Kira Leigh

Kira Leigh is an artist who creates intriguing surreal, humouress and playful portraits of quite disgusting characters. Her work is intricate and detailed and vibrant with acid colours. The drawings are a visual documentary of her day to day life and thoughts and popular culture. I really like her style of drawing and the amount of detail that you can see in her work is amazing. The way everything is so random but flows so well is surprising. Her work will definitely be inspiration when creating my own freaky characters.

Alex Pardee

Alex pardee is a freelance artist and designer famous for his illustrations for album cover art. His illustrations are mainly of creatures he imagines, freaky and grotesque characters, which coupled with the fact he designs album covers makes him perfect for this project. He mainly works in pen, inks, watercolour and dye, and although his creations may be twisted and horror like, they are also extremely beautiful. His style and ideas are very original and vibrant and I really enjoy his work.

Gottfried Helnwein

Gottfried Helnwein is fine artist, painter, photographer, installation and performance artist. There are many serious topics behind his work which include historical and political issues, psychological and sociological anxiety. His work is often considered provocative and controversial. I particularly like his hyper-realistic watercolours and drawings, mainly of wounded children. They are highly disturbing, showing children scarred physically and scarred emotionally; however the style and tone of the drawings and the colours used make the images compelling and beautiful in an extremely strange way.

Diane Arbus

Arbus was a photographer who was known as "the photographer of freaks"; her black and white photographs were of people on the outskirts of society and "normalcy" and her work was often considered controversial. She photographed many circus performers as part of her work.

Lucy Casson

Lucy Casson is a sculptur who makes figures using materials she collects on the streets, using found objects and recycled materials such as metal wood and wire. Observations of people, animals and scenarios inspire her cartoon like characters. Like Julie Arkell's work the creatures she makes are quite quirky and freakish, alhough her style is very different.

Sara Fanelli

Sara Fanelli is a childrens book author and her illustartions combine drawing and collage with design and typography. Her work is playful and colourful and very stylised. Alot of the illustrations she designs are quite freakish and I have chosen to incliude her work in my research as I think her style could influence my own work. Also the typography element of her work is useful to my own need to involve typography in my album covers.

Julie Arkell

Julie Arkell is known as a contempory folk artist who makes small doll like people and creatures. Her work is mixed media, she makes the papier mache figures, stuffs bodies and embroiders their little clothes. She uses recycled materials, found objects, discarded toys, newspaper and scarps of fabric ect, creating alot of different textures. I really like the handmade element to her work and the distintive style, her small characters are really unique and interesting, they are very quaint and fairy-tale like. Some of her dolls are completely 3d and some are more 2d with raised elements. I'd really like to experiement with making my own small doll of one of the freakshow chracters as part of development for this project.