Digital Art: Print

Fall 2020

Artist Statement

This year, the pandemic has greatly impacted all aspects of my life including my artwork. I have a great love for photography which usually appears in each class I take, and yet this fall I found myself doing more digital drawing rather than creating photos. I believe this happening was linked to the necessity of our new way of life to stay inside and away from others. I have become used to spending my time indoors which lead to drawing each assignment rather than traveling across Long Island with friends to find beautiful places to photograph.

I also found my responses to each assignment took on a playful, whimsical approach, and I allowed my imagination more freedom than before. In project 1, I chose to create a book cover to represent a fantasy book I have read, placed in another universe. It demonstrated my mind’s want to escape to another place, outside of our currently virus-ridden world. In project 2, I created a poster of Yosemite, one of our National Parks. At that time I was yearning to be outside and see beautiful places, because though I have accepted the necessity that we stay apart, the easiest solution to that is to stay home and inside. It is an incredibly mundane way of living life and I found myself wishing to be outside in a beautiful place more than once. In project 3, I was inspired by the bright colors and eccentricity of Andy Warhol’s work, which were a bright contrast to my surroundings at the time, and chose to emulate those aspects in a work of my own. Each project is a window into what I wish the world to go back to.

 

Project 1 // Book Cover

Fantasy of Frost, 2020
Claire Woronick
12.66 x 9 inches

          Fantasy of Frost is a book by Kelly St. Clare with a particularly interesting world concept – two floating islands or “worlds” connected by a treacherous path of floating rocks. The original book cover takes its inspiration from frosty textures and snowflakes, which I felt was a bit too plain and basic to represent the wonderful story it tells. Instead, I wanted to try my hand at digital drawing and visually create the universe I read about.

I created the artwork for this cover in photoshop and used a pen tablet to draw all elements of the piece. The front cover, spine, and back cover were created as separate photoshop files first, and then once completed, the sections were consolidated into an InDesign document. I enjoyed exploring how to draw and paint digitally as this was something I do not have much experience in, and I think that the piece came together nicely. I chose to stay within a similar color palette of pinks, oranges, blues, and purples which helped each element of my design mesh together.

Project 2 // Poster

Yosemite, 2020
Claire Woronick
13 x 19 inches

         In project 2, I took my inspiration from the vintage national park posters of the 1920s which were typically made by lithographic print processes. I was drawn to them because of the limited color palette and simple shapes that suggest the famous landmarks of each park in their respective posters. I greatly enjoyed the idea of simplicity. Utilizing my observations, I drew my representation of Yosemite digitally, incorporating some of my own style with splatter, rough textures, and outlines. I used a reference photo of El Capitan, the famous landmark in Yosemite pictured in my poster, and drew from back to front – starting with the sky, then the mountain, grass and greenery, and then the trees and river. I used a lot of different texture brushes from within Photoshop as well as different blend modes. A retro-style font representative of my inspiration was used to bring everything together. The design process is entirely different from the original posters, which of course made it a bigger challenge to emulate the style I like so much, but I feel I was successful in achieving my goals for this project.

Project 3 // A Series of Cards

Today’s Pop Art Shoes (series), 2020
Claire Woronick
19 x 13 inches

          I was inspired by both Andy Warhol’s shoe illustration series and his pop art style. I decided to tie this series into what it may have looked like if Andy Warhol used modern day popular shoe styles (in the last 10 years) for his series, after a suggestion from a colleague that I should take my idea further than just creating “pop art.” I combined Warhol’s idea of an art series focused on shoe styles and his pop art style.

My process to create this work is as follows: I used shoes from my closet that I thought could represent styles I believe are somewhat popular today. I first used a DSLR camera to take the photos of each shoe, and photoshop to process the images. The photoshop “posterize” filter was applied to each to get a grainy, “illustrated” appearance in each image. Following the filter application, I moved the “saturation” slider up to 100 for each shoe, which brought out any colors that may already be present at low levels in the image. This was especially apparent in the bottom left shoe. I then used the “hue” slider to change the colors to compliment their backgrounds. Colors were chosen based on what has been popular in the last few years; I referenced this page, https://juiceboxinteractive.com/blog/color/, for my background colors. My last steps to give my shoes an overall “poster” look were to apply a small outline and drop shadow to each one.

Though this work may not appear immediately personal to me, I applied my own style in fashion and art to this project. I feel that my work represents me; it is my shoes and the colors of my generation.