Charlotte Walker Art Foundation Degree

Something I have collected since childhood is trading cards. When I was little I had a lot of football cards, and so did my dad in the 60s and 70s - it's a format that seems to never get old. I remember going toW H Smith to get Dr Who cards and Top Trumps too, and it's a kind of warm feeling to have these memories, so I want to explore cards further in this project. I have scanned some collectible cards that I have at home and I want to use them as inspiration for my own set of nostalgic cards. 'Drop Dead' cards Drop Dead is a British clothing brand who create fictional, anime style characters to market different series of clothes and add a sense of narrative, and when I bought some items from them recently it came with a couple of their trading cards for free. What I observed about these cards is that the artwork fills the entire space, while the additional information, like statistics, is minimised so that the characters are the assertive focal point. Some elements of

So far, a lot of my project has been focused on objects like toys and decorations, but I wanted to still be able to incorporate my found objects from beach combing. I figured I could do this by including them in the backgrounds of my cards, so I experimented with creating patterns based on motifs that appear on my pieces of broken pottery, with a combination of organic and geometric shapes. I used a variety of colours so I had more options for each object's background, allowing me to choose a colour way that suits that particular thing best. I also wanted to use slightly garish colours to emphasise my themes of kitsch and nostalgia, which I don't personally associate with 'sophisticated' or contemporary colour choices like monochrome. For the first few samples I used my alcohol markers because I like the flatness and intensity, especially on the newsprint because of the distinctive way it absorbs the ink - I think this one is my least favourite because I couldn't fi

Using my collected photographs as references, I started generating images using various materials in an illustrative style. I predominantly used pencil and watercolour because they enable me to create sensitive drawings that have a certain softness and human touch in the sketchy markings and subtle colours. I also used a black fineliner for certain details. Drawing in this style gives me feelings of nostalgia because a big part of my childhood was reading Roald Dahl books which had the iconic illustrations by Quentin Blake which are full of character and energy, so this adds a personal touch to the work that also relates to the theme.   Something else I experimented with was alcohol markers. I used them to create intense blocks of flat colour which remind me of a more comic style, compared to the book-ish look of the watercolour. In particular, the 'duck-n-dry' and frog candle drawings exemplify the saturated nature of the ink which reflects the bright, over-stimulating world o