Another day, another brilliant North East artist! Today we’re focusing on Cris Stewart, the brilliant mind behind NET00n - most popular for their ‘Wor Angel’ illustrations and models.
Cris believes he’s always been a creative person, from a young age he loved to draw his favourite cartoon characters or create his own while he drove around in the car on weekends. Though, his love for working in 3D didn’t come in until secondary school; this is where art became less pencils and crayons and more creating with clay, wood and paint. He expressed taking a lot of his artistic inspiration from his grandfather who was an oil painter and encouraged him as he was growing up.
It’s interesting to learn that a lot of Cris’ current techniques are self-taught, but he has a whole background of qualifications within art & design from GCSEs and A Levels, HND and even a BA HONS degree in animation!
Cris travelled a lot within his previous career and found himself with plenty of spare time, mainly spent on trains or in hotel rooms. “I'd caricature people I’d meet or animals I’d seen on my journey. Each journey always produced amazing views of the northeast skyline on an early morning as I was leaving Newcastle station or each time I came home and this turned my attention to home and the place I live as new inspiration for me.”
Outside of the North East, Cris has expressed that the cinema has been one of his biggest influences; “I love films, especially ones from my childhood. I enjoy mashing up ideas from pop culture in a sort of ‘what if?’ way.” With his natural creative flare and his ‘outside the box’ mindset, he manages to come up with some incredible artwork either in commissions or collaborations - “it allows different ideas to amalgamate with your own and produce something new you might not have come up with.”
We absolutely love working with Cris at For The Love of The North, seeing his creations come to life and watching as our customers fall in love with his work too is always amazing to see. Working with independent creatives is something we’re very passionate about and we always try to create an open space for artists to freely express themselves as best they can. Cris commented, “the shop also provides a showcase for local artist's and sellers that they otherwise would not have which is amazing! And in a marketplace that is increasingly dominated by big one shop stores, it is nice to see a community atmosphere being actively encouraged and a stress on local products and people, a really unique creative hub always producing something new to buy.”
We’ve worked with Cris a fair few times and he’s had some brilliant ideas, we asked him what’s been his favourite design he’s made for us so far and if he has any ideas for future creations, “I have enjoyed all the collaborations which we have worked on but I particularly enjoyed making and creating the Seaside Angel this was originally a card design which I loved designing but then it has been great to develop this into a 3D figure which I think I can continue to develop as time goes on coming up with different iterations. I would love to come up with different editions of the seaside angel, maybe one with a seagull on its head but I've many other ideas for seaside and North East related products.”
With every order we send out, we include a Tourist Tip; a little snippet of useful information for those travelling to the great North! We asked Cris what his ultimate tourist tip is, “we have recently visited the Victorian Tunnel in Ouseburn which was amazing!! You have to book in advance but such a good one hour tour under Newcastle learning about the war and mining and once you are back out in the fresh air you are in the Ouseburn which has some amazing pubs with some really tasty food!!”
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We hope you’ve loved reading about another one of our beloved artists here at For The Love of The North, be sure to check out all of Cris' work on our site!
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