Artwork Catch-up

The past couple of weeks since starting college have been possibly the busiest I’ve ever experienced. I have worked really hard on my art-based subjects especially, and the only time I have had to write this blog post is today, in a break between lessons. I wanted to share what I’ve created during this time. I want to apologise in advance for the bad quality of some of these photos, my scanner isn’t that great quality and some were taken using my phone’s camera. I will make sure to take photos of my work using my camera in the future.

Firstly, I had to create a ‘journal of exploration’ for my graphic design summer work, and for this I had to research designers and emulate their style. I’m particularly interested in illustration, so I focussed on illustrators.

The first illustrator was Charlotte Day, who adds a botanical element to her work and I think this is particularly beautiful. I decided to emulate her ‘Office Plants’ project that I found on Behance.net, using objects from my house rather than an office (which I don’t have).

Although I did two paintings in her style, I found it too detailed and I wasn’t happy with the result overall, but this one was the better of the two. I used gouache to create this piece.

The next artist was Mateja Kovac, who I thought was a watercolour artist but upon further research, she actually creates her work on Photoshop using watercolour style brushes. I managed to find some watercolour brushes available for free download to have a go at emulating her style, and this is what I came up with:

I found it difficult to do any real detailing as the brushes I downloaded are quite big and blocky, rather than thin and delicate. I love the background splats of colour however, which I think do give a realistic watercolour effect to the image. I want to improve at using this technique in Photoshop.

The final artist I researched for my journal was Ekaterina Koroleva, who’s work I personally think I emulated the best. She does very delicate watercolour and pencil portraits of women, that have a mix of messy but dainty.

I did three emulations of her work (all originals can be found in her website or Behance page), and I used gouache paint rather than watercolour, which gave me a much richer colour. For the black parts, I didn’t have any ink and I wasn’t confident enough to use gouache as I wasn’t sure if the colour would come out dark enough or not, so I just used fine liner. My favourite emulation has got to be the yellow image with the pencilled portrait.

I have also done some portraits for my fine art studies – we got to pick our own topic this year (which I am extremely thankful for as I realised I struggled with being confined to a topic previously) and I have picked facial expressions which I’m excited about, and you can definitely see that in my work. For this topic I have around 4 months to complete it, so I’m going to focus more on the different materials and techniques I can use to create a portrait rather than the model itself, if that makes sense. I started by taking photographs of my stepdad making different expressions, so that I could use him to immediately start drawing and creating portraits.

I then took these two photos, and used fine liner and water for one and just pencil for the other. I loved the way these turned out.


I’m now moving on from this to do contour and very simple line drawings of my little brother. I have started to look at Julian Opie which I have found interesting, although I find his work too simplified, so I am going to take the coloured aspect from his work forward into my project.

I feel this post has gone on for too long so I will stop waffling, but thank you if you read all the way to the end!! I will make a tab on here at some point so I can upload all my originals in good quality for viewing anytime.

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