Monoprinting workshop

I used the hippo reference from the other week image to make these in the monoprinting workshop. I drew them on freehand to get each one different.  I used a thin tool to draw the first three and the edge of a piece of card for the last one. I'm not particularly pleased with the outcomes as they look messy and quite dull but it was good to learn the process.

Sketchbook

 Here's some non-work related drawings from my sketchbook.

Visual Language - Classic Horror Films - Line

From the options I chose the category classic horror films as its an area I have quite an unfulfilled interest in and its not something I would usually draw, they're rather more sinister, so I thought it would be fun to try it. My plan of action is to watch some films and pause scenes that look worthy of drawing, and draw them. I did it with Friday the 13th and I think it was quite successful, I got some good pictures from it and it made me look more intently at the film and notice the care put into the composition of the shots. Here are some I thought were successful, I used five or six different pens and made around 35 drawings.

Visual Language - Drawing from reference

-draw each picture you brought in a minimum of three times using a variey of monochrome media.

Here are what I thought were some of my more successful drawings from this task. I enjoyed it because I drew images I wouldn't usually do and its been a while since I've drawn from a photograph just for the reason of creating a drawing. The restrictions of colour made me thing more about how I use lines to shade, such as in the ice skater drawings where I developed an angled scribbling technique to suggest the direction of fabric. I liked taking quite complex images and simplifying them to quite cartoony line drawings, it made me think about how useful reference images are, because there's no way I'd have managed to draw a plane without. Also the repetition of each image meant I developed a sort of familiarity and muscle memory for the shapes I was drawing meaning each subsequent drawing would be easier, so in future when trying to draw something I'll know to tackle it multiple times before I get to know what I'm doing. 

Studio Brief 1 - Your Initial Brief

-following an interview with an assigned partner produce one A2 black and white image to display their personality and incorporate their initials. 

My parter for this task was Zara. During the interview I found she's very family oriented, well travelled, quite into saving the environment and likes Game of Thrones and Star Trek, among other things.

Then I fell ill so missed several sessions and had no access to A2 paper, thus I did my planning in my sketchbook.

I tried quite a lot of ideas, many of which did not work, but found and repeated some successful ones

I struggled with the task of producing a minimum of 128 ideas and found myself running out quite quickly. Although the rigorous and exhaustive nature of the challenge proved useful as I generated much more work on the subject than I thought I would and ended up with better ideas as a result. 

I decided the suitcase idea was my strongest so did a lot of testing as to where and how it would fit on the A2 page to make it appear most comfortable. I also planned the stickers I was going to put on it, which originally were just to be places she'd visited but I expanded to using symbols that described aspects of her personality. 

These are some more developed plans for my suitcase idea where I was deciding whether or not to include a body and clothes coming out of the case. I chose to keep the body because the floating arm didn't make much sense but the spilled clothing looked too cluttered along with all the stickers so I decided against that.

These are two other ideas I developed but they only include one initial. I didnt think they were as strong as the one I chose, nor did they show as many personality aspects, rather just sticking to one. 

This is my final drawing. I have conflicted feelings towards it because I'm quite happy with the line work and idea but to add some tone I used a grey crayola pen and water which didn't give me the result I expected. It looks too blobby and dark and it doesnt fit in with the rest of the elements of the drawing. Also during the crit I found many of the symbols weren't clear unless they were explained, but once I said what they meant they made sense, so I'm not sure whether this is bad. I think I could've done more with the initials, put them into a more interesting sticker perhaps; they look a bit too blunt, but I was in a rush to finish. I got two chopped tomato votes, which is more than i was expecting because I don't think I did my best work for this brief.

Photoshop

I actually prefer this version to my finished piece, I think it works better in colour. I used textures for the suitcase and skirt and the rest were coloured using a brush. Although I forgot to add the initials..

This was an earlier plan of the above design. I chose to work to a set colour scheme and experiment with the tones created using multiply on overlapping layers. This was useful as I learnt how to make extra tones without using more colours.

 With this one I experimented with coloured lines and shading using varying opacities. It doesn't look very spectacular but has made me consider using coloured lines in future.

This was a very scrappy sketch so made for quite a scrappy end result, I used the texture of some rocks for the path but I could've definitely done more with the people had the sketch been more refined.

I used a grass texture and again used multiply to create tone in the coloured areas. I think the colouring greatly improved this rather bland idea.