Poster by Fox, Andy

name: Fox, Andy

I live and work in a place called Leeds, which is in the north of England and is the fifth city that I've lived in over the last five years. I think it's important for me to keep seeing new things and visiting new places - I love to travel, last year I spent a couple of months living the easy life in Thailand and Cambodia, soaking up all that completely alien culture which was great. For the sake of my artwork I think it's really important to be always looking for something new and trying to find new ways of doing things which is always the challenge. I've been drawing for as long as I can remember and it's great that I can hopefully make a bit of money from doing something that I love. During the day I work as a graphic designer so I always seem to be thinking about art and design in some way, which is why every now and then I like to go out and drink lots of Guinness to take a break from it all.

My work is heavily influenced by popular culture, from the stuff I see around me all the time to the music that I listen to and the films and tv shows that I watch. I think that my use of colour comes from the cartoons that I watched as a kid (He-Man, Thundercats etc.), I always seem to go for that kind of fake cartoony look when it comes to choosing colours. When I first began studying illustration I was into artists like Brad Holland and Ed Hopper which I think in a way still influences my composition, I often like to leave big empty spaces in my work. Looking at the work of The Designers Republic introduced me to bold japanese style graphics which I think is something that is a fairly constant theme throughout most of my stuff. I use textures in my work to try and take what I do back to the old ways I think, before I learnt how to use a mac I painted with water colours, acrylic and gouache quite a lot and so i wanted my work to look a bit messy again I guess. I'm always trying to do something new which is very difficult to achieve but worth sticking at I think - there are so many great illustrators out there all trying to do the same.

Have a look at my website too: www.mr-fox.com