Sharmelan Murugiah Research
Sharmelan Murugiah is a Welsh/Sri Lankan artist based in London. He creates amazingly surreal and dreamlike colourful illustrations. He has created work for New Scientist and Little White Lies which are two publications that I would like to create illustrations for which is one of the main reasons I have chosen to research him.
Murugiah has suffered deep seated issues of low self esteem and low confidence in his life which has always and will always be a part of him. This struggle is sometimes shown within his art and the kind of projects he has taken in the past. For example, he created work for the Poet Lionheart where he prodced 4 paintings that depicted anxiety and depression as a result of the built environment, which is the human made environment such as towns and cities. He has previously struggled with establishing his style, but this particular project helped him to generate a much clearer vision of his new style.
Murugiah’s process varies depending on whether or not he is creating work traditionally or digitally. When creating traditional work, Murugiah sketches his ideas on cheap printer paper because he reworks and redraws is ideas a lot initially, so using the cheap paper keeps the costs down. Murugiah also draws into sketchbooks to work out his ideas, similar to how I work. Once Murugiah is happy with a sketch, he scans them an blows them up big on to canvas before using posca markers to draw the linework and acrylic paint to colour his designs. This is a similar process to how I work, though I have never thought about blowing up my sketches to finish them at a larger scale traditionally, I normally don’t blow up my work until it is completely finished, perhaps this is a process I can try in the future.
When it comes to creating digital work, Murugiah starts out with the same process of working out his ideas on printer paper, he then scans his sketches and uses an iPad Pro and apple pencil to redraw the work in Photoshop before colouring digitally. I have always thought it would be nice to own a graphics tablet such as an iPad pro where you can draw directly onto the screen. It seems a lot less complicated than using a cheaper graphics tablet such as my Wacom draw where you have to look away from where your hand is moving in order to paint digitally. I too start off with a traditional sketch and use Photoshop to colour my art when creating digital illustrations, this seems to be an industry standard and it is reassuring to see professional illustrators working in a similar way to myself.
Murugiah gets a lot of inspiration from movies and has said that pretty much every movie that he has watched has provided him with inspiration in some way, shape or form. He seems to be drawn to older movies, like the ones he watched as a kid, as well as classic 80s sci-fi which led him to illustrate a Stranger Things book called Visions From the Upside Down which gave him a chance to produce a series of work in a different medium. He is also inspired by artists such Keith Haring, Roy Lichenstein and Andy Warhol, as well as more contemporary artists such as Eve Lloyd Knight, Hattie Stewart and the astounding James Jean.
I am really looking forward to using Murugiah as inspiration for this project because I love his art style and the way that he portrays mental health problems, he seems to really understand what people are going through, and he does as he has suffered himself. I see myself using Murugiah as a long-time inspiration, not just for this project.