Analysis: Miles Donovan

Miles Donovan is an Illustrator and art director living and working in London. His work has been used internationally for editorial and advertising clients including The New York Times, Creative Review, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Telegraph, TIME and Wired. You can find his illustrations in the books

'Illusive', 'The Fundamentals of Illustration', 'Pen and Mouse' and 'Illustration Play'. Miles Donovan is an artist who creates these abstract and unique digital and handmade collages. Most of Donovan's work is very colourful and bright where he experiments with text and shape. 

Miles Donovan was an artist that I looked at near the beginning of this personal project. I was looking at his much more colourful work along with other artists collages such as Kurt Schwitters, David Carson and Andy Warhol. I was looking at Donovan and these artist because I was creating collages to develop my chosen theme of crime. Out of all of the experiments I really enjoyed creating and really loved my inspired Miles Donovan and Kurt Schwitters outcomes. I used some of my own photographs from previous projects, found photographs and used photoshop to be able to experiment with colour and shape. 

These were my first experiments: 

Miles Donovan Inspired

Kurt Schwitters Inspired

A collage was something that was a possibility for me for my outcome because I felt that the use of a selection of photographs, text and colour could really help with documenting a theme and expressing my views and opinions on the subject. After experimenting with a selection of digital and film photographs I felt that a collage was definitely an idea for my outcome. We having a variety of images for my collage and having a fixed theme I wanted to document and express I started to look back at Miles Donovan's work and found some collage work of his I really liked. These two collages (below) are two from Donovan's website portfolio. I really like these collages because of how I feel they match with my chosen theme of crime. I feel they match because of how Donovan has used spray paint and other urban quite underground abstract effects. Donovan uses a variety of harsh lines, rectangular shapes, and edited photographs to be able to create these urban city landscapes. I really love how Donovan uses layers of lines, shapes and photos to be able add a 3d feel to the collages. I feel that the 2nd image below almost looks like a city panorama.