Hello, my name is Emily Turner, and I am a third year BA Visual Communications and Design student. After years of attending the Perth College Degree Show and volunteering as a HND, it is pretty exciting to now be contributing to it myself!
I came to this course straight out of school because, to be honest, I had no clue what I wanted to do. My interests were creative but seemingly too broad to fit into the confines of one course. I loved photography but I also loved drawing. I spent my summer making short films with friends and on the computer editing them together. What sort of course let you do all that?
Well friends, somehow, I found it.
I loved the Beano and Dandy as a kid and would pour over old annuals at my grandparent’s houses, trying to figure out how the lines came together to make the pictures seem so full of movement. I got a Beano themed comic book kit and for about two years friends and family would get Minnie the Minx and Ivy the Terrible on their birthday cards! I regularly went to Blackpool to see family and always loved the Illuminations which must have sparked an interest in big spectacles and instillations. Later on, I got really excited by technology and spent a lot of time practicing photography and making short films with friends. Although modelling has never been my thing, I’m blessed with a very photogenic sister who will happily pose for me whenever! We both love acting, so making short films was always a lot of fun even when production was slow due to inexperience and a lot of hat juggling by me.
Making calendars and cards for people has been my most consistent creative interest over the years because I started so young. My mum would give my sister and I 12 squares of paper and we would draw a picture for each month, and that was Christmas presents sorted! It is really fun to personalise a picture you know the recipient will love and hide references to jokes and memories in the background. I love working on the detail with fine liners and coloured pencil, I just have to remember to take a step back every now and then to make sure the colours pop like I think they do! I set up @ljttlemoon_art very quickly because I needed a social media platform to advertise when I was a guest artist at ReCAP Festival. It’s been a great way to document my work, and more recently show of my personalised cards. I’m looking forward to doing a redesign of the whole thing, posting regularly and finally starting the online shop I’ve always wanted!
My art style generally is a lot more minimal. In a phrase, minimal lines for maximum impact, and I love a chunky coloured pen as a tool of choice. I like drawing like this because it is fast and instinctive, and best of all really easy! It’s difficult to know what motivates you to make art. During the pandemic, there have been great chunks of time where I have made nothing at all. I think for me art is a reaction to your life, the people in it, what goes on around you, the things you see and hear. A lot of the art I make for pleasure is to document something that has happened to me, like a day out or a view. It is also just things I love, like my friends and really extravagant cakes.
These days I’m fascinated by animation, especially those minimal ones on lo-fi videos. My goals this year are to learn a bit of animation, finally master Adobe Illustrator and rekindle my love of filmmaking. And perhaps even do some of that in the college building!
Thanks for reading, and I can’t wait for you to see this years Degree Show!
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