na www.​shiny​bi​nary.com

How do you make you work look so shiny and clean?

Well I don’t think that’s true of a lot of my work, some of it is pretty messy and that’s some­thing I really enjoy. For the stuff that is clean though I guess I just utilise the fact that in dig­i­tal art it’s very easy to achieve clean edges and per­fect tex­tures. If I do use photos for pic­tures like that I make sure I put in a bit of time retouch­ing them before hand, fixing little bits and bobs that might dis­tract from the over­all pur­pose of the image I’m using. I’m moving away from that sort of stuff right now, using a few more tra­di­tional media to give it a rough edge. Whether people will like this or not is another thing, but I’m enjoy­ing it right now. Shiny­bi­nary will be Shit­ty­bi­nary for a bit.

Are you web designer or an illustrator?

I’m a web designer, that’s my job at the moment anyway. I’m quite pas­sion­ate about web design and web stan­dards. I get sniffy about use of HTML tables in web lay­outs and overuse of Flash and things like that. How­ever my real pas­sion at the moment is dig­i­tal art/illustration, and that’s what I spend a lot of my spare time doing and try to improve myself in. There is some over­lap in the two, making web graph­ics cer­tainly use some of the skills I have learnt while doing my art, but over­all there is a def­i­nite divide between them. My designs are based on things like usabil­ity, acces­si­bil­ity, web stan­dards and semi­otics whereas my art­work is nearly always about visual impact and noth­ing else. Basi­cally I do both and enjoy doing both.

Apart from illus­tra­tion and design what other things are you into?

I’m really into my music, which is prob­a­bly what every artist who’s asked about their other inter­ests says, but it’s just the truth. I try and see as many gigs as pos­si­ble, whether large bands at fes­ti­vals or big venues or local bands in shitty pub’s back rooms. When I’m at my com­puter I tend to always have music play­ing, I find work­ing with­out it a lot more tedious. I need to buy one of the new ipod nanos, I’m a bit of a design whore when it comes to them. They look far too good to buy any other mp3 player, although I hate whoever’s deci­sion it was to only have the 8 gig one in black, I want green! Apart from that the obvi­ous things, books, films, drink­ing, making fun of people with silly hair, buying shoes, laugh­ing at birds etc.

Who are your favourite artists/illustrators alive today?

I’m gen­er­ally rub­bish at remem­ber­ing other artist’s names or who did what, but there is actu­ally an enor­mous amount of work out there I like. I love Jeff Soto’s art, he has what I would con­sider to be a per­fect mix­ture of tech­nique and vision and is some­one I admire hugely. Apart from that (for­give me if I only remem­ber design names rather than the actual person’s name here) I love the work of Vault49, Zen​vi​ron​ments.com, Tragik​labs.com, Damnengine and many others that escape me right now.

If I told you your work reminds me of H. R. Giger’s work, but in a dig­i­tal age; what would your reac­tion be?

I would be amaz­ingly flat­tered, and pretty incred­u­lous. Giger is actu­ally one of my favourite artists ( I guess I should have men­tioned him above seeing as he’s not dead as far as I know), and I adore his unique vision. Also the tech­ni­cal skills he has with an air­brush are pretty mind bog­gling, a lot of people try to emu­late it with dig­i­tal paint­ing tech­niques but I’ve still yet to see one come close to his.

Are you involved in any col­lab­o­ra­tive projects at the moment and is there anyone you would like to work with?

I have a couple of things on the go, but find­ing the spare time for any per­sonal work at the moment is tough. I really enjoy col­lab­o­rat­ing with other artists and should really be more proac­tive about asking other artists if they fancy work­ing with me. I think I enjoy work­ing with people who have very dif­fer­ent styles and work in dif­fer­ent media to myself. Tra­di­tional artists and pho­tog­ra­phers are people I would par­tic­u­larly like to have a go with, so if anyone read­ing this is fan­cies doing some­thing then they can give me a shout… As for people I would like to work with, you could take any of the people I men­tioned ear­lier, I’d love to work with them all. Doing some­thing with Jeff Soto would be a dream come true, but unfor­tu­nately some­thing I think will prob­a­bly remain just a dream Oh and I would love to do stuff on clothes, putting my designs or pic­tures onto shoes would be very cool, I have a thing for nice trainers.

What’s next in the pipeline for Nik Ainley?

Things are moving quite fast for me right now so I’m just trying to take stuff as it comes. At the minute I think I’ve accepted a few too many com­mis­sions, which is stop­ping me from doing any per­sonal work. I would like to slow these jobs down a bit so I can do some more of my per­sonal pic­tures as I have a lot of ideas float­ing around my head right now which I would like to have a go at turn­ing into real­ity. Apart from that I have a whole bunch of mag­a­zine things coming up, which is nice, and hope­fully even­tu­ally I will be able to move into a cre­ative agency. Some­where where I can do what I love doing all day, and learn from more expe­ri­enced people than me. Who knows, I just want to get better at what I do really, then die bloated and rich at 30.

Shouts?

I should men­tion the guys and girls at Depth­core, a great bunch of artists who are a lot of fun to work with. Also the guys at Com­puter Arts and Digit for being so nice to me, may they con­tinue to pay me money for doo­dling in their mags.

Aliens or Terminator?

Aliens with­out a doubt. Even if I didn’t love Giger I would still say Aliens, they are just far cooler. I think the fact that they are quite so lack­ing in any human­ity, or ratio­nal­ity makes them scary. Even if you could work out a way to com­mu­ni­cate with them and explain the sit­u­a­tion and how there’s no point in want­ing to kill humans and how we could just get along they would prob­a­bly still want to rip your face off. I don’t quite get their repro­duc­tion system though, it seems overly com­plex. You need a queen alien to lay eggs, to pro­duce face hug­gers which lay eggs in other crea­tures to pro­duce aliens who then just prat around killing people and don’t seem to help in pro­duc­ing more aliens them­selves. Where does the queen come from? Maybe a normal alien gives birth to her, that would at least give them some pur­pose but still doesn’t make much sense to me.

I guess if I had to say who would win in a fight, it would prob­a­bly be a ter­mi­na­tor. I just don’t think an alien has the strength to actu­ally do much harm to a ter­mi­na­tor, seeing as how they are really really hard bas­tards. The only way would be for an alien to get its blood onto a ter­mi­na­tor, I bet that even they would melt under that stuff. Then you have the T-1000 though, he’s designed to melt so I’m not sure if the acid would have any effect on him? A ques­tion of chem­istry I guess. Now it has been raised though I think it’s the duty of film makers to find out for us. As for T-X, I didn’t like her; she’d get her arse kicked.

Coke or Pepsi?

Full fat Coke or nothing.

You can see more of Nik Ainley’s work at
www.​shiny​bi​nary.com

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