Kid Acne

Kid Acne is a Sheffield based artist who started off designing album covers for record labels during the time that he was studying fine art and later graphics and illustrating. He produces commissioned work as well as graffiti on boarded up houses, making his own music and creating comic strips called ‘Zebra Face’.

He likes to listen to other people’s conversations as inspiration for his work as he illustrates them and then produced all of the images that he created in to a book, which told many peoples stories. More recently, he has been producing work for clubs designing and producing flyers for them to use as promotion for the club itself as well as specific theme nights as well as producing designs for Levi’s where his work was shown all around Europe. He has also designed t-shirts for Prada who took a lot of control over the content of the work as they had a clear idea of what they wanted whereas smaller companies allowed him to work more freely and design what he wanted to. He also designed a small collection of jumpers for friends and hand crafted before being shown in a gallery exhibition as a one off.

Although he is interested in fantasy art, he has also experimented with photography, which has taught him a lot of techniques and skills. All of his work is still hand drawn and scanned in to a computer, not produced digitally on a computer as he chose not to learn how to use Illustrator or Indesign, and has then been made in to books several times to help promote his work.

Acne’s favourite place to display his work is on the streets of Barcelona as it isn’t an offence and therefore you can’t get arrested for it. This lead to more commissioned work from the paint companies who asked him to design the paint cans for other artists to use. Helmut Newton, a photographer who loved to photograph naked women, as well as Roy Lichtenstein, influences many aspects of his work.

He produced a book cover, which made designers approach him to ask if the drawings could be made in to children’s toys, of which he agreed. He provided many drawings, which were then sculpted and made and presented in mystery boxes so as you didn’t know which toy you would be getting.

Recently he has been participating in life drawing classes so as to keep up and improve his drawing skills as well as to keep active and observation well in an area that he finds hard and challenging.

He has also collaborated with a photographer who asked him to draw small images over the top of his portrait and fashion images and were then published and exhibited in Paris where an Art Director approached him to as him to do a similar thing to some of him images.

He gets permission to graffiti his work on to people who own land or buildings by asking and being polite as well as showing samples of work to show them that you are serious about your work.