Hi, I’m Briony Keay, a graduate in Design for Digital Media primarily based across Brighton and the Midlands. I typically create illustrations and frame-by-frame animations using a variety of different software, such as Photoshop, After Effects and InDesign. As an avid fan of fantasy fiction, I’m interested in creating fully-realised characters and developing interesting worlds in my work.
Across my years at Brighton University, I’ve created works stemming from my background as a biracial woman on the topic of representation of women of colour in pop culture, typically looking at television shows, films and cartoons. I primarily focus on 90s to early 00s pop culture media that I grew up with, dissecting the shows I used to (and still do) love, ranging from The Powerpuff Girls to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I have a large knowledge of pop culture tropes, and aim to dissect them within my work. I want to create work for women like me who grew up loving the things that I love, but were never quite able to see themselves in the characters onscreen. My work often attempts to lovingly combat pop culture tropes; it is never always just a criticism, but instead a scolding love-letter to the television shows and cartoons I love. I always display women of different races and sexualities than are typically seen in the media, and think it is crucially important to continue doing so.
For my most recent project, I was able to focus heavily on my character design skills as I designed the characters for and crafted the story for my new animated webcomic, ‘Violent Delights’. ‘Violent Delights’ is an animated webcomic set in the far future about a cast of misfit outcasts struggling against a corrupt government. It draws on tropes typical to the cyberpunk genre and hopes to subvert them; I was able to explore cyberpunk deeply in my research, and worked on my character concept skills, in particularly playing heavy emphasis on shape and linework. I’ve been exploring my use of colours, in particular using colours to craft a sense of tone and atmosphere, and have been using these skills to attempt to further my own world-building skills. Within this collection of work, you can see character concept drafts for Ig, the main character of the webcomic, a young robot who struggles with an addiction problem and hears mysterious voices. You can also see his walk sequence, which helps suggest his attitude and character. I have begun uploading this webcomic on Tapas.io, and it can be found there under the name ‘Violent Delights’.
