Kanye has a lot to answer for

Now I'm a Taylor Swift fan so he's not exactly my favourite person, but he did introduce these strange accessories into our lives. Though I'm not sure if that's a good thing considering I saw an old woman wearing a yellow pair teamed with a hoodie, short skirt and fishnet tights the other day. Perhaps they should have an age limit...no one over 30 to wear them?

In response to the new rave/UV party/neon feeling of the summer I produced this drawing based on photos of a night out with my friends. I traced the photos in pencil, outlining the figures and adding a few lines of detail. I just used cheap sketchbook paper so it was thin enough to see through. Then I coloured in elements of the images with highlighter pens; anything that was pink, orange, yellow, blue or green. I also coloured in some angular lines in the background to represent beams of light. It was here that I realised I need some new highlighters as a lot of them were running out, but they were ok just for this experiment. I then went over the pencil lines in black felt tip. It's important to do this after using the highlighters otherwise they mix with the black and you end up with dirty colours instead of bright neons.

This painting is from my Make 20 Paintings project and uses the same imagery as the drawing. I painted the background stripes, which follow the direction of the lines on the glasses, with acrylic paint so they could be bright and vibrant and then the figure is painted with oil paint so that I could produce a realistic image, which I can never do with acrylics.