Verity Warner-Moulding is a 3rd year University of Brighton illustration student; her drawings and animations often depict animals, and natural spaces reminiscent of folklore and mythology. I talked to her about her ideas, her recent engagement with digital media, and her stop motion short film, Inga.
A lot of your paintings depict natural areas and animals, why is that?
I get a lot of inspiration from these subjects because I like to represent the emotions that you feel when you’re surrounded by nature. I also get drawn towards their colours, and symbolism.
In terms of technique, what tools do you mainly rely on?
I mainly work with traditional media; I use pens, pencils and gouache. Recently, however, I’ve started relying more on digital media, so I’ve been scanning my sketches and turning them into gifs and videos. I’ve started doing this because it’s faster, but also because I’ve realised that the art world is transitioning more and more into the digital space.
How do you think technology can be used to help artists?
It’s becoming quite common for artists to upload their work into social media, so I’ve found that is a really good habit to communicate my ideas out there. Moreover, in terms of narrative, animation allows me to create linear stories such as my short film, Inga.
Tell me a bit more about Inga.
Inga was a 3D stop motion project that I did last year. I got the idea for the story based off the poem “A Natural Disaster” by Lydia Davis. However, as I was doing it, it developed more into my own interpretation of it; so, the final video ended up being about loneliness.
In practical terms, I did the puppets, the house and the props from recycled materials. I had to take a photo for every frame in which the character moved, so the whole project took me around two weeks in total. I mainly enjoyed making the characters, and being able to have a different approach to my art was really fun!
Do you have a dream collaboration?
I’d love to do a big project with all my friends; it would be interesting to see how all of our ideas come together since we all have different skills.
Have you got any exciting projects coming up in the future?
I’ve been learning photography to help me with my inspiration. I’ve been exploring colour and places with that, which then I can use as reference for my drawings.
To see more of Verity’s work…
Website: https://www.veritywarnermoulding.com/
Instagram: @verityillustrates
To watch the short film Inga: https://vimeo.com/446760054
