Elan Kardas moved to Wellington two years ago and started his career journey with Yoobee School of Design. He is thrilled that he has found a medium that he excels in, and can now channel his art from traditional through to digital.
It is a long way from his youthful years in Hamilton, where he had been a rebellious tagger, hitting the pavement and releasing his anger through his spray painting. Feeling like he didn’t fit in, Elan could have gone down a very different path, but instead thought he should find something positive to pursue, and that’s when he found Yoobee School of Design.
Now studying his second Diploma, Creative Digital Design with Yoobee, Elan was approached by ACG Education recently to create a wall mural with the theme ‘What is Education to you?’. Through this project, Elan created three sketches highlighting roads, learning and intersections. He then created stencils for each vocational college, depicting trades, health, hospitality, IT, tourism, beauty, business, art and design. In the centre is the brain which represents career choices to be made, and the options you have if you put your mind to it.
Elan has really enjoyed the creative process and plans to paint more murals in the future. But he says, “You need to be enthusiastic and drive the connections in the creative industries. If I can paint something that makes people smile, this is worth more to me than payment”.
It hasn’t all been easy and, at first, Elan did find it hard to translate the skills from tagging and spray painting to digital design. He says, “It was an uncomfortable transition, but over the last few months I’ve picked up a lot of new skills. Using the pencil tool on Adobe Illustrator – I’ve hand drawn my ideas, scanned them in and effectively redrawn them”.
Now complete, his mural for ACG will certainly stand out. It embodies the opportunities and pathways available for students. Elan feels very proud and quite humbled to have been given this chance to create something significant.
ACG’s Group Marketing Director, Ana Maria Rivera says, “Elan has delivered above and beyond our expectations, he has certainly nailed the brief and we couldn’t be happier. From my point of view it’s 100% representative of the different pathways we offer at ACG. This speaks to our students and staff, and I can’t wait to see it on the wall in ACG’s offices.”
