EXPERIENCE, LOVE, CREATE ART
RADIOACTIVITY
THE ART SERIES
RADIOACTIVITY: THE ART SERIES is an art series showcasing my fascination with derelict environments, more specifically those caused by nuclear fallouts that have happened in real life. Following two children, Maria and Shiro from Chernobyl and Hiroshima respectively, the series contains standalone pieces featuring ruined architecture and plant overgrowth. These pieces were mostly created in my adolescence when I was more passionate about the subject, hence there are only a few artworks here compared to the many others I've made. However fret not, dystopian art fans, as I do intend to revisit the series soon.
Maria (2018) is an A4 watercolour painting lined with a Micron pen. This is the first proper artwork I made for the Radioactivity series. For this painting, I wanted to focus on Maria's facial scars and explore the detail I could achieve with watercolours, so I spent extra time layering the paints and adding as much detail as I could without losing the illustrated character look.
Maria is a young girl, about 10 or 11 years old, living in what we know Chernobyl as today - a decrepit town now teeming with plant life and wild dogs, its grounds however still poisoned by the radioactive material from the 1986 nuclear disaster.
When I first learnt about the real-life Chernobyl disaster, I couldn't help but imagine a lone, young girl walking through the cold woods with all sorts of mutations on her face and hands, wondering what to do next now that everyone had evacuated from the place she once called home. I could envision her petting the wolves, foraging for mutated fungi and fruit.
But as I didn't really want to make a typical comic, I decided to turn her story into an art series, also inspired by the museum exhibits I was visiting at the time.
MARIA (2018)
SHIRO (2018)
Shiro (2018) is a mixed media A4 piece from one of my sketchbooks, made with Microns and brush pens. For this piece, I wanted to explore environment drawing as I'm too used to drawing characters only. I was also really into dramatic shading at the time, so I used a Chinese ink brush pen for dark shadows, which I think helped achieve the traditional Japanese painting look I was going for.
As the style and architecture suggests, this piece is about Maria's counterpart, Shiro, a young Japanese boy living in the Hiroshima forests. While the Hiroshima atomic bomb occurred much earlier than the nuclear accident in Chernobyl, I figured I couldn't let Maria be the only character in this series. It's almost as if I wanted to give her a friend, even thought he's from a different time period and continent. I guess it was also my way of exploring the two different cultures and the art that would follow it.
