Mark Hearld

A little while back I was given a book about Mark Hearld as a present, and immediately I liked his fun sense of style, his bright use of colour and his clever combination of paint and collage. His printed fabrics for St Judes show perfectly how a lino cut can easily be transferred into a repeat print. I like how well he brings flora and fauna into his work, my favourite example of this is his dear image, where he actually car-sprayed over real leaves for a ghostly beautiful image.

Honestly WTF - fashion

Ashkan Honarvar's fashion collages

Matt Wisniewski's digitally layered photos

Lisa Kellner's weird sculptures using fabrics and pigments.

Erik Madigan Heck's surrealist inspired photographs for Mary Kantrantzou 

- a glorious collaboration.

Honestly WTF - flowers

Honestly WTF is a fabulous blog that I constantly turn to for inspiration, and I am forever discovering artists and designers whose work I greatly enjoy. It is great for tracking new trends, and bright colours, interesting collages and whimsical drawings constantly crop up.

Mercedes Laguna's childlike acrylic paintings

Kirsty Gammill's thich-paint style

Which reminded me of Nick Knight's floral photography, where he exposed the prints to heat and water during the printing process to create this watercolour effect.

Arcade Fire

I loved Arcade Fire's video for their new song 'Reflektor' from the moment I watched it. It is such a perfect use of cinematography, outfits and sculpture; I liked way it sticked to black and white, the use of mirrors throughout, the almost outsider art feel to it, the weird paper mache heads - the entire thing was simply mesmerising. I feel like I could do an entire project based on this video alone!

Cornelia Parker

Here is another artist featured on 'What Artists Do All Day'. As a lover of pattern, I like the way she constructs her sculptures in a logical, well-thought out manner - each piece could almost create a pattern itself, whether through objects or shadows. I thought 'Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View' was a really clever was to challenge how we view objects. Whilst the film of the shed being blown up felt like an art piece in itself, they way she displayed the fragments as if they were floating has a mesmerisingly beautiful effect, totally changing the view of a rather boring everyday thing. I think looking at shadows could be a great way to inspire abstract pattern making.

I actually saw her piece 'Thirty Pieces of Silver' a while back when it was at the Tate. I like how the steam-rollered pieces take on a whole different quality when they are hung in such an unconventional way; sitting just above the floor they almost look like fragmented pools.

Angie Lewin

I have always really liked the prints of Angie Lewin, but it is only reccently I managed to read a book about her work and saw some of her sketchbook pages too. Whilst her final pieces are usually lino prints, I discovered that her early designs are often pencil and watercolour, a combination that is my favourite to work with. It was really inspiring to see how she takes seed head and flower shapes and turns them into something more graphic and stylised. What I really like about her work, other than her impeccable use of colour, is how she combines drawing some elements true to life, and others in a stylised imaginative way.

Blendscapes

I love looking at fashion illustrations (or at least just illustrations of faces), especially those of a whimsical watercolour nature. So I was made up when I spotted these drawings from Oriol Angrill Jorda's series 'Blendscapes'. I like how landscapes and faces have been merged together so carefully with that slightly wish-washy battered effect, so that they almost look like double exposed photographs rather than paintings.

Polly Morgan

I have always liked the macabre work of taxidermist Polly Morgan and recently watching the documentary 'What Do Artists Do All Day' gave me insight to the way she works and the inner workings of her pieces. Living in a house where there are several pieces of taxidermy, I found it very interesting to see how her artworks were created and shaped into her unusual creations. What I like the most about Morgan's work is the unusual and unexpected nature of her work, the way she challenges traditional concepts surrounding taxidermy. On a lesser level, I simply like the shape of birds themselves and how she lets the animal dictate the final piece.

Tame Impala video

Tame Impala - 'Feels Like We Only Go Backwards'

As soon as I saw this video, I loved the vibrant colors and bold simplistic shapes, immediately assuming  that digital techniques had been used to create the thick brush-stroke style. I was amazed to find out that the video, directed by art duo 'Becky and Joe' was actually made up of over 1000 separate hand created plasticine collages. I love the overall effect of blurring images and globular shapes merging into one, and the way the plasticine colours never quite stay true gives it such a wonderful handmade feel.