Chris Ballasiotes is an Artist that my tutor recommend I take a look at. His site is here: http://siotes.com/

I’ll talk about a couple of pieces of his work that I find interesting and inspiring….

I think this image is a really great combination of something digital i.e the photograph of the girl, and hand rendered lettering. The broad stroke of the letters, and the visible brush strokes make it feel authentic/heart felt rather than cold/generated token graphic.

 

This caught my eye as a playful/inventive way of getting some typography into an image to create a graphic design. Its yellow tissue paper overlaid over a photograph, which gives the feel of it being something important or memorable which is being captured. The cut out letters, which let you see the photo underneath lend a really nice feel and make you consider what is the thing in the photo/what is he trying to have patience about. It might be fun to try a similar technique in an appropriate exercise/project.

This is a watercolor of objects from the artists home that have some meaning or value to him. I guess that’s a nice sentiment, I’m not sure that’s what I get a feel for in seeing the image though. But I do really like the overlapping of the two colors and simplicity of the shapes, it shows how you don’t need to have a lot of detail in order for the viewer to recognize the subjects/objects.

 

I’m not entirely sure how to describe what I see in this. But I like the sense of pattern in the blue watercolor painting and the yellow tissue circles. I like that you can see the blue water color paint through the tissue paper. it’s sort of mysterious, makes you want to discover more without seeming dark/like something is being hidden because it’s sinister.

 

This is a water color but it feels digital and hand drawn at the same time. I think partly due to the smoothness/uniform of the black background which is broken up bu the fluidity and blended nature of the type and white/grey blobs. It’s again simple, but effective, you get the gist of how light will always shine in darkness because I will always stand out more.

 

I wanted to look at some logo more graphic design based work. So the above logo for a youth group is perfect. It’s lots of different ideas the artist had for logo’s but I actually quite like them altogether as a pattern of logo’s. Creating pattern from hand drawn illustrations using digital software might be a good way for me to explore combining the two worlds effectively.

 

This is a really simple watercolor of a phrase, but the light and dark created by the water mixed with the paint add’s depth/interest. I really like the brush strokes which show at the ends of the individual letters.