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RSS
Somehow, when I wasn’t paying attention to myself, I joined the digerati set. Too many hours in front of the computer screen and suddenly I understand XML, CSS, and RSS. I can’t hardly use any of them worth a damn, but I know they’re acronyms.
During the slow process of online self-education, among the many things I’ve learned is that Microsoft Internet Explorer really does totally suck. So, like all the other faithful techies out there, I’ve been using the Mozilla Firefox browser for quite some time.
Firefox is superior to Internet Explorer for many reasons, but I mention it here because of the extensions. Extensions are simple little add-ons that you can install - free and easy - to enhance the capabilities of your browser.
There are all sorts of great extensions that make browsing faster and more effective, but the one that’s most relevant to our chat here is StumbleUpon. You tell this extension the sort of things that interest you - like art - and it helps you discover stuff that you might not otherwise be fortunate enough to, well, stumble upon.
Like Nik Ainley’s shinybinary.com. I was blown away by Nik’s artistic talent, so I asked him to share a few of his favourite images with us and answer a couple of my questions (the self-education continues!)
Nik, tell us who you are.
My name is Nik Ainley, I’m a 24 year old web designer from Oxford in the UK who also produces digital graphics and illustrations in my spare time. I have a website www.shinybinary.com, which has a lot of my work on it as well as more personal info etc.
Imagine
You mention on deviantART that you’re “a sucker for eyes and birds and stuff like that.” What are the recurrent themes in your work, and why do you explore them?
I honestly don’t try and focus on any particular theme, preferring to stay pretty abstract and make whatever happens to be on my mind or something. It has been pointed out to me that I do have a lot of pictures with heads in, often coming apart in some way… read into that what you will about my state of mind, but it’s nothing deliberate I assure you
Type
Talk about your creative process, using Type as an example.
What inspires you to start a piece? Do you use pen & ink, scans, digital photos? What software apps do you use most often? Any particular filters, tools, or techniques that you use frequently? When is a piece finished?
This picture is actually a commissioned one, however it is an almost exact copy of another picture I did with different lettering. The idea behind it was really just to take a word and make an entire picture out of it by making each letter important and beautiful. I actually never sketch out work before hand, generally just having a vague idea in my head. In this case I then made the letters separately in a 3D program, before transferring them to Photoshop. It’s then a case of just working on each letter and to make them shinier, as well as their shadows and positioning to give a sense of depth. A lot of the line work around the text is done in Illustrator, but often with heavy Photoshop tweaking, including a lot of photos being blended in. I would say I spend at least 90% of my time in Photoshop, not using one particular tool or technique more than any other really… I just use what I need to get the job done. A piece for me is finished when anything I add or do to it doesn’t actually improve it. That can often happen a lot earlier than I expect since I like adding as many details as possible, which isn’t always the best way to proceed.
Athena redux
Your work regularly features masses of incredible detail - often composed of an interaction between the organic (eyes, flesh, blood) and the inorganic (metal, polygonal wireframes, fractal repetition) - surrounded by fields of relatively empty space. Why this juxtaposition?
I guess the addition of organic parts is an attempt to give some soul to my work. Digital art can often be incredibly cold and technical, and the computer is a great tool for producing that, but sometimes lacks humanity. I find mixing different media and styles of art very interesting, and a tool like Photoshop is geared up to doing just that. As for the empty space thing, I think this is because I like to have a strong focal point in my work. I often find the idea of fixed canvas sizes and shapes limiting anyway, and so don’t pay as much attention to the borders of the picture, as in my mind they don’t really exist. I think this is something I will get away from in the future as I do more print work. Having centralized pictures has worked out quite well for me though. Some designs I sold to be printed on t-shirts would have been a lot harder (or impossible) to adapt if they hadn’t been fairly central, isolated objects.
Thanks to Nik for sharing his talent with us. Be sure to check out his site, shinybinary.com, and if you like his work, you can purchase prints on his deviantART page.
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