Michael Arnold’s work is digitally slick and filled with great pairings of pattern and colour. He goes in depth telling us about his process and materials.
Dots, stripes, and checks, among many other patterns play out in Michaels work with unreserved intensity. We like how he arranges them side by side, having them work together to build up a layered, patterned effect. It’s a strong, graphic style that translates well into products as he goes on to tell us.
I’m a 22 year old self-taught commercial illustrator, working in the advertising and editorial industry for clients like Brita, Nike and Rock en Seine festival to name a few.
My style centers on a big use of patterns and flat colours and my subjects can range from figurative works to more abstract pieces and portraits.
Almost all of my pieces are created solely digitally with the occasional hand-drawn abstract element being scanned and then traced digitally, these are the textured with patterns that I create.
The program I use is pretty janky, which means I have to be quite creative in how I put patterns and elements together but I’m so used to it that even though I now have Adobe Illustrator I generally don’t use it, much.
Recently, I’ve started to explore my work being used in other mediums such as small sculptures and paintings as well as different contexts like the bags I produced for LOQI and the shoe I worked with Bucketfeet on.
As well as this, I’m working on incorporating animation into my work as I feel that’s the next step for it.
Generally, I only ever use my Macbook and some pencils and papers to sketch things out when I’m stuck, which means I’m completely free to move around and work where I like – even using my phone as a portable scanner for those moments where it’s quicker for me to draw a shape by hand than on the computer.
© Michael Arnold, 2014
