Hello and welcome, My name is Kiran and I'm a portrait artist based in West Sussex, UK. This part of my website is to fill you in on who i am, what i do and how i came to be doing it.
As you've seen from my gallery I specialise in highly stylised modern pop art portraits,
although my first love was graphic illustration and line work as you can see by my self portrait to the right and some of my college samples below.
I reluctantly had to move away from this pen and paper style of work to become more efficient and widely accessible in a professional position.
Occasionally I will pencil, ink and scan a piece then re-create it digitally, 'Locks' and 'Selina' are a good example of this.
This page will slowly grow as I get more time to code, I'll be including some of my college work along with details on how I went from working full time in retail to organising my first canvas exhibition.
Please feel free to contact me via the link at the bottom with any questions about me or my work.
I've always been interested in drawing. My dad was an artist and also enjoyed carpentry, all my brothers and my sister have a drawing ability. From a young age I practised all the time watching cartoons and reading comics to improve the quality and style, I actually learned alot about facial expression from the Dandy and Beano, quite an unusual source but caricatures are typified be exaggerated expressions.
As I got older and progressed I looked at American and Manga comics learning to sharpen my skills and to stylise my work. I wanted the realistic characters of American comics and the energy and dynamic style Manga provides.
Of the American comics Spider-Man was my favourite, you would always see cityscapes from unusual angles along with acrobatic poses which gave me alot to try catch up with. I enjoyed Manga for the same reasons but with added bonus of higher quality and more dynamic line work. I spent along time learning to use speed lines effectively along with different ways of inking to add depth to my pieces.
At school art was naturally my favourite lesson but being dyslexic I struggled in most other lessons having to put in an extra effort to reach the middle ground. Back then not a great deal was known about Dyslexia so it proved to be a frustration for me and my teachers.
I put my full effort into my art and improved greatly though the course of my G.C.S.E's.
When leaving school I went into full time work, my first job was with Kwik Save as a shelf stacker. At the time the wage was £2.50 and hour, think I was there for a year and then moved to JJB Sports.
I stayed for six years in retail going to a different job every few years and being trained in management, stock taking, staff training and the other usual things. I wasn't happy with the way I was spending life, spending every day repeating yesterdays tasks. I would spend my time doodling at work to pass the time which made it clearer that I needed a change.
I had continued my art as a hobby through the years after leaving school, doodling and practising effective inking. I never considered what I did to be more than a way to pass the time. I began teaching myself digital art using 'Paint Shop Pro 7 AE. I spent along time experimenting photographs, mixing effects and playing with layers.
Eventually I started to do line work on there using the mouse, My early test pieces were poor representations of the image I had in my head and what I would have been able to create if I had used pen and paper. This was a frustration but I knew I was treading new ground and persevered. These test pieces would prove to be vital experience and paved the way for my first digital portrait (pictured below) which was the catalyst that got me where I am today.
I made it in 2004 and on the whole the picture works, on closer inspection the line work is very rough and the effects are dated but at the time it was a breakthrough and I was proud of it. It was made at 1900 pixels wide as opposed to the 12000 scale i use today and took about twelve hours to do. The hair, like the rest of the picture was made using the line tool working in four colours on separate layers. It took seven hours to do the hair, after that the rest was pretty simple. I remade this piece at the end of 2009 and added it back into my portfolio titled 'Blank'.
After much thought I decided that I would give up my full time position at work to go to college and follow up on my art. This decision meant becoming a weekend worker, going from forty hours a week to just sixteen. Initially it wasn't met by much enthusiasm by most friends and family as I would have to pay for the courses and I didn't actually know what I was going to do when I finished. The way I looked at it is I have two years to figure it out,
I knew that my work was different and that could make it work but you can't convey that to people without first having the results.
I enrolled at College in September '05 where I signed on for an As and ALevel in Art & Design. initially I was apprehensive about going to college after being out of education for a number of years I had concerns about whether I could keep up with the younger students or if my work would be of an acceptable quality compared to people in the routine of constantly drawing.
I was helped greatly through my ALevel by my friends and my first model Couper Laycock who provided me tons of pictures to work with, I was fortunate in that a number of my friends allowed me to draw them, some of these pictures were later remade and are part of my gallery such as "Locks", "Selina" and "Stars" in fact only a handful of my early prints have survived in the gallery section.
On my 1st day I was under the impression I was coming in for an interview but as it turns out after the interview I was taken to class where I was seated at the front being the last in.
There were about thirty or so people in the class so it was all very awkward and then came classic school words "who hasn't got a pencil?" everyone looked at each-other slightly amused, it was an art class of course they have pencils.
Slowly my hand went up and took the shame, then the teach broke out another one "who hasn't brought any paper to and art class?" everyone just looked right at me and up went the hand. It was pretty embarrassing at the time but looking back it broke the ice and helped me fit in with the class more.
It wasn't until my second year, my ALevel that I was able to fully express myself artistically as we were able to choose our own course theme. I decided that I kill two birds with one stone and would use my ALevel as preparation for professional freelance work,
my ALevel teacher was a freelance illustrator and his experience was priceless in speeding up the process and helping me to avoid pitfalls inexperience guides you towards.
I decided that I needed Three main things as my preparation, a website, a portfolio and a business card.
I would make each of these and also document my progress on each one giving detailed annotations of my intentions a reasons behind some of my choices. It amounted to huge amount of work.
My website was very amateur and made use of the handful of pictures I had and some scans of my college books. It was my first step into web design and was relatively well laid out but the text was ineffective and bad spelling had got in the back door. Although I still have the source code I can't bring myself to host it online.
My portfolio was different in that I decided to make a DVD portfolio. This was quite a challenge as I had no idea how to use the software but after some playing around I got the hang of it.
The contents of the DVD was a menu with scrolling thumbs of my work in the background giving a choice of a slide show, about me and my website. One of the guys I worked with was in a band and agreed to use a sample of one of their songs as a menu theme.
My business card was probably the worst of the three, it was a piece of paper with thumbnails of my work printed on both sides then folded, stapled and cut to make a small book.
At the time my artwork was still very rough around the edges and wouldn't really impress anyone in a professional position but that's all part of the learning curve.
In October 2007, a few months after finishing college I submitted a portfolio of work to the capitol theatre in Horsham for exhibition. All submissions are viewed and selected by a panel, in January I received confirmation that they had accepted my work and had chosen six prints to be exhibited later that year.
This was my first experience in putting a show. The Capitol Theatre took care of publicising the event I just had to write and provide my own press release along with some promotional photographs.
After the contract was signed the hard work began. I had just left college after spending two years working
weekends so money was pretty tight and I now had to find hundreds to have the six canvases printed. It was always going to be the only real opportunity to launch my artistic career and get my work seen by a large audience. If I had held back from submitting my work and waited it would have been a whole year
before I would be able to exhibit there and a lot can be accomplished in a year with a good start.
The opening day soon came round and the event went off well, it took quite a few hours to hang the canvases with lots of tiny adjustments being needed so that they all sat square and evenly spaced. My work was well received by the public, the vibrant colours and varying styles was refreshing for most visitors and many examined them closely to see if they could figure out my methods.
The Crawley News covered my story on the opening week which boosted the visitor numbers, I was also fortunate in that the college also promoted my exhibition encouraging all first and second year students to go along
as I had been in their position only a year or two before. With the exhibition finishing I was approached by Bar Med in Crawley who had seen my work in the paper and offered me permanent exhibition with them so the canvases we moved to their new home.
© copyright site & art kiran farrow 2006 - 2010
