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I drew inspiration for both landscapes from "The Witch" as I think the contrasting colours and emotions presented in these scenes are really intriuging. The film heavily relies on its setting of a rural farm to progress the story and act as the foundation for its scares. I wanted to pick a film where the landscape was so centric to it that it almost became a character in itself.

The end scene of The Witch shows the coven indoctrinating a new member through a ritual by a raging fire. The vivid colours and freedom of the women sharply contrasts with the muted suffocating aesthetic of the film's first two acts, as portrayed in my second landscape.

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I attempted atmospheric perspective in this painting to signify the movement of the witches in the background. I used limited colours and shapes while also blurring their outlines. While I think it is effective, I definitely need to work on the technique in my future paintings.

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We were instructed to become a canvas and paint ourselves in relation to our theme. I really enjoyed this task as horror is rooted in prosthetics, an area i'm fascinated by.

I decided to create a similar zombie effect to what I created on my portrait as I wanted to see how it would translate in a different medium. Due to the pandemic, I was limited to using kitchen roll and PVA glue to create the spores. The process was time consuming but i really enjoyed making art that was moulded to my face and moved with me. Once everything was dry I painted the piece in reference to the zombies from The Last of Us, using warm tones to make it look like spores and fungus.

Despite the limitations i'm really happy with how the final product turned out. I have always loved practical effects and am considering persuing it a career in the future. One of my favorite horror movies "Cabin in the Woods" had incredible practical creature makeup that inspired me to experiment with 3d features.

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While I liked the objects and their composition, it felt somewhat plain to me. I added foliage and a chain to my final composition to represent decomposition and violence.

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Non dominant hand painting of my still life

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Non dominant hand painting of my still life

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My interest in horror began after seeing Coraline in the cinema when I was 8. Despite being marketed as a movie for children, it is riddled with horrific imagery and dark themes of murder and loss. Stop motion has always been a passion of mine, and I feel that the style greatly lends itself to horror.

Coraline features a plethora of gorgeous sets and puppets. One particularly impressive scene consists of a vibrant booming garden. The Laika team worked tirelessly to bring the surreal forest of flowers to life. They used everyday items such as popcorn to imitate cherry blossoms and a dog that mimicked a flower in bloom. Lights were also installed throughout the set to give it an otherworldly feel. The cobbled ground was hand painted and sculpted, lending itself to the set as it allows the sculpted flowers to shine without feeling too busy.

The characters themselves are fantastic and versatile sculptors. Over 150 unique faces were made for the movie's protagonist, allowing them to access a range of emotions by switching out sections of her face between shots. The secondary characters receive the same amount of care, with all of them having unique character design and motion. The sculpture department at Laika first create an armature that they then build on using clay. After this, features such as hair, eyes and freckles are painted by hand and replicated hundreds of times for each character. The final product exudes Laika's love for the craft, this being the main reason that I would love to work for them one day.

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The ghost children in Coraline terrified me as a child, the frozen expression of horror on their faces led to many sleepless nights after I watched the film .

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The Other Mother tranforms into a grotesque spider-like creature with needles for hands, echoing the work of Del Toro as opposed to a lighthearted childrens animation

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Géricault’s work is often regarded as the epitome of the romantic era, evoking emotion through subject matter and use of colour. His mastery of the human form greatly enhanced his impact on the movement as the figure exuded life agiity. His work often depicts horrific scenes of violence and sorrow, using decomposition and gore to evoke emotion in the viewer.

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Géricault’s most infamous and controversial work is undoubtably “The Raft of The Medusa” (1818). Inspired by the devastating wreck of a French frigate that carried over 150 soldiers, Géricault worked tirelessly to portray the subject in its most raw form. This included interviewing and sketching two of the survivors and procuring body parts from a local morgue to examine the process of decomposition. The Raft of The Medusa was subject to major controversy upon its debut in the salon of 1819 due to its political undertones . Although the painting was a technical marvel, the horrific scene left many patrons of the salon questioning the integrity of Géricault's work.

The monumental canvas is dominated by grief. The sallow tones of the sailors' skin is a sombre warning of their impending doom. While some figures seem to accept their dire fate, others signal fruitlessly to a passing ship, the most prominent figure of this fleeting hope being a black man. This choice was controversial in the context of Paris' racist climate during the 20th century. Two figures in the foreground seem to be partaking in cannibalism. Géricault's skilled application of paint was overshadowed by what many considered to be a "pile of corpses".

The work is a fantastic example of Gericault's mastery of painting. The giant 4.91 m x 7.16 m canvas is adorned with sallow tones of greens, blues and browns. The dull nature of these tones allow the red flag being waved in desperation to become a focal point of the scene. Gericault's devotion to detail is evident throughout the painting, from the skin tones of the decaying corpses to the anatomy of each of the figures.

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In a similar manner to The Raft of The Medusa, Géricault paints a gruesome and intimate scene of death and decay in “Guillotined Heads”. I find Géricault’s  unflinching depictions of reality extremely interesting, as over a century later they are still controversial.

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My set up for the composition

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The Last Of Us is a horror video game that revolutionised gaming forever. It prides itself on its realism, and its stunning art style often provides relief from the oppressive atmosphere of the game. Its landscapes allow it to stand out from the now over-saturated zombie genre.

While playing The Last Of Us I often feel like I am navigating through a painting from the romantic era. The environments are based on real cities that have been weathered by a 20 year apocalypse. The marriage of nature and the urban cityscape creates a unique setting that complements the story of the game. The creatures themselves complement the art of the world. The zombies can be identified through their red spores growing from their faces allowing them to stand out against the natural greens and browns of the games environment. I often found myself pausing to take in the gorgeous details of the terrain as I navigated through the apocalypse.

The world of The Last Of Us mirrors the narrative's central theme: that the most grave situations have moments of levity.

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Suspiria broke the boundaries of horror and propelled the genre into the cultural phenomenon it is today. My painting style is hugely inspired by the palette and composition of the film.

Director Dario Argento was determined to show audiences that horror can be both terrifying and a triumph of cinema. He utilised vivid colours to create an uncanny atmosphere, highlighting the mystery of the film's primary location of the dance studio. Throughout all my work I often reference the film's palette as I love to use vivid unnatural colour in otherwise mundane settings.

Argento put red everywhere, in reference to the evil within the dance school and the bright red creative passion that fuelled said evil. The film’s emphasis on colour made its gruesome deaths theatrical, transforming its witches’ gleeful bloodlust into a sensory-overloading, overwhelming breed of terror.

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For my second piece of facepaint I wanted to apply what i learnt during the emotional portrayal through colour lecture.I was inspired by the gaudy colour palette of one of my favourite horror movies Suspiria. The director played with these oversaturated colours to create an uncanny atmosphere and revolutionised horror cinema, as prior to the film’s release in the 70s horror was very gothic and bleak. I revisit the movie a lot for inspiration in all aspects of my art so thought it would be interesting to interpret how the colours illuminated the characters during this task.

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I love how this painting turned out. I wanted to paint a neutral looking expression with a creeping aspect of horror, in reference to the calm before the madness in many horror films. The horror in question is a zombie spore heavily inspired by my favourite video game The Last Of Us. The infection was designed to be realistic, being inspired by the cordyceps fungus that zombifies small insects.

I used cool tones on the figure to both contrast the cordyceps and to reference a corpse like apprearance, signifying his inevitable fate.

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I love the 3D appearance of the fungus. I used modroc and acrylic to give the impression that its literally growing off the canvas. My use of 3D was inspired by Dylan Gebia Richards innovative 3D paintings.

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A clicker from The Last Of Us

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I was inspired by the gaudy colours of suspiria as well as the black and white films that charactrised early gothic horror while painting this portrait. The portrait is of an iconic scene from the revolutonary "Get Out". I used a red based palette to try and achieve a monotone effect. I think this might have worked better with oil paint due to the thickness of the paint. I decided to only paint the head to heighten the surrealism of the work and add to its uneasy nature.

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I chose horror for my institution as it is one of my favourite forms of art. Since its establishment as a genre in the 19th century, audiences dismissed horror as a cheap cash grab using senseless visuals and jump scares. Despite this, some of the most prolific films of the last century belong to the genre. Films such as The Shining, American Psycho, The Thing, and Alien transcended the horror label and established themselves as cult classics. This is a huge reason why I love horror; every entry into the genre is fighting against this pre-established consensus that they're nothing more than popcorn films to forget.  Due to this the genre often flies under the radar of Hollywood,  letting directors push their craft to its extremity.

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Dylan Gebbia Richards is an artist who experiments with was and pigments to create vivid 3D paintings.  I immediately took to his textured and sporadic pieces upon discovering him while researching Georgia O'Keefe, as they exhibited together in 2018. The vibrant pigments used in his work are reminicant of Suspiria and Colour Out of Space.

Gebbia's unique style is on full display in his installation "Omni". The monumental work was inspired by meteorology and geology, spanning two parallel walls as to fully immerse the viewer. The artist harmoniously allows the themes of familiarity and foreign to emerge from the work through his skilled application of wax and a beautiful spectrum of pigments. The material creates a bounty of landscapes, ranging from mountain ranges to lava and uncanny dream worlds.

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As my final piece collaborating different aspects of my previous work, I decided to paint an abstract horde of zombies. I combined the landscapes of The Witch with zombies resembling the spores on my portraits. I wanted them to become more abstract the further back they stood to signify the volume of the pack.