PAIGE CASSIDY

My name is Paige Cassidy, an illustrator based in Central London. My passions as an illustrator is poetry, illustrative techniques and children’s books. The reason as to why I like poetry is that I can express myself clearly when telling a personal story and using illustrations to communicate my thoughts and feelings to the audience. I recently used this technique in my third year summer project by making a poem book about my alcoholic father and expressing my emotions that I had dealt with in the past 2 years with him. Since using this technique, I have come to realise that this gives my work a richer meaning and is quite powerful when it comes to telling a personal story. This would be a passion I would like to take on further in the future. In the second year I had to write an essay about 2 artists’ work and how they compared to each other. One artist in particular stood out to me which was Frida Kahlo. I was fascinated by her drawings and her paintings, the way she used symbols to show her feelings in a personal situation or to tell a story about a particular part in her life. I aspired to take what I had learned about Kahlo and use it in my future work in the third year. I am currently making a personal animation about my alcoholic father to show awareness of alcoholism by showing personal situations I had experienced in my life whilst living with an alcoholic parent. after creating two pieces of personal works I came to the conclusion that this made my work stronger, richer and has made me grow as an artist. I currently like to use a wide range of techniques when it comes to creating art pieces. I like to be very hands on with the pieces that I produce as much as possible. Personally, I feel digital techniques takes away the expressive marks and richness that you get from handmade images. Print making is a technique that I like to use with my pieces seeing the bold and thin lines creating a silhouetted illustration come to life through the ink. I also find it’s such an expressive method to use in illustration and its very therapeutic when using this process. In the second year for a project I used this technique by creating mono prints of building that I found interesting in Kings cross. Looking at old and new buildings to show how it had changed over the years. For the future it would be my passion, to produce a children’s storybook. I want to be able to make children’s imaginations run wild when seeing colourful prints or hand drawn illustrations in the book. As a child I adored reading books like Dr. Seuss, looking at the characters in the book made the stories come to life in my had and made the story telling really enjoyable. That enjoyment would be something I would like to give to children one day.