Thursday, August 8th 2024
Carolyn Hawkins is (according to her own website) a Melbourne-based artist, working across the fields of graphic design, illustration, animation, printmaking, and painting, as well as various music and writing projects. Carolyn’s body of work is as wide as eye-catching, mixing hand-crafted lettering with printmaking, as well as animation and design work. “I always try to remain playful, bold and experimental in my approach”, she says, and it shows. Remaining original and true to her personal style in a landscape where everything has been done and redone.
Carolyn got her start in illustration when she was involved in another artistic route: music, playing in bands. She became the go-to person in her circle for the creation of posters, merch and album covers, and it helped her develop her aesthetic, as she recalls in her interview with It’s Nice That: “Gig posters especially have been a great way to experiment with different ideas when I was still trying to find my voice with illustration and design. They only really circulate for a bit before they disappear into the ether, so I found I was more inclined to take creative risks with these kinds of jobs”. Yet, illustration is just one of the many Aces that Hawkins has in her sleeve. In 2021, she also experimented with stop-motion creating videos with Moontown TV for Moontown Records: “The animations were experimental, reconfiguring old imagery to work with some short synth tracks I’d put together”.
Even though you can clearly see Carolyn’s style and brand visiting her portfolio and her socials, she herself felt that her pov was all over the place at one point and she was too focused on being “cohesive” with what she presented in her pieces. Nowadays, she focuses on making projects she enjoys rather than thinking if it will look cohesive in her Behance, given priority to the process over the results: “I’ve always been interested in the tension between the mechanical and the handmade, repetition and inconsistency, playing with or referencing analogue processes to build layers of texture… And using collage to create wonky, and sometimes fractured images”.
Carolyn’s work is very graphic and colorful, loaded with lettering, collages and illustrations, offering a crafty, kitschy vibe in the best way possible. Being aligned with this handmade aesthetic, she turns to her art books instead of digital references when she encounters creative roadblocks: “If I’m having a bit of trouble thinking of visual ideas, I’ll turn to language and brainstorm lists of words or write down ideas and concepts, which will in turn usually loop back to some visual paths to follow… I also find getting away from the computer and looking through some of my art books is almost always a good move: I’m just looking at my shelf right now and some sure-fire favorites to get ideas flowing are David Hockney’s prints and drawings, Sister Corita Kent’s screen-printing workshop, a book of crayon drawings from Yirrkala in Arnhem Land, and a catalog of Flying Nun posters and album art”, just to name a few of her references and sources of inspiration.
Hawkin’s process usually ends up late at night with a lot of coffee, a moodboard that crystallizes all of her ideas and the inspiration coming out right before exhaustion kicks in – sounds familiar for any designer, huh? Check out Carolyn’s portfolio if you’re looking for something cool to inspire your current projects.
Sources:
Disclaimer: All images attached to this article are not property of Lorem Ipsum.
