Why the ground goes down first
Starting with a flat field of violet or red, before anything gets drawn into it.
ADETAYO
Studios
01 / Featured Works
Freshoff thestudio floor
Six pieces from both sides of the practice. Scribble drawings on flat saturated ground, and coloured pencil worked up close on paper.
02 / The Process
TheProcess
There are two ways a piece starts here. Either it is built from scribble over a flat, saturated ground, or it is layered up in coloured pencil until the paper stops showing through.
Digital scribble · detail
Contemporary African Artist
02 / The Artist
Nigeria / 2026
Meet the Artist
Adetayo
Studios
Adetayo StudiosEst. 2014
Untitled (Breakthrough), digital drawing
Digital Scribble
Biography
The joy behind
the crown
Adetayo works two ways that have almost nothing in common. One is digital, drawn fast in scribble over flat fields of violet, red and black. The other is coloured pencil on paper, layered over weeks until the tooth of the sheet stops showing.
The halo keeps coming back in the digital work. Worn, unwound, doubled, and once gripped in a fist. The pencil portraits stay with a single person, close in, and spend colour on two or three things at most.
The digital drawings go out as signed archival prints. The pencil works are one of one on paper, signed on the reverse. Both are sold by enquiry.
Currently obsessed with
- Halos
- Flat saturated grounds
- Scribble density
- Graphite portraits
- Rationed colour
- Hand-lettered margins
- 10
- Works in the gallery
- 2
- Bodies of practice
- 1 of 1
- Every original