I love look­ing at the vari­ety in Rose Blake port­fo­lio. It’s a mix­ture of print­mak­ing, draw­ing, and comics, all with an obvi­ous influ­ence of sequen­tial work and books.

Each sec­tion of her port­fo­lio has a dif­fer­ent feel to it — a slightly dif­fer­ent style. Her print­mak­ing is com­prised of shapes, and how those shapes coex­ist when no lines divide them. Her palette choices vibrate against each other, as if part of her print­mak­ing is an exer­cise in color the­ory. I think she’s arranged a lot of prints in an inter­est­ing way. Grid­ded, I want to read them sequen­tially, although the nar­ra­tive is not always clear.

Rose’s draw­ings have a dif­fer­ent mood to them. They are darker, and make ref­er­ences to death, belief, and reli­gion — com­plete with the depic­tion of a crow being cru­ci­fied on a cross. I love how loaded these images are yet painted rather sim­plis­ti­cally. It’s the power of sym­bols that Rose has so beau­ti­fully used.

Rose also does a bit of col­lab­o­ra­tive work. Check out this ani­ma­tion, God’s Machine — it uses Rose’s sequen­tial and sym­bolic sen­si­bil­i­ties. Ani­mated by Azusa Nak­a­gawa and designed in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Laura Bird.

god’s machine. from azusa on Vimeo.

All images via her web­site.