Art and Design Foundation Diploma

Stefan Koidl is an Austrian freelance illustrator and a concept artist, who creates eerie illustrations in Photoshop. His works feature various creepy motives, ranging from urban legends to mythical creatures. Stefan has been drawing since he was a child, but started focusing on drawing professionally in 2016. When asked what inspires him to create these eerie drawings, the artist said: “Artists, films, games. I always wanted to make paintings like the “professionals” do. A huge inspiration is also the ability to paint stuff from your imagination, creating your “own worlds.” “I love Lord of the rings, Shutter Island, Stranger Things, and everything that has to do with fantasy or horror,” the artist told  Demilked . Stefan's Stefan most influential artists are Feng Zhu, Sabbas Apterus, John Park, Darek Zabrocki, Greg Rutkowski and Simon Stålenhag. (Demilked, 2019) Stefan also told Demilked that his works normally take between 6-10 hours to create. He is heavi...

As noted in my project proposal, I was planning on focusing my project around narrative illustration. I was going to look at artists which tell a story through storyboards and captions. After some thought, I believe this was too commercial and I want to create a piece that is more conceptual. I think the success from my previous project influenced this decision because I was hoping to create a book with a range of stories that my audience could enjoy viewing. However, I like drawing faces and I think it is important for me to enjoy this project as much as possible because it is the last of the course. I am hoping to continue with expressing narratives but in a more abstract manner. After discovering artists that are suited to the theme of nightmares and my primary observation drawings, I decided that I did not want to make my project about scary and disturbing imagery. I believe that some nightmares can actually represent a good change in your life and do not necessarily  have nega...

Shown below are screenshots of primary research I conducted. I reached out to my target audience by advertising my project on Instagram and how I need to collect dream stories for me to illustrate. I  managed to receive a variety of stories some more in depth and unsettling than others. After conducting this research, I realised how vague dreams really are and how hard they can be to remember in detail. This implies that my research was not the most reliable because it made it difficult for me to visualise them. I also debated whether I wanted these stories to be confidential or left anonymous. It is very likely that I will integrate the details of some of these in my final piece, and I feel as though I should give credit for using them as reference. I asked everyone involved and they all say they do not mind. I believe it is best to keep it confidential as these experiences are personal to them. Reading these gave me an insight to people's irrational fears and what could be c...

In the early 1900's, Sigmund Freud proposed that while all of our dreams are a collection of images from our daily conscious lives, they also have symbolic meanings, which relate to the fulfilment of our subconscious wishes. (YouTube, 2019).  In other words,  Sigmund Freud’s theory of dreams suggested that dreams represented  unconscious  desires, thoughts, and motivations. According to Freud’s psychoanalytic view of personality, people are driven by aggressive and sexual instincts that are repressed from  conscious awareness . While these thoughts are not consciously expressed, Freud suggested that they find their way into our awareness via dreams.  In his famous book  The Interpretation of Dreams , Freud wrote that dreams are "...disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes." The activation-synthesis model of dreaming was first proposed by J. Allan Hobson and Robert McClarley in 1977. According to this theory, circuits in the brain become ...

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/ppvk8b/we-asked-vice-illustrators-to-draw-their-nightmares I thought it was important to include this article as part of my secondary research. I am looking into narrative illustration and the potential ways I could recreate stories from other people. This article is an obvious link to my proposal and I found it intriguing how each artwork is very different from each other. This  convinces me to be more abstract with the nightmares I illustrate.  Seeing these artists visually translate their nightmares made me realise that they do not have to be an exact replicate of the experiences they can remember. To the creators these occurrences  were scary for them, but this is not shown through their illustrations. It is not only the imagery from a dream that can cause a mixture of feelings and make it memorable - it can also be the colours and the message behind it.