Digital artist Claire Gill

initially developed a digital approach to making artwork to create ideas for a painting. She was familiar with Adobe Photoshop so chose this programme as an expedient way to visualise her ideas. To date she has developed over 100 coastally inspired digital collages. Claire’s work explores a sense of place and is created from original photographic imagery taken on trips to the coast. She creates an entirely new scene by cutting out images and building up layers in Photoshop. These new scenes, while visually fictitious, hopefully retain a sense of the place which inspired them. Claire can build up to 140 layers in the development and discovery of an image, only reducing the layers as the image begins to take shape. She works on several digital collages at once, allowing each of them to develop in their own way. There is no end-point in mind, each piece is on its own journey, ending at the point where she feels that all elements within it are resolved. The joyful part of the process for Claire is discovering what the final image will be.

Working digitally can be a very slow process. Photoshop is an amazing programme and some things can be done very quickly, however other things take a long time; digitally cutting out things like stones, ropes and grass is challenging. Secondly, to discover what the image will be takes time. Some digital collages develop quickly, while others can evolve over a period of a few weeks or months.

Her images are printed on Hahnemühle archival cotton rag with UV resistant inks. Both paper and inks exceed museum standards for longevity in a print. All images are available in three sizes:

Small: image size 19.43194cm, paper size 30330cm, edition of 50 Medium: image size 34334cm, paper size 50350cm, edition of 25 Large: image size 56356cm, paper size 61362cm, edition of 10 https://www.clairegill.co.uk/