Vanessa McKeown is a London-based art director and photographer. Photo illustrator Vanessa McKeown creates colourful food imagery using everyday objects with humorous undertones. She has a unique take on foods and everyday objects and has created an entirely new way to get your daily serving of fruits and vegetables with her clever still life photographs. The Chelsea College of Art and Design graduate uses everyday objects to reimage food in colourful compositions- visions of eggplants, grapes, and tomatoes are created using strategically filled balloons and actual plant stems. McKeown uses her eye for detail to set up edible still lifes such as a sponge cake made with real leaning sponges. Vanessa McKeown is 26 and lives on her own with her pet cat. She studied graphic design and worked as a film editor but in recent years decided to do more photography work as she prefers to do photography. To capture her works Vanessa uses a Canon 5d camera and ends to use a 100mm lens and lightly uses Photoshop to clean the photo up ready for her Instagram. McKeown has a huge following of 70K followers on Instagram with her photography. She tends to use pale blue throughout her work as she loves the colour and she thinks that it has a way of making everything look good. McKeown thinks that the most important thing about the work she does is that it must come from the heart. She also thinks that it is important to feel free and not worry if it’s the right way or the wrong way, especially in the composition of the photograph.
Additionally, her series ‘Good gone bad’ captures vegetables and fruit as fast food and features them in an unusual setting. In this series McKeown blurs the lines between nutritious and “fast” foods by covering familiar vegetables with unhealthy toppings. On the inspiration behind it, McKeown says; “I like to mix things up and make them visually pleasing!”
When Vanessa has an idea she tends to write it down to help her to lead on to a bigger and better idea. When she is stuck for ideas she looks at things that aren’t related to what she is doing, or she even watches a film then goes back to her work. It often takes Vanessa a few hours sometimes but sometimes she can come up with ideas very quickly and then go back to it in an hour to change the scale of her work. McKeown wants to make people smile with her work as she likes to communicate small ideas, and ways of seeing differently. Her favourite pieces of work that she has created is the Marlboro and crayons and the toothpaste and rainbow candy.
Additionally, her series ‘Good gone bad’ captures vegetables and fruit as fast food and features them in an unusual setting. In this series McKeown blurs the lines between nutritious and “fast” foods by covering familiar vegetables with unhealthy toppings. On the inspiration behind it, McKeown says; “I like to mix things up and make them visually pleasing!”
When Vanessa has an idea she tends to write it down to help her to lead on to a bigger and better idea. When she is stuck for ideas she looks at things that aren’t related to what she is doing, or she even watches a film then goes back to her work. It often takes Vanessa a few hours sometimes but sometimes she can come up with ideas very quickly and then go back to it in an hour to change the scale of her work. McKeown wants to make people smile with her work as she likes to communicate small ideas, and ways of seeing differently. Her favourite pieces of work that she has created is the Marlboro and crayons and the toothpaste and rainbow candy.
Personally, I really like Vanessa's work because of the objects she uses in her work and how they contrast to the colourful backgrounds she uses. Her work tends to make me laugh because of the things she uses in her work for example the poop emoji used to create chocolate ice cream on a cone. I like the way she creates and tells jokes with her work and how she does it. I also enjoy the way she uses multiple objects to create the same meaning of the objects in the picture for example the milk bottles in a glass milk bottle as it creates a great visual effect.