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.
Hi there would you mind sharing which blog platform you’re working with?
I’m going to start my own blog in the near future but I’m having a difficult time choosing between BlogEngine/Wordpress/B2evolution and Drupal.
The reason I ask is because your design seems different then most blogs
and I’m looking for something completely unique. P.S
Apologies for getting off-topic but I had to ask!
I am using WordPress but my design is because of the theme I use – I just googled for free WordPress themes to find one I liked, and then on WordPress itself I search for plugins that put social media links on the side, etc. Hope this helped and good luck with your blog!
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