Artist Sarah Graham encourages Y9s!

Artist Sarah Graham encourages Y9s!

Our Year 9 artists have been treated to a ‘shout out’ video from artist Sarah Graham, encouraging them as they  study her work as part of the GCSE syllabus.

In her video, Graham shows the students her latest piece of photorealism work and gives a tour of her studio in Letchworth. Thank you Sarah for being such an inspiration!

As they learn to draw photo-realistically, our Year 9 artists have been taking photographs of sweets, looking at light, composition and background. They then draw their photographs using a grid scale to ensure the correct proportions. Next they apply colour to achieve the final effect.

Sarah Graham is a UK based photorealistic artist whose distinctive oil on canvas paintings celebrate nostalgia and childlike wonderment. Combining vivid colours and realism, Graham favours kitsch images of toys, sweets and adolescent subject matter to create an elusive sense of sheer joy. She will arrange subjects in her studio and take up to 200 hundred photos before deciding on the right composition. Once arranged, she will use oils to capture light and shadows on her subjects and recreate the blurring seen in objects photographed out-of-focus. In 2012, she was commissioned by indie-rock band Kaiser Chiefs to paint the album cover of their singles collection Souvenir.