Julian Opie inspired piece

I created an image using photoshop as a medium. My piece was inspired by the work of Julian Opie. I chose o use photoshop because I had previously experimented wih using acrylic paint, and felt tips. Neither of these mediums gave me the right opions to create a piece similar to the work of Julian Opie. Each of those mediums (acrylic paint and felt tips) left me wiht brush/pen srokes on my piece, unlike the flat, block colour of Julian Opie's compuer generated portraits.

To create my photoshop image I scanned in a previously drawn pen outline portrait to use as a starting point for my piece created on photoshop. I then used the paintbrush tool on photoshop to trace round my image on photoshop. I traced each feaure of my portrait (face, hair, and neck etc.) on seperate photoshop layers. I then used the paintbucket tool to fill in the different parts of the portrait.

Using photoshop is definitely the most effective of the mediums I used. It gives a clean, flat colour, similar to Julian Opie's work.

Julian Opie

Julian Opie is an installation artist. He attended the Goldsmith’s school of art in London.
Julian Opie creates some portrait work. In this work the faces tend to be minimalistic he uses bold black lines and block colours to fill in he lines.

This is an example of Julian Opie’s portrait work. He designed minimalistic, simple outline images of the band members in Blur. He used bright colours for the background of each of he images. I think the backgrounds help to add personality to the images of each of the musicians. He used different colours to add texture to the hair of the subjects, this contrasts he res of the images where just block colour has been used.

This is a piece Opie created inspired by ballet dancers. He was representing a two dancers frozen during their routine.
I love how he’s simplified the bodies of the two dancers, turning them into basic bold outlined figures. Although he’s removed all the detail from the two figures, he’s kept the graceful elegance of the movements performed by the dancers. He has kept the detail of the ballet shoes on the dancers, although he’s removed things like the hair and faces of the figures.
I like the light, pastel colours he’s used to colour in the figures, it adds to the serene nature of the dancers movements.