How I Started
Today I thought I'd share an art post called 'How I Started' for my 'get to know me' series. I take part in quite a few different art fields so I thought I'd do a little introduction to how I started in each one, talk about what I studied in college, university and how I work now!
Painting
I first started painting properly when I was 13 - I started making endless acrylic portraits of animals on scraps of cardboard taken from Amazon packages before ever buying actual canvas'. My first acrylic painting was the Wolf painting below, and the first canvas' painting I made was the Tiger - which my mum still keeps on the hallway wall now (slightly embarrassing).
I added some more work in from the same year, a pencil drawing from my GCSE sketchbook for an 'observe' project. I also added in baby Shannon's first ever oil pastel drawing of Lucian Freud, and an abstract painting that I ended up cutting up for something else the same day.
Photography
Most of the family photos were taken by me playing around as a kid with film and toy cameras so I always had some kind of interest from a young age. Below I showed some photography work that I did in the early stages of me experimenting with photography. I found a real interest in street photography and analog photography. I also included images of the first wedding I ever photographed!
Illustration
Starting illustration work came from attending an illustration workshop while studying for my foundation year in Art and Design. I originally wanted to study photography and hadn't even thought about illustration since I couldn't draw... After seeing the kind of illustration work that other people were making and what I could do, I really started working hard on making an illustration portfolio for university. I really loved things like printmaking already, then bought my first graphics tablet and practised almost every day until I could start drawing like the work I liked from others.
The workshop challenge was 'The Last Time You Cried' which is where my first illustration came from, (the pink one right at the top of this article), which was based around Anxiety.
Design
I kind of fell into Graphic Design by accident. I really wanted to study illustration further in university but was limited to the universities I could attend to for personal reasons, but the local univeristy doesn't do an illustration course until Masters. They told me they do illustration as a part of their Graphic Design course and that's how I ended up studying it! I knew absolutely nothing about Design before going, so I went to a Graphic Designs studio for some experience beforehand and actually ended up loving it!
Below I've shown The Beatles album cover for my first design exhibition in 2016, a book cover for Jamaica Inn for an exhibition in 2017, and some poster designs I've done much mroe recently.
I hope you liked looking through some of my really early work! Thanks for reading, and follow (here) to see more of my current work!
SHANNON WOODFIELD.
