earrings, and really expressed how colour displays such strong energy when juxtaposed with one another.
Much like the Earthworks Poster Collectives ideologies “From the mass media and the use of fluorescent poster inks these works adopt a DIY aesthetic5“, I try and replicate a screen-printed look with my artworks through layers of colours. While Roberts and Lockhart use pencil to achieve this effect, I use this as influence and replicate it through both pencil and vector-based images. The idea of the DIY aesthetic again relates back to how I believe it is important to be involved in the design and be recognised for a style on a page and therefore create influence as a designer.
- Louise Lockhart, Paper Doll, Up My Street, Valentines Prints, 2019, Mixed media, accessed 9th April 2019, https://www.instagram.com/theprintedpeanut/
- Tess Smith Roberts, Street Scene, Telegraph Today, 2019, Mixed Media, accessed 10thApril 2019, https://www.instagram.com/tesssmithroberts/
- Bruce, Margaret and Lewis, Jenny. “Women Designers — Is There a Gender Trap?” Design Studies 11, no. 2 (1990): 120.
- Margolin, Victor. Design Studies: Tasks and Challenges. The Design Journal: Parallels between art and design, 16, no. 4 (2013): 402.
- Berry, Jess. “Earthworks and Beyond.” Alternative Practices in Design: Queensland collectives 1979-1989: Symposium Proceedings 2010, 2010,190.
Design Methods 