INFO
Inspiration.
My main influences are fashion, pop culture, photography and music.
Fashion and fashion photography are fascinating. Beautiful people, hair styles & make up styles, amazing clothes. Colours and the emotions in some photos can be unforgeteble.
Pop culture also has a dominant influence in my work. Shapes and silhouettes found in highlife
magazines are other points of my inspirations. Spoiled fancy women who are part of our culture nowadays are reflected in my artworks, as is eroticism which is part of fancy magazines.
Anyone who appreciates my artwork is an inspiration, too. :)
Artistic influences.
As a teenager, I was largely influenced by Masamune Shirow’s “ Ghost in the shell”, “Evangelion” Hideaki Anno, and “Akira” Katsuhiro Otomo . But the first most extraordinary movie which I saw was GTS and the story of Major Mokoto Kusanagi a female with a cybernetic body and the haunting choral song that plays throughout the film that was remarkable for me at that time. I was completely fanatic ghost in the shell characters, so my first drawings were clone of the manga characters. But that was just training for my skills and of course I realise that my artwork had no originality, and I started to make the slow departure from that style to find my own. However, after a few years, my influences and tastes evolved dramatically. Of course not only Japanese comic had influence on my art, I was also fascinated by American POP-ART artists who were using emphatic and simplified figures. Pop art animators who desired to bridge the gap between art and life, turned to the urban reality that surrounds them, the environment that shaped the thinking way of being and art buyers. I was mainly fascinated by Roy Lichtenstein’s art, he was the first artist who put comics in museums area.
Of course, sometimes the art critics of that time challenged the originality of his artworks, however Lichtenstein responded to such claims by offering responses such as the following: "The closer my work is to the original, the more threatening and critical the content. However, my work is entirely transformed in that my purpose and perception are entirely different. I think my paintings are critically transformed, but it would be difficult to prove it by any rational line of argument"-and I empathised with him.
When my characters evolved I put a little bit of Ancient Egypt in art and the way they created ideal human proportions.
So in short: Anime/Manga, American POP-ART and Ancient Egypt brought me to where I am today.
Art technique.
Everyone of my artworks begins from a pencil drawing sketch, then sometimes I scan it and edit it Photoshop CS5 - using my Wacom Intuos2 tablet. I also create some of my artworks in Illustrator.
All of watercolours effects are created traditional watercolour techniques and are scaned as well.
However, I paint on my artworks after printing - it depends :)