Nic Squirrell creates digital art and watercolour pieces that often focus on the small, delightful details of everyday life and travel. In the digital vector work Afternoon Tea, a light blue two-tiered stand holds a collection of five small cakes and pastries. I really like how the vertical composition is framed by various flowers and berries against a plain white background, making the food and drink look like a special occasion. The use of red and white in the palette gives the piece a very clean and cheerful feeling that is typical of this style.
Afternoon Tea
Another side of the work involves more traditional media like watercolour and textile techniques to capture architecture and cityscapes. Ait Benhaddou shows a dense cluster of rectangular and tower-like buildings in a vibrant range of red, yellow, purple, and white. The structures are stacked closely together with small, dark openings for windows and doors, some of which have rounded or pointed arches. It is interesting to see how the artist uses these different media to create such a sense of depth and texture in a cityscape.
Ait Benhaddou
All The Flowers and All The Flowers Dark show a more abstract approach to botanical subjects using watercolour and textile patterns. These pieces contain dozens of circular and oval shapes in shades of pink, red, orange, and purple scattered across the page. Each shape has internal marks like dots or radiating lines that make them look like cross-sections of fruit or tiny cells. While the first version uses a white background, the dark version places these magenta and pink petals against a black background, which makes the colourful shapes stand out even more.
All The Flowers
All The Flowers Dark
