Julian Opie
| Born in 1958, Julian Opie emerged as an influential figure in British Art of the 1980s after creating a series of painted metal sculptures. He is known to engage with new technologies to expand his art style and is known to work with one idea across many forms of media from print, canvas, metal and vinyl. Opie works with photography and then digital alteration to create art made up of basic black outlines and simplified areas of colour. His graphic portraits and computer aided design work has enabled him to easily transition between the worlds of contemporary art and commercial art, having produced an album cover in 2000 for the pop band Blur and an LED projection for U2’s Vertigo tour in 2006. Many of his works are displayed in the National Portrait Gallery, The Tate and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. |
Here I recreated my digital portrait in the style of Julian Opie using PhotoShop. The main style of Opie is block colours with a heavy outline and the infamous black circle eyes. For the base colours of the face, hair and clothes I found PhotoShop and the Polygonal tool successful at selecting areas and the Paint bucket easily filled the selection with solid colour. I found the highlights more difficult to construct curving lines creating a more angled look than Opie's.
David Hockney
Born in 1937, Hockney was a draughtsman, Print maker, stage designer and photographer. He Is considered an influential British artist in the Pop art movement in the 1960s. In the 1980s Hockney produced a series of photo collages which he called Joiners. He created these first by using Polaroid prints and patch worked the images together. The photos were taken from different perspectives at slightly different times resulting in a work similar to cubism. The creation of this art type was purely accidental. In Hockney’s search for photographic reference for painting he disliked the distortion that occurred when using a wide angled lens that was available at the time. To avoid this he took a series of Polaroid’s and then glued them together. On discovering the composition of this Polaroid’s he saw a narrative and began to look deeper into photography as an art form. In 1985, Hockney used the Quantel Paintbox, a computer program that allowed the artist to sketch directly onto the screen. Since 2009 Hockney has produced many paintings using the Brushes app. Before this he used Photoshop and a stylus as a brush.