Even when not taking inspiration from roofs, archways, and brick walls or crafting award-winning insights to London’s urban environment, Daniel Clarke’s work has a striking architectural quality to it.
With a colourful collection of shapes, Daniel builds his images and layers them with the same overlapping, textured quality as print. It’s a technique he has carried through even though now working mostly digitally.
In other non-building-focused aspects of his work, he uses the same approach to layers and forms, maintaining that wonderful structural tone.
He talks about these techniques and some of his new ventures below.
I’m an illustrator from London, currently working from my studio in Dalston shared with various talented illustrators and animators. I’ve been working as an illustrator for 3 years now, whilst balancing other jobs on the side.
However I am now working freelance which has given me more time to experiment with my processes and materials which has started opening doors to new areas outside of editorial illustration.
I’m currently working with a Scandinavian furniture store to produce textiles for their chairs and accessories, as well as a skateboard brand to produce graphics for their decks.
As my work has always been produced for magazines and newspapers, I’m very excited to see it in a new context.
My practice involves various methods including painting, collage, printmaking and digital illustration— out of these, digital is my go to when working commercially.
My method combines hand drawn shapes and textures using gouache, charcoal, inks and much more which are then manipulated in Photoshop.
This process began more as a convenience than a preference, as it allowed me to experiment with colours and composition easily and make amendments which can be quite common when working with a client.
However, this technique has developed into a preference as it holds a lot of similarity to printmaking through the method of building multiple layers of colour, shapes and rough markings which are then scanned into Photoshop where I can then rearrange individual elements to produce my ideal composition.
Whilst I do prefer the finish of a hand made print or painting, I feel that working digitally allows for more experimentation in the final stages which gives the work a special quality that can be lost in my other processes.
© Daniel Clarke, 2015
