Before John Lennon was a world famous singer song writer he was an art student. Maybe he wasn’t the portrait artist or fine artist that most of the other student could brag to be, but he had his own unique and sometimes disturbing art style, drawing deformities and hunch backs. His small scribble like drawings would define him as an artist, and become instantly recognisable as his style. Years on his art and his music still inspires many people. As it did me.
(Pop Art by Jay Kelly)
Like John I enjoyed drawing from a very young age, and at the same age as John I too went to art college. The degree I was going for was in cartooning at the time, a style that I wasn’t completely comfortable with, I simply chose it because it was the only one that took in book illustrating. Within the next couple of years I’d decide to try my hand at portraiture, something I wasn’t very good at. For many years I had draw caricatures, and i found it hard to turn what I had learned into creating realistic faces.
(Pop Art by Jay Kelly)
Being a massive Beatles fan, of course they were my first choice to draw and Always had been for many years by this point. Slowly I improved, but for me I didn’t improve enough, never being truly happy with the art I was creating. I started with using basic HB pencils and quickly move on to using artist sketching and finishing pens. Using the ink pens gave it a better more (in my opinion) finished look. Little details were still lacking, I wanted to bring art to life but was struggling to do so.
(Digital Painting by Jay Kelly)
After many years of trying I brought my first art creating software, and soon discovered I couldn’t draw well on it and quickly went back to hand drawing my art. It was around this time that I found out I could edit my art on the software to blend the colours more evenly and make the lines more crisp. Somewhere around this time I started trying to dabble in pop art style prints using the software and it over took my time I spent drawing by hand. When the new pop art became more popular, I moved on to doing it full time! I posted my new creations on social media and they were getting more attention then what I had previously been doing.
(Digital Paintings by Jay Kelly)
I could created artistic scenes and it seemed to bring the art to life more, but I still wanted to be able to paint or at least draw as well as doing a large amount of graphic design and pop art. I created new ways of editing the pop art and making more edgy designs, always trying to perfect my style along side still trying to learn to paint portraits, I was very slowly getting there, but still to slowly for my liking. It was during the spring of 2017 when I was working on some artwork for a Liverpool event to mark the Beatles Sgt Pepper album’s 50th anniversary, and a couple of other illustration and design jobs, that I came across a new way to draw on my software.
(Digital Painting by Jay Kelly)
The new idea was, not 100% successful, but with a lot of hard work and trial and error I believe it would make a great new style of portrait painting. It was at this stage I had to take some time off from digital art for a while due to health reasons. During this break that lasted for nearly 6 months, I had a lot of time to think, to work out how to perfect the style of art I had been trying to master for more of my teenage years. While I wasn’t able to create digital art in this time I dabbled in cartoon sculptures.
(Digital Painitng by Jay Kelly)
When sculpting I used to measure the head as I went to make sure the proportions were not to out, it was by doing this I had an idea, a way to bring my drawings to life and make them as good as they can be! Once back working with my software I had this new idea and I was ready to go, I used measuring and dotting to map out the face, and this is how I do the work I do now.
~Artist and Beatles fan Jay Kelly
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