Finalised Rainsong (or close to finalised!)

Rainsong.

Walking in an ethereal earth

the cause you fell for far too deep

dissipate of any worth

In this ethereal earth

The feeling that you had to keep

For fear, for hesitation

for to save your reservation

Anticipation filled with doubt,

All you have derived

And all you tried to figure out

            In an ethereal world you walk

While someone else is waiting

In the space between two worlds apart

For you to keep your heart.

Rainsong brought him out into the night,

She danced on city river rails and curbs
beneath his skin.

Away from all the indoor lights, howling

deep within, the purple colours of the night

She found him.

Dizzied from the dust, that sparkled from her

breath. Untrembling he touched, a life that

breathed death.

A high hum coming from the sky, unsettled

him again- pulling apart, left standing by although,

She could not wait

Eoin Murray, 2014

I think this is finished! This was an interesting and very long process. it started out as an abstract painting:

The painting was based on Eoin's poem, Rainsong, I worked on it in it's abstract form for a long time before deciding it was finished, but then going over and back about whether or not it really was! I've been doing mainly portraiture the last while, and after seeing an image on Instagram which set off another image in my own mind, I started experimenting with it in Photoshop, layering over many different photographs before I found one that I felt really worked. I created a photoshop painting of this photo, to bring the painterly feel into it, and then got it printed onto canvas. I wasn't happy at all with the canvas print however! The colours were completely washed out, so I worked back into it with oils and gave it the vibrancy I first wanted. I'm happy with it now, and it's strange developing a new process, it gives me a lot to think about!

Coppeen Heritage Society

My good friend Shane Cronin recently contacted me about designing a tourist map for his heritage society in Coppeen. Shane has been really active in Coppeen in promoting local heritage and tourism and this map is hoping to further boost public interest in Coppeen. I just recently finished the map which features illustrations from a local artist. The map will be installed on the 18th of August, hoping to make it down and see it in the flesh!

Photoshopping Pt. 2

Last week we had our first photoshop session as part of our New Media module. This week was our final afternoon of it, good fun all round! This is my second final image - I think! I'm always tempted to keep messing with them, but we just have so much other stuff to do that I don't have time!

It's a collage of photographs taken at the Giant's Causeway, at a gig and of loads of graffiti and some Gaudi glass in Barcelona.

Photoshopping

This afternoon as part of our series of lectures and workshops in New Media we created few photoshop images. Here's the first of mine, I need to finalise another one next week. It's a combination of a photograph of my eye and a photograph that I took on the Conor Pass. I was initially drawn to the photo because of the really strong dark triangle in the foreground of the image. It happened accidentally but made the composition of the photograph stronger and more interesting. Trying to hold myself back from too many miscellaneous Photoshop effects and filters as I was doing it! I'd forgotten how much fun photoshop is. It was really nice hearing other people's reactions to it as well when they hadn't been exposed to it before, they were all blown away by what you can do.

Dermot Power

Wow, my poor blog is getting more and more neglected :( it's been a really crazy 2013 so far, the dip seems to be even busier this semester! Maybe i'm still just settling in.

I'm doing concept art with one of my first year groups at the moment. We're looking at character concept art as a way to get them interested in life drawing. This week they'll be developing their own characters based on story archetypes. I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with!

I showed them some of Dermot Power's work last week. They loved it! His concept art is amazing and I think it's inspiring to show the pupils the work of someone from Cork who has really excelled at what he does.

Here's some of that work I showed them, there's loads more on his site.

Dia de los Muertos

I'm doing a Day of the Dead class with my TY group tomorrow in school. I love Mexican culture and their vibrant art tradition and I wanted to take a different approach to the usual Hallowe'en themed art done in schools. I also think there's something a lot more edgy and exciting about the Day of the Dead art than the traditional Hallowe'en images we get here.

I've featured two female artists here, Sylvia Ji and the wonderful ZSO. Sylvia Ji uses the traditional Catarina image in her work a lot, ZSO dipped her toe into Mexican art with these fab Calavera, I love them all!

Very unseasonably I did a few calavera back in August for a friends birthday, great fun to paint, hopefully the pupils will enjoy it tomorrow.

Posters from A Brief Exchange

So i've been blogging a lot about A Brief Exchange the last couple of months, Noeleen recently put up a facebook album of the work done for the show, there is a lot of great work there.

I'd highly recommend you to check it out. Here is some of the work to whet your appetite...

Brief Exchange - Final Submission

Here's my final submission to Brief Exchange, as usual I was working right up to the deadline!

I submitted a short rationale as well as follows:

"Nature vs Nurture".

Research on the brief quickly led to the dark topics of eugenics and human animal husbandry.  In these debates the female body and foetus are often reduced to delivery mechanisms and products.  The resulting work references DNA and incorporates female and foetal imagery to allude to these debates.

I'm really looking forward to the exhibition and seeing the other work!  It's all the brainchild of the very talented Noeleen Doheny and the follow up to last year's Full Circle exhibition. Check out the lovely poster below...

A Brief Exchange - A First Cut

A couple of weeks ago I was delighted when a friend of mine, Noeleen Doheny, approached me to participate in an upcoming graphic design and illustration exhibition she's organising.

The idea behind the exhibition is "a brief exchange".  23 designers and illustrators were randomly assigned briefs written by the other designers / illustrators in the group.  Mine was based on "Nature vs Nurture".  I started off by doing a bit of research into the phrase, where it came from and what it's been used for, pretty unpleasant reading for the most part! After a few sketches I came up with a concept of basing it on an artists impression of DNA. I chose to focus on female bodies and foetuses as these are both often reduced to products or delivery mechanisms in the darker side of the nature vs nurture debate.

Here's where I am at the moment on it.  It's a mix of photography, drawing and photoshop painting.  It's still pretty rough but i'll hopefully get a chance to clean it up a bit before taking the wedding-hiatus!

Pop

Seeing as this is going to print this week (or maybe next) I guess it's fine to put this up here! The finished cover for the Pop EP from Slow Motion Heroes.

I ended up paring back the original drawing in photoshop and just using one element of it in the final thing, can't wait to see it in print!

Atomic 4

Another version of my Atomic illustration! This is the fourth (and final!) now and my favourite (previous ones here, here and here). It was drawn using a black sharpie, tidied up in photoshop & coloured in illustrator. I think the compression on blogger is making the image look weird, again!! For me it looks better here, on my site.

Happy new year!

Cintiq Messing!

So I was at my friend Will's house the other day, and (finally!) had a go off his Cintiq, it's UNREAL! My new #1 most-wanted object of desire.

Here's our collaborative masterpiece! Haha, it reminds me of dodgy college projects & lots of messing!

Delicate Heart

Here is the final version of the "delicate heart" illustration (words by my brother). It looks totally different to how I first imagined it, always interesting when that happens!

My heart is delicate

Like snow falling,
on warm ground

This feeling,
My heart like
snow,

Is delicate,

My little brother, as well as being a maths & physics genius (boast much?!) also writes poems, he lets me read them some times and this particular one really stuck in my head, i'm working up an illustration around it, so far it's starting to look way different than I had imagined! I'm doing a lot of experimentation with scanning and photographing different materials, as well as a lot of drawing & redrawing the heart.

Slow Motion Heroes

This is an illustration i've been working on for Cork band, Slow Motion Heroes. It's meant to be slightly retro sci-fi, I think it's slightly influenced by Mad Men, which i've been watching loads of and I LOVE! I went for retro due to the bands slightly nostalgic tone, and sci-fi cos "Slow Motion Heroes" made me think of the moon landing, again possibly an influence from Mad Men! I had a pretty solid idea for what kind of font I wanted to use so I drew one myself for it.

God I just noticed there, how many times can I say "slightly" in the one post?!

Other work news, we made our Elvin Beta V3.0 release today, wohoo!

Atomic 3

So as I mentioned recently i've been trying to develop an illustrative style for myself. This latest idea for an illustration (based on Blondie's Atomic) has already had one spin. Here's the second, it's totally different to the first, though based on the same drawings, I guess it's brash & loud like the first one, but in a totally different way! The type is all hand-drawn here as well, as if you couldn't tell!

Tomorrow's going to be an INSANELY busy day at work as we polish up the AIB animation to get it out to the client for Friday, so this has been nice to clear my head for the evening.

Atomic

I want to produce a series of illustrations based on song lyrics. The first one being "Your hair is beautiful" from Blondie's Atomic (I love that band!). This drawing is based on a photograph, i've still a good bit from the finish line, i'm really trying to discover / develop my own style with these.

New Website Navigation

I'm working on a new dimension to my site navigation. I'm thinking of changing the navigation to incorporate a flash animation using these rollover images for "Blog - Work - About". I'm toying with the idea of printing out the outlines and painting them, or colouring them in illustrator, early days yet! The first image here has been done in pen and colouring pencils. The "work" & "about" image are in pen.

Oil Pastels!

I've been getting back into oil pastels after a (long!) hiatus, you can get really intense colours with them. I experimented a bit in photoshop with this image, breaking it up and layering it to bring out the colours even more. I was thinking of Paul Gauguin images when I did this, hoping for a slightly tropical/intimate feel.

It's been a crazy month with Dubai-Volcano-Romania, things should be getting back to normal now I think....

I am not an artist

Had fun doing this little gif today for I am not an artist. It popped up on design you trust during the week so I filed it away to do at the weekend! It's curated by Soon in Tokyo, I think it's a really cool idea, like a digital version of contributing a patch to a quilt, wonder how long it'll run for?

It was done in photoshop cs4, which has a very handy animation feature. Feel like I did something productive with my Saturday now, which from the outset seemed like it was doomed to a be a hangover write-off!