Artwork Title: Reverse Portrait: Alice

Reverse Portrait: Alice , 2014

Alba Ceide

Reverse Portraits is a visual identity project where fictional and real-life creativity are merged into a mirrored image of the model. The drawings are pencil simulations of the fictional landscape of the portrayed, consequence of dreams, intellectual activity and the connections I created between the models and the literature characters. (http://cargocollective.com/albaceide/REVERSE-PORTRAITS) TSOTA: On the subject of your new project, Reverse Portraits: what inspired this? AC: The project started without being a project. Because of my graphic designs I spend many hours in front of the computer, and I was looking forward to doing a pencil self-portrait. So one night I photographed myself and I started drawing my head carefully. When you are very focused drawing it’s easy to loose the whole perspective, and you can do silly mistakes, so to avoid this I usually put the drawing in front of a mirror to refresh my mind with the inverted image, as my first drawing teachers taught me. At a certain point, I saw the pencil portrait reflected in a mirror: it was practically done but it was floating in a white space. Nothing wrong with this, I like plain backgrounds, and the image itself was very strong and inspirational. The pencil-girl (at this point of the process still bald) was holding pencils and drawing herself, and I thought she could be doing so in the world she’d like to imagine; I immediately found parallels with this idea and Alice through the looking glass by Lewis Carroll. I imagined the background I would draw around my Alice, and I drew it. I started to have ideas for the next drawings, and some posters, and… the ideas became a project. Now it’s one of the self-initiated projects I’m doing: a hybrid between drawing and design, integrating the identity of classic English literature characters with people I know in London. The core of the project is pencil portraits and graphic design material that I create on the computer with Illustrator and Photoshop. (http://www.thestateofthearts.co.uk/features/interview-with-london-based-illustrator-and-graphic-designer-alba-ceide/)
Uploaded on Sep 1, 2016 by Suzan Hamer

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