Shania Wickramarathna-Siriwardena

‘Intro to’ has been a really fun and interesting project. I found that it really helped me to get back into the cycle of making and being inspired by my surroundings. I enjoyed incorporating the project into my daily life and finding things that I could possibly use for my artwork. At times I found it difficult to get into the rhythm with this project as at one point when we were juggling two different projects it was hard to organise myself to give both my full capability. Although this was the case I still managed to push through and enjoy the project for its simplicity and creative freedom. I learnt a lot about my personal style and what I tend to be more attracted to as a designer, for example I have always been drawn to bright colours which is something that has never really changed. At one point during this project I was given advice to try using more muted colours which I did try but I really did not enjoy this at all. I also learnt that I am very inquisitive of weird and wacky shapes which are often depicted in graffiti. This shows throughout my work as I used a lot of street art/graffiti as inspiration for my drawings. At the start of this project I was extremely excited about how much freedom we had with this project and how we could really make it our own. This soon became quite overwhelming as I often found myself asking the question “how can I make this object my style?”. I had to stop overthinking how my work would reflect me as a person and just allow myself to create without thinking too hard about how it resonated with me. This has made me realise that the less you think about how your work relates back to yourself, the more it will be purely your style which is something I will now try to remember in my future work. Now that all my drawings are finished I am happy with the outcomes. I think that I can definitely produce a higher standard of work but I’m going to try not to be too hard on myself an instead use this as motivation to improve on my work. I will definitely work on my time management for future projects as this will help me to benefit in my creative practice but overall I had a great time doing this project and am very pleased with my outcomes.

This is a simple painting I made using acrylic paints and a roller. I was trying to mimic gritty textures of walls around Hackney Wick and translate this texture into a pattern. I decided to not add any more things into this drawing as sometimes I feel like I can tend to add too much to a drawing.

This pattern is of a crane I saw at Stratford station. Although the crane is suppose to be the highlight of this drawing I really like the technique I used to create the background of this image. I also really like the pop of orange I used as it really stands out with the blue tones.

This repeat pattern is inspired by the bottle cap artwork on the bridge in Hackney Wick, the backdrop is made up of the colours that majority of the bottle caps. I used blue tones to draw the clusters of bottle caps as they stand out from the backdrop. I used a roller for the background.

This is another pattern I made mixing the bottle cap design with the shapes of graffiti overlayed. I like that I used black for the graffiti outline as I can imagine most other colours wouldn’t look as bold. I also liked that I focused primarily on the outline and didn’t fill the shape in as it wouldn’t have given as nice of an effect if the shape was coloured in.

This is a pattern I made from a shape I saw within some street art. I thought it was a cool shape and at first I was going to colour them all in the same way but I actually really enjoy all the rows being different. I like how the backdrop peeps through the first and second row of the shape.

This is a pattern I made which is heavily inspired by my other painting depicting more shapes from graffiti artist. I absolutely love the effect of the repeat and would really like to see how I could create this texture on fabric.

This is a pattern I made depicting some cool green brick work I saw. I decided instead of trying to paint every brick perfectly I would just make a coloured backdrop for the brick and draw the shapes on top. I like to layer fine lines from post pens on top of crazy, liquid backgrounds from pure acrylic paint.

This is a pattern I made inspired by a plant on my windowsill, I decided to deconstruct the plant which actually has pink in its leaves and also the black dots which are similar to the pattern on the leaves. This was a fun task and I really like the outcome of all the individual parts of the plant having their own space to be shown on the page.

This is my favourite pattern that I created. I drew some shapes from graffiti I saw and let the paint drip down. I then went in and outline the shapes in black. The outline really brings the piece together and I love how letting the paint drip down actually connected the top and bottom which created new shapes.

Im not very happy with this pattern. Its inspired by another plant on my windowsill. The colours don’t really stand out to me or look very appealing together and I think I really overcrowded the page which I tend to do. This is good as its something I can learn from and I will definitely keep in mind not to get too obsessed with filling the page and actually leave room for some blank space in my compositions as this can be more effective in most cases.

This Painting is inspired by the graffiti around Hackney Wick. I created texture on the paper by crumpling it up and going over the creases with a graphite stick, this is meant to mimic the texture of the wall this graffiti was on.

For this painting I used the colours from various street art around Hackney Wick as a background and went over this with some poscas to draw the graffiti.

This image shows how nature and urban areas intertwine with each other, there are a lot of walls that are covered in plants and street art in Hackney Wick.

This is a collage I made inspire by the silhouette of tree branches at sunset, the pink represents the warm tones of the sky.

This painting again represents how cityscapes and nature mix together. The top half are leafs reflecting bright red lights from a pub garden. The bottom half is the textures that peeled posters mixed with paint and rainwater create after long periods of time.

This painting is inspired by the London eye lit up at night, I also included fragments of some beautiful green brickwork I saw by the London Eye and some graffiti around that area.

This painting is inspired by the bottle cap artwork in Hackney Wick mixed with the reflections of the canal

For this painting I used inspiration from a night out in London that I had. The purple geometrical shapes are from the bright purple lights shining through windows from a warehouse and the orange patterns are a silhouette of my friend, the textured background represents how our night was super unpredictable.

This painting is just a close up of some graffiti, I really liked how the spray paint causes a gradient an wanted to highlight this in a painting.

This image is a mixture of the colours from my previous painting mixed with the actual graffiti texture, it shows how erratic graffiti artists use their spray paint.