Semester 2, Week One : Portfolio Development & Presentation
Draft portfolio
It was helpful to see my work through others’ eyes and hear what evoked response. I found seeing the work in progress on screen helpful: though response from the group was positive it reinforced my feeling that the image was too dark and the combination between photographic textures/digital colouring and hand-drawn style wasn’t successful. I took on board observation ‘if it’s a book about winter it needs to be really snowy’ and comments about the selection of plants and flowers. After experimenting further I started from scratch and achieved a much more cohesive result drawing on a library of painted textures I had created last term and from previous experiments with paint and media.
Presentation of the portfolio is written up in a separate blog post, and final portfolio for submission to Goldsmiths’ MA in Children’s Book Illustration can be viewed at https://auriolbishop.crevado.com/ , The Bear images are also out for submission with a publisher.
Arriving at a personal visual style
Having started working in a combination of Illustrator and Photoshop, my final successful outcome was in the end created entirely in Procreate, which I find a much more intuitive software that works well in conjunction with hand-drawing. I have arrived at a process which begins with pencil sketch, photographed and recreated with digital fine-lining, building up layers and experimenting with colours and composition. The process unlocked when I saw that a paint texture I’d intended to use for water made the perfect night-sky backdrop for my moonscape. From there I revisited the whole scene, including my central Bear character: his body is drawn using cloned textures fro m the edge of an old charcoal drawing on brown paper. I also tried the colour from old pictures created using coffee but that was too pale. The leaf colour is taken from an abandoned watercolour. Proof that I’m right to hoard even my unsuccessful attempts: you never know what’s going to be exactly what you need one day!
I have found a way to achieve the painterly effect I wanted along with the flexibility and professional finish of digital artworking. I’m interested to discover whether the result is appropriate for print. Trial printing on my home printer is promising: the rich blue sky reproduces well and the resolution is high quality, although the Northern Lights style streak is lost and the shading on the moon too pale to translate. I think there is still improvement to be made on making the Bear stand out more clearly from the background and the highlighting on his face and neck could be more blended. I will revisit after a time away from the piece, and want to try strengthening the outline on Bear and perhaps a finer line to the background outlining.
I’m finding that, although I may not end up working in the Adobe softwares, I can apply training and principles I learn: for example, my portfolio layout is influenced by understanding the indesign grids although it was created in Keynote; and experiments and insights gained from the Illustrator workshop have been invaluable in learning what’s possible with digital illustration.
Comments
Post a Comment