Artist Research
08/02/2021
Misia Stawinski
Misia Stawinski is an illustrative artist based on Instagram and YouTube (@misia.illustrator). She doesn’t currently have a very large following on her platforms, however, I have been following her for a while now, and I admire her work and her incredible style. I think that her work is inspiring and definitely helped me define my own idea for my Zine.
I think that her style resembles a child’s work in a way. The confidence behind every line that she draws reminds me of how a child puts pen to paper without any regard for planning beforehand. As well as this, her work is always very colourful and expressive. And she always manages to feature some kind of adorable character of smiley face in all of her works.
As I came up with my Zine idea of ‘Growing Up’ or rather the reasons why you shouldn’t, I knew that he style had to be childish and colourful. I knew that Misia’s style would be the perfect inspiration for my work.
Dahlia Raz
Dahlia Raz is another artist based on Instagram that I follow, as well as a published author with her book called ‘SHIT ART is better than NO ART.’ She makes a point of reminding her large following that art doesn’t need to be meaningful and realistic in order to be good and fun. She stresses the importance of creating not only to spread goodness, but to most importantly have fun. Saying over and over that she created a piece because she just felt like creating it.
I adore how the colours and line art don’t always match, and I love how the subject matter doesn’t always make the most sense. I think that these aspects of Dahlia’s work would work well with my Zine idea because of the nonsensical and wacky finished product. The line art is my main inspiration for my work and I love how messy and expressive it is.
Georgia O’Keefe
Throughout her life and creative career, Georgia O’Keefe worked with and created art using a large variety of different mediums. Including paint, oil on canvas and water colour on paper too. Georgia O’Keefe is most well known for her large paintings of flowers, city skyscrapers in New York and the landscapes of New Mexico. Despite these works being her most well known, I will be focusing on her water colour pieces.
She used water colours freely without sketching beforehand as a way to freely experiment and express her feelings through the paint. She painted landscapes, sunrises and sunsets often because she enjoyed the intense colours that each scene would bring.
I have decided to use Georgia O’Keefe as the inspiration behind my Zine backgrounds as I adored how the water colour paintings created their own borders rather than stick to the edge of the paper itself. I also thought that a water colour base could be interesting to layer on top of with other media I would use like crayon and marker.
