THE ART OF PUNK

Emotion bleeds in fiat fog. Boundless thought, caged form. This punk, stripped of name, burns into the chain—defiant, electric, and etched in a future no one owns.

My interpretation for the Punk Royale  [PUNK LEGENDS] Open Call was a labour of love. So much was poured into this piece as I fought with myself at every turn as to how it should be presented. In the end, I found myself going through a dozen iterations that I tossed until this final version captured my artistic soul. Punk to me is defiant, electric, uncaged and free, just as the mother blockchain it will be immortalized on.

Built with 33 layers of digital collage, nine (9) years of photographic images from my archives, and  many hours experimenting with blends and how they interacted–all assembled in Affinity Designer v2 on Mac.

Layers. Blends. Drawn shapes to mask. No illustration. No AI. This is a hand crafted union of digital art and photography.

Watch The Teaser Video ➡️

The frame for my Punk is homage to my previous career in book printing, much like an Easter Egg of sorts, by employing a halftone screen effect, which is core to traditional book printing. I have included a 100% Pixel view of the artwork including this frame section below.

Deep in the fabric of my digital art collage style is a history of imagery from my archives that spans almost a decade, in this instance from 2013 to 2024. Each image brings meaning and complexity to the interaction of the blends between the layers. Not including the frame and drawn shapes, there are 11 images that make up the colour, details and textures seen. Four of the images were captured in Pompeii, bringing in a special historical component of chaos and emotion that the Punk exhibits and that bleeds from that time in history.

The light glancing across the floor of the cathedral was brought into the artwork to cast that warm diagonal light across the forehead area. This contrasted the cool dark blue of the lightning storm. An interesting fact is that the lightning was originally meant to be the eyebrows of the face to give an expression of explosive intensity. I didn't feel the eyes resonated, so they were removed.

This resulted in a completely new dynamic and brought anonymity to the character. This is perfect in the reflection to the ethos of Bitcoin. I duplicated the "name identifier with name removed", from the image where my daughter is holding the mask and pasted near the ear. Interestingly, the resulting images blended in the upper half of the Punk feel to me like a liquid soup of energy bottled up inside as it moves side to side. This then sparked the idea to complete turf my original lower portion of the Punk and replace it with the screaming mouth, letting go of everything and trying to dissipate that built up energy inside.

Looking further, we see a white rough outline of a skull, the mask my daughter is holding, which looks very much like the residue of a sticker that has been ripped off to the entire upper left of the art. It is a duplicate of the frame which exists in secret within the Punk as well Leaning on the energy from within, this gives dynamic movement as it literally rips off its background. The second is breaking free from the cage of fiat as one enters the new age of Bitcoin.

The weird blobs to the upper right and the one that crosses into the Punk are actually distortions of a Minecraft poster, building on the new age of blockchain and unlimited potential to build new worlds.

Building the lower portion of the face, I found the blends between layers working for the top half but not the lower. It is a unique process that is a WYSIWYG. Countering this, I changed the blends until I loved the lower half and then exported that and placed it back into the artwork to enjoy the best of both worlds.

There was no diagonal line separating the top and lower half originally. Something was missing. It felt too calm and static. I then added a horizontal divider to create something more, yet it was still incomplete. It took the division becoming unbalanced and without correction of small imperfections to make it, well, perfect. 

I didn't include the other 22 layers in this article. They consisted of the frame and many drawn blocks to control which blends affected which layers. They are instrumental to the final cosmetics, but did not carry the unique historical component of real world life hidden within.

This Punk Legend consumed my entire being for many days. The result was soulful and dynamic. Mission accomplished.

To the upcoming collector of this work. You are early. This fits into the genesis time of my journey into creating digital art collages free from the binds of technical minimalist perfection. This is only the beginning. Art and photography is my soul.

 I use music during my creative process. It guides my ideas. That will be for a future instalment for The Art Of...

The 11 images used in the final composition of this Punk are shown in preview below ➡️