Miles Johnston

This young English artist is using his pencil sketches to drive his fervent creativity

Miles Johnston was still a teenager when he caught the eye of ImagineFX during the first Rising Stars campaign. Four years later, he’s become an inspirational artist to many.

Miles found his feet online in the digital art community, posting work on sites like conceptart.org. “The whole online art scene feels like a cool, extended friendship group, and it’s been exciting meeting so many people that I’ve known from online.”

Now Miles has turned to perfecting his pencil work. His engaging sketchbook posts see the artist settle on a theme and explore it in as much depth as possible. “I try to be honest about what I’m interested in, even if it means making a bunch of drawings around ideas that might seem a little weird.”

For Miles, experimentation is key to finding new forms and shapes in familiar drawings. “Sometimes I’ll take an old-school approach, with lots of thumbnails and careful planning, and sometimes I’ll work a whole image outwards from a single focal point.” Finding spontaneous shapes and ideas is what matters: “I like to leave my process open enough to follow those impulses,” he says.

At the heart of Miles’s approach to art is the belief that you should always be challenged, to continually wrestle with your doubts and fears to drive forward. “The best thing about painting, in my opinion, is that you never reach a limit, and the challenge never goes away.”

http://ifxm.ag/miles-j

Artist tip

ALWAYS DRAW

“I spend a lot of time in my Moleskine, even doing a lot of finished work in them. I like having my setup be really simple and portable, so I can vary where I work a lot.”