Here is another piece entitled Manchester United trying a different idea with the abstract shapes, which was a good experiment to see how those dueling 45 angles work together. This is just a mock-up, nothing official for the team.

I also designed a cd cover for The Kinks ‘Arthur’ album. Both of these were fun to apply the new style with different genres.

I’ve been trying hard over the past two weeks to explore this new run of artwork, which spring-boarded from a previous piece. Adding a few more design elements unexpectedly threw my work into a new direction, which is interesting because my experience in working with something abstract is very low.

I’ve been researching designers and artists from the early to mid 1900s as inspiration for this new pieces. Old travel posters, textbook covers, early computer art and old magazine ads are a great pool of hardcore design.

Previously posted on my Flickr stream, the new pieces are Stockholm (pictured above), Heelal and Fraai.

This one, entitled Omringen uses symmetry to get a bit of a different composition. I’m having a good time using these shapes to convey different compositions and aesthetics as I work on them. This is essentially one shape duplicated at different sizes, and overlapping groups on top of one another to create different shades of color. The design is ever-changing, which is quite exciting to see.

The works in this style thus far have been sketches at low resolution, but as I gain a bit of momentum I will be trying out larger scale works to see how much more a larger canvas can handle. More real estate means more shapes.

I created another image earlier today entitled De Aanleggen ’08 which was the first in this color palette inspired by harvest gold fridges and avocado green stoves of the 1970s.

I continued my abstract experimentation last night using a similar color palette as before, and created Oplossing. By overlapping the shapes and setting the top layers to Color Burn, I unlocked a new range of bold colors to work with. The shapes are essentially the same oranges and blues I used before but I let them fuse together naturally when I worked with them.

I’m sometimes paranoid about leaving opacities at full on overlays because I have a hard time ‘not’ seeing strictly the effect I applied. With this new piece I tried to separate myself from the actual process and to see the colors for what they were. Joshua Davis made a point of saying “It’s hard to see your environment when you’re in your environment” during his QBN speech, which is very true and sort of applies to what I’m doing, or trying to do. It’s easy for me to see a bold red as being the result of two or more effects, so it’s hard to see only the vibrant color and how well it works.

So as I continue I’m forcing myself to forget Photoshop and focus on the colors it might generate.

Last night I saw down at my computer with the intention of exploring a few of the design themes from my previous work, while incorporating the typical elements that have showed up in my work for the past few months. The art always takes on a life of it’s own as I proceed due to my organic process of letting the elements bounce off of one another when different effects are added.

This new one, entitled 72 Eindelijk Dynamo reprise was supposed to be an extension of the previous piece until it veered off in an unexpected abstract avenue. I have always enjoyed certain pieces of abstract art (the complicated kind, not the lazy) and have been reading up on some abstract painters from the early and mid 1900s, like Mondrian, Rothko, Braque and a few of the Russian Futurist guys. This led me to experiment more with shapes rather then physical elements.